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Soundscape 185

spiritual powers are passed on to followers. In contrast to male leaders, only
few women in leadership positions can claim to possess the divine blessings
associated with leading Sufi clans. Accordingly, haptic modes of mediating
spiritual powers are subordinate to other forms of passing down charisma to
make followers partake in it. Nevertheless, in their case too, the tactile and
kinaesthetic dimensions of sound play a central role in captivating the moral
imagination of listeners and in compelling them into action. Audio recording
technologies reinforce listeners’ perceptions of the tactile dimension of
aurality that is of the “touching” experience of voice and of moral excellence
conveyed through voice. These technologies thus enable female leaders to
establish their authority as figures of ethical guidance yet simultaneously
perpetuate distinct conventions of generating spiritual authority.

Conclusion

The various, often synaesthetic modes of sensation and their attendant
practices and technologies, which are constitutive of the contemporary
religious soundscape(s) in West Africa, illustrate how misleading it would
be to conceive of soundscape exclusively in terms of aural-oral modalities of
mediation. The sensual complexity of these religious soundscapes also helps
to refute the still widespread assumption that modern society is characterized
by the hegemony of vision over hearing and of forms of sensual perception.
Both the continuities and the recent transformations in local understandings
and techniques relating to the transmission of spiritual power through voice
and word point to the continued and pervasive importance of aural-oral
forms in mediating and authenticating experience, religious and otherwise.
Soundscape is particularly useful to think of the continued relevance
and omnipresence of sound because it highlights the spatial and embodied
dimensions of sound perception and the all-enveloping sensual experience
it generates. Because soundscape is closely related to body movement
and sensation and anchors religious experience in the here-and-now, it
implies a notion of localized “scape” that differs from deterritorialized
conceptualizations of “scape,” such as reflected in Appadurai’s famous
“ethno”scape. That is to say, though certain materials and elements of a
religious soundscape may travel across distances, such as in the case of the
audio-recordings of Ayatollah Khomeini’s sermons (Sreberny-Mohammadi
and Mohammadi 1994), the particular experiences they generate are always
inscribed in, and generative of, locally specific regimes of ethical practice
and religious power-knowledge.
The central role of soundscape in fashioning, anchoring, orienting, and
authenticating religious experience evolves and transforms over time, in a
dialectical movement. Believers, practitioners, and religious authorities, by