ISA International Guest Lecture: KATHERINE SWANCUTT
How does the melding of script and voice bring to life the dreams of religious specialists, ordinary people, and spirits? Scriptural voicings among the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, often unfold as riffs on the religious texts of their animistic priests, which may be ritually used to make dreams and wishes a reality. One common dreamfulfilling ritual across the Liangshan mountains is the sacrifice to the local mountain spirit, which many Nuosu beseech to grant them health, prosperity, fertility, growing numbers of livestock, strength in every endeavour, wealth, success in business, feasts with neighbours, a lack of disputes, and to have their speech and actions protected. Going further, many Nuosu ask their mountain spirit to stay, rather than leave the area, even when they dig up or plough into its territory. Disturbing the mountain spirit may cause it to retaliate against people, their grains, and livestock––or to simply withdraw its protection by ‘moving house’. Yet keeping mountain spirits in place has become increasingly challenging as new energy technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels are installed deep into the earth to manage climate change. In this lecture, I show how several ordinary Nuosu men gave scriptural voice to a priestly text during a sacrifice to their local mountain spirit, which supported their own dreams of being protected by it well into the future.
Katherine Swancutt is Reader in Social Anthropology and Director of the Religious and Ethnic Diversity in China and Asia Research Unit at King’s College London. She is also Project Lead of the ERC synergy grant ‘Cosmological Visionaries: Shamans, Scientists, and Climate Change at the Ethnic Borderlands of China and Russia’. She has conducted anthropological fieldwork for more than twenty-five years on shamanism and animism across Inner Asia and is the author of four books and special issues, plus numerous articles on these themes. Latest publications include the 2023 guest edited issue of Asian Ethnology, titled Demons and Gods on Display: The Anthropology of Display and Worldmaking.