Paper short abstract:

In Algerian rituals, trance provides the social recalibration of material, human bodies and immaterial, energetic ones. This paper explores the body as a creative site where the biological, social, and material are managed through the temporal, social ecosystem of ritual.

Paper long abstract:

In Algerian popular Islamic rituals, bodily techniques of trance articulate sociality between material and immaterial worlds. Bodies are key here, whether they are human or nonhuman bodies (as atmospheric energies or spirits), because they are always assumed to be porous and are therefore engaged as creative sites of material-immaterial relationships between human and nonhuman dimensions. For example, in trance, the moving, human body has access to otherworldly knowledge, it may become a vessel for transgenerational memory (images that enter consciousness), and it may become a host of immaterial agents, all which drastically affect human social relations. When such relationships fall into disrepair, resulting in various manners of sickness from mental-emotional disturbance to paralyzation and chronic illness, trance is a way of engaging with such pain and suffering and their intertwined social implications. Furthermore, trance renders individual suffering public and socially relevant. Indeed, the express purpose of trance is to provide a pluralistic and porous body-ness in the ritual's highly dynamic social ecosystem so that the material and immaterial can be recalibrated through the human body with the direction of musical and ritual experts. In this paper, I contextualize eighteen months of fieldwork on Algerian rituals within the broad strokes of related theoretical work on the aesthetics of pain and illness (Asad 2003; Desjarlais 1992; Kleinman & Das 1997; Pinto 2011; Scarry 1985; Throop 2010), recent phenomenological approaches in anthropology (Ram & Houston 2015), bodily practices (Blackman 2012; Csordas 1999; Scheer 2012) and the canon of music and trance.