Page 196 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Soundscape 179

authoritative knowledge about the sacred (Stolow 2005). As we will see
below, in Muslim West Africa, text-based understandings of the central
importance of hearing in conveying God’s truth interlock with broader
cultural appreciations of the voice as a central vehicle of mediating spiritual
power and divine truth (e.g., Stoller 1984; Schulz 2003). However, the
central importance of orally-aurally mediated religious experience has not
precluded the emergence of visual forms of Muslim piety in some areas of
West Africa. Followers of the Muride Sufi order in Senegal, for instance,
engage in visual tokens and representations of their spiritual leaders and
their divine blessing (baraka) in ways that disprove generalizing assumptions
about the allegedly strong anti-iconic bent in Islam (Roberts and Nooter
Roberts 2003). Because of these regionally divergent hierarchies of authentic
spiritual perception and engagement, there sometimes exist fierce debates
within particular religious traditions as to which mode of sensual and
embodied mediation is the most truthful and effective one.
The relevance of soundscape to explorations of religious experience
and its sensual mediation comes out most clearly in Feld’s refined analysis
of auditory space as a complex field of meanings that is closely related to
spiritual and religious practices, to cosmology, and to a conceptual ordering
of the world through material objects, practices, and social organization.
Feld’s study is highly important in yet another respect. To a greater extent
than other explorations of the role of soundscape in mediating experiences
of the transcendent (e.g. Beck 1993; Hirschkind 2006), he takes seriously
the notion of scape (rather than simply focusing on sound as most other
authors do) by positing the spatial as the starting place for our exploration of
the role of bodily movement and sensual orientation in religious experience
and mediation.
Drawing on these important insights, future anthropological investigations
need to address more consistently the question of how the practices,
conventions, technologies, and institutions that generate and inhabit a
religious soundscape map onto divisions along power inequalities and gender
and other forms of social and economic difference.
Another, highly important insight to be drawn from recent anthropological
work on soundscape is the insistence on the contingent and dynamic nature
of sensual ordering. In other words, rather than assuming and essentializing
any fixed culturally specific hierarchy of the senses (e.g., Ong 1981; Burrows
1990; see Beck 2006: 11), studies of processes of religious mediation need
to take into consideration the always open-ended, indeterminate nature of
sensual perception and ordering. The particular relationship that emerges
between perceiving subjects and objects and experience of the religious is
not a function of the specific prescripts of a “culture” or “tradition.” Rather,
it is the outcome of a historically determinate yet open-ended process of