III. Ethnographic Soundscapes
2. Islamic Soundscapes
Charles Hirschkind
•
Associate Professor of
Sociocultural
Anthropology at UC
Berkeley
•
The Ethical
Soundscape is his first
single-authored book;
•
Awarded the 2007-2008 Sharon Stephens First
Book Prize from the American Ethnological
Society and a Clifford Geertz Prize "Honorable
Mention" from the Society for the Anthropology of
Religion.
•
Co-edited (with David Scott) Powers of the Secular
Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, published
by Stanford University Press in 2005
•
Currently working on his second book, focusing on
Southern Spain. It is a study of the different ways
in which Europe's Islamic past inhabits its present,
unsettling contemporary efforts to secure Europe's
Christian civilizational identity.
The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette
Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics:
•
“This book is a study of a popular Islamic media
form that has had a profound effect on the
configuration of religion, politics, and community in
the Middle East. As a key element in the
technological scaffolding of what is call the Islamic
Revival (al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya), the cassette
sermon has become an omnipresent background of
daily urban life in most Middle Eastern cities…” (p.
2)
•
“…the contribution of this aural media to shaping
the contemporary moral and political landscape of
the Middle East lies not simply in its capacity to
disseminate ideas or instill religious ideologies but
in its effect on the human sensorium, on the
affects, sensibilities, and perceptual habits of its
vast audience.” (p. 2)
Islamic Cassette Sermons:
• Commonly associated with the militants and
radical preachers
• “Bin Laden’s Low-Tech Weapon”
• A symbol of Islamic fanaticism
• The “media form par excellence” of Islamic
fundamentalism
• The vast majority of taped sermons do not
espouse a militant message
• Listening to cassette sermons is a common a
valued activity for millions ordinary Muslims
around the world
• Political commentary – directed against the
nationalist project
• “…gives direction to a normative ethical project
centered upon questions of social responsibility,
pious comportment, and devotional practice.”
(p. 5)
• Bears the imprint of popular entertainment
media
• Three diverse strands are conjoined in these
tapes: the political, the ethical, and the
aesthetic. (p. 5)
Islamic Cassette Sermons:
• Commonly associated with the militants and
radical preachers
• “Bin Laden’s Low-Tech Weapon”
• A symbol of Islamic fanaticism
• The “media form par excellence” of Islamic
fundamentalism
• The vast majority of taped sermons do not
espouse a militant message
• Listening to cassette sermons is a common a
valued activity for millions ordinary Muslims
around the world
• Political commentary – directed against the
nationalist project
• “…gives direction to a normative ethical project
centered upon questions of social responsibility,
pious comportment, and devotional practice.”
(p. 5)
• Bears the imprint of popular entertainment
media
• Three diverse strands are conjoined in these
tapes: the political, the ethical, and the
aesthetic. (p. 5)
“The sermons of well-known preachers spill into the street
from loudspeakers in cafes, the shops of tailors and
butchers, the workshops of mechanics and TV repairmen;
they accompany passengers in taxis, minibuses, and
most forms of public transportation; they resonate from
behind the walls of apartment complexes, where men
and women listen alone in the privacy of their homes after
returning home from the factory, while doing housework,
or together with acquaintances from schools or office,
invited to hear the latest sermon from a favorite preacher.
Outside most of the larger mosques, following Friday
prayer, thriving tape markets are crowded with people
looking for the latest sermon from one of Egypt’s wellknown Khutaba’ or a hard-to-find tape from one of
Jordan’s prominent mosque leaders.” (p. 7)
Main Ideas and Research Questions:
• The practice of listening to such taped sermons
- the colonialist / orientalist / modernist
occularcentric view of Muslim oratorical
practices
• Evolving rhetoric style and performance in the
tapes
• The formation of an Islamic counterpublic
• Islamic soundscapes
• Modernity and the senses
• Part of a growing body of Anthropological
literature focusing on the patterning of
perception and sensory experience across
different cultures and historical contexts
Cassette Sermon Listening Practices:
• The utility of sermon tapes
• Attentive and in-attentive listening
• Inshirah
• Marcel Jousse’s concept of “gesticulations”
• Brian Massumi’s concept of “affect”
• Affect / action
Comparative Analysis:
Think of an everyday listening practice you
engage in, and compare it to the cassette sermon
listening practices of the Egyptian Muslims
Hirschkind worked with
Egyptian Muslims
Listening to Cassette
Sermons:
European/American
Walkman Users:
Egyptian Muslims
Listening to Cassette
Sermons:
•
Mobile
European/American
Walkman Users:
•
Mobile
Egyptian Muslims
Listening to Cassette
Sermons:
European/American
Walkman Users:
•
Mobile
•
Mobile
•
Muslim
•
Secular (capitalist)
Egyptian Muslims
Listening to Cassette
Sermons:
European/American
Walkman Users:
•
Mobile
•
Mobile
•
Muslim
•
Secular (capitalist)
•
Ethical soundscape
•
Privatized soundscape
Egyptian Muslims
Listening to Cassette
Sermons:
European/American
Walkman Users:
•
Mobile
•
Mobile
•
Muslim
•
Secular (capitalist)
•
Ethical soundscape
•
Privatized soundscape
•
Orientalism, imperialism
•
Aesthetic colonization
•
Inshirah – Jousse’s
notion of gesture, “to
hear with the heart,”
moral knowledge and
action
•
Public invisibility personal space defined
as conceptual space
•
Inshirah – Jousse’s
notion of gesture, “to
hear with the heart,”
moral knowledge and
action
•
Affect and action,
devotion and
entertainment
•
Public invisibility personal space defined
as conceptual space
•
Both utopian and
alienated, colonizing
and colonized
Public and Counterpublic:
Public
•
•
•
•
A tendency within liberal thought to view the
individual as necessarily in conflict with the
community
Exclude any recognition of the institutional and
disciplinary conditions that enable it
Self-organizing
Rational speech
Counterpublic
•
•
•
•
•
Discursive arenas where subordinate groups
articulate viewpoints, interests, and identities that
stand opposed to the hegemonic discourses of
bourgeois society (Nancy Fraser)
Rests upon a conceptual edifice in which
deliberation and discipline, or language and power,
are regarded as thoroughly interdependent.
Takes public deliberation as one of its modalities
Cuts across the modern distinctions between state
and society and between public and private
Founded and inhabited by the ethical listener
Public
Counterpublic
•
Individual vs. state
•
Subordinate groups vs.
hegemonic discourse
•
Does not consider
institutional or
disciplinary conditions
•
Deliberation and
discipline are
interdependent
•
Self-organizing
•
Cuts across
state/society,
public/private
•
Rational speech
•
Inhabited by the ethical
Define the Islamic concept of “Da’wa”
Define the Islamic concept of “Da’wa”
Define Hirschkind’s concept of “Cassette Da’wa”
Cassette Da’wa:
•
Unstructured and informal
•
Situated outside boundaries of prescribed ritual
practice or scholarly instruction
•
A domain and discourse that stands in a disjunctive
relationship to the public sphere of the nation and
its media instruments
•
Both normative and deliberative
•
Globalized
•
Resulted in participants’ increased familiarity with
bases and styles of Islamic argumentation
•
Not a move towards liberalism
•
Considered “noise” by secular and nonfundamentalist Muslim Egyptians
•
Gender equality?
•
Resulted in participants’ increased familiarity with
bases and styles of Islamic argumentation
•
Not a move towards liberalism
•
Considered “noise” by secular and nonfundamentalist Muslim Egyptians
•
Gender equality?