In Ritual Soundings: Women Performers and World Religions, Sarah Weiss examines the sanctioned subversion of gendered expectations for women in patriarchal religious communities around the world as exhibited within the liminal space of the religious ritual. Weiss reintroduces comparison as a crucial tool for scholars when used responsibly, arguing that comparisons of seemingly unlike communities, and the parallels such comparisons reveal, can reduce prejudice between individuals of different religious groups. Ritual Soundings incorporates a remarkable range of diverse case studies that demonstrate Weiss’s thorough scholarship and great knowledge surrounding women’s performance practices within localized forms of major world religions.
Ritual Soundings is made up of six chapters framed by an introduction and conclusion. The introduction orients readers to Weiss’s methods and motivation, identifying the book as a “meta-ethnography” that draws from and reanalyzes ethnographic findings of earlier scholarship (2). Using multiple and diverse case studies, this technique lends itself to Weiss’s comparative approach. Chapter 1, “Women Performers and World Religions,” further prefaces Weiss’s material by defining “world religion” within the book’s context, establishing Weiss’s argument for responsible comparative scholarship that avoids exceptionalism, discussing the localization of popular world religions, and explaining Weiss’s selection of case studies.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 form what Weiss identifies as the first section of the book. These chapters comparatively explore the ways that women from religious communities around the world use performance to navigate the anxieties of marriage. Included performances take place alone or in the company of other women and family members. Chapter 2, “Wedding Lamentation,” addresses traditions from such varied settings as a 1980s Pakistani community in Great Britain, Orthodox Christian communities in 1980s Greece and twentieth-century Finland, a 1980s Bihar Hindu community in northern India, and seventeenth-century Italian opera tied to traditional Catholic wedding laments. Weiss explores the historical and spiritual roots of wedding laments in these settings. Chapter 3, “Demeter’s Lamentation and Baubo’s Mockery,” is a short exploration of the mother-daughter relationship between Greek mythology’s Persephone and Demeter in the upheaval of Persephone’s abduction by and forced marriage to Hades, King of the Underworld. While it is the only chapter that does not introduce and directly engage with an ethnographic case study, chapter 3 parallels Demeter’s grief at the marriage of her daughter to that of mothers in case studies presented earlier in the book. The chapter probes fears from ancient Greece that women’s public lamentations held the potential to uproot societal order. This literary, mythological example of a mother’s grief and subsequent cheering through the good-natured mockery of another woman bridges chapter 2 to chapter 4, “Revelry and Resistance.” Chapter 4 discusses mockery during wedding festivities as means of empowerment for women and alternative methods for coping with the immense change that follows a marriage, especially in societies where arranged marriages are common.
In the second section of the book, Weiss spotlights women’s use of the liminal space created by religious rituals to break traditional gender roles within public, community-sanctioned settings. Chapter 5, “Girls’ Poetry and Social Critique at Muslim Berber Weddings,” describes a practice within a Moroccan Berber community in which marriageable young women, normally clothed from head to toe and separated from non-relative men, dance suggestively and sing out poems of their own composition, which usually address socially and politically controversial issues. Because these young women are being evaluated as potential brides by audiences, Weiss notes that the performance is a rare opportunity for the women to present themselves on their own terms. “Transgression and Tarantella among Catholic Women in Calabria,” the final chapter, chronicles the history of the tarantella music and dance genre of southern Italy. The tarantella, named for a convulsive illness caused by tarantula bites, emerged with the discovery that inflicted patients experienced relief when musicians performed for them. It can be traced to at least the fourteenth century when both music and dance were restricted due to potential ties to paganism. With its believed medical properties, the tarantella became a religiously approved form of performance. Today, women in contemporary Calabria perform the tarantella at festivals and on pilgrimages. Dancing without ceasing for a pledged number of hours or given distance is a common religious vow for women pilgrims. Because the tarantella tests the boundaries of modesty for women, yet is chosen by its performers as an act of devotion, it also gives them agency. In both chapters, women behave in surprising, empowering, and usually forbidden ways that are welcomed within their contexts.
Displaying her impressive ability to relate a vast range of case studies, Weiss emphasizes that the examples throughout the book represent a temporary empowerment of women. The very unusualness of these performances during liminal times reinforces normality of everyday patriarchal restrictions. Additionally, performing in such rituals does not equate desire to change a community’s social order—many women performers help to perpetuate patriarchal order in their daily lives. However, such performances suggest the possibility of empowered, alternative roles for women.
One of the many strengths of Ritual Soundings is Weiss’s proactive addressing of possible critiques. Weiss explains her decision to include examples from mainly Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and Jewish communities based on available case studies. She addresses potential concerns about her use of meta-ethnography drawn from the fieldwork of other scholars by proposing its potential as a starting point for comparative techniques that help build intercultural understanding. Ultimately, addressing these potential areas for criticism strengthens the case for Weiss’s methods. She effectively employs comparison and meta-ethnography to highlight commonalities between seemingly unlike communities of women while avoiding value judgements that place one religious practice over another. It may have been useful to the reader to know Weiss’s own religious positionality, but perhaps it is more powerful that readers are unable to surmise this from her writing. Additionally, it would have been helpful if Weiss had reflected on the two-part design of Ritual Soundings (described above) within the introduction, as it is not indicated in the table of contents or clearly established until the conclusion (129).
Weiss’s work contributes to a growing body of ethnomusicological and anthropological scholarship surrounding women, music, performance, and religion, expanding this scholarship with her uniquely comparative approach (2-3, 133). With its wide interdisciplinary influences, Ritual Soundings will appeal to ethnomusicologists, folklorists, anthropologists, scholars of religion, sacred music, gender studies, and more. It will be a staple for anyone with an interest in women and religion, performance as a means of women’s agency, comparative methods for scholars, marriage and wedding traditions, localized practice of major religions, lamentation traditions, gender roles within religiously influenced patriarchies, and any of the communities from which case studies are drawn.
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[Review length: 1097 words • Review posted on December 16, 2022]