Boria in contemporary Malaysia is a popular annual choral street performance that is composed predominantly of Sunni Malays. The performance may vary from year to year, but what is common is that boria is traditionally performed during the first ten days of the Islamic month of Muharram. As to its origin, most scholars advocate that boria is in fact not indigenous; rather, they locate its roots in the solemn Shi'i Indian-Persian Muharram that arrived with them after the 1786 British settlement of Penang. These scholars maintain that by the midnineteenth century, the new generation of the Muharram observers, including the locals and the indigenous population, transformed it into boria-a jovial and carnival type occasion. This article, however, dismisses the popular notion that the Shi`i Muharram was transformed into boria. I suggest that boria is connected to the understudied faq & imacr;r outdoor aspects of the historic Muharram observance of south-central India.
This article explores the controversy surrounding the ethnic origins of the Bobonese, a mixed Melanesian community in Tidore, Indonesia. It examines how a group of politicians, centered on a revived sultanate, strategically employs the narrative of the Bobonese's "Papuan origins" to legitimize their demands for enhanced regional and personal status. The study argues that Tidorese ethnicity has a constructivist nature, and highlights how the ongoing debate over Bobonese identity challenges this constructivist tradition. Furthermore, it analyzes how colonial perceptions of racial hierarchies, as well as notions of racial purity and hybridity, have acted as barriers to the Bobonese efforts to assimilate into the Tidorese ethnic group. Ultimately, this study sheds light on the challenges faced by mixed Melanesian populations in Indonesia, where entrenched racial hierarchies continue to shape social and political dynamics.
Although Karen Ruffle (2021b) finds that commemorations of Karbala are "intersensorial," Babak Rahimi and Mohsen Amin (2020) have observed their digitization. Scholars researching technological mediation via mechanical reproduction and the electrical grid, then analogue and digital technologies, have routinely concluded that technological mediation "decay[s]" (Benjamin 1936), "numbs" (McLuhan 1964), "amputates" (Kittler 1986), or "closes off" (Lupton and Maslen 2018) sensoria. The digitization of something perceived to be intersensorial is therefore paradoxical. To understand this paradox, this article borrows from Wendy Willems's (2021) understanding of "relational affordances" and Patrick Eisenlohr's (2021) concept of "atmospheric citizenship" to expound an expression of digital bereavement in which the whole sensorium is activated, animated, and entangled: the videos of Royall Records, led by Nadeem Sarwar, founded in Pakistan, and based in Australia. An elaboration of their intersensoriality challenges idealist and techno-determinist views of digitality, in which the digitalis held, contradictorily, to be at once an immaterial other and a material barrier. This article posits digital atmospheres as a way of articulating this challenge.
Many Shi`i religious media stores that operate beside shrines, along procession routes, or in Shi`a-majority neighborhoods, began in the early 1980s documenting Muharram processions on nascent home recording technology. Unlike the footage broadcast on national television, the recordings released by Shi`i videographers are intricately connected to the pulse of the atmosphere of the processions: their sonic mood, ambient materiality, and concomitant bodies in mourning. Through ethnographic fieldwork among Shi`i media producers in the Pakistani city of Lahore, this article explores the strategies deployed by one videographer to disclose love and mourning for Imam Hussain and the Ahl-e Bait, the family of the Prophet Muhammad. This article asks, what sequence of events and techniques of montage did this videographer choose to deploy to make his recordings of Lahore's Muharram commemorations commensurable with the experiences of those participating?
This article focuses on how the funeral rituals performed by Cantonese Daoist masters transform "official" "profane" space into "unofficial" sacred space within Singaporean Housing and Development Board void decks. It highlights the role of human agency and structural contingency in challenging dichotomous concepts ofpower and resistance. Void decks are intended as public spaces thus religious activities performed there embody and reflect negotiations of power between dominant and subordinate strata of Singaporean society. Through fieldwork observations, this study illustrates how void decks are imbued with divine and spiritual significance. It explores the Singaporean State's efforts to simplify and codify spatial dimensions to constitute their subjects and reveals how these efforts are adopted, compromised, and even subverted by human agency. The funeral rituals imbue human initiatives with greater significance and present an underexplored case study of Chinese religion in Singapore.
