Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Kristina Jonutytė
(Vilnius University)
Jaimie Luria (Cornell University)
Mattias Brand (University of Zürich)
Send message to Convenors
- Chairs:
-
Mattias Brand
(University of Zürich)
Kristina Jonutytė (Vilnius University)
Jaimie Luria (Cornell University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Iota room
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 5 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Vilnius
Short Abstract:
This panel invites critical engagement with questions of religious placemaking and the ways in which the production and reproduction of sacred/religious space is understood and experienced, both discursively and “on the ground” (Nadia Abu El Haj, 2001), as a mode of asserting religious identity.
Long Abstract:
Questions of space, place and placemaking have long informed a diverse body of scholarship concerning the dynamic relationship between cultural history, religious practice, and the politics of belonging. On the one hand, religious ideas, practices and institutions are emplaced and respond to the particular spatial regimes they find themselves in. On the other, they creatively shape and appropriate those spaces. Both of these processes are essential to one’s sense of belonging or unbelonging, including religious communities. In this panel, we consider placemaking as a form of religious “technology”, which may include a broad variety of discourse and action from temple building to religious urban planning or heritage-making. We invite critical engagement with questions of religious placemaking and the ways in which the production and reproduction of sacred and/or religious space is understood and experienced, both discursively and “on the ground” (Nadia Abu El Haj, 2001), as a mode of asserting religious identity. For example, how are technologies that engage particular spatialities and/or temporalities (e.g., site specific rituals, religious bureaucracy, heritage narratives) negotiated by various stakeholders in order to assert and challenge claims to personhood, identity, and the past? How is religious continuity negotiated in relation to existing and emergent spatial regimes? How do different actors negotiate their placemaking projects and what contestations arise in the process?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 5 September, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses a range of heritage narratives surrounding the preservation and memorialization of Jewish ritual baths in urban landscapes across the Mediterranean. It argues for an ethnographic approach, citing critical possibilities for analyzing politics of memory, identity, and placemaking.
Paper long abstract:
Dozens of recovered and reconstructed Jewish ritual baths currently serve as interpretive and "immersive" features of urban Jewish heritage landscapes across the Mediterranean. They are largely memorialized as sacred spaces whose presence has been hidden just below the surface for generations. Considering the customary role of ritual immersion in enacting Jewish identity and continuity, it is perhaps no wonder that contemporary Jewish heritage discourses claim the ritual bath (miqveh) as a site of monumental significance. Interestingly, the museumification and monumentalization of these baths in Jewish quarters of Toledo and Girona in Spain, for example, and in Jerusalem and Safed in Israel has drawn heavily on an insistence that the pools represent a quintessentially Jewish time and space. Drawing on recent ethnographic fieldwork in Spain, Sicily, and Israel, I trace the signification of the now-desiccated pools by diverse stakeholders in the present day, including local grassroots and municipal patrimony organizations, global cultural heritage networks and the nation state. By highlighting the affective relationships between the subterranean, formerly aqueous spaces and the technologies of placemaking employed by those who care for them, I engage contemporary memory projects whose stewards and audiences hold distinct and even irreconcilable attachments to the recuperation of Jewish historic built environments. Through this paper, I argue that the site of the miqveh offers critical possibilities for reconsidering the polarizing rhetorics of loss and recovery that dominate Jewish heritage discourses and for reframing hegemonic narratives of belonging, while taking seriously the nuances of community-based understandings of cultural memory, inheritance, and claims to time and space.
Paper short abstract:
The paper addresses how the material and spatial dimensions in the conversion from one religious site to another influence practices of adherents, aiming at deconstructing the dichotomy between the representing human subject and the represented building object.
Paper long abstract:
In recent decades, more and more churches in Western European cities are abandoned and then converted to another religious sites such as mosques. Previous literatures on these building conversions have been focused exclusively on meanings or discourses given by human actors (church congregants, mosque adherents, politicians, local authorities etc.) in the politics among them. Such tendency is informed by integration-oriented norms in contemporary Western European societies, and moreover, by remaining modern epistemological dichotomies (subject/object, human/non-human), which has prevented scholars from grasping the phenomena comprehensively considering materiality and spatiality.
This paper explores, on the contrary, material-spatial continuities/modifications involved in a conversion process and their entanglements with religious practices of Muslims using the converted bulding, through a case study of the conversion from Lutheran Capernaum-Church into Al-Nour Mosque in Hamburg, Germany. In the analysis of this paper, materials and space in the building are conceived not only as mere objects of representation but also as autonomous actors influencing human ones, drawing on the “Actor-Network-Theory” proposed by Bruno Latour.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the Buddhist history of Ulan-Ude, asking how the changing socio-political context of a diverse city is shaping Buddhist identity, belonging, and practice.
Paper long abstract:
Buryat Buddhism is tightly linked with the rural milieu. The connection between religious practice and the countryside is deeply embedded in ritual, narrative, as well as history. While Buryats were previously mostly nomadizing herders, over the 20th century much of the Buryat population has moved to the capital city Ulan-Ude. Buddhism today is thriving under the newly urban conditions, but many of its historical, ritual and ideological threads still link it to the previously rural context. Ulan-Ude, the capital city of Buryatia, has been through waves of change: the city was established in the late 17th century in Russian colonisation but was previously a Buryat nomadic gathering point. Over the 20th century, Buryats were forced to settle and many moved to the then-Russian city. In the post-Soviet period as religion resurged across Russia, a Buryat Buddhist presence has been widely felt in the capital. In a multi-ethnic city that Ulan-Ude is, this strong presence of an ethnic-religious group is a consequential identity statement as well as a religious necessity. This paper explores the Buddhist history of Ulan-Ude, asking how the changing socio-political context of a diverse city is shaping Buddhist identity, belonging, and practice.
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on the analytical and comparative value of the notion of “domestic religion” for religious mediation mediation techniques and technologies at home. Following a processual turn, I propose to focus on processes of “domestication”.
Paper long abstract:
A wide array of religious objects and practices have been attested in homes throughout history and all over the world. Novel approaches to these objects and practices have sought to avoid essentializing them in a universal or primaeval “domestic religion,” instead looking at the affordances and materiality of specific objects, their role in the discursive construction of “the home,” and the entanglement of public and private sphere(s).
Amongst the findings of this recent wave of scholarship are the subtle change of English domestic interior decoration after the Reformation (Hamling 2010), the crucial importance of religion in contemporary home-making practices of migrants (Boccagni 2020), the diversity of types of homes and houses, the intrinsic connection with religious individualization (Fuchs et. al 2019), and the impossibility of separating religion at home from its institutionalized counterparts (Tweed 2006).
In this paper, I will reflect on the analytical and comparative value of “domestic religion” to understand the wide variety of religious mediation techniques and technologies at home throughout history. Two features stand out: (1) the conceptual relationship with controversial notions of “magic” and “popular religion,” and (2) the role of rejected binaries like work/home, male/female, and public/private. Rather than immediately rejecting “domestic religion” as a category, I aim to follow the development of the concept from its initial context in Victorian ideas about religiosity to current studies focused on material and everyday mediation techniques. Following the so-called “relational paradigm” (Krüger 2021; cf. Josephson-Storm 2021), this paper proposes the notion of “domestication” as processual alternative focused on the selection and transformation of religious objects brought home.