This chapter examines how musical performance is bound up with displays and exchanges ofsentiment in Vietnamese spirit possession rituals, known as len dong. It aims toshow how the expression of emotion is culturally mediated through ritual practice and musicalperformance by exploring the affective modalities of mediumship from new perspectives. I alsoconsider the ways in which emotional expressions in ritual practices are inflected by genderrelations to the environment and discuss how the exchange of sentimental relations (tinhcam) among musicians and between musicians and their audience is a highly prized idealduring mediumship rituals and many other traditional contexts for musical performance.

Deeply felt sentiments are mediated, shared, and expressed in mediumship practices in numerousways. The process of coming out as a medium, the special relationships mediums develop with certainspirits, the bodily experience of spirit possession, the enactment of ritual acts, divineutterances, and the music and dance performed during rituals are all invested with emotionalassociations and meanings. To explore these affective meanings, I examine the symbolic, bodily, andsocial aspects of ritual experience and performance and consider the religious framework ofmediumship as a complex system of affect. In this system, linkages between emotion, the environment,gender, and ethnicity are encoded in the sonic and mythical identities of the spirits. Throughexpressive musical performance and ritual practice, a range of emotions and particular environmentsin the natural world are related to the ethnicity and gendered characteristics of incarnatedspirits.