Taratīl: Songs of Praise and the Musical Discourse of Nostalgia Among Coptic Immigrants in Toronto, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the integral role of taratîl, the most prevalent genre of non-liturgical devotional music among Coptic Christians. Specifically, this study concerns the role of taratîl in evoking nostalgia, and through the narrative of personal memory and collective remembrance, reconciling many immigrants with their homesickness for Egypt or the Sudan. Taratîl are religious, non-liturgical folk songs that allow Copts to worship and praise God outside of liturgical contexts, while also serving multiple functions in the lives of Copts in Egypt as well as the diaspora. Unlike formal church services, which are generally sung in the Coptic language, taratîl are sung in Arabic, the first language of most Coptic Christians. As a vernacular genre, they are intimately tied to personal worship. They are also imbued with highly expressive texts and draw upon a wide repository of recurring symbols and culturally embedded metaphors, which, through their expression, evoke nostalgia and remind participants of their homesickness for Egypt or the Sudan. Taratîl not only enliven personal memories, but also allows participants to contextulalize them and to narrate them to each other. Through the collective remembrance of home, taratîl become an effective medium in reconciling homesickness, avoiding a feeling of homelessness, and finally, helping participants create an idealized home away from home. In this case, homelessness denotes an immigrant's feeling of emotional severance and separation from their native cultural and social networks (see Edgar et al. 2004; Kim 2005; Papastergiadis 2000). This phenomenon is particularly evident among Copts who have just recently immigrated, or older members of the community who have spent most of their lives in their homeland. Through musical and textual analyses of metaphors and symbols included in the songs, this study explores how performance of and listening to taratîl stimulates individual reminiscence and collective remembrance of nostalgia and memory, evokes the "homeland," and mediates Coptic-Canadian identity. This study is based on ethnomusicological research at St. Mark's Coptic Orthodox Church of Scarborough, Ontario, Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".