Everyday Creativity: Singing goddesses in the Himalayan foothills, by Kirin Narayan

Carlan, Hannah

doi:10.4000/ebhr.393

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The same relation between singing, regulating air in the lungs, and the effects of prāṇayāma are reported in Hyam (2019, 82–89) and Narayan (2016, 212).…”

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confidence: 68%

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Sonic matters: Singing as method and the epistemology of singing across Bengali esoteric lineages

Lorea

2022

American Anthropologist

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Songs are knowledge" (g āne jñ ān) is a recurrent saying among Bauls, Fakirs, Sahajiyas, and other Bengali esoteric and heterodox communities. The sonic dimension of songs is related to cosmogonic vibration, seed, food, and feminine bodily fluids. Singing, requiring breath control and concentration, is associated with yoga. How is the performance of songs simultaneously an embodied way of knowing and an act of indigenous scholarship? Can the epistemology of singing coexist with hegemonic sensory epistemologies in a postcolonial South Asia? This article draws upon a ten-year ethnographic engagement with Bengali-speaking gurus and performers to discuss how singing provides a transformative and anthropopoietic knowledge, rooted in bodily experience and exchanged among performers-listeners to build togetherness in ways that subvert dominant ideologies of relatedness. This article also adopts Bengali understandings of ensounded knowledge to question the ocularcentric and scriptist epistemologies that underlie modern academia. Taking songs seriously as ways of knowing in their own right, I suggest singing as method and using the feelingful body as a research tool, not only for an ethnography that reflects the sensory epistemology of the communities I work with but also as a promising way to decolonize anthropology's epistemic ethnocentrism.

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“…The same relation between singing, regulating air in the lungs, and the effects of prāṇayāma are reported in Hyam (2019, 82–89) and Narayan (2016, 212).…”

supporting

confidence: 68%

“…2828The cathartic function of religious songs has been discussed by Narayan in similar terms. For her singers/informants, bhajan songs are like a bath in the holy river Ganga (Narayan 2016, 188) and the flow of sounds can wash away their bad deeds (198).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sonic matters: Singing as method and the epistemology of singing across Bengali esoteric lineages

Lorea

2022

American Anthropologist

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“…Some of them got extremely frustrated with the death or disappearance of their birds, and others offered high rewards (up to US$500) for the retrieval of lost pigeons. This was the face of rooftop pigeons that cultivated a pleasurable shauq (personal enthusiasm) among aficionados, pulled them out of their dull routines and obligations, and inspired in them what Narayan (2016) calls “everyday creativity.”…”

Section: The Face Of the Animalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Face‐to‐face with the (animal) Other

Kavesh

2023

American Ethnologist

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The imperial underpinning of the early anthropology of Pakistan constituted “the other” as a subject of comprehension, categorization, and containment. Later, with the post‐9/11 geopolitical backdrop, anthropologists focused on selected themes such as religious and ethnic disparity and political nationalism, eliding some topics or groups. What would it mean for the anthropology of Pakistan to consider alienated themes and groups while emphasizing the infinity of the Other? How would conceiving the Other beyond a political or religious other, or even beyond a human subject, create a possibility of decolonizing the anthropology of Pakistan while exploring multiple futures—emergent, imagined, and expected? Such an approach critically moots a reexamination of theoretical, methodological, and epistemological tenets and urges the discipline to engage with diverse lifeworlds. It brings the face of the Other face‐to‐face with anthropology beyond humanity to consider all beings, intersubjective and collaborative experiences, and shared values.

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Everyday Creativity: Singing goddesses in the Himalayan foothills, by Kirin Narayan

Cited by 2 publications

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Sonic matters: Singing as method and the epistemology of singing across Bengali esoteric lineages

Sonic matters: Singing as method and the epistemology of singing across Bengali esoteric lineages

Face‐to‐face with the (animal) Other

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