Digital Humanities: The Autumnal Rites to Confucius and Beyond
Thomas A. Wilson, Hamilton College
Background
In September 1998 I traveled to Tainan, Taiwan with my student Brooks Jessup to film the annual sacrificial rites to venerate Confucius in the Confucius Temple. This rite was performed by officials of the imperial court at the county level throughout the empire as early as the seventh century and was subject to court debate and periodic reform until the early twentieth century. As official ceremony, these rites were no longer performed after the fall of the imperial court in 1911, but was revived again by local authorities as early as the 1920s and was formally adopted in Taiwan by the Republic of China in the 1960s. In the reform period of the post-Mao era, municipal authorities have allowed the revival of various forms of these rites at imperial Confucius temples throughout China, usually as a way to attract tourism. The rites were performed by officers of the city government of Tainan with only brief interruptions during the twentieth century, though tourism is evidently not a motive.
Project Details
Phase 1: DVD and Website Development
A. The current version of the DVD was edited by David Cohen, who also inserted my translations of the liturgy as subtitles. A student has reformatted the DVD to make it more user-friendly. The next step is to develop a voice-over narrative, which can be turned on or off in the video. Additionally, I plan to develop interactive links, which will provide detailed background on the rite, including annotated illustrations from ritual manuals, notes on key changes in the rite during imperial times, and a bibliography.
B. Stephanie Wong has already redesigned the form of the current website, The Cult of Confucius: Images of the Temple of Culture. She can work with me to revise the current content and add an additional page on the rite that is the subject matter of the DVD. This page might, for example, divide the rite into several parts and each part could include short film clip taken from the DVD to illustrate key elements of the rite. The site will include another page on Confucius Temples throughout Asia based on photographs I have taken.
Phase 2: Virtual Temple & Conference
A. Development of a virtual Confucius Temple that would allow the user to enter a temple - anonymously or perhaps as one of several ritual celebrants - to explore the sites and sounds of the Confucius Temple, its spirit niches, and ritual instruments. Unlike the Catholic Mass, which revolves around the central role of the Eucharist, Confucian sacrifices are complex events dispersed throughout the temple and, in some cases, to neighboring temples where other deities receive ritual offerings. Thus one's experience of such a ceremony would depend entirely upon the role one played.
B. Conference (Hamilton College, Spring of 2011) attended by specialists on this and similar rituals, to discuss development of a consortium for the Digital Humanities resource on religious rituals focusing on the production of a web-based archive of films of religious ritual performed in Asia.
Phase 3: Creation of a program to support undergraduate research on temple rituals in Asia
A year-long research project on a particular ceremony or religious site culminating in the production of digital resource available on line. Components will include a research paper, on-site visitation of the place or places of rites under study, and completion of a field report and production of visual record of the site.