Faith by Aurality in China's Ethnic Borderland

Media, Mobility, and Christianity at the Margins
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-64825-074-3
Verlag: Boydell & Brewer

Buch, Englisch, Band 15, 268 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 531 g

Reihe: Eastman/Rochester Studies Ethnomusicology

Illuminates how voice, faith, and hearing become intertwined with technologies of sound reproduction and mobility amid the rapidly transforming religious landscape of China's ethnic borderland.

The twentieth-century expansion of Protestantism among the upland peoples in the China-Southeast Asia borderlands has catalyzed a profound sociocultural change in the region. In Faith by Aurality in China's Ethnic Borderland, Ying Diao finds important sonic evidence for this religious revolution in the rapidly transforming region of northwest Yunnan, presenting a compelling account of the region's Christian minority and highlighting the importance of aurality in this group's response to Christianity and other modernizing projects. Diao documents a range of sounded religious practices by the Lisu, an indigenous yet historically migratory people, to examine how participatory music production, circulation, and consumption become integral to indigenous perception and experience of faith.

Weaving together evidence from multisite fieldwork, archival records, and audiovisual media, Diao demonstrates a nuanced understanding of people of faith at the margins, one centered on the sensual and material dimensions of religion and on the intertwining of local agency and external hegemonic forces. The resulting book provides historical and contextual information that enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical scholarship on global Christianity while showing how sound can be an ambivalent but fruitful avenue through which ways of faith are constructed in a context where religion remains voiceless.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Diao, Ying

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Historische & Regionale Volkskunde
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikgattungen Geistliche Musik, Religiöse Musik
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikwissenschaft Allgemein Musikethnologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Notes on Romanization and Terminology

Introduction
1. Becoming the Faithful: Cleanliness and Conversion
2. Hearing the Return of Faith: Radio and Listening Audience
3. Producing Gospel Songs: Studio and Media Practitioners
4. Faces and Places: Sounds That Recognize
5. Traces of Faith: Sound Artifacts and Infrastructures
6. Performing Recorded Songs: Religiosity by Body
7. Hidden Faith: Sanitizing the Voice
Conclusion: Faith on the New Frontier

Appendix 1: Glossary of Old Lisu
Appendix 2: Glossary of Chinese Characters
References
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Diao, Ying
YING DIAO is an ethnomusicologist and cultural anthropologist with expertise in the nexus of sound, media, and religion, and in music, minorities, and transnational cultural production in the China-Southeast Asia Borderlands. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is currently a SSRC Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow.