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- Convenors:
-
Jesko Schmoller
(Humboldt University Berlin)
Stefan Williamson Fa (Lund University)
Guangtian Ha (Haverford College)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 21 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel is devoted to the role of the senses in situations of religious experience. We wish to inquire how our perception of external stimuli enables us to transcend everyday life contexts and seek to trace the real effects of religious materialities in our environment.
Long Abstract:
Throughout history, the senses have been crucial in mediating the human-divine relationship. From sound to smell, and vision to taste, the human senses have contributed immensely to lifting the believer beyond the mundane and the everyday, despite their apparently empirical immanence. Thus far, academia has been reasonably attentive to religious experience and the reality beyond, but neither have we so far sufficiently theorised how our perception of music, scents, flavours or other external stimuli helps us transcend ordinary experiences, nor have we linked this connection with transcendence to the broader problematic of media and mediation. Conventional approaches centred on representation have tended to interpret those media merely as signs and conduits for more abstract ideas and concepts. In contrast to these and inspired by new insights in the field of material religion, we prefer to take mediation and materiality seriously by recognising the essential role of religious objects in mediating the human-divine dyad.
In this panel, we wish to bring together papers dealing with different religious traditions, historical periods, and social contexts, and through such diversity highlight the real effects and consequences of religious materialities in this world. These can include practices of place-making through the construction of sacred sites, ritual practice, or pilgrimage. They can further pertain to the production of sacred socialities and connections among humans but also between humans and divine beings, where the use of religious objects exposes the presence of the latter.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 21 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
The paper reflects on the use of material means and devices as part of crafting individual ways to establish relations with the divine, based on the particular case of the innovative ritual healing practices of a woman in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in Spain.
Paper long abstract:
Healing is a distinctive feature in Charismatic Renewal in contrast with other Roman Catholic Church movements, one that has been adapted, as others (e. g. laity relevance in ritual practices, and their direct relation with the sacred), from the Pentecostal movement. Healing is opened to every participant, as an established process with specific practices that provide an adequate spiritual condition for the relation with divinity, that of "worship". While the foundation of healing is spiritual perfection, regarding Charismatic point of view, it also involves emotional and physiological consequences. Healing ritual practices are predominantly public and collective, and involve a divine power characterized as masculine, Jesus Christ, and of a non-specific gender, the Holy Spirit.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork data, I focus on ritual creativity in Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in Spain by the particular case of an agent. Material devices enable her to create a personal and complementary ritual variation that completes her religious needs. Unlike institutional practices, this variation is domestic, private and individual, and linked to the feminine Catholic divine power, Virgin Mary; a variation constructed from material means (music, candles, iconographic representations, photographs, devotional objects, confessional literature, diaries), that constitute an intimacy sphere as a sacralized locus by the sensory and healing relationship with the divinity.
Paper short abstract:
SCREENING of two scenes from a forthcoming film about luminosity and a new spiritual movement in post-revolutionary Egypt. DISCUSSION of how microphenomenological interviews and audiovisual media can be applied to describe socalled religious experiences with precision and in detail.
Paper long abstract:
Having worked for seven years on jinn possession, Islamic exorcism, and radicalization among Danish Muslims, I reached a point of exhaustion finding it impossible to work in the toxic political climate of escalating hatred and fear between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe.
An Egyptian friend gave me a simple advice: "Stop focusing on the darkness in this world: Look at the light"; an approach to life he himself had learned after having been in and out of Salafism as well as through two failed revolutions before he found relief in a different form of religious devotion that is rising in post-revolutionary Egypt.
I took the advice and together with the Egyptian filmmaker Mohammad Mustafa, the photographer Amira Mortada, and the philosopher Omar Rakhawy, I embarked on a search for the light in the Egyptian capital. Recorded between 2014-2020, this film documents our journey through the lights of the city, the Nile, and the desert. In addition the film documents an inner search for answers; what is the light, what does it do, how can there be so much darkness and light in this world and inside ourselves, what is the significance of these beings of light that sometimes present themselves in the midst of rituals, in our everyday lives, and in our dreams?
The film is a product of a long term visual anthropological research project that applies microphenomenological and audiovisual research tools to examine subjective experiences of light in meticulous detail.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses water in the context of pilgrimage and commemoration practices in Ethiopia: connecting mobility, worship, commemoration and healing, it spotlights how water mediates socio-divine relationships and features as medium producing and enmeshing everyday and sacred socialities.
Paper long abstract:
Water presents a central element across religious traditions: it is symbolic of life, purity, salvation and healing. It also distinguishes the sacred from the mundane, e.g. through consecration. In contexts of spiritual practice, water thus emerges as more than merely a physical resource, unfolding its social, spiritual, and sometimes political potential in manifold ways.
This paper discusses water as medium for the production of (sacred) socialities, taking the example of pilgrimage and commemoration practices in Ethiopia. Ethiopian Orthodox pilgrimage frequently centres on the pilgrim's acquisition of holy water, be it for healing, blessings or casting out demons. Simultaneously, the acquisition and intake of holy water is closely connected with grave visitations and commemorating ancestors: given the financial means, deceased are buried on a church compound, the graves being built as tiny houses. These serve as home, resting and meeting place when the deceased's relatives seek holy water and other (spiritual) services. This example shows how water becomes the medium for individual and social transformation (e.g. transforming illness into health, an unnamed infant into an acknowledged persona, facilitating the integration of an outcast, celebrating the communion) while concurrently demonstrating how water also mediates between various levels of sociality, establishing, maintaining and restoring human-divine relationships, human-ancestor relationships, and relationships among humans. The paper presents ethnographic data collected in Southwest-Ethiopia in winter 2019, and seeks to provide a basis for discussing what we mean by "sacred socialities" and how these are tied up in processes of mediation.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnography among the Naqshbandiyya-Jahriyya Sufi order in China, this presentation takes the dead ashes as pivots of life, as the culmination rather than deflation of the sacred, and as the material substrate for the unfolding of faith in the everyday.
Paper long abstract:
Most religions in the world use incenses; and the spice routes are of the earliest such global routes as combine commerce and culture. While scents and flavours as sources of heightened stimulation have attracted considerable attention in recent years, scholars have thus far paid little attention to what is left behind after these moments of intense sensation have run their course. Ashes, for instance, appear to be no more than useless dregs shed by the airy scents as they ascend to the heavens. And yet there are others who collect the ashes, mould them into magnificent shapes, carry them about as they migrate, and leave in their trail the faint fragrance of faith and family.
Drawing on ethnography among the Naqshbandiyya-Jahriyya Sufi order in China, this presentation takes the dead ashes as pivots of life, as the culmination rather than deflation of the sacred, and as the material substrate for the unfolding of faith in the everyday. Ashes are where the incense sticks find their firm footing; and ashes at holy sites have to be guarded against large numbers of pilgrims keen on exploiting their barakāt. When a devoted Jahriyya Sufi migrates s/he has to pack a small bag of ashes retrieved from their parents' incense bowl to fill the new burner in their new residence. How are we to weave smell, migration and ashes into a story that tells us as much about materiality and migration as it does about faith and sanctity?
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates the multisensorial activities of pilgrims at the cave sanctuaries of Sari Saltuk, one of the most fascinating Muslim saints in the Balkans, where intense religious experiences are engendered by the saint's physical traces and material objects.
Paper long abstract:
In the Western Balkans two sacred cave sanctuaries on mountaintops are believed to be the resting places of the 13th-century Muslim saint Sari Saltuk, one of the most fascinating figures in Balkan religious history. Traditionally associated with two different Sufi communities, these are major pilgrimage sites noted for their blessing and curative properties. One site is associated with the Bektashi Sufi community and overlooks the small mountain town of Kruja in northern Albania; the other, cared for by the Saʿdi Sufi community, is located on Mount Pashtrik at the border between northern Albania and Kosovo. Reflecting the intrinsic association between matter and place, both sites are dynamic spaces where a multitude of sensorial activities are continually being generated and shaped by action, movement, and use. These are mediated by the pilgrims interactions with the saint's materiality, his physical traces and objects (sanctified by contact with the saint), whence they light candles, offer prayers, inscribe graffiti, leave gifts and monetary offerings as well as personal items and photographs; animal sacrifices play a major role with the meat being consumed during the ritual and -- like the sacred water collected in bottles and the stone fragments removed from the sacred rock -- being taken away. Against this background, I will focus on the intense multisensorial experiences these religious materialities engender. Following a multidisciplinary, synthetic approach, my argument is based upon a series of sensory ethnographic observations at the two sacred sites in 2012 and 2019, complemented by annotated photographs.