ABSTRACT
Historians of Roman Catholicism have analyzed the observable links between the church, its bells, and rural societies, and their work has raised two questions. Firstly, how do church bells and human societies relate to each other today? Secondly, what can be said about the place of the bells in the Christian worship soundscape? In an effort to answer these questions, this chapter focuses on the restoration of the old bells of Notre-Dame de Paris and their replacement with a new set of in 2013 as part of the celebration of the cathedral’s 850th anniversary. Ethnographically collected empirical data will be analyzed, taking a pragmatic approach that aims to identify the properties associated with the bells and consequently their ontological status, as it is bound to their affordance abilities.
