Beginning from the premise that religious practices always entail distinct regimes of sensory engagement, this panel investigates how people’s religious affects, and in particular their relation to place and space, are shaped by ritual sensoria. Drawing on various anthropological, ethnographic, and historical methodologies, the papers examine how sight, sound, smell, and touch contribute to a sense of religious emplacement in contexts as diverse as pre-colonial Andean temples, Canada’s urban centers, Tamil Catholics’ Marian devotions, and South Asian Shiʿi poetry. What can anthropologists learn about religions by closely examining the interplay between the sensory stimuli and the built environment in which they are deployed. How might that interplay facilitate certain kinds of religious habitus? What might a comparative examination of ritual sensoria illuminate about the underlying mechanisms through which people individually and collectively experience the sacred?
State-sponsored religious performances in the Inca Empire featured an abundance of sensory stimuli. While scholarly efforts have predominantly focused on studying the role that the senses played within Inca religion through documentary evidence, lesser attention has been paid to Inca religious experiences in place. To spatially contextualize and thus better understand the sensorial dimensions of Inca sacredness, I will examine Inca religious performance as it was embodied in the most significant sacred center in the Andes at the time: the Coricancha. Specifically, I will explore how the center functioned as a site in which participants could engage with the sacred through the interplay of sound, sight, smell, and taste. To do this, I will combine ethnohistoric sources with archaeological materials, architectural evidence, and acoustic analysis. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this paper offers an avenue to address the materiality and intangibility of Indigenous religious experiences in the past.
This paper presents an ethnographic approach to the study of Pentecostal sounds in urban spaces. Drawing from my ongoing project, Mapping Christian Audibilities, I explore sound as a material form that can be explored through fieldwork. Moving beyond traditional church settings, the paper focuses on outdoor Christian sounds—such as those produced by prayer groups, parades, and street preachers—and traces how they interrupt and interact with the sonic environment of Toronto’s Bloor Street (a major, downtown thoroughfare). By combining active listening, sound walking, and sound mapping, I examine how sound creates territoriality in urban contexts. Building on scholarship in religion, sound, and space, I argue that Christian sounds do not simply blend into the urban sonic background but actively interrupt and engage with it, creating "mixed-tapes" that make contemporary Christianity audible—and give it a complex presence—outside church buildings.
The Virgin Mary as ‘Our Lady of Good Health’ or Arogya Madha is a powerful protectress for migrant, working-class, marginalized caste Tamil communities in South India, across confessional identities. This paper suggests that the roots of this pervasive popularity of the Virgin is rooted in her articulation through the lived ritual grammar of Tamil Dalit and Shudra maternal tutelary divinities, known as the ammans. Attending to ethnographic narratives of seeing, feeling and hearing Arogya Madha through visions and divine voices, animal sacrifice and miraculous images, it demonstrates how the ‘White Virgin’ is configured into a ‘Tamil mother’, both an intimate, wholly present partner for place-making and a place in the unknown. As an amman, Mary's engagement by her followers in turn attests for them a sense of rootedness in the midst of the liminal subjectivities of being Tamil and Catholic and structural and personal experiences of violence, displacement and exclusion.
While there is growing interest in the role of senses in the history of Islam (Lange 2022), very little attention has been given to sensory approaches to Shiʿi Islam in South Asia (Wolf 2017; Bard 2015; Hyder 2006), an already “peripheral” area of Islamic Studies (Fuchs 2019). This paper explores the engagement of the senses in Shiʿi rituals in the Indian subcontinent. Examining the Urdu Shiʿi lament genre, I argue that the interconnection of the sensorium with South Asian Shiʿi devotional practices functioned in three important ways to shape Shiʿism in South Asia. I argue that the role of the senses in the use of ‘Indian’ music, poetry, and objects engaged local sensibilities and emotions that shaped important connections between the Indian subcontinent and the Arab Islamic world and helped to firmly establish Shiʿi Islam within the realm of ‘South Asian’ religions.
| Lauren Leve | lgleve@unc.edu | View |