Sounding Islam provides a provocative account of the sonic dimensions of religion, combining perspectives from the anthropology of media and sound studies, as well as drawing on neo-phenomenological approaches to atmospheres. Using long-term ethnographic research on devotional Islam in Mauritius, Patrick Eisenlohr explores how the voice, as a site…[Read more]

Singing while working and working while singing have appeared to be, throughout history, the same social activity without a clear or categorical distinction. In this paper we explore this field in the industrial shoemaking environment in Menorca (Balearic Islands), regarding it as a social process of adaptation and resistance against contemporary…[Read more]

This thesis seeks to contribute towards the emerging discourse in Ravel studies concerning gender, as well as adding to the ongoing work in musical narratology, especially as regards ballet, to which very little narratological attention has been given. Employing a combination of narratological and Schenkerian analysis, this thesis argues that…[Read more]

On the phonological adaption of Armenian loanwords starting with plosives or fricatives in the Turkish dialects of the province Erzurum.

On conditional forms in the dialects of Erzumrum province, conditional constructions and temporal clauses.

The present article investigates a type of complex sentence in Turkish where the predicate
of the embedded clause is based on a conditional form followed by the particle de or
sometimes bile. The syntactic and semantic peculiarities of this construction in Turkish
are outlined according to the exhaustive description of concessive conditionals…[Read more]

There is a rich corpus of texts written in Zapotec during the Mexican colonial period that remains relatively understudied. The nature of the corpus poses significant challenges to would-be readers; for example, the texts were written using the Roman alphabet with few standardized spelling conventions, resulting in a large number of homographs and…[Read more]

In the National Theatre of Scotland’s The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (2011), the eponymous heroine is a collector of ballads, who views her role as the loving preservation of traditional artworks. However, Prudencia’s perspective is challenged by her late-night encounter with the sinister Nick, whose own passion for collecting forces Pru…[Read more]

This essay uses Arnaldo Momigliano’s genealogy of antiquarianism and historiography to propose a new method for engaging the past. The Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987) traced antiquarianism from its advent in ancient Greece and later growth in Rome to its early modern efflorescence, its usurpation by history, and its transformation…[Read more]

‘Narrative Theory’ is an online introduction to classical structuralist narratological analysis. This preliminary section provides an introduction to the notion of level of analysis in narrative, and examines a number of theories bearing on the structure of the fabula (Aristotle, Tomashevsky, Bal) and of the story (Genette), with attention to the…[Read more]

The ruins of church-mosques, museums, and ancient cities inform material culture as allegories inform spiritual life, invoking transcendence amidst desacralization. Drawing on Benjamin, Jameson, and Koselleck to advance our understanding of the functioning of ruins across time, this ethnography of ruins engages with the paradoxes generated by…[Read more]

From the early nineteenth century up until the first half of the twentieth century, many leading scholars in the emerging field of linguistics were occupied with what would today be considered a kind of linguistic typology. The various classifications of languages they proposed were generally intertwined with speculation about the “racial” tra…[Read more]

Assembled cigar box fiddle. Fiddlin’ John Hutchison learned to play on a fiddle made from an Old Virginia Cheroots Tobacco box. In a taped interview he calls it a “cigar box.”

The label is under the soundboard. Fiddlin’ John Hutchison learned to play on a fiddle made from an Old Virginia Cheroots Tobacco box. In a taped interview he calls it a “cigar box.”

Fiddlin’ John Hutchison learned to play on a fiddle made from an Old Virginia Cheroots Tobacco box. In a taped interview he calls it a “cigar box.”

In this article I make a case for an analytic of atmospheres as a way to understand the seemingly ineffable yet powerful effects of vocal sound on listeners in an Islamic setting. Focusing on the recitation of devotional poetry in honor of the Prophet Muhammad among Mauritian Muslims, I seek to bring together neo-phenomenological approaches to…[Read more]

In the summer of 1704, Antonio Vallisneri (1661–1730), the preeminent Italian physician and natural philosopher of his time, traveled with a “daring soul” and “trembling feet” across the “silent horrors” of the northern Apennines: down the hills south of Reggio Emilia to northern Tuscany and the western edge of his native land, the Province of G…[Read more]

This note criticises some equivocations and ambivalent notions in the writings of Derrida, especially ‘Limited Inc’ and ‘De la grammatologie’, as regards the notions of norm, intention, system, center, consciousness, writing, speech act and literal meaning. Derrida is shown to both have his cake and eat it, using his own text as a paradoxical…[Read more]