ABSTRACT
This chapter brings the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to bear on the religious implications of what the philosopher called the “sonorous being” of our embodied, fleshly existence. Csordas examines two ethnographic phenomena that extend the existential meaning of our sonorous being to the dimension of the sacred. These are the religious practices of Pentecostal-Charismatic singing in tongues and Native American Church peyote songs. The practices share the characteristic of singing without any semantic or lexical component, allowing us to reimagine vocalization, speech, and song as bodily secretions, or material emanations of sonorous being. The religious setting consecrates the natural act of vocalization. Csordas suggests that these sacred songs create a particular relationship between immanence and transcendence. Engendering this relationship in concrete experience is the significance of peyote songs and singing in tongues, and what they have most in common in addressing the imaginative force of sonorous being in defining our humanity.
