Voicing Beyond Humanity: The Audacity of Care in Efficacious Ritual Song

The comparative religious category of efficacious ritual singing coalesces from embodied relational practices spanning three autoethnographic ritual contexts: Hindu deathbed chanting; Jewish pre-burial recitations; and Shipibo Amazonian plant medicine songs. In each case, the human voice intentionally invokes and carries divine non-human agent(s) to help patients cross beyond the afflictions of illness and death, relying on deep relational alliances with the more-than-human world in order to effect much needed transformations. As these connections are strengthened and refined over time, contexts for reciprocity and care extend and expand within and beyond humanity.