Faculty Research Fellows Lunch with Denise Gill

Denise Gill: "Singing Souls into Graves: Muslim Women Deathworkers and the Consequences of Posthumous Aurality in Western Turkey"

How do Muslim women caring for the deceased use sound to provide a beautiful death? My ethnographic book project, Aurality and the Craft of Deathwork, interrogates the sounds and emergent listening structures attuned to death, dying, and migratory thresholds in Turkish lands and seas. Letting women deathworkers embedded in this highly sex-segregated Islamic funerary ritual speak for themselves, the book demonstrates how Muslim deathworkers’ practices are crafted, ruptured, or sustained through what I name “posthumous aurality” – the knowledge that the deceased can still hear.

Denise Gill is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology.