Dancing at the Thresholds tells the story of a racialized community in Algeria that literally trance dances at the thresholds of consciousness. It also tells the story about how these communities negotiate and ""dance"" at thresholds of the sacred and profane, at the perceived clashes of Islam and animism or of sub-Saharan versus North African lifeworlds.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork alongside archival sources, oral histories, and ritual analysis, author Tamara Dee Turner considers these dances through an affective, embodied lens to challenge mainstream assumptions of affect theory. The dance embodies centuries of traumatic histories haunting these communities: their ritual, dīwān, coalesced over three centuries of the trans-Saharan slave trade. Embodying these tumultuous pasts, dīwān rituals move painful feelings through the trancing body to the point of affective ""ignition"" and release. However, to accomplish this, ritual actors must cultivate specific atmospheres conducive to trance and transformation via a particular Algerian understanding of atmosphere called ""hāl.""
A much-needed ethnographic approach to the living family lineages, practices, and intimate epistemologies of diwan, Dancing at the Thresholds is a story about the nature of healing and how wellness depends on the respect of wider, affective ecologies beyond both the individual and the human.
By:
Tamara Dee Turner
Imprint: Indiana University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780253075871
ISBN 10: 0253075874
Series: Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa
Pages: 354
Publication Date: 12 May 2026
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Accessing Audiovisual and Supplemental Materials List of Illustrations Note on Transliteration Prelude Introduction PART 1. Rupture and Emergence: Trans-Saharan Roots, Routes, and Afro-Maghribi Emplacement 1. Caravans, Sufis, and Maghribi Islam 2. The Emergence of Dīwān and Its Polyvalent Pantheon 3. Sounding and Embodying the Pantheon PART 2. Affective Ecologies of Ritual: Atmosphere, Affective Labor, and Bodily Ignition 4. The Magnitude of Atmosphere 5. Launching and Warming the Ritual Ecology 6. (Inter-)Corporeality, Trance, and Affective Ignition PART 3. ""Modernizing"" Dīwān: Imbricated Milieux and New Economies of Transmission 7. New Economies of Transmission 8. The National Dīwān Festival Epilogue: Trajectories of Dīwān Appendices Glossary Sources Acknowledgments Index
Dr. Tamara D. Turner is a psychological anthropologist and ethnomusicologist who specializes in the connections between music, consciousness, and mental health, particularly in Sufi and ritual communities of North and West Africa. Since 2008, she has conducted international field research on the ways that music and dance function in healing across cultures. She has held academic posts and fellowships in the US, UK, Algeria, and Germany, publishing award-winning, international research spanning the fields of psychology, cultural theory, African Studies, and music studies.
Reviews for Dancing at the Thresholds: Music, Trance, and Feeling in Algerian Dīwān of Sīdī Bilāl
""I cannot overemphasize how vital a scholarly contribution this is. We are fortunate indeed that Turner was able and willing to do this research, which unfolded over 10 years—giving the work a temporal depth that is rare these days. Given her own positionality as a musician capable not only of interviewing dīwān experts but also of playing with them, she is the only one able to give us this kind of deeply researched, 'experience-near' personal account. No one else will be able to do this.""—Jane Goodman, author of Staging Cultural Encounters: Algerian Actors Tour the United States ""This book outlines a wealth of scholarship on under-recognized communities across Algeria with attention to the nuances of geography, purpose, generation, belief, and economy. By bringing these together with attention to a frame of ecology, Turner writes a compelling story that challenges notions of how these pieces of personal and ritual experience interrelate.""—Christopher Witulski, author of The Gnawa Lions: Authenticity and Opportunity in Moroccan Ritual Music
