Tamara Turner

Within the framework of ethnomusicology of musico-ritual traditions in North Africa, I am currently researching kinesthetic and bodily epistemologies (particularly relationships between affect vs. cognition), symbolic interactionism, music and altered states of consciousness and religion and medicine within a musical context.

My Master's fieldwork on gnawa music in Morocco focused on the ethics of both *musical* aesthetics such as ideas about "fullness" in musical timbre as well as an aesthetics of illness and healing. Developing these ideas further, my dissertation on Algerian diwan (a cousin tradition to Moroccan gnawa and Tunisian stambeli) will look at relationships between performance and reception and aesthetic differences in regional repertoires.

Previous ethnomusicological fieldwork to Algeria and Morocco includes Mali, Turkey, Ghana, and Ireland.