Faith by Aurality in China’s Ethnic Borderland

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.