21.03.2013
International Symposium: Mediating Religion – Emotional, Material, and Ideological Practices
April 5-7, 2013, Fürstenzimmer, Schloss Hohentübingen
Convenors: Prof. Monique Scheer, Ludwig-Uhland-Institute für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft and Prof. Pamela Klassen, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto
With the support of the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung and the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto
Scholarly interest in the role of media in religion has increased dramatically in the last five to ten years. While it has focused primarily on the effects and uses of visual and mass media, it has also led to a more intense reflection on the nature of mediation more generally and religion’s special relationship to it. This conference proceeds from the assumption that all religious practices are forms of mediation, ways not only of ‘making the invisible visible’ but of making the immaterial available to other senses as well (or instead). It brings together scholars from historical and cultural anthropology, history, art history, and religious studies to discuss the materiality of the medium and nature of mediation itself.
Three aspects of religion and mediation and their interactions will be in the focus of the symposium: ideologies determining what counts as a medium, the materiality of the medium, and emotion as a medium of religious experience.
Friday, April 5, 2013
2:00 Monique Scheer/Pamela Klassen: Welcome, opening remarks
Section 1: Visibility & Invisibility in the Study of Materiality
2:30 – 6:00
Chair: Monique Scheer
Peter Collins: Quaker Plain and Plaining: Making the Visible Invisible
Tine van Osselaer: Bits and Pieces of the Divine: Fragments of the ‘Sacred’ Trees at Belgian Apparitional Sites
William A. Christian, Jr.: The Invisible Connections of Everyday Things in a Midwest Household
Gertrud Hüwelmeier: Cell Phones for the Spirits: Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Vietnam
6:15
Public lecture - Webb Keane: Rotting bodies: On the clash of semiotic ideologies
Saturday, April 6, 2013
Section 2: Texts, Bodies, and the Matter of Religion
9:00 – 12:30
Chair: Gabriele Alex
Amira Mittermaier: Islamic Charity: The Poor as Medium
Vlad Naumescu: The Iconic Economy of Old Belief: Towards an Aesthetics of Transmission
Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek: From Visual Image to Script Image: Jewish Rituals of Mediation between the Past, Present, and Future
Matt King: Taming the Mad Elephant: Missionaries, Lamas, and Mediating Conversion
Section 3: Sensation, Emotion, and Space
4:30 – 7:30
Chair: Amira Mittermaier
Inken Prohl/Tim Graf: Same Forms - Same Sensations? Zen in Japan and in the West
Pamela Klassen: Maps and the Mediation of the Colonial Spirit
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Section 4: Sensible Evidence & Empirical Spiritualities
9:30 – 13:00
Chair: Pamela Klassen
Pascal Eitler: Extrasensory Perception: Seeing and Hearing the New Age
Monique Scheer: The Materiality of Protestant Emotions
Knut Graw: Ob-jective Truths: Divination and the Mediation of Ritual Efficacy in Senegal
Final discussion
If you are interested in attending this workshop, please send an email request to <link mail ein fenster zum versenden der>monique.scheer@uni-tuebingen.de.