Throat Singing (Khöömii) – Mongolia (Traditional)
A polyphonic enactment of landscape-as-agent, where the body becomes an interface of animist intentionality and acoustic transcendence
Thinking Through Alfred Gell (1945-1997)’s Art and Agency
Introduction
Mongolian Khöömii, or overtone throat singing, is a traditional vocal technique wherein a singer produces a low fundamental tone while simultaneously manipulating overtones to create one or more high-pitched melodic lines. This sonic duality, often performed without instruments and deeply rooted in animist cosmology, is not simply a technical feat but an intentional act of cosmological alignment. It is not “music” in the Western performative sense, but a sonic ritual of place, power, and presence.
From the vantage of Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, Khöömii is a prime example of non-Western art as social action. It is a ritual index of human and non-human interaction, a technological enchantment of the voice, and a performative redistribution of agency between body, sound, and land.
Agency and the Non-Human World
In Mongolian cosmology, the natural world is alive—mountains, rivers, winds, and animals possess spirit and intentionality. Khöömii emerges not as an imitation of nature but as a direct co-performance with it. For example:
The whistle-like overtones mirror wind over grasslands or birdsong,
The fundamental drone echoes the low growl of the camel or the river’s depth,
Many songs are dedicated to sacred mountains, performed at or toward them.
Gell would read this as a case of distributed intentionality: the “artist” is not just the throat singer, but the mountain and the wind. The human body is simply the channel through which the world sings itself.
Distributed Agency: The Singer as Interface
In Art and Agency, Gell rejects the idea of artists as isolated creators. In Khöömii, the singer is:
Not a “performer,” but a spiritual technician,
Trained to mimic and merge with the natural agents around them,
Enacting a technically demanding, invisible labor where mastery is achieved not by ego but by erasing the self into sound.
This matches Gell’s theory of the “indexical artwork”—the vocal sound is not the agent, but the index of the singer’s embeddedness in a larger ecology of action. The singer’s entire being becomes an agentive device in a system of cosmological relations.
Technologies of Enchantment: Sonic Magic Through the Body
Khöömii, when first heard, defies logic. The human voice should not be able to produce two melodies at once—yet it does. This is Gell’s “technology of enchantment” in its purest form:
The observer is drawn in by the impossibility of the act,
The sound seems to emerge from non-human or supernatural sources,
This technical mastery produces not just admiration, but reverence.
For Gell, this is central: the artwork must enchant through technical agency. Khöömii becomes a sonic illusion, a deliberate distortion of the expected capabilities of the human body, thus generating a belief in higher powers—be they ancestral, animistic, or simply cosmic.
The Voice as Object: Sound as Art Nexus
Unlike an object-based artwork, Khöömii offers an important extension of Gell’s theory. There is no “physical artifact”—the sound itself is the art object, ephemeral and shaped by air, mouth cavity, teeth, and throat.
Yet, this is no contradiction. Gell holds that artworks are indexes of agency, not objects per se. The sonic output of throat singing is the trace of intentional activity—it stands in place of spirit communication, cosmological presence, or relational status.
The voice is the agentive extension of the performer’s interior,
The sound becomes a materialized trace of sacred attention.
Thus, Khöömii fits squarely within Gell’s system—it is an immaterial artifact of material action, whose indexicality is heard rather than seen.
Temporality and Landscape as Agents
Time in Khöömii is cyclical, slow, spacious. The songs do not “progress” toward a climax but hover, rotate, resonate. In this way:
The performer constructs aural architectures that reflect Mongolian nomadic time—rooted in the landscape’s rhythm, not a clock,
Songs repeat, evolve subtly, echoing wind circling a peak or hoofbeats over steppes,
Each performance is temporally unique, responding to location, weather, spirit mood, etc.
Gell emphasizes that art structures time. Here, the Khöömii singer creates a sonic field of sacred duration, where ritual presence and acoustic time merge. The song becomes a temporal zone where spirits, humans, and winds converse.
Animism, Sound, and the Totemic Body
Many Khöömii practitioners describe their voice as being possessed by the animal or element they are mimicking:
Some become horses galloping through rhythm,
Others “sing the river” as it flows through their chest.
This aligns with Gell’s notion of the artwork as a surrogate agent, standing in for other beings. Khöömii does not just refer to the horse—it becomes the horse, sonically.
The throat becomes a totemic interface, and the audience’s recognition of this transformation confirms the efficacy of the artwork as an agent of cosmological participation.
Conclusion
From Alfred Gell’s anthropological philosophy, Khöömii is not simply an acoustic curiosity—it is a distributed ritual of enchantment, where intentionality flows through body, voice, mountain, and wind.
The human is not the agent of the artwork—they are the medium. The sound is not the expression—it is the trace of sacred action. In Khöömii, we do not hear “music”—we hear the world singing itself through a human conduit.