Studying religion and culture
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Religion? Religion in the modern world?
In many parts of the world, people no longer identify with religious traditions. Theories of modernity, in fact, assumed that religion was disappearing from the modern world. This, however, has been proven to be wrong. Religions continue to influence and shape our contemporary world in different ways, be it in form of personal spirituality, as motifs adopted in culture, art, music, and modern media, in narratives of national and cultural identities, or as reference points in politics.
Scholars of religion analyze all these contexts without considering questions of religious truth. Instead, we are interested in how people interpret the world from their religious perspectives and how they move and act in this world.
What is the Study of Religions?
In the Study of Religions, we analyze religions in their historical and contemporary forms from a neutral and non-denominational perspective. We are interested in religious perceptions and interpretations of the world. We study forms of communicating, meaning making, and acting both in their everyday-life and extra-ordinary contexts such as rituals. We also analyze discourses about what religion is in relation to other concepts such as spirituality, secularity, ideology, or science.
Methodologically, scholars of religions adopt an outsider’s perspective: We are not interested in assessing the truth of religious statements; we are neither principally critical nor affirmative of religion(s). The object of inquiry is not “the Divine,” “the sacred,” or “the supernatural.” Instead, we analyze human statements, actions, and modes of perceptions by using empirical and historical-philological methods from the humanities and cultural studies.
Which sources do scholars of religion analyze?
Scholars of religion work with a great variety of source materials:
- Texts in all forms (ancient manuscripts, inscriptions, books, newspapers, texts on the Internet and social media)
- Images and visuality in art and everyday culture
- Music from various genres (so-called classical music, popular music, traditional music), sound and noise, acoustic dimensions of experience
- All forms of media (from archaeologically and historically preserved media to modern mass media and digital media)
- Objects, artifacts, materiality
- Human activities of forming their environment
- Empirically collected data such as interviews, surveys, participant observation (both quantitative and qualitative data)
- Forms of action and bodily experience.
What kinds of questions do scholars of religion ask?
Scholars of religion pursue a broad range of questions, depending on their interests and their fields of research. They examine processes of historical change, characteristics of contemporary developments, patterns of interreligious contacts, and relations between religion and culture, society, politics, and economics.
Traditionally, comparative perspectives have played a large part in the study of religions.
Scholars of religions also think about theories of religion(s) on various levels of abstraction and generalization. They do not ask what religion actually is – but rather examine different conceptualizations of “religion”. These questions are also applied to related concepts such as spirituality, secularity, knowledge traditions, etc.
The study of religion works in close contact with other academic disciplines because of the geographical breadth and historical depth of the field.
Focus areas in Tübingen
Our research team at Tübingen works specifically on the following religious traditions, regions and time periods:
- History of religion in Europe, especially the history of the Celtic and Germanic-speaking peoples
- History of the discipline, particularly in the 19th century
- Contemporary European religiosity, especially alternative spirituality, (neo-)Paganism and occultism/contemporary magic
- Indigenous religious traditions in Mesoamerica and North America, especially the Aztecs
- Religions of South Asia in past and present, especially East India, Bangladesh and the Andaman Islands
- Intercultural contacts in the context of Christian mission since the early modern period
- Religious diversity in Africa in past and present, incl. global networks
Aesthetics of religion, especially material texts, and sound/sonic approaches to religion.