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Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the experience of being in a divinely created world by studying the early modern Muscovites' accounts of the Siberian nature. It scrutinizes the reports on the nature's bounties and their consumption through the lens of the Orthodox Christians assumptions about matter and divinity

Paper long abstract:

Sweet juicy vegetables and numerous types of berries, grape vines, fig trees, date palms, and fragrant flowers, as well as countless fatty fish, abundant fowl and game - these are the features of the Siberian environment the Christian Muscovite travelers and settlers observed and reported on in the surviving written accounts. Arguably, they identified the Siberian land with the garden of Eden that God Himself destined for the Orthodox Christians to inhabit. And yet, the same authors reported on the constant struggle for survival they have experienced while in Siberia due to food shortages, unfriendly terrain, and extreme temperatures.

The spectacular descriptions of Siberia's cornucopia can be attributed to a Christian symbolical interpretation of the environment or simply to a textual borrowing from the Bible. Instead, this paper attempts to see in thus described world "what there is to be seen" (Holbraad/Pederson) by treating these testimonies as factual statements. Specifically, I examine such aspects as the obtainment and consumption of food, feelings of hunger, thirst, and satisfaction, as well as coldness and warmth through the lens of the authors' ontological assumptions. The most vivid of these assumptions are the existence of a good and loving God, the world's divine inception, and the consequential ethical implication for acting in and upon it. Ultimately, the paper studies the experience of being in a divinely created world

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Paper short abstract:

This paper attends to the use of fragrance among Muslims in the Russian Urals. By appealing to their senses, fragrance contributes to the production of place and space and helps to manifest a reality radically different from perceptions prevalent in Russian mainstream society.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is devoted to the study of fragrance (misk or attar) in Muslim communities in the Russian Federation. Fragrance is being professionally sold at booths during festive events or expositions and can constitute a small business for young Muslims offering it to costumers after the Friday prayer. Also during suhbat ceremonies with the Sufi master (a mystical technique involving dialogue), small bottles of misk might be circulating.

Drawing upon empirical material collected in the Urals region of Russia since 2015, the paper is informed by the idea that material objects hold a formative and transformative potential to shape and create space and place. Instead of looking into the production, distribution, sale or advertising of misk, I will enquire how it affects users by appealing to their senses. When misk and other objects come into play as part of contemplative techniques and pilgrimage practices, they can help to expand the confined limits of Western conceptualisations of time and space and thus radically rupture the boundaries of a shared perception. Depending upon the people in question, the "other world" becomes manifest to varying degrees. Muslims may suddenly realise themselves as suspended in animate space, looking out into a personalised universe, where interactions between humans and not-altogether-humans take place and where we can no longer clearly differentiate between the here and now and the hereafter.

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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on virtual ethnography and participant observation, I focus on the social, material and moral configurations of Eau de Cologne (kolonya, in Turkish) during the current COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, much has been written on the politics of sound and images, as well as on sonic and visual experiences in religion. Different kinds of smell likewise function as a mediating force in ethical formation and experiential religion. In Islam, scents are given a great significance with good scents being considered media of protection and divine presence. Different kinds of fragrances are extensively used in religious offering and commonly applied to objects of everyday ritual use, such as prayer mats or prayer beads. At the same time, they are also part of everyday therapeutic practices and form part of individuals' quest for a clean and sensually attuned body. Scents and fragrances are of a fleeting and emphemeral materiality, invisible, yet perceptible. They draw attention not only to the relationality of the material and the spiritual worlds, but also to that of bodily matter.

In my paper, I focus on the social, material and moral configurations of Eau de Cologne, kolonya, in Turkey and its diaspora during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Due to its high alcohol content and disinfectant effect, kolonya has recently assumed the role of a staple in everyday life in Turkey and became the quasi-official national cure for dealing with the Corona crisis.

Drawing on virtual ethnography, interviewing and participant observation in Berlin, I seek to contribute to the debate on mediation and materiality in experiential religion from the perspective of the Anthropology of the body, the senses and Islam.

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Paper short abstract:

For young Christians in London divine experience is considered to be beyond the senses. In grappling with the limits of the flesh the young worshippers entangle the material with the divine to allow for a copresence (Beliso-De Jesus 2016) which is in the world but is not of it.

Paper long abstract:

In one of London's charismatic Christian youth churches it is often taught that if you are doing it because it feels good, you are doing for the wrong reasons. For the young members the senses are not conduits to mediate divine experience but worldly impediments to its authenticity. Instead, a relationship with God requires the faithful to draw upon a divine knowledge and cultivate a spiritual sensorium which is embedded in a global aesthetic of charismatic Christian faith.

Engaging with existing debates concerning the mediation and materiality, this paper will discuss how the young Christians' concerns with 'the problem of presence' (Engelke 2007) is reflected in their embodied worship practices and material engagement with a global Christian aesthetic. Their church transcends its west-African base through global, media, and transnational religious connections while encouraging deeply personal religious relationship with the divine. This, I argue, locates the divine simultaneously interior and exterior to the young worshippers and enables their senses to take on a divine capacity which transcends the body and the individual.

I ask how this might be understood as encouraging a copresence between divine and human actors which does not rely on mediating a transcendent God, but materially knowing the divine through an embodied, immanent and spiritual presence. Overall this paper will reflect the entanglement of the transcendent and the material as the young members of this church learn how to feel God without relying on the limits of their physical senses.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper acknowledges the importance of materiality in Sufi practices. It also highlights the importance of looking at the complex interactions between human and non-human beings, objects, places, knowledge, belief, values and actions which make the experience of the transcendence possible.

Paper long abstract:

The culminating point in the practice of Sufism is the physical "journey to the saint', in this case, to his shrine, since everything is related to the encounter of the saint's presence and experience of his spiritual power. This spiritual power, which is called 'baraka' and translated as "grace", "blessing" or "blessedness", is materialized in different objects and experienced through music, scents, flavors, emotions and actions. Materialized blessings of the saints are taken home by devotees and consumed with strong belief that their wishes will get fulfilled and mundane problems be solved. By providing ethnographic examples on "how religion happens materially", this paper acknowledges the importance of materiality in maintaining human-divine relationships in the context of Sufi practices. By materiality, however, we mean a broad spectrum of things, such as: objects, human body, places, and practices that enter into co-existing relationships and shape and re-shape each other. On the examples of baraka, this paper aims to highlight the importance of looking at the complex interactions between these 'actants': human and non-human beings, objects, places, knowledge, belief, values and actions which make the experience of the transcendence possible. The work is based on ethnographic material collected on Sufi shrines in Ahmedabad (India) in September 2018 and March 2019.

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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, using Barad´s notion of "diffraction" (2007), I will explore how a long-standing amateur radio relationship, between a radioaficcionado in Santiago, Chile and a station in the Chilean south called "Friendship", became a cornerstone for the Chilean ufology movement and its detractors.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will explore how a long-standing amateur radio relationship, between a radioaficcionado in Santiago, Chile and a station in the Chilean south called "Friendship", became a cornerstone for the Chilean ufology movement and its detractors. One of the ways I will be understanding the "Friendship effect" is by attending to a "performative understanding of technoscientific" (Barad, 2007: 90) practices, especially ones related to the radio and to auditory sensations. I will be exploring Barad´s notion of "diffraction" whereby "subject and object do not preexist as such, but emerge through intra-actions" (2007: 89). We could think of this diffraction, or interference, of radio signals and messages in non-representational ways; ways that do not assume the "object" out there, but reconstruct it, phenomenally, auditively, in the continual moment of occurrence and also in the after-fact, and importantly, collectively. Media images, newspaper coverage, and social media all contribute to these diffractions and to the construction of the "object" in question (in this case the "aliens" assumed to be living in Chiloé, and a strange craft in the sky that made its appearance in Santiago in 1985). I argue that in this case, media and technologies intermingle with the sensory and affective dispositions of users, creating certain atmospheres across ontological thresholds; more importantly, they exhibit a vitality that overruns their material properties and enmeshes with the ontological specifics of the lives of their users, participating directly in the generation of a so-called "reality".

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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic research carried out in North-eastern Turkey, this paper examines practices of vocal recitation employed by Shi'i Muslims in the cultivation of relations of intimacy with the holy figures of the Family of the Prophet.

Paper long abstract:

Devotion to the family of the Prophet Muhammad is central to Shi'i Islam. Genres of vocalised lament and praise play an important part in the veneration of these figures. This paper focuses on such practices of devotional recitation amongst Shi'i Muslims living in Turkey. I argue that the sonic and discursive qualities of recitation aim towards the cultivation of relationships with these holy figures. Reciting and listening offer ways for Muslims to come to know, love and live life alongside the Family of the Prophet. The cultivation of relations of intimacy with these figures challenges earlier approaches which have highlighted 'relations of simulation'. By prioritizing exemplification, emulation and simulation these approaches relegate such figures to historical abstract models for social and political action, ignoring the ways their presence is experienced in everyday life. Engaging ethnographically with the ways Muslims cultivate relations with these "more-than-human' beings through sound, challenges the occularcentric and materialist secular assumptions which continue to underlie contemporary anthropology.

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Paper short abstract:

Dreams and Miracles materialize in specific ways in the everyday life of Shia. For artists, art become a mediator between the person and the divine which this paper will explore and propose an extension to Gell's agency of art.

Paper long abstract:

A lot of Shia experience religious dreams and miracles on regular basis. Despite the centrality of these experiences among many Shia communities around the world, very little has been explored ethnographically. During fieldwork, many of my Shia research participants in Kuwait defined miracles as God and Ahl Al-Bayt's way to communicate with human and others state it as a form of reward for their worship and religious service. Ahl Al-Bayt here means the household of prophet Mohammed. Understanding the world of oneiric experiences in religion will provide valuable insights to the type of connections fostered between the human and the divine. In this paper, I will introduce how one artist in Kuwait experience miracles through her art and how this challenged my perception as a researcher in terms of the senses invloved.

The question that guides this paper is "who actually has the agency?" Through one example of a statue and its maker, I will test Gell's theory of art and propose an extension to it as it does not account for a complex and multilayered type of agency of art. Miracles introduce a level of sophistication that a linear analysis of their role will undervalue what they actually do. To address this panel's focus; the senses, I introduce a specific form of art that is not very common in the Islamic world as it involves specific sense all together which reflects what some people value when it comes to their connection with God and Ahl Al-Bayt.