Sebanti Chatterjee, "Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

New Books in South Asian Studies · May 14, 2023 · 55m

Sebanti Chatterjee's book Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality (Bloomsbury, 2023) is about sacred and secular choirs in Goa and Shillong across churches, seminaries, schools, auditoriums, classrooms, reality TV shows, and festivals. Voice and genre emerge as social objects annotated by tradition, nostalgia, and innovation. Piety literally and metaphorically shapes the Christian lifeworld, predominantly those belonging to the Presbyterian and Catholic denominations. Indigeneity structures the political and cultural motifs in the making of the Christian musical…