Paper short abstract:

In an Algerian ritual, various trance states are musically cultivated in order to grapple with human suffering. Trance processes bring the past to bear on the present so that through an individual’s “experience,” other subjectivities and temporalities are cultivated in the trancing body.

Paper long abstract:

In Algerian diwan, a ritual that emerged out of the trans-Saharan slave trade, various trance states are musically cultivated in order to grapple with human suffering. In order to do this, trance processes bring the past to bear on the present so that through an individual’s “experience,” other subjectivities and temporalities are cultivated in the trancing body: ancestral suffering, intergenerational memory, stories and legends of the community, hagiographies of saints, and one’s own interpersonal suffering in the present. “Experience” is a nuanced concept here, given the varieties of agency loss that define trance and in which many degrees of conscious awareness fluctuate. This exploration of trance temporality productively complicates how we think about time and experience, about what it can mean to inhabit—in bodily ways—“infinitely many times.” This co-presence of “then” and “now” is crucial to the goal of trance in the management of pain and suffering: a kind of temporal-intersubjective integration. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork in Algeria, recent anthropological scholarship on the nature of “experience” as it attends to suffering (Desjarlais 1992, Davies 2011, Throop 2010, Pinto 2014), hauntological theory (Derrida 1994, Good 2012, Hollan 2019) music and trance studies (Jankowsky 2010, Becker 2004, Rouget 1985), and cross-disciplinary engagements with affect theory (Ahmed 2004, Cassaniti 2015, Massumi 1995, Mazzarella 2009, etc), this paper proposes that the utility of ritualized trance is due to the collapsing of time and multiplicities of “experience.”