Voices of the Ritual

Voices of the Ritual
Author: Nurit Stadler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 0197501303

Voices of the Ritual analyzes the revival of rituals performed at female saint shrines in the Middle East, highlighting the ways in which members of minority religious groups have laid claim to space through rituals enacted at sacred spaces in the Holy Land. Using ethnographic analysis, Stadler tracks the popularity of the rituals and the themes of female materiality they are often grounded in.

Voices of the Ritual

Voices of the Ritual
Author: Nurit Stadler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 019750132X

Voices of the Ritual analyzes the revival of rituals performed at female saint shrines in the Middle East. In the midst of turbulent political contention over land and borders, Nurit Stadler shows, religious minorities lay claim to space through rituals enacted at sacred spaces in the Holy Land. Using ethnographic analysis, Stadler explores the rise of these rituals, their focus on the body, female materiality, and their place in the Israeli-Palestinian landscape. Stadler examines the varied features of the practice and implications of the rituals, looking at themes of femininity and material experience. She considers the role of the body in rituals that represent the act of birth or the circle of life and that aim to foster an intimate connection between the female saint and her worshippers. Stadler underscores the political, cultural, and spatial elements of this practice, bringing attention to how religious minorities (Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Druze, among others) have utilized these rituals to assert their right to the land. Voices of the Ritual offers a valuable assessment of religious ritual practice that encrypts female themes into a landscape that has historically been defined by war and conflict.

The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual

The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual
Author: Shemeem Burney Abbas
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780292705159

The female voice plays a more central role in Sufi ritual, especially in the singing of devotional poetry, than in almost any other area of Muslim culture. Female singers perform sufiana-kalam, or mystical poetry, at Sufi shrines and in concerts, folk festivals, and domestic life, while male singers assume the female voice when singing the myths of heroines in qawwali and sufiana-kalam. Yet, despite the centrality of the female voice in Sufi practice throughout South Asia and the Middle East, it has received little scholarly attention and is largely unknown in the West. This book presents the first in-depth study of the female voice in Sufi practice in the subcontinent of Pakistan and India. Shemeem Burney Abbas investigates the rituals at the Sufi shrines and looks at women's participation in them, as well as male performers' use of the female voice. The strengths of the book are her use of interviews with both prominent and grassroots female and male musicians and her transliteration of audio- and videotaped performances. Through them, she draws vital connections between oral culture and the written Sufi poetry that the musicians sing for their audiences. This research clarifies why the female voice is so important in Sufi practice and underscores the many contributions of women to Sufism and its rituals.

Hearing Voices, Demonic and Divine

Hearing Voices, Demonic and Divine
Author: Christopher C. H. Cook
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 462
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0429750943

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781472453983, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative 4.0 license. Experiences of hearing the voice of God (or angels, demons, or other spiritual beings) have generally been understood either as religious experiences or else as a feature of mental illness. Some critics of traditional religious faith have dismissed the visions and voices attributed to biblical characters and saints as evidence of mental disorder. However, it is now known that many ordinary people, with no other evidence of mental disorder, also hear voices and that these voices not infrequently include spiritual or religious content. Psychological and interdisciplinary research has shed a revealing light on these experiences in recent years, so that we now know much more about the phenomenon of "hearing voices" than ever before. The present work considers biblical, historical, and scientific accounts of spiritual and mystical experiences of voice hearing in the Christian tradition in order to explore how some voices may be understood theologically as revelatory. It is proposed that in the incarnation, Christian faith finds both an understanding of what it is to be fully human (a theological anthropology), and God’s perfect self-disclosure (revelation). Within such an understanding, revelatory voices represent a key point of interpersonal encounter between human beings and God.

Voices from the Ancestors

Voices from the Ancestors
Author: Lara Medina
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816539561

Voices from the Ancestors brings together the reflective writings and spiritual practices of Xicanx, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx womxn and male allies in the United States who seek to heal from the historical traumas of colonization by returning to ancestral traditions and knowledge. This wisdom is based on the authors’ oral traditions, research, intuitions, and lived experiences—wisdom inspired by, and created from, personal trajectories on the path to spiritual conocimiento, or inner spiritual inquiry. This conocimiento has reemerged over the last fifty years as efforts to decolonize lives, minds, spirits, and bodies have advanced. Yet this knowledge goes back many generations to the time when the ancestors understood their interconnectedness with each other, with nature, and with the sacred cosmic forces—a time when the human body was a microcosm of the universe. Reclaiming and reconstructing spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization, particularly in these fraught times. The wisdom offered here appears in a variety of forms—in reflective essays, poetry, prayers, specific guidelines for healing practices, communal rituals, and visual art, all meant to address life transitions and how to live holistically and with a spiritual consciousness for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Sacred Smoke

Sacred Smoke
Author: Harvest McCampbell
Publisher: Native Voices books
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2011-09-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1570679851

Smudging is the burning of herbs as a spiritual practice. An herbalist and educator, Harvest McCampbell explains and illustrates this integral part of traditional Native American life that she began learning about from her Iroquois Onondaga Oswegatchie grandmother. Learn how to make smudge sticks and identify, collect, and grow a wide range of sacred plants for smudging. Discover how to reclaim your own traditions and find your personal healing rituals. Includes sources to purchase herbs and reference materials.

The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual

The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual
Author: Shemeem Burney Abbas
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2010-06-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0292784503

The female voice plays a more central role in Sufi ritual, especially in the singing of devotional poetry, than in almost any other area of Muslim culture. Female singers perform sufiana-kalam, or mystical poetry, at Sufi shrines and in concerts, folk festivals, and domestic life, while male singers assume the female voice when singing the myths of heroines in qawwali and sufiana-kalam. Yet, despite the centrality of the female voice in Sufi practice throughout South Asia and the Middle East, it has received little scholarly attention and is largely unknown in the West. This book presents the first in-depth study of the female voice in Sufi practice in the subcontinent of Pakistan and India. Shemeem Burney Abbas investigates the rituals at the Sufi shrines and looks at women's participation in them, as well as male performers' use of the female voice. The strengths of the book are her use of interviews with both prominent and grassroots female and male musicians and her transliteration of audio- and videotaped performances. Through them, she draws vital connections between oral culture and the written Sufi poetry that the musicians sing for their audiences. This research clarifies why the female voice is so important in Sufi practice and underscores the many contributions of women to Sufism and its rituals.

Hearing Voices

Hearing Voices
Author: Sarah Finley
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2019-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496212797

Hearing Voices takes a fresh look at sound in the poetry and prose of colonial Latin American poet and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51–95). A voracious autodidact, Sor Juana engaged with early modern music culture in a way that resonates deeply in her writing. Despite the privileging of harmony within Sor Juana’s work, however, links between the poet’s musical inheritance and subjects such as acoustics, cognition, writing, and visual art have remained unexplored. These lacunae have marginalized nonmusical aurality and contributed to the persistence of both ocularcentrism and a corresponding visual dominance in scholarship on Sor Juana—and indeed in early modern cultural production in general. As in many areas of her work, Sor Juana’s engagement with acoustical themes restructures gendered discourses and transposes them to a feminine key. Hearing Voices focuses on these aural conceits in highlighting the importance of sound and—in most cases—its relationship with gender in Sor Juana’s work and early modern culture. Sarah Finley explores attitudes toward women’s voices and music making; intersections of music, rhetoric, and painting; aurality in Baroque visual art; sound and ritual; and the connections between optics and acoustics. Finley demonstrates how Sor Juana’s striking aurality challenges ocularcentric interpretations and problematizes paradigms that pin vision to logos, writing, and other empirical models that traditionally favor men’s voices. Sound becomes a vehicle for women’s agency and responds to anxiety about the female voice, particularly in early modern convent culture.

Kiowa Voices: Ceremonial dance, ritual, and song

Kiowa Voices: Ceremonial dance, ritual, and song
Author: Maurice Boyd
Publisher: Fort Worth, Tex. : Texas Christian University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1981
Genre: History
ISBN:

In this first volume of Kiowa Vioces the society has presented Kiowa cultural beliefs and values as preserved and revealed in a combination of Kiowa ceremonial dances and song rituals, their legends and art.