Events

Whether through mantras, Quran recitation contests, or Christian congregational singing, sounds, bodies and texts depend on each other for the continued vitality of the sacred and the way it is experienced in Asia. However, texts have been given utmost priority in the field of Religious Studies for a series of historical and cultural reasons that have been summarized as a “scriptist bias” and “ocularcentrism”. Ranking vision over other senses in Western cultures, at the expense of the auditory and other sensory realms, has produced a kind of “disciplinary deafness” in the study of religions. This conference aims to consider the importance of “a sonic turn” to bring forth understudied connections between bodies, sounds and media in the private and public life of religions in Asia. It welcomes tool-box approaches from multidisciplinary scholars who combine methods and perspectives from religious studies, history, ethnomusicology, anthropology, media studies, folklore and performance studies.

Bodies of texts, which represent our common acceptation of the term corpus/corpora, will give way to a specific attention on “bodies of songs” (Hess 2015), “bodies of sounds” (Dodds and Cook 2013), the “skinscapes” of religious experience (Plate 2012), the sensory and embodied dimensions of the sacred (Csordas 1994, Meyer 2011), and the “entextualization” of the body through sacred sounds (Flood 2005). The role of sounds and embodied practices will also emerge as encompassing these intimate and affective dimensions, and reflecting broader questions on mediatization, and on the relationship between sounds, religions and power. In fact, the use of sound shapes the ways in which space is produced and perceived. Hence religious soundscapes, especially in urban and multicultural spaces, have been discussed as enveloping and claiming territorial authority, establishing boundaries, or awakening inter-religious tensions. An emerging literature on congregational singing as establishing community and the sense of belonging, and recent scholarship on the relationship between religious soundscapes and place-making are helpful in articulating the theoretical liaison between sound, people, places and identities. However, these conceptual frameworks, frequently based on urban, predominantly Christian, and North Atlantic contexts, often neglect intimate discourses, real experience and lived understandings of sound – and what sacred sound does to the people who are creating, listening, producing, and interpreting it.

The focus on the sonic aspect of religion cannot be separated from movement and touch, as fundamental dimensions of the experience of the religious body. Sound, and the senses of the praying/playing/listening/dancing body, appear as an interconnected and fundamental point to start an innovative discussion on the politics and the aesthetics of religious experience. The ways in which performed and sounded religious experiences are produced, transmitted, reproduced, commodified and received is also inseparable from the technical and mediated ways in which these communicative acts take place. Therefore our discussion is necessarily embedded in the understanding of the relationship between religion and media. Sound and the sonic ritual body are articulated and understood in different religious mediatizations, as cultural expressions communicated by oral, textual, musical, danced, digital, and other vehicles. Whether conveyed by live performance, graphemes, televangelism, or social media, the sensorial field of religious chanting, preaching, mourning, ritual dancing, or singing, becomes a site for broader social negotiations, sectarian contestations and trans-territorial identity formations, ultimately unsettling and multiplying the discussion on religion, the senses and the media in Asia.

Our discussion is interested in the various intersections between religious sounds, bodies, mediascapes and the reflection of power relationships, in order to understand contemporary issues that comprise but are not limited to:

• Community-making and place-making processes;
• Sound in ritual performance and the heritage discourse;
• Multicultural soundscapes in the public sphere;
• Sacred music, migration and diasporas;
• Sonic contestations and the production of inequalities; 
• Religious sounds in new and changing mediascapes.

CONFERENCE CONVENOR

Dr Carola E. LOREA
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Registration is closed for this event, and seats for walk-ins are subjected to availability. If you would like to be placed on the waiting list, please write to Ms Tay Minghua at aritm@nus.edu.sg.