Paper short abstract:

In the the ceremony known as the Souls' Banishment, among Tepehuan people of Mexico, a ritual specialist uses prayers to mediate between the souls of the dead and their living relatives, in order to secure their permanent separation and keep each group in its own distinct realm.

Paper long abstract:

Among the Tepehuan people of northern Mexico, some feelings and emotions are strictly socially sanctioned. When a death occurs, the mourning relatives must restrain themselves from crying and otherwise visibly expressing their grief, so as not to prevent the dead from peacefully leaving the world of the living. Departing from these social conventions can end in another dead, since this demonstrates to the dead the grief caused by the events. Commonly, the mourning relatives dream about the dead telling them how much they miss them and how starving they are. Once again, the living people must resist and avoid showing their feelings to their dead relatives. This situation is brought to a close through the performance of the ceremony known as the Souls' Banishment, which centres around the prayers performed by a ritual specialist. This ceremony must be carried out a year and five days after the death. In this presentation, we analyze this ceremony and the prayer known as "the dispatch", exploring the aesthetic oral dimension sought by the specialist recurring to different poetic resources to assuage the feelings of the living and the dead. The ritual specialist is a master of discourse, and in these situations he must display his skills as a diplomat, mediating between the realms of the living and of the dead, in order to convince the dead to leave the living world peacefully and separate themselves from their relatives.

Paper short abstract:

We introduce verbal charms among Veps in Northwest Russia, which are ritualized ways of speaking customarily used to prompt a change in both human beings and environments. We refer to the charms as 'event'—a transformative and suspended period of time, in which human and non-human agencies coalesce.

Paper long abstract:

In our paper, we present verbal charms (puheged, vajhed/pakitas in Vepsian) among Veps, an Indigenous minority group of Northwest Russia. Vepsian verbal charms are ritualized ways of speaking that are customarily used to prompt a change in both human beings and environments. Veps understand that in the act of 'blowing' (puhuda) air along with reciting 'specific words' (vajhed), human and often non-human agencies join forces for changes in people and the environment to occur. In fact, the event of 'blowing specific words' can be transformative when channels of communication between human and non-human agencies are open. We refer to this encounter as 'event' (cf. Kapferer 2015), a transformative and suspended period of time, in which human and non-human agencies come together. By presenting the relational and dynamic aspects of the verbal charms and focusing on the movement of air and the utterance of specific words, we also aim to summon the actuality of a strict boundary between language and materiality (cf. Cavanaugh and Shankar 2017; Keane 2008; Wiener 2013). In the 'event', the rigid separation between 'material' and 'immaterial' realms begins to be felt as an artificial construction. It galvanizes a different kind of relations with the environment, objects, body parts, which are not understood as simply accompanying tools. Last, we also challenge the assumption that verbal charms and similar folkloric genres are disappearing and often belong to the past, as part of a long-gone 'traditional knowledge'. These practices still endure, which indicates resilience and resistance.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the reclamation and revitalization of Sakha algys (blessing poems) among contemporary speakers, and their use in new contexts; it focuses on how shared affect and intersubjective states are produced through the creation, circulation and performance of algys poetry.

Paper long abstract:

The revitalization of the Sakha language in Russia's Far Eastern Federal district has included a focus on many traditional poetic genres; while Olonkho (epic poetry) is often seen as central to this movement, other genres have also re-emerged in the public spheres and become vehicles for language reclamation. In recent years, Sakha algys (pl. algystar) or blessing poems/prayers have seen a marked resurgence; they are now found circulating online on social media in textual form, and showing up in the linguistic landscape of the city of Yakutsk as well as being performed at both public and private gatherings. The case of algys also sheds light on tensions between concepts of tradition and innovation, and blurs the lines between public and private meanings. This presentation argues that while their revitalization is a highly salient symbol of an ethnic revival movement, it is also a deeply personal 'technology of the self' (Foucault 1984; cf. Hirschkind 2006) that shapes and develops individual and communal systems of belief (Sakha iteghele). Examining how algys produce shared affect and 'intersubjective states' (Wilce 2012) between speakers and hearers illustrates how connections are fostered between the human and other-than-human; the sharing of algystar, whether written or spoken, also reveals ways in which Sakha speakers use algys to enact visions of positive futures amongst conditions of social and political uncertainty.

Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how linguistic acts modulate the affective rhythms shared by social groups by eliciting sensorial awareness of and relationships to otherness, both human and more-than-human forms.

Paper long abstract:

This paper shows how linguistic instances modulate the affective rhythms shared by social groups by comparing the focal speech acts in the services of two Anglican churches in London - an Anglican Evangelical church and a traditional parish church. By focusing on two focal moments - the Evangelical sermon and after-sermon song, on the one hand, and the parish church Holy Communion and Communion anthem, on the other - I illustrate how worshippers articulate speech with singing/listening instances and elicit distinct modes of community-making. I argue that in each church practitioners cultivate a different role for speech acts and shape distinct sonic relationships between worshippers and between worshippers and God. In turn, these configurations of speaking, praying, singing, listening engender distinct affective and sensorial relationships to otherness - to the more-than-human divine Other and the human Other. As such, these articulations of speech and singing/listening acts materialise specific ideals about what constitutes a 'good' individual and collective (Christian) life.

Drawing on this comparative sensorial ethnography, I focus attention on speech as a sonic form that emerges interrelated with other sonic forms such as praying, singing, listening, thus highlighting the sensual and affective dimensions of speech acts. In this, the paper suggests avenues for exploring how linguistic acts shape social actions and relationships not only through linguistic content but through particular sensorial qualities and configurations of linguistic acts.

Paper short abstract:

The use of poetry to shape affective experiences of humans and non-human components of the built environment is a recurring theme of post-Soviet scholarship. This paper examines poetry and politics in contrasting representations of a neighborhood in Vilnius as plans for its reshaping unfold.

Paper long abstract:

Naujininkai is a neighborhood south of the train tracks in Vilnius, which has long been stigmatized and marginalized for its working-class and ethnic-minority population. In 2019 the Lithuanian Railways, together with the City Government, introduced plans for a massive urban renewal project targeting the train station and surrounding areas. This ambitious project is branded as "Vilnius Connect" to highlight mobility, as well as a promise of overcoming spatial and social segregation by 'bringing the city center to the other side of the tracks'. Meanwhile, a handful of poets and writers who moved to this area over the last decade have produced works that demonstrate a deep sense of connection with the city through the existing urban infrastructure. These works stand in stark contrast to the justification the city deploys for the new project, which presents existing transportation infrastructure as an exclusionary border or boundary. How might place-based poetry about cities be considered a form of politics, particularly by articulating subtle embodied practices and affective attunements to other-than-human elements of the urban environment? In what ways might poetry oppose or get co-opted by urban renewal projects or other attempts to shape a city's image and affect? By analyzing the language of urban renewal branding in juxtaposition with the poetry of residents of the targeted neighborhood, this paper will offer an approach to researching affect through attention to the interplay of poetics, infrastructure, and politics.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the meaning of devotional practices called sravanam (to hear) and kirtanam (to speak or sing) among Hare Krishna devotees in Mayapur, West-Bengal. I will argue that these practices have a transformative capacity to generate an aesthetic and affective atmosphere of bhakti.

Paper long abstract:

This paper describes how Krishna devotees in Mayapur, West-Bengal, rely on certain sonic and linguistic acts to transform the urban space into an affective atmosphere of bhakti, devotional love of God. The city of Mayapur is considered a dham, a sacred place, where the Lord himself appeared in the 16th century. This narrative accounts for an increasing number of Hare Kirshna devotees to settle in Mayapur. However, the rapidly growing city and rising property prices has also resulted in a rise in corruption, crime, and questions of safety and well-being.

For Krishna devotees, sravanam (to hear) and kirtanam (to speak or sing of the glories of the Lord) are considered the most important processes of developing bhakti. I will show how particularly nama kirtan, focusing on the Lord’s names, aims to tune devotee’s sensibilities towards an aesthetic experience in a ’perfection of perception, the perception of the unity-in-multiplicity of sensible qualities’ (Baumgarten1750; cit. Howes 2006). I will argue that by specific linguistic and acoustic means, Krishna devotees design the affective state in which they feel Krishna’s presence in His holy name and ultimately in everything they perceive. They learn to use the sound of the holy name as a medium to transcend the experience of the noisy city into a perceived reality of bhakti. I will illustrate my argument with various sonic examples from my field recordings.

This presentation makes the case for a performative approach towards sacred places, which takes into account sonic and linguistic practices, the relationships they generate, sensuous experiences, and inner states of well-being and belonging. The sonic and linguistic object, in this context, presents itself as an opportunity to assess and render the ephemeral qualities of the sense of sacred, well-being, and the environment.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the poetic construction of "affective attunement" between a political speaker - Mãe Beata de Yemonjá, a religious activist from the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion - and her audience. It shows that political affect is not only intersubjectively but also textually constituted.

Paper long abstract:

The analysis of affect as a politically constitutive force has tended to remain outside the scope of linguistic anthropologically oriented research on political communication. Nevertheless, if political affect is understood as intersubjectively, and thus also interactionally constituted, linguistic anthropological modes of analysis have much to offer to our understandings of it. This paper demonstrates this point through an analysis of the poetic construction of "affective attunement" between a political speaker - Mãe Beata de Yemonjá, a religious activist from the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion - and her audience.

The paper's analysis is divided into two parts. First, it examines the overlapping discursive devices that composed Mãe Beata's speech's affect-inducing poetic structure (explicit semantic argument and affectively evocative narrative imagery, a reliance on first-person plural pronouns to hail audience members to a collective we, and repetition and parallelism that operated on both linguistic and paralinguistic levels). Second, it describes how the speech itself acted as a metapragmatic diagram of the kinds of affective attunement between humans and the co-present deities cultivated in Afro-Brazilian religions, and between practitioners and other humans, that Mãe Beata and her fellow religious activists envisioned to form the core of their religious political project.