Islamic Performance Traditions across Regions between West and Southeast Asia
CERES Palais, room "Ruhrpott" (4.13)
Islamic Performance Traditions across Regions between West and Southeast Asia is a workshop on the traditions of performing religious texts and their variation across languages and regions. It aims to link scholars working on Islamic traditions from West to Southeast Asia, who are otherwise scattered along various academic disciplines. Performance is taken in the broad sense of reciting, transmitting and representing textual traditions. The workshop seeks to explore the variety of sensations that accompany recitals like sound (tunes, rhythms, refrains, musical instruments), smell (perfumes, flowers, incense) and taste (sweets, beverages, fruits) and their functions as channels for the transmission and reception of devotion and merit. The presentations deal with the implications of the varieties of performance traditions on the dynamics between the canon of ritual obligations and local practices, the written and the audible and between the verbal/semantic and the emotional/sensual.