Department of Religious Studies graduate student, Alex Kreger, has penned and performed several new songs inspired by the 19th-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. He wrote this music during the pandemic and recorded it last September in New York.
Alex is currently in Ankara, Turkey, on a prestigious Fulbright-Hays fellowship. His research focuses on the Alevis, a Sufi Muslim community concentrated in Turkey and the Turkish diaspora. Alevis are known for the central role music plays in their collective rituals called muhabbet (meaning both “love” and “conversation”). His research investigates how Alevis draw on the affordances of their sacred lute, the saz, to cultivate durable translocal networks grounded in friendship, while sidestepping definitions of Islam taken for granted by secular states and Islamic revivalists alike.
You can listen to Alex talk about his Durkheim project here:
View the complete recordings below.
