China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is experiencing a crisis of securitization and mass incarceration. In Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam, author Rachel Harris examines the religious practice of a group of Uyghur women in a small village now engulfed in this chaos. Despite their remote location, these village women are mobile and connected, and their religious soundscapes flow out across transnational networks. Harris explores the spiritual and political geographies they inhabit, moving outward from the village to trace connections with Mecca, Istanbul, Bishkek, and Beijing. Sound, embodiment, and territoriality illuminate both the patterns of religious change among Uyghurs and the policies of cultural erasure used by the Chinese state to reassert its control over the land the Uyghurs occupy. By drawing on contemporary approaches to the circulation of popular music, Harris considers how various forms of Islam that arrive via travel and the Internet come into dialogue with local embodied practices. Synthesized together, these practices create new forms that facilitate powerful, affective experiences of faith.

In the late 1970s Islam regained its force by generating novel forms of piety and forging new paths in politics throughout the world, including China. The Islamic revival in China, which came to fruition in the 2000s and the 2010s, prompted increases in government suppression but also intriguing resonances with the broader Muslim world—from influential theoretical and political contestations over Muslim women’s status, the popularization of mass media and the appearance of new patterns of consumption, to increases in transnational Muslim migration. Although China does not belong to the “Islamic world” as it is conventionally understood, China’s Muslims have strengthened and expanded their global connections and impact. Such significant shifts in Chinese Muslim life have received scant scholarly attention until now. With contributions from a wide variety of scholars—all sharing a commitment to the value of the ethnographic approach—this volume provides the first comprehensive account of China’s Islamic revival since the 1980s as the country struggled to recover from the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution. The authors show the multifarious nature of China’s Islam revival, which defies any reductive portrayal that paints it as a unified development motivated by a common ideology, and demonstrate how it was embedded in China’s broader economic transition. Most importantly, they trace the historical genealogies and sociopolitical conditions that undergird the crackdown on Muslim life across China, confronting head-on the difficulties of working with Muslims—Uyghur Muslims in particular—at a time of intense religious oppression, intellectual censorship, and intrusive surveillance technology. With chapters on both Hui and Uyghur Muslims, this book also traverses boundaries that often separate studies of these two groups, and illustrates with great clarity the value of disciplinary and methodological border-crossing. As such, Ethnographies of Islam in China is essential reading for those interested in Islam’s complexity in contemporary China and its broader relevance to the Muslim world and the changing nature of Chinese society seen through the prism of religion.

Winner, 2023 Clifford Geertz Prize in Anthropology of Religion, Society for the Anthropology of Religion The Jahriyya Sufis—a primarily Sinophone order of Naqshbandiyya Sufism in northwestern China—inhabit a unique religious soundscape. The hallmark of their spiritual practice is the “loud” (jahr) remembrance of God in liturgical rituals featuring distinctive melodic vocal chants. The first ethnography of this order in any language, The Sound of Salvation draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork to reveal the intricacies and importance of Jahriyya vocal recitation. Guangtian Ha examines how the use of voice in liturgy helps the Jahriyya to sustain their faith and the ways it has enabled them to endure political persecution over the past two and a half centuries. He situates the Jahriyya in a global multilingual network of Sufis and shows how their characteristic soundscapes result from transcultural interactions among Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and Chinese Muslim communities. Ha argues that the resilience of Jahriyya Sufism stems from the diversity and multiplicity of liturgical practice, which he shows to be rooted in notions of Sufi sainthood. He considers the movement of Jahriyya vocal recitation to new media forms and foregrounds the gendered opposition of male voices and female silence that structures the group’s rituals. Spanning diverse disciplines—including anthropology, ethnomusicology, Islamic studies, sound studies, and media studies—and using Arabic, Persian, and Chinese sources, The Sound of Salvation offers new perspectives on the importance of sound to religious practice, the role of gender in Chinese Islam, and the links connecting Chinese Muslims to the broader Islamic world.

Pieces of the Musical World: Sounds and Cultures is a fieldwork-based ethnomusicology textbook that introduces a series of musical worlds each through a single "piece." It focuses on a musical sound or object that provides a springboard from which to tell a story about a particular geographic region, introducing key aspects of the cultures in which it is embedded, contexts of performance, the musicians who create or perform it, the journeys it has travelled, and its changing meanings. A collaborative venture by staff and research ethnomusicologists associated with the Department of Music at SOAS, University of London, Pieces of the Musical World is organized thematically. Three broad themes: "Place", "Spirituality" and "Movement" help teachers to connect contemporary issues in ethnomusicology, including soundscape studies, music and the environment, the politics of identity, diaspora and globalization, and music and the body. Each of the book's fourteen chapters highlights a single musical "piece" broadly defined, spanning the range of "traditional," "popular", "classical" and "contemporary" musics, and even sounds which might be considered "not music." Primary sources and a web site hosting recordings with interactive listening guides, a glossary of musical terms and interviews all help to create a unique and dynamic learning experience of our musical world.

In Moravian Soundscapes, Sarah Eyerly contends that the study of sound is integral to understanding the interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in early Pennsylvania. In the mid-18th century, when the frontier between settler and Native communities was a shifting spatial and cultural borderland, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. In Moravian communities, cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also superseded musical traditions such as song and hymnody. Complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic environments—or soundscapes—characterized daily life in Moravian settlements such as Bethlehem, Nain, Gnadenhütten, and Friedenshütten. Through detailed analyses and historically informed recreations of Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes and their attendant hymn traditions, Moravian Soundscapes explores how sounds—musical and nonmusical, human and nonhuman—shaped the Moravians' religious culture. Combined with access to an interactive website that immerses the reader in mid-18th century Pennsylvania, and framed with an autobiographical narrative, Moravian Soundscapes recovers the roles of sound and music in Moravian communities and provides a road map for similar studies of other places and religious traditions in the future.

Say the words "evangelical worship" to anyone in the United States -- even if they are not particularly religious -- and a picture will likely spring to mind unbidden: a mass of white, middle-class worshippers with eyes closed, faces tilted upward, and hands raised to the sky. Yet despite the centrality of this image, many scholars have underestimated evangelical worship as little more than a manipulative effort to arouse devotional exhilaration. It is frequently dismissed as a reiteration of nineteenth-century revivalism or a derivative imitation of secular entertainment -- three Christian rock songs and a spiritual TED talk. But by failing to engage this worship seriously, we miss vital insights into a form of Protestantism that exerts widespread influence in the United States and around the world. Evangelical Worship offers a new way forward in the study of American evangelical Christianity. Weaving together insights from American religious history and liturgical studies, and drawing on extensive fieldwork in seven congregations, Melanie C. Ross brings contemporary evangelical worship to life. She argues that corporate worship is not a peripheral "extra" tacked on to a fully-formed spiritual, political, and cultural movement, but rather the crucible through which congregations forge, argue over, and enact their unique contributions to the American mosaic known as evangelicalism.

What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women’s life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women’s agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting—even their notions of virtue and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.