Icons and Innovation in Southwest China's Religious Texts
Sacred texts mobilise many forms of change, but while studies on them tend to focus on an exegesis of textual meanings, they rarely show how religious specialists, their clients and even the texts themselves interact in practices that trigger religious change. Shamanic or 'animistic' religions in particular have often been considered as the foil to the world religions, whose text-reading priests cite written passages which reinforce social conventions across the generations. However, sacred texts can also be subjected to a 'hybridised' practice of textual and oral exegesis, which combines (1) the imagistic-linguistic or phonetic elements of script forms and (2) the materiality of the written texts as used in rituals with (3) religious practitioners' memories of previous performances, which are often a spontaneous response to social circumstances.
This project, funded by the AHRC-ESRC Religion and Society programme as a Major Research Award 2009-2012, brings four researchers together: Elisabeth Hsu (Principal Investigator); Katherine Swancutt (AHRC Research Fellow); Markus Schiesser, who is an ethnographic filmmaker based in Shanghai; and a Shaman who holds the post of Traditional Cultural Specialist at an ethnographic institute in Yunnan, China. It investigates the chanting of sacred texts as a 'technique' which skilfully amalgamates the materiality of the text with its imagistic scripts, in ways that either give rise to 'revelatory' religious innovations or reinforce conventions. It explores how shamans in Southwest China interact with their sacred texts in practice, effectively rendering texts into 'works-in-progress' rather than into 'fixed entities'.
The project has previously hosted the fortnightly ArgO-EMR seminars, and will host an upcoming conference at ISCA, on the exegesis of Asian divinatory texts and their sacred spaces.
- Nuosu Shaman Sacrifice
