Conclusion: Faith on the New Frontier

Summary

A literary language in transnational circulation for over a hundred years; a Gospel radio program; home studios in the bustling city; disc recordings sold at farmers’ markets; gospel songs shared on social media; a night-long song-signing daibbit performance in a church gathering; the inscription of ddoqmuq mutgguat singing on the ethnic heritage list—on the southwestern Chinese border, the Lisu hanleixsu have encountered all these sound technologies in their Christian practice of aurality. Most of the acoustic dimensions of early conversion were presented to the converts as written or printed forms, in which the Fraser script served as both a force that constituted the Christian vision of modernity and a medium for constructing knowledge about it. Deriving from American media evangelism, the radio as an emerging Christian medium introduced recorded sound to the separated hanleixsu for the first time, producing a different kind of church space and an audible technique for the new listening community. The home studio, with limited financial, technical, and material support, provided a vital link to the Lisu media practitioners who dedicated themselves to gospel music and media production for transnational circulation and listening. The disc recording— once prevalent for its affordability, durability, and reproducibility—provided the local community members with the opportunity to create and consume their own music for vernacular uses. The disciplining work on the public exhibition of Christian culture in the case of the Lisu peasant choir turned a usable Christian vocal technique into a legible sound object. Faith is (re) made or restrained through the aural as defined by relationality and renewability, which, I argue, is the essential part of the broader Lisu pursuit of Christian belonging.

Despite the seeming clarity of the Gospel message conveyed through each of the foregoing mediums, there have been many twists in the Lisu Christian process of striving after faith, twists that this book has attempted to describe. Lisu radio producers of GBM started to work for evangelical outreach, but later determined to make more Lisu music videos and films for nonradio use. In the Lisu transnational recording industry, the rapidly emerging media specialists based in Myanmar and Chiang Mai became stars, yet their fame arose not from any form of superiority but from their roles as advocates for community members.