Ambient Sufism : ritual niches and the social work of musical form / Richard C. Jankowsky.

Audio, video, and musical examples may be accessed on the accompanying website, https:///sites.tufts.edu/ambientsufism.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : Ambient Sufism -- Ritual reflexivity : musicality, Sufi pedigrees, and the masters of "intoxication" -- Ritual hospitality : women Sufis and the musical ethnics of accommodation -- Ritual alterity : the musical management of Sub-Saharan otherness -- Ritual remnants : legacies of Jewish-Muslim ritual musical convergences -- Ritual as resource : set-list modularity and the cultural politics of staging Sufi music -- Conclusion : ritual niches and the social work of musical form.

"Ambient Sufism is a study of the intertwined musical lives of several ritual communities in Tunisia that invoke the healing powers of long-deceased Muslim saints through music-driven trance rituals. Richard C. Jankowsky illuminates the (virtually undocumented) role of women and minorities in shaping the ritual musical ecology of the region, with case studies on men's and women's Sufi orders, Jewish and black Tunisian healing musical troupes, and the popular music of hard-drinking laborers, as well as the cohorts involved in mass-mediated staged spectacles of ritual that continue to inject ritual sounds into the public sphere. He uses the term "ambient Sufism" to illuminate these adjacent ritual practices, each serving as a musical, social, and devotional-therapeutic niche while contributing to a larger, shared ecology of practices surrounding and invoking the figures of saints. And he argues that ritual musical form--that is, the large-scale structuring of ritual through musical organization--has agency; that is, form is revealing and constitutive of experience and encourages particular subjectivities. Ambient Sufism promises many useful ideas for ethnomusicology, anthropology, Islamic and religious studies, and North African studies"--