Beyond the Visualist and Scriptist Bias:
The Sonic Turn in Religious Studies
Jay McDaniel
I borrow the phrase "the sonic turn in religious studies" from Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North: Senses, Media and Power, edited by Carola Lorea and Rosalind Hackett and published by Routledge in 2024. The volume explores sound, listening, media, and power in religious worlds beyond the customary focus of Western scholarship. Lorea and Hackett are interviewed in the podcast below. What follows are notes taken after listening to the interview, beginning with a personal note. Then you will find the interview itself, plus the publisher's description of the book.
A Little Late (or early) for the Sonic Turn
Trained in the philosophy of religion and theology, I was a little late in taking the “sonic turn” in religious studies. This turn involves breaking free from the assumption that religion is primarily about verbalized beliefs grounded in texts, and only secondarily—if at all—about experience, ritual, community, identity, and materiality, including sound. It challenges a distinctly Western and, in many respects, Protestant tendency to locate religion primarily in texts, textual interpretation, and the beliefs associated with them.
It is called the “sonic turn” because sound, hearing, orality, and listening play such important roles in religion as it is actually lived. The phrase is not meant, however, to exclude the other senses. Rather, the sonic turn opens the door to a fuller, embodied understanding of religion—one that includes seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, moving, and feeling as well as hearing.
Many of my colleagues in Religious Studies took the turn long before I did, especially if they were trained in the academic study of religion, not philosophy or theology. They were interested in ritual studies, in the phenomenologies of religious experience, in the religion of daily life with its focus on food, companionship, security, identity, and localized meaning-making. They thought I was too philosophical.
There was truth in their critique. Embedded in my training was a scriptist bias and, surrounding that a visual bias: that is, a prejudice to think that religious meaning comes through reading visually accessible texts on the screen or in books. This bias had lodged itself in my own mind, even though, truth be told, my religious feelings were shaped far more by music, the poignancies of human life, rivers, dogs, and the rest of the natural world than by texts. Moreover, I was a longtime practitioner of Zen meditation, which offers a body-to-mind way of knowing rather than a mind-to-body way. In Zen practice, understanding can begin with breathing, posture, silence, and bodily presence rather than with beliefs or abstract ideas. In short, my own "religion" was not exactly text-based,
There was an irony in all of this. I knew that, for many of my students, popular music was a primary source of religious feeling, even—and perhaps especially—if they were not formally associated with what the academy calls “religious traditions.” They might not read the Bible, but they listened to Taylor Swift or Kendrick Lamar. And in their listening, it was not simply the lyrics that gave them a sense of meaning. It was also the rhythms, harmonies, melodies, textures, and soulfulness of the music. For a few of them, classical music without lyrics, jazz, or electronic music functioned in much the same way. As one student said to me, “I don’t know if I believe in God, but I believe in Bach.”
Still, I had been trained by philosophers and theologians to think that the study of religion was primarily the study of religious texts and the discursive ideas derived from them. Thus, when, toward the end of my teaching career, I found myself teaching courses in “Rock, Roll, and Religion,” I felt a little embarrassed when explaining to colleagues that, for their term projects, I encouraged students to bring music into class, let us listen to it together, and then talk about what we had heard. I worried that my colleagues might consider this approach a little unscholarly.
I don’t think I would feel the same way today. But, as I said, in terms of my teaching career, I was a little late for the sonic turn in religious studies. Or, to say the same thing, I took the turn a little early, and was not quite sure if it was alright to take it from a philosophical perspective. On, then, to a bit about the book edited by Lorea and Hackett. Here are notes from the interview:
The Visualist and Scriptist Bias
The visualist and scriptist bias of modern academia, shaped largely by Western scholarship, has obscured the importance of sound, hearing, and listening in human life, including religious life. In South Asia, for example, this bias has hindered an adequate understanding of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other traditions. Scholars who concentrate primarily on written texts risk overlooking religion as it is heard, embodied, performed, and practiced.
In these traditions—especially in their tantric modalities—sound is not merely a sensory phenomenon. It can be a way of entering into conversation with the cosmic vibrations of reality, sometimes named nāda. Sound becomes a medium of engagement with the other-than-human: spirits, ancestors, gods and goddesses, animals, landscapes, and unseen presences. Mantras, sacred syllables, bells, drums, ritual recitations, devotional songs, and periods of disciplined silence do not merely symbolize religious realities. They help bring those realities into felt and relational presence.
This dimension of religion is missed when scholars focus exclusively on doctrines, written texts, and visual symbols. They do not simply miss an interesting feature of religion; they may miss the religion itself.
The need is for a post-secular, post-visual, post-scriptist epistemology and ontology. If by the secular we mean a way of knowing that methodologically ignores gods, goddesses, ancestors, spirits, and other-than-human agencies, then religious studies needs an epistemology of the post-secular. Such an epistemology need not require scholars to affirm every religious claim as objectively true. It does, however, require them to listen sympathetically and imaginatively to worlds in which more-than-human presences are experienced as real participants.
Spiritual but not Religious
Religious sounds are also present in more private and less ritualized forms of meaning-discovery, as illustrated by the electronic music created by women in Asia and Europe. Such music may not belong to an established religious institution or employ an explicitly theological vocabulary. Nevertheless, its drones, pulses, layered voices, electronic textures, and immersive atmospheres can become vehicles for contemplation, self-transcendence, healing, and communion with something larger than the individual self.
Here the religious does not necessarily appear as doctrine, ritual, or belief in supernatural beings. It may emerge as an exploratory form of listening: a search for depth, connection, liberation, or altered consciousness. Electronic sound creates spaces in which inherited identities can be unsettled and new possibilities of selfhood can be imagined. For women artists in particular, it can offer a means of recovering the body, challenging patriarchal conventions, and composing alternative worlds of meanin
Trained in the philosophy of religion and theology, I was a little late in taking the “sonic turn” in religious studies. This turn involves breaking free from the assumption that religion is primarily about verbalized beliefs grounded in texts, and only secondarily—if at all—about experience, ritual, community, identity, and materiality, including sound. It challenges a distinctly Western and, in many respects, Protestant tendency to locate religion primarily in texts, textual interpretation, and the beliefs associated with them.
It is called the “sonic turn” because sound, hearing, orality, and listening play such important roles in religion as it is actually lived. The phrase is not meant, however, to exclude the other senses. Rather, the sonic turn opens the door to a fuller, embodied understanding of religion—one that includes seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, moving, and feeling as well as hearing.
Many of my colleagues in Religious Studies took the turn long before I did, especially if they were trained in the academic study of religion, not philosophy or theology. They were interested in ritual studies, in the phenomenologies of religious experience, in the religion of daily life with its focus on food, companionship, security, identity, and localized meaning-making. They thought I was too philosophical.
There was truth in their critique. Embedded in my training was a scriptist bias and, surrounding that a visual bias: that is, a prejudice to think that religious meaning comes through reading visually accessible texts on the screen or in books. This bias had lodged itself in my own mind, even though, truth be told, my religious feelings were shaped far more by music, the poignancies of human life, rivers, dogs, and the rest of the natural world than by texts. Moreover, I was a longtime practitioner of Zen meditation, which offers a body-to-mind way of knowing rather than a mind-to-body way. In Zen practice, understanding can begin with breathing, posture, silence, and bodily presence rather than with beliefs or abstract ideas. In short, my own "religion" was not exactly text-based,
There was an irony in all of this. I knew that, for many of my students, popular music was a primary source of religious feeling, even—and perhaps especially—if they were not formally associated with what the academy calls “religious traditions.” They might not read the Bible, but they listened to Taylor Swift or Kendrick Lamar. And in their listening, it was not simply the lyrics that gave them a sense of meaning. It was also the rhythms, harmonies, melodies, textures, and soulfulness of the music. For a few of them, classical music without lyrics, jazz, or electronic music functioned in much the same way. As one student said to me, “I don’t know if I believe in God, but I believe in Bach.”
Still, I had been trained by philosophers and theologians to think that the study of religion was primarily the study of religious texts and the discursive ideas derived from them. Thus, when, toward the end of my teaching career, I found myself teaching courses in “Rock, Roll, and Religion,” I felt a little embarrassed when explaining to colleagues that, for their term projects, I encouraged students to bring music into class, let us listen to it together, and then talk about what we had heard. I worried that my colleagues might consider this approach a little unscholarly.
I don’t think I would feel the same way today. But, as I said, in terms of my teaching career, I was a little late for the sonic turn in religious studies. Or, to say the same thing, I took the turn a little early, and was not quite sure if it was alright to take it from a philosophical perspective. On, then, to a bit about the book edited by Lorea and Hackett. Here are notes from the interview:
The Visualist and Scriptist Bias
The visualist and scriptist bias of modern academia, shaped largely by Western scholarship, has obscured the importance of sound, hearing, and listening in human life, including religious life. In South Asia, for example, this bias has hindered an adequate understanding of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other traditions. Scholars who concentrate primarily on written texts risk overlooking religion as it is heard, embodied, performed, and practiced.
In these traditions—especially in their tantric modalities—sound is not merely a sensory phenomenon. It can be a way of entering into conversation with the cosmic vibrations of reality, sometimes named nāda. Sound becomes a medium of engagement with the other-than-human: spirits, ancestors, gods and goddesses, animals, landscapes, and unseen presences. Mantras, sacred syllables, bells, drums, ritual recitations, devotional songs, and periods of disciplined silence do not merely symbolize religious realities. They help bring those realities into felt and relational presence.
This dimension of religion is missed when scholars focus exclusively on doctrines, written texts, and visual symbols. They do not simply miss an interesting feature of religion; they may miss the religion itself.
The need is for a post-secular, post-visual, post-scriptist epistemology and ontology. If by the secular we mean a way of knowing that methodologically ignores gods, goddesses, ancestors, spirits, and other-than-human agencies, then religious studies needs an epistemology of the post-secular. Such an epistemology need not require scholars to affirm every religious claim as objectively true. It does, however, require them to listen sympathetically and imaginatively to worlds in which more-than-human presences are experienced as real participants.
Spiritual but not Religious
Religious sounds are also present in more private and less ritualized forms of meaning-discovery, as illustrated by the electronic music created by women in Asia and Europe. Such music may not belong to an established religious institution or employ an explicitly theological vocabulary. Nevertheless, its drones, pulses, layered voices, electronic textures, and immersive atmospheres can become vehicles for contemplation, self-transcendence, healing, and communion with something larger than the individual self.
Here the religious does not necessarily appear as doctrine, ritual, or belief in supernatural beings. It may emerge as an exploratory form of listening: a search for depth, connection, liberation, or altered consciousness. Electronic sound creates spaces in which inherited identities can be unsettled and new possibilities of selfhood can be imagined. For women artists in particular, it can offer a means of recovering the body, challenging patriarchal conventions, and composing alternative worlds of meanin
Religious Sounds: Beyond the Global North
interview with the editors
"What makes sounds “religious”? How are communities shaped by the things they hear, play, or listen to? This book foregrounds connections between sounds, bodies, and media in the private and public life of communities beyond the Global North, analyzing diverse configurations of the category of sound and various sonic ontologies to usher in a more inclusive global anthro-history of religious sounds.
Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) implements a “sonic turn” in the study of religion by engaging with a diversity of auditory, musical, and embodied practices. Dislodging the Global North as the main point of reference for studies on religious sound, in this volume editors Carola E. Lorea and Rosalind I. J. Hackett propose an acoustemology of the post-secular with an emphasis on Asia as method. Unsettling and expanding existing discussions on senses, media, and power, the editors present religious sounds as co-creating subjectivities and collectivities that coalesce around audible aesthetic formations, demonstrating that religious sounds are not only produced by certain religious traditions but also produce communities, shaping the self and sensitivity of those who participate.
Carola E. Lorea is Assistant Professor of Rethinking Global Religion at the University of Tübingen. She worked as a research fellow at NUS Asia Research Institute, International Institute for Asian Studies, Gonda Foundation, and Südasien-Institut (Heidelberg). Her first monograph is Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman (2016).
Rosalind I. J. Hackett is Extraordinary Professor, Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, University of the Western Cape, South Africa and Chancellor’s Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee. She is Past President and Honorary Life Member, International Association for the History of Religions.
Khadeeja Amenda is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies in Asia programme at the Department of Communication and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) implements a “sonic turn” in the study of religion by engaging with a diversity of auditory, musical, and embodied practices. Dislodging the Global North as the main point of reference for studies on religious sound, in this volume editors Carola E. Lorea and Rosalind I. J. Hackett propose an acoustemology of the post-secular with an emphasis on Asia as method. Unsettling and expanding existing discussions on senses, media, and power, the editors present religious sounds as co-creating subjectivities and collectivities that coalesce around audible aesthetic formations, demonstrating that religious sounds are not only produced by certain religious traditions but also produce communities, shaping the self and sensitivity of those who participate.
Carola E. Lorea is Assistant Professor of Rethinking Global Religion at the University of Tübingen. She worked as a research fellow at NUS Asia Research Institute, International Institute for Asian Studies, Gonda Foundation, and Südasien-Institut (Heidelberg). Her first monograph is Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman (2016).
Rosalind I. J. Hackett is Extraordinary Professor, Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, University of the Western Cape, South Africa and Chancellor’s Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee. She is Past President and Honorary Life Member, International Association for the History of Religions.
Khadeeja Amenda is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies in Asia programme at the Department of Communication and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore.