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Dancing at the Thresholds: Music, Trance, and Feeling in Algerian Dīwān of Sīdī Bilāl
Paperback
Series: Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa
ISBN13: 9780253075888
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: May 12 2026
Pages: 354
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.79 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Dancing at the Thresholds tells the story of a racialized community in Algeria that literally trance dances at the thresholds of consciousness. It also tells the story about how these communities negotiate and dance at thresholds of the sacred and profane, at the perceived clashes of Islam and animism or of sub-Saharan versus North African lifeworlds.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork alongside archival sources, oral histories, and ritual analysis, author Tamara Dee Turner considers these dances through an affective, embodied lens to challenge mainstream assumptions of affect theory. The dance embodies centuries of traumatic histories haunting these communities: their ritual, dīwān, coalesced over three centuries of the trans-Saharan slave trade. Embodying these tumultuous pasts, dīwān rituals move painful feelings through the trancing body to the point of affective ignition and release. However, to accomplish this, ritual actors must cultivate specific atmospheres conducive to trance and transformation via a particular Algerian understanding of atmosphere called hāl.
A much-needed ethnographic approach to the living family lineages, practices, and intimate epistemologies of diwan, Dancing at the Thresholds is a story about the nature of healing and how wellness depends on the respect of wider, affective ecologies beyond both the individual and the human.
1 different editions
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Dancing at the Thresholds: Music, Trance, and Feeling in Algerian Dīwān of Sīdī Bilāl
Turner, Tamara Dee
Hardcover
Also from
Turner, Tamara Dee
Dancing at the Thresholds: Music, Trance, and Feeling in Algerian Dīwān of Sīdī Bilāl
Turner, Tamara Dee
Hardcover
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