Last Thursday, January 29, about twenty students and faculty gathered to listen to a talk on the place of religious sound in a pluralist society.
Drawing from his research on the 2004 public debate surrounding the adhan (call to prayer) in Hamtramck, the speaker, Isaac Weiner, a professor of comparative studies at The Ohio State University, discussed tensions and reactions to the inescapable public presence religious sound: what sounds are sanctioned, and which ones merely tolerated, while others are strictly proscribed. For Weiner, the logic of pluralism generated several responses to religious sound, ranging from domesticating religious traditions (in effect, to make them resemble and extol the principles of Protestant Christianity) to protecting those traditions as a space outside the secular.
That religious sound in public spaces operate in manifold ways (background noise, annoyance, devotional practice) Weiner, along with Amy Derogatis (MSU Religious Studies), David Stowe (MSU English/Religious Studies), Scott Schopieray (MSU College of Arts and Letters), and myself (MSU Libraries), are seeking to archive those sounds, and then feature them in a web-based digital project. “The Religious Soundmap of the Global Midwest” project is part of a Mellon funded initiative, Humanities Without Walls (HWW), which looks to foster collaborating among Big Ten schools, accent the global nature of the Midwest, and supplement scholarship that historically has focused on coastal sites, whether East or West. With grant money from Mellon, Weiner and his collaborators will be sourcing sound locally, with an eye to expanding beyond Michigan and Ohio. Both Weiner and Derogatis also envision this project as a pedagogical exercise, with students helping to capture, edit, and upload sounds.
Ultimately, the public-facing component of the project, the website, will enable users not only to listen to sounds, but knit them together, creating sonic religious journeys, virtual pilgrimages, or use sounds to craft their own definition of religion (a vexed and much debated term by scholars). And given the potential diversity of those plural definitions for religion, the project team deliberately offers equally generous definition for religious sound: auditory practices that exhibit spiritual value to scholars, practitioners, and publics. So for some that might mean tolling church bells, but others may claim the roar of a Big Ten football game as religious sound (especially if it’s MSU and UM, right?). No matter how users define religion or its associated sounds, the public humanities nature of the project, combined with a platform in development that will exploit the affordances of a digital environment, makes Weiner’s theoretical and historical contribution to scholarship on religious sound and pluralism accessible and dynamic for the widest possible audience.
-Bobby Smiley (@bobbylsmiley) Digital Scholarship and American History Librarian, MSU Libraries