Findings & Footnotes

Since the 2010s, scholarship on religion has undergone a “sonic turn,” writes ethnomusicologist Séverine Gabry-Thienpont (French National Center for Scientific Research, CNRS) in an introductory article to the latest thematic issue of Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions (April–June) on the new musical religious ecosystems. Work in anthropology, history, media studies and sound studies has converged on treating sound as a central object for understanding how religion is practiced and experienced today, rather than as an ornament of worship. The question at the core of the journal’s issue is what happens to religion when its sounds are electrically amplified, recorded and streamed. Gabry-Thienpont’s introduction draws on Steven Feld’s notion of “acoustemology,” the idea that societies come to know the world through their sonic environments, and argues for an acoustemology of religion. Amplification is not a neutral technical add-on. Loudspeakers, studios, digital audio workstations and streaming platforms reshape ritual spaces, listening habits and communities—but also religious authority.

The six case studies in the issue cover a wide range of issues and phenomena. Among them, Hélène Sechehaye shows how the electrified guembri (three-stringed plucked lute) has become a requirement for efficacious Gnawa ritual nights in Morocco. Its sound settings are modeled on concert sound, and the master’s authority now also rests on his control of the amplifier placed beside him. Other contributions follow recorded sound beyond the ritual setting. Emmanuelle Olivier analyzes the rise of Pichichi, a Malian cultural entrepreneur whose Islamic zikiri songs have been popularized through reality television and TikTok, bypassing established religious elites. In her article, Rachel Harris describes exiled Uyghur Sufis in Istanbul who listen, often alone, to recorded dhikr (remembrance of God through repeated praise and invocation) on their phones. This case shows that mediatization need not mean commercialization, and that recordings can serve as technologies of memory for a threatened community. Following Birgit Meyer, the introduction suggests that media do not simply transmit a preexisting sense of the sacred but help produce it. The issue also shows how sound technologies redistribute authority among clergy, laity, and independent entrepreneurs. Those articles remind us that religion must be heard as well as read.

Another article looks at a Mandinka harp played among the West African griots (or storytellers) known as the kora and its journey from a Senegalese abbey to monasteries across Africa and Europe, showing that sound technologies do more than spread a liturgical practice: they also produce its perceived authenticity. Isabelle Jonveaux (University of Fribourg, Switzerland) and Katrin Langewiesche (University of Mainz, Germany) draw on multi-sited fieldwork in some 20 monasteries between 2013 and 2024, focusing on the Benedictine abbeys of Keur Moussa (Senegal) and Jouques (France). The kora was adopted at Keur Moussa, founded in 1963 by monks from the French abbey of Solesmes, as part of post-conciliar “inculturation,” and soon became the abbey’s emblem. The authors argue that this was less a fusion of two musical cultures than an appropriation in which Gregorian chant remained dominant. Its spread also relied on an imaginary of African authenticity. That imaginary has carried the kora to monasteries where it has no local roots, including in Gabon, Rwanda, Hungary, Italy and Belgium. 

At Jouques, the nuns use the kora at the service of Lauds as a sign of solidarity with the monastery they founded in Benin. The authors observe how the spread of the kora may also be associated with efforts for reaffirming the place of the Gregorian chant in the Catholic Church.

Since 1972 the monks at Keur Moussa have redesigned the kora with tuning pegs, then guitar keys and chromatic levers, and have sold over two thousand instruments, more of them in Europe than in Africa. A written notation and a teaching method made it possible to learn the kora without a griot master. This detached the instrument from its Mandinka context and opened it to non-griots and to women. Records, later CDs, streaming services and, since 2022, monthly live broadcasts of vespers on the French Catholic channel KTO followed. These justify themselves religiously, but they also generate significant income, since the kora workshop is the monastery’s third source of revenue. For more information on this special issue, visit: Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions