Sufism, subjectivity and parapsychology: refashioning the dirbāsha ritual among Sufis in modern Iraq

This paper explores the ritual of the dirbāsha as an extraordinary miracle performance and its role as a bodily practice in the formation of modern Muslim subjectivities among the Qādiriyya-Kasnazāniyya Sufi communities in Iraq. During the climax of collective dhikr gatherings, male Sufi novices perform extraordinary and dangerous acts, perforating parts of their bodies with swords or long skewers without seriously injuring themselves. From the Sufi perspective, this ritual is, first of all, interpreted as the miracle of a Sufi shaykh and not of the performing Sufi novice since it is seen as an expression and proof of God’s power as transmitted through the shaykh. Moreover, it has been argued that the ritual is constitutive for the formation of the religious subjectivity of the performing Sufi novice since it allows the embodiment of mystical concepts as emotional, sensorial and existential realities. For the individual ritual experience to work, the social construction and constant reframing of these “miracles” needs to be taken into account as well, namely the ordinary ethics of the extraordinary which allow the miracles to be perceived as such. The present case of the Kasnazāniyya will show how Sufis combined their pious with a modern, critical and self-reflexive subjectivity and successfully managed to reframe this highly controversial practice – which is criticised by religious reformists and secularists alike – beyond its traditional ritual context with the modern science of parapsychology.

In praise of urban walking: Towards understanding of walking as a subversive bodily practice in neoliberal space

Focusing on the steps that literally and metaphorically guide us today, this paper takes walking as its main subject and establishes it theoretically as a form of subversive bodily movement. If contemporary sociological and humanistic treatments of walking show that this everyday practice has not been completely overlooked, the gap opens at the level of thinking it in relation to the dominant social order and its spatial and temporal manifestations. As we argue, in the hegemonic neoliberal context, walking has the potential to manifest itself as a practice that breaks with the existing logic of both space and time. Through the methodological application of the cat’s cradle game, we develop a theoretical argumentation to ground walking as a bodily practice that requires different space and different time. Emanating from the body, it opens to the space and time of enjoyment – a heterotopia erected in relation to the current neoliberal hegemony, but in the manner of a crack, a path that carries the projection of a possible alternative.

Costume

Dress is integral to the performance of ballet, carefully considered in the collaboration between the choreographer and the designer. This chapter offers a broad introduction to thinking about “costume” as a term that is reserved for and relates to garments used for performance. It examines contemporary ballet costume through the conventions evidenced in the component parts of garments while emphasizing a tradition of making. Uniform is used in the training of a dancer so that dress is embedded in bodily practice, becoming a symbiotic partner in the dance. Contemporary ballet abandoned the form of the classical tutu and features leotards, bare legs, and pointe shoes or canvas slippers, flattening the hierarchy and blurring the gender lines.

Voices that Matter?

How do we thoroughly historicize the voice, or integrate it into our historical research, and how do we account for the mundane daily practices of voice . . . the constant talking, humming, murmuring, whispering, and mumbling that went on off stage, in living rooms, debating clubs, business meetings, and on the streets? Work across the humanities has provided us with approaches to deal with aspects of voices, vocality, and their sounds. This article considers how we can mobilize and adapt such interdisciplinary methods for the study of history. It charts out a practical approach to attend to the history of voices—including unmusical ones—before recording, drawing on insights from the fields of sound studies, musicology, and performativity. It suggests ways to “listen anew” to familiar sources as well as less conventional source material. And it insists on a combination of analytical approaches focusing on vocabulary, bodily practice, and the questionable particularity of sound.

Embodying Sonic Resonance as/after Trauma

This chapter shows that interwar French musicians understood music making as a therapeutic, vibrational, bodily practice. Soldiers’ accounts of music making in correspondence and diaries reveal that enlisted musicians were frequently concerned with how music’s organized vibrations offered antidotes to the unpredictable and harmful vibrations of warfare. In memoirs and method books, professional French musicians like Marguerite Long, Émile Vuillermoz, and Marcelle Gerar described singing and piano playing as mentally and physically beneficial sensorial practices. Investigation of scientific, medical, psychology, and musical discourse from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals a genealogy of the perception of music as a healing vibrational medium that was prevalent during and after World War I. In situating these accounts of music making’s benefits within broader international understanding of music’s sonic qualities, this chapter illuminates the role that vibration played in the development of music therapy in France during World War I.

Exploring the embodied subtleties of collaborative creativity: What organisations can learn from dance

This study illustrates the value of embodied subtleties in the process of collaborative creativity. Drawing on a sensory ethnography of two dance productions, we illustrate the fine-grained ways in which professional dancers negotiate creative processes behind the scenes. We identify three aspects through which collaborative creativity emerges from bodily subtleties: (1) moving beyond individual bodies towards collective ambitions, (2) relating to colleagues’ micro-gestures and bodily nuances, and (3) the role of ‘serious play’ between bodies in setting the scene for the first two aspects to occur. The findings will contribute to our understanding of the practice of collaborative creativity, which we treat as not only a mental but also a highly intimate bodily practice. We conclude that appreciating sensory micro-dynamics between oneself and one’s colleagues is crucial for creative collaboration, which is increasingly necessary for management learning in contemporary organisations.

Female Negotiations of Affect in Domestic and Public Space in the Television Series The Handmaid’s Tale

The screen adaptation of the 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, converges with the current global turn to the right. Across different geographies and variables, there have been attempts at reinforcing the control of women’s reproductive capacity, crucial to the reproduction of capitalism, and resistance by networks of feminist movements. Such tensions bear resemblance with the concerns represented in the television show. Within the affective turn, in the present study, I examine the gaze as a gendered bodily practice of control over women as well as a practice of resistance under the guise of affect, friendship and desire, in private and public space.

Celebrating Neighbourhood Birds: Performing Equality in Avian-human Performance

Birds are messengers of climate change and loss of biodiversity. As a backdrop I use Henrik Ernston’s and Erik Swyngedouw’s suggestion of politicizing the environment in the era of the Anthropocene. Politicizing the environment is here fundamentally performative, which means that questions concerning environment are related to ecological understanding, egalitarian acting and respectful relationships. I argue in this text that considering and performing a non-human perspective is an equalitarian bodily practice of politicizing non-human beings around us. In this text I ask: how does avian-human performance practice politicize birds? I am interested in analysing what effects of differences are generated in the entangled relations of performance practice, and how do they relate to performative politics of equality. The concepts eco-justice, diversity, agential realism and Rancière’s performative politics, which are actualized in “distribution of the sensible”, are central in the diffractive analysis of non-human performance practice. In this pedagogically inclined artistic research project, I combined three bird discourses: the scientific, sentimental and “the reality-of-a-bird” discourses are embedded in performative avian-human performance inquiries. However, such studio practices are not enough. Scientific studies, combined with studies in indigenous knowledge systems and direct intra-action with diverse non-humans, can open deepened ecological understanding of the needs and desires of a more-than-human-world. Combining these aspects with performance practices may reveal more ways of politicizing non-humans and of voicing their needs and desires.