Ambient Sufism

A richly detailed ethnography and history of Tunisian Sufi music, Richard Jankowsky’s Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form is an important contribution to discussions of music and religion, Sufism, ritual studies, the malleable relations between the sacred and the secular, and anthropology of religion. It is firmly located within the discipline of ethnomusicology, so the focus is on music more than religion. Jankowsky describes the Sufi phenomena under consideration as “ambient” because the word connects two aspects of his object of study—a broad social and physical context in which a variety of people experience Sufi music, and the ritual ambience produced in specific spaces and with specific sounds (11). He analyzes the musical and ritual experience as centered on interlocking kinds of sonic intensification: discrete, sequential, and global (16). Discrete intensification is the repetition of a single musical phrase with acceleration, increase of sonic density, and rise in pitch. Sequential intensification is a process where one rhythmic pattern modulates into another rhythmic pattern. Global intensification is a pattern that takes the longest to achieve and occurs through systematic layering of additional musical instruments.

With this grounding in the formal aspects of Sufi musical-ritual genres, Jankowsky turns to the ways in which various groups both find connection with and distinction from one another in their musical and social practices. Chapters address the distinctive contributions of women musicians and devotion to female Sufi saints, Jewish musical traditions that intersect with Sufi ones, variations introduced by sub-Saharan African communities, and finally the complex mediations of sacred and secular in the presentation of Sufi music at a 2015 music festival. These case studies and histories are an important contribution to the study of the production and reception of Sufi music and illuminate beautifully the complex negotiations of gender, religious, and ethnic differences within a common language of musical form.

Importantly, the book includes a website with audio and video recordings. Despite Jankowsky’s detailed descriptions of the music and recitation, the actual sounds were a complete surprise when I listened to them. By no means does this indicate a weakness of Jankowsky’s descriptive abilities—it is simply a reminder that a description of music is not a substitute for direct engagement with it. The recordings also made clear that Jankowsky’s analysis opened ranges of meaning that I would never have picked up on simply from listening to the recordings.

Yet for all the book’s merits—and they are considerable—on both my first and second read I found myself preoccupied with the politics of ethnography. Ambient Sufism is an example of the conversion of other peoples’ religious experiences into the author’s academic capital. Even the invocation of “documentation in times of trouble,” with a reference to an academic source for the phrase, ended up reading more like academic posturing than a deep wrestling with the suffering “trouble” implies (3). In rare moments, Jankowsky allowed for a more vulnerable subject position—student, friend—to peek through the armor of the authoritative ethnographer, but he ultimately reproduced the colonizing gaze that critics of anthropology have long diagnosed as a fundamental moral failing of the endeavor. When he showed a moment of self-awareness that his interest in Sufi perspectives risked painting Islamist voices as one-dimensional (21), drawing attention to “voice” highlighted both that the whole project he pursues is curatorial in a way typical of Eurocentric discourses, insofar as the voices he is interested in represent a kind of cultural Other, and that the voices he was directly engaged with were so strongly funneled through his sophisticated theoretical apparatus that it was ultimately Jankowsky’s voice, not those of his interlocutors, that was “in the conversation.” Nevertheless, Jankowsky’s thorough and careful study provides a wealth of documentation and analysis that rewards the reader with a clear picture of the complexity of both musical form and social reality at work in Tunisian Sufi music.

Dirk von der Horst is an instructor of religious studies at Mount St. Mary’s University, Los Angeles. 

Dirk von der Horst

Date Of Review:

September 9, 2024