Prof. Barend J. ter Haar (University of Oxford): Sounds in Chinese Religious Culture

Sound plays a central role in Chinese religious culture, also and maybe even more so from a historical perspective. Since sound, like smell, taste, and a variety of tactile experiences are extremely hard to recover historically, it is not surprising that little attention has been paid to this dimension of religious life. Nonetheless, the situation sounds worse than it really is. We can combine insights from living religious culture, for instance (but not alone) on Taiwan, to increase our understanding of historical information. Evidently this is risky, since the past (probably plural) and the present are different worlds, especially with respect to sound. Living in an age without the buzzing of omnipresent machines, the sound as well as the conscious silences of religious practice in the past must have worked fundamentally different from today. In this lecture, I will concentrate on early evidence from the Han and Period of Disunion.