Performers of Shia mourning rituals in Tehran often emphasize the significance of linguistic content in their vocal performances. Through reciting Persian poetry, Shia prayers, hagiographic accounts, and other linguistic elements, they commemorate the suffering of Shia holy figures, especially Prophet Mohammad’s grandson Hossein, whose martyrdom in 680 AD is considered a seminal event in Shia history. Despite this emphasis on the semantic transparency of moral messages, their performances often display varying degrees of linguistic ambiguity and instances of linguistic unintelligibility. Drawing upon my ethnographic research since 2016, I analyze specific ritual moments to examine how a relative absence of semantic transparency shifts ritual participants’ attention from textual to sensory aspects of ritual performance. I focus on ritual weeping, an improvised vocal modality, to demonstrate how the weeping voice generates a powerful affective atmosphere in which participants engage in “the interactional creation of a performance reality” (Schieffelin 1985). In this context, the weeping voice finds not only iconic importance, as anthropologists argue (e.g., Tolbert 1990; Wirtz 2007), but also symbolic significance, embodying “ideologies of voice” (Weidman 2007) in Shia rituals: that is, the suffering endured by Shia holy figures is of such intensity and intolerability that words fail to capture its magnitude and can only be expressed through spontaneous modalities of grief experienced by ritual performers. Investigating the dynamic interplay of semantic and affective modalities of grief, I elucidate how rituals enact shared historical grief not only through collective forms but also by enabling individualized expressions of emotion and meaning-making.

This paper probes the relationship between vocal and instrumental performances of dargīlik, a centuries-old folksong tradition indigenous to Tajik Badakhshan. Comprising an unmetered four-note tune and a large repertoire of poetic couplets in the local eastern Iranian Shughani-Rushani language, dargīlik expresses the social-emotional state of dargīli, or “longing” for a beloved from whom one is separated. Originally sung exclusively by women in private everyday life and for funeral lamentation, dargīlik was taken up during the Soviet period by male musicians who used plucked lutes to “voice” their own wordless renderings of the genre. An analysis of field- and archival recordings alongside practitioners’ own statements suggests that these new instrumental interpretations of dargīlik closely emulated the prosodic contours and idiomatic speech-inspired embellishments of vocal performances while also significantly broadening the genre’s musical and poetic-discursive scope. Players re-contextualized dargīlik within multi-part instrumental suites, experimented with transposition and harmonization, and, by eliding the texts entirely, obscured both dargīlik’s feminine origins and social relations encoded within the poetry. I argue that what were once women’s sung evocations of yearning grounded in particular scenarios and environments became—and continue to be today—instrumental utterances of a more generalized emotionality that nevertheless remain uniquely comprehensible to, and playable by, those who know the poetry. Based on fieldwork conducted in Tajikistan, this paper bridges previous folkloristic and musicological studies of dargīlik (e.g., Shakarmamad 1993, Yussufī 2003, Berg 2004/2015) and contributes to wider, cross-cultural ethnomusicological explorations of voice-instrument surrogacy, language, and the performative musical semiotics of emotion.

In urtyn duu (long song), a genre which developed originally from the nomadic lifeways of Mongolian herders and in relation to place-specific knowledge, the emphasis of singers’ artistry has been placed on the use of elongated vowels with ornamental additions and melodic extensions. While herder singers in the countryside mostly employ this as their everyday way of singing, this improvisation technique has been discussed by professional singers using the term egshig tömökh (vowel twisting). As this indicates, singers create intentional semantic blur by mixing several vowels such that there is an absence of clear diction, or a lack of distinction in semantic meaning, which makes it hard for listeners, even native Mongolian speakers, to understand. Based on my fieldwork, I analyze the practice of sonic utterance created through egshig tömökh not only within human practice, but also within a multi-species environment. This contextual refocusing considers whether this sonic utterance is not truly non-verbal, but rather “preverbal” (Abram 1996), suggesting an utterance which has been lost to human language. In this way, the singing, particularly given its semantic ambiguity, acts as a metalinguistic tool that makes it possible to co-create and embody meaning with an other-than-human audience, so extending its communicative reach. Drawing from the ideas of ecological dwelling and language (Ingold 2000, Kohn 2013, Tsing 2015 ), I argue that “linguistic unintelligibility” in urtyn duu is, in fact, sensory intelligence, as I define it in the Mongolian case, and reinforces greater rapport between singers and their audience through energetic connection.