The Liturgical Calendar

2021 ◽  
pp. 98-117
Author(s):  
Christopher Bell
Keyword(s):  
Musical Performances ◽  
Monastic Community ◽  
Ritual Practices

Chapter 4 broadens its focus on Nechung Monastery’s ritual activities and annual calendar by exploring month-by-month the significant rites the monastic community historically performed every year. The New Year celebrations around the Jokhang Temple, the opera and musical performances at Drepung Monastery, and the Flower Offering Festival at Tsel Gungtang all illustrate the richness of Nechung’s liturgical involvement throughout the year, as well as its ties to other institutions and major Tibetan holidays. Moreover, these ritual practices and ceremonies reveal Nechung’s growing liturgical history, as the monastery accrued various rites from ritual masters, and in response to important events, throughout the centuries.

Gendering Emotions: Ṭarab, Women and Musical Performance in Three Biographical Narratives from ‘The Book of Songs’

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-183
Author(s):  
Karen Moukheiber
Keyword(s):  
Formative Period ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Musical Performances ◽  
Slave Women ◽  
Social Conduct ◽  
Literary Biographies ◽  
The One ◽  
The Book Of Songs

Musical performance was a distinctive feature of urban culture in the formative period of Islamic history. At the court of the Abbasid caliphs, and in the residences of the ruling elite, men and women singers performed to predominantly male audiences. The success of a performer was linked to his or her ability to elicit ṭarab, namely a spectrum of emotions and affects, in their audiences. Ṭarab was criticized by religious scholars due, in part, to the controversial performances at court of slave women singers depicted as using music to induce passion in men, diverting them from normative ethical social conduct. This critique, in turn, shaped the ethical boundaries of musical performances and affective responses to them. Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s tenth-century Kitāb al-Aghānī (‘The Book of Songs’) compiles literary biographies of prominent male and female singers from the formative period of Islamic history. It offers rich descriptions of musical performances as well as ensuing manifestations of ṭarab in audiences, revealing at times the polemics with which they were associated. Investigating three biographical narratives from Kitāb al-Aghānī, this paper seeks to answer the following question: How did emotions, gender and status shape on the one hand the musical performances of women singers and on the other their audiences’ emotional responses, holistically referred to as ṭarab. Through this question, this paper seeks to nuance and complicate our understanding of the constraints and opportunities that shaped slave and free women's musical performances, as well as men's performances, at the Abbasid court.

Reconstructors

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Stefania Palmisano
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ritual Practices

This article treats the Reconstructors, a Catholic Community founded in Italy by the Jesuit Vittorio Cappelletto. After a period in India at the school of Anandamurti, the leader of the Ananda Marga movement, Cappelletto’s spiritual experiences induced him to import the teachings received from the Indian guru into Christianity. After presenting the salient stages in the history of the Reconstructors, this article analyses the doctrinal structure and the ritual practices of the movement. Next, it explores the movement’s esoteric bases and the relationships between Cappelletto and his disciples. Finally, the “story behind the story” is engaged, along with reflections upon the contingencies and dilemmas of fieldwork.

How Girls Generation Use Erotic Capital?

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adib Rifqi Setiawan
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Social Influence ◽  
Women's Studies ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Musical Performances ◽  
Women’S Studies ◽  
Workplace Romance ◽  
Erotic Capital

We didn’t work like common women's studies work on sexuality that generally focuses on sexual harassment or workplace romance to the exclusion of strategic forms of erotic capital. However, we consider women’s strategic sexual performances as a form of social influence and address the positive and negative consequences that may follow. This review highlights the occurrence and complexities of erotic capital in Girls Generation’s musical performances and modelling career, then discusses the important implications of use their erotic capital (i.e. face and leg) to influence others or gain desired ends. In so doing, the findings highlight a need for rethinking traditional conceptualizations of empowerment and initiates a new direction for feminist scholarship in this regard.

Ritualized Writing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan D. Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
State Control ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Ritual Practices

Transcribing scripture (sutras) represents one of the most central devotional practices in the Buddhist world. Sutra copying functioned as a form of ritualized writing, a practice strategically set apart from more mundane forms through a set of practices and beliefs. This book highlights sutra transcription throughout Asia, but focuses primarily on seventh- through ninth-century Japan, where the practice is particularly well-documented. It shows how scribes engaged in ritual practices related to purification and how patrons held elaborate dedication ceremonies upon the completion of a project. It traces the social organizations and institutional structures through which sutra copying took place. It highlights the function of the practice in the lives of diverse individuals from scribes to rulers. As a whole, the book offers a radical reassessment of Buddhism in ancient Japan that moves beyond scholarly tendencies to focus on state control and exploitation, and proposes a new way to treat scriptures as ritualized texts that interact dynamically with the individuals and communities who produce them.

What is liturgy?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Wolterstorff
Keyword(s):  
Main Argument ◽  
Musical Performances

The nature of liturgy is explained in this chapter by first analyzing the nature of an enactment of some liturgy. The main argument is that liturgical enactments are a species of scripted activity, resembling, in that respect, games, musical performances, dramatic performances, and the like. Associated with every liturgy is a set of prescriptions for the correct enactment of that liturgy; Call that the script for that liturgy. The liturgy itself is then that sequence of act-types that is enacted when the prescriptions associated with that liturgy are faithfully followed. A liturgy is thus a universal: it can be enacted at many times and in many places. More specifically: liturgies are for being directly engaged with God in acts that can be loosely characterized as acts of worship.

Textual Events

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Homeric Hymns ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Performance ◽  
Textual Traditions ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Ritual Practices ◽  
Formal Features

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts. The fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as textual events. Several chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings. Others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. In addition to studies that analyse individual lyric texts and lyric authors (Sappho, Alcaeus, Pindar), the volume includes treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events re-examines the relationship between the poems’ formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of sociopolitical discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within them. As well as enacting cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

“FX, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenna Ward ◽  
Allan Watson
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Emotional Labor ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Musical Performances ◽  
Work Spaces ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
Creative Artists ◽  
A Site

The music industry is characterized by stereotypical images of excess, pleasure, intensity, and play that have given rise to folklore of “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” Through a qualitative study of sound engineers this chapter explores two main questions: To what extent is the lived reality of working in studio contexts with creative artists reflected in the stereotypical representations of “rock ’n’ roll”? To what extent is the “rock ’n’ roll vibe” an organic, voluntary state of creativity or facilitated “emotional FX” elicited by studio staff to enhance particular musical performances? The chapter demonstrates ways in which engineers and producers manage their emotions to influence and support performances from artists. These emotional labor performances aim to recast the technological, and often stark, physical space of the recording studio as a site of autonomy and play, turning work spaces into sites of pleasure and excess in sometimes uncomfortable working conditions.

Influence on Early Christian Worship

2020 ◽  
pp. 377-391
Author(s):  
Paul F. Bradshaw
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Hebrew Scriptures ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Ritual Practices

This chapter traces the various ways in which the cultic language and imagery of the Hebrew Scriptures influenced and shaped the liturgical thought and ritual practices of early Christianity, from the first to the fourth century ce. At first, this was primarily through the metaphorical or spiritual application of such concepts as priesthood and sacrifice, but eventually there are indications of the beginnings of the adoption of a more literal correspondence between some elements of the Temple cult and aspects of Christian worship. Both corporate and individual practices of prayer are covered, including the use of the canonical psalms, as well as the appropriation of traditional ritual gestures and the emergence of Christian holy days out of biblical festivals.

scholarly journals Animating Idolatry: Making Ancestral Kin and Personhood in Ancient Peru

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 287
Author(s):  
George F. Lau
Keyword(s):  
Family Members ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Lines Of Evidence ◽  
Ritual Practices

Historical and archaeological records help shed light on the production, ritual practices, and personhood of cult objects characterizing the central Peruvian highlands after ca. AD 200. Colonial accounts indicate that descendant groups made and venerated stone images of esteemed forebears as part of small-scale local funerary cults. Prayers and supplications help illuminate how different artifact forms were seen as honored family members (forebears, elders, parents, siblings). Archaeology, meanwhile, shows the close associations between carved monoliths, tomb repositories, and restricted cult spaces. The converging lines of evidence are consistent with the hypothesis that production of stone images was the purview of family/lineage groups. As the cynosures of cult activity and devotion, the physical forms of ancestor effigies enabled continued physical engagements, which vitalized both the idol and descendant group.

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