College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

China’s extremely rapid urbanization over the past two decades has transformed the religious landscape. In eastern Suzhou, untold thousands of graves have been relocated or destroyed, and hundreds of village temples and their deities have been bulldozed along with the villages that hosted them. Contrary to expectations of both urban planners and most scholars, however, these changes have empowered some aspects of religion.

As anthropologists have noted in other cities of the world, urbanization appears to have created an enlarged space for spirit mediums. Is this sort of village-based religion sustainable after villages no longer exist? This paper suggests renewed thinking about the concept of sustainability through a consideration of multiple temporalities. Spirit mediums offer a temporal alternative to: (1) the continuous time of temples (which commemorate the “sustained” memory and presence of a patron deity); (2) the cyclical time of the ritual calendar (with repetitions taking place regularly each year or each lunar month); and (3) the transformational/punctuated time of the urban planners (which replaces a “backward” peasant era with a new era of “modernity”).

In contrast, mediums give a present voice to the people and things of the past, especially those bulldozed into the dirt beneath the new city. Time here works like origami, where the past does not simply continue, repeat itself, or disappear in favor of a completely new present. Instead, the past is folded into the ground, always leaving open the possibility that a medium can unfold it again or fold it into something new. Mediums have always done this, but urbanization has greatly enhanced their role and that of folded time.

Speaker:

Robert Weller is a Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. His research currently focuses on two broad projects. The first concerns China’s rapid urbanization – bulldozers have flattened farms and houses, villages and towns, graves and temples. Millions of people have been resettled in the process, displacing them socially as much as physically. His project concerns resettled people at the edge of the wealthy city of Suzhou. Now living in huge, low-end apartment complexes to house the relocated population, how are the residents rebuilding social and personal lives in the city? Weller is looking at their spiritual lives, especially because Suzhou has pioneered an unusual policy in China of building several new temples to house their gods. What new forms of spiritual life have come into being due to newly deterritorialized bodies (of both deities and people) and networks, the introduction of technologies such as new media and high-speed rail, and new policies like cultural heritage preservation or Suzhou’s temple construction? How are people adapting to the end of a worship life built around village institutions that no longer exist? The second project Weller is focused on involves a collection of essays on silence. On the one hand, it considers the implications of our inability ever fully to know how to understand someone’s silence. Silence thus forms an extreme of the problem of the multiple potential meanings of any text. On the other hand, silence is also involved in the rhythms of life; rhythmic silences enable conversation as much as music.