Praise Singing

I am interested in the ways in which praise performance coaxes praise targets to prosocial action like generosity. This overlaps with the anthropological, rhetorical, and political study of suasion and the ambiguity of the gift, which remain pressing questions for the study of performance. How do we persuade? Who can be persuaded, and how much? What strategies and performative moves facilitate persuasion, and which undermine it? How do we perform generosity, and how can we induce it?

I’m particularly interested in the ways in which suasive actions are put together via different modalities—poetic speech, gesture, movement, song, drumming, and bodily orientation.

My fieldwork has been with groups of performers who sing praise in the Sultanate of Oman, but I also study related Arabic language genres throughout the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and East Africa.