Adab and Embodiment in the Process of Performance: Islamic Musical Arts in Indonesia
Physical embodiment is central to the experience of religion in Islamic Indonesia. Based on research among students and professional reciters of the Quran and an intersecting community of performers of religious genres—from unaccompanied song to ultra produced pageantry and video clips—this paper address the physicality of performative religion as it relates to adab. Using recent research on hajir marawis, an athletic display combining song, dance, and percussion performance, I address the way that moral piety is enacted through behavior, from posture to performance, among young Indonesian boys and girls, and the ways that renewed forms of adab combine with a more indigenous ideology known as adat.
Biography
Anne K. Rasmussen is Professor of Music and Ethnomusicology, the Bickers Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, and Director of the W&M Middle Eastern Music Ensemble at the College of William and Mary. Rasmussen’s research interests include music of the Arab and Islamicate world, music and multiculturalism in the United States, music patronage and politics, issues of orientalism, nationalism, and gender in music, fieldwork and ethnography, music performance, and activist ethnomusicology. Rasmussen just assumed the presidency of the Society for Ethnomusicology. She is author of Women, the Recited Qur’an and Islamic Music in Indonesia (2010); co-editor with David Harnish of Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia (2011); co-editor with Kip Lornell of The Music of Multicultural America (1997, revised edition, 2015), and editor of a special issue of The World of Music on “The Music of Oman” (2012). Rasmussen’s new research interests in the Arab/Persian Gulf region began with a Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center research fellowship in 2010 and continue, with annual research and study and performance tours involving students, to the present.