The Festive Sacred and the Fetish of Trance

Abstract

What happens when a sacred and local practice such as trance is made into a fetish, detaching itself from its context of origin and circulating in transnational markets and international music festivals as a sign that carries its own power? When a ritual practice is so appropriated, it not only affects its performance context — the social milieu of its exchange — but the practice itself is transformed. This is the case with what is often called “trance” as it travels in the global market: it is made into a fetish, treated as an object with transformative powers, ultimately becoming a form of symbolic capital that helps create the category of the “sacred” in a transnational context. In this article I focus on one example of such fetishization — The Essaouira Gnawa Festival of World Music in Morocco. Emphasizing the “universality” of music, international music festivals like the one in Essaouira construct a notion of the sacred for audiences who come faithfully and perennially from great distances to “trance out” to the music.

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