"Environmental Temporalities in Chinese Religious Landscapes"

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This workshop explores the relationships humans have had with their environment through attention to temporalities associated with different elements of the landscape. Human lifespans, and the meaning derived from them, come into relief through comparisons with nonhuman temporalities: wooden beams decay, tides ebb and flow, and rocks persist across geologic eras. Nonhuman temporalities may govern human activity, or re-signify the meaning of human behavior across different scales. 

The papers of this workshop collectively argue that accounting for nonhuman temporalities is necessary for our understanding of the environmental entanglements of Chinese religious sites and their ethical implications. Each paper observes how literary, visual, and architectural mediums translate time into human meaning. These technologies of record-keeping also add their own relation to time: a poem is associated with the temporalities of human speech, while a photograph claims to capture a thin sliver of time; both make what is momentary into something enduring. The built environment itself is an assemblage of components that possess varying temporalities of decay and which collectively depend on human care and investment for their longevity. Each paper adopts a case study that focuses on a different element of the natural landscape—tidal water; sands and wind; trees; and rocks—and analyses the specific “knots of ethical time” that emerged at that site.  Presenters include:  

• Alia Goehr (University of Minnesota), “Stony Indifference and the Precarity of Human Ecosystems”
• Natasha Heller (University of Virginia), “Trees, Temporality, and Technology”
• Jason Protass (Brown University), “Tides of Time”
• Michelle Wang (Georgetown University), “Architectural Renovation and Temporalities of Devotion at Dunhuang”