The Promise of Sonic Translation

Performing the Festive Sacred in Morocco

Bibliographic Data

ID2279650
AuthorsDeborah A Kapchan (New York University, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume110
Issue4
Pages467-483
Publication date2008-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Anthropologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00079.x
OpenAlexW2110084523
LanguageEN
Citations received49
References cited28

How do international music festivals produce experiences of the sacred in multifaith audiences? What is their part in creating transnational communities of affect? In this article, I theorize what I call "the promise of sonic translation": the trust in the ultimate translatability of aural (as opposed to textual) codes. This promise, I assert, produces the "festive sacred," a configuration of aesthetic and embodied practices associated with festivity wherein people of different religions and nations create and cohabit an experience of the sacred through heightened attention to auditory and sense-based modes of devotion conceived as "universal." The festive sacred is a transnational (thus mobile) phenomenon inextricable from the enterprise of sacred tourism. Such festive forms not only produce a Turnerian communitas but also create new transnational categories that mediate religious sentiment and reenchant the world

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Communitas · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Liminality · Phenomenon · Sociology · Tourism · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Culinary Culture and Tourism · History · Philosophy · Religious Tourism and Spaces