Reclaiming Silence in China: Temples, Longing and Rhythm in an Age of Bulldozers

This talk will distinguish two forms of silence: the silence that makes rhythm (and thus ritual) possible, and the silence of loss and longing. Robert Weller will argue that both forms, as they intertwine, are crucial parts of the adjustment to traumatic change. Most of the ethnographic evidence comes from a case of rapid urbanization on the outskirts of a large Chinese city, involving the resettlement of 100,000 people and the bulldozing of their villages, fields, temples, graves, and ways of life. The analysis centres on the stories people tell about their gods and ghosts (and thus also on the ones they do not tell), and on the rituals they perform (which are not “told” at all).

Robert P. Weller is Professor of Anthropology and Research Associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University. Most of his work concentrates on Chinese societies in a comparative context. His early work began with the problem of religious meaning and authority. Who has the power to impose an interpretation? Could you impose one across a land as vast and a history as long as China's? A more recent research area has been Chinese culture change in its global context, with all its flows and stoppages, appropriations and resistances. These interests have resulted, most recently, in Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies (co-author, Cambridge, 2017). Weller’s current research focuses on religious change and rapid urbanization in China.

Beyond Chinese societies specifically, Professor Weller’s other major research endeavor is a more theoretical exploration of what allows humans to live in peace while still accepting the deep differences that divide us. This began with a book (Ritual and Its Consequences) on the tension between a ritual attitude (what you do makes you who you are) and a sincere one (what you do is only the reflection of who you are). Modernity, he and his co-authors argued, has embraced the sincere side in a way that is historically unusual and that creates inherent social problems. That work has been extended into a second volume (Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity), which concerns problems of ambiguity, boundaries, and empathy. A third (again co-authored) is currently in press: How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor in Social Life (Oxford University Press).

Weller’s recent work on silence has appeared as “Salvaging Silence: Exile, Death, and the Anthropology of the Unknown,” Anthropology of this Century, 2017 (available online).