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- Convenor:
-
Jana Valtrová
(Masaryk University)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Jana Valtrová
(Masaryk University)
- Discussant:
-
Milan Fujda
(Masaryk University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Tau room
- Sessions:
- Thursday 7 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Vilnius
Short Abstract:
This panel will explore the relationship between religion and (mis)communication from the vantage point of both geographical, cultural, and disciplinary margins. It attends to issues such as cross-cultural communication, physical disabilities, and uncertainty.
Long Abstract:
This panel will explore the relationship between religion and (mis) communication from the vantage point of both geographical, cultural, and disciplinary margins.
The main questions it sets out to examine are: (1) How is/was religious knowledge mediated to those who could not understand, either on account of language, media of communication, or physical disability? and (2) How can the study of religion as a discipline contribute, both theoretically and methodologically, to the discussion about uncertainty and communication failures in the contemporary world?
Failures, misunderstandings, and unfinished projects of religious communication often remain on the periphery of scholarly interest, even though they offer precious insights into how religious messages and the parameters of their mediation were fashioned and reframed in order to reach non-typical audiences. At the same time, many of such issues gradually moved from the margins of scholarly interest into the center of both academic and non-academic attention, where scholars of religion can offer much-needed theoretical reflection. This panel aims to initiate a more intense scholarly discussion of the topics of misunderstanding, incomprehension, and uncertainty in both inter- and intra- religious communication by exploring these issues from vantage points as diverse as cross-cultural communication in religious missions, disability history and cultural history of the senses, media history, visual studies, and others.
The panel welcomes (but is not limited to) contributions that tackle some of these topics:
· Misunderstanding and miscommunication in cross-cultural contacts: past and present
· Media technologies and miscommunication: how media transform religious messages
· Translating religions: language barrier and misunderstanding
· Miscommunicating bodies: body language, disability, and (mis)communication
· Reflecting miscommunication: coping with communication failures
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 7 September, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
The paper raises the question of (mis)understanding the religious in the process of modernization. Translating "religion" is perceived “from the margins” in terms of both the subject, ie. the "small" Bulgarian culture, and the approach, ie. the postsecular reading of the local literary studies.
Paper long abstract:
The paper raises the question of understanding the religious in the modern Bulgarian culture. The context is given by the ambiguous modernization experience by the local intellectual elites in the first decades of the 20th century. The focus is on Bulgarian literary criticism, as the literary studies discourse is perceived as a unique testimony of overlapping various orders of knowledge that have different genealogies, i.e. the Eastern Orthodox and the Protestant one. The study refers to the assumptions of postsecularism and the idea of understanding ideological horizons in (crypto)confessional or (crypto)theological terms.
Several examples of the Bulgarian literary criticism from the interwar period are brought up in order to reveal the ways in which the religious (as opposed to the secular) is understood and functionalized. The analysis is conducted in the context of the transfer of modern ideas regarding the notion of religion, as the particular focus is on the role of a model of understanding the relation between the religious and the secular that is associated with the Protestant thought and predominates in the social sciences and humanities.
The question of importing, translating and new (mis)understanding of the religious is perceived “from the margins” in terms of both – the subject, i.e. the Bulgarian culture which is understudied within the field of the intellectual history, and the approach, i.e. the postsecular deconstruction of meanings used in the local literary studies. The aim is to go beyond the research practice to investigate the local Orthodox ideological horizons based on the Western-centric scientific presumptions and prejudices and to address the question of the consequence of “translating” religion for both – the local views on the national identity and the local scientific matrices.
Paper short abstract:
Replacing religious studies with studies of uncertainty is a way that follows up the initial intuitions in religious studies, overcomes miscommunications inscribed into the category "religion", and enables non-colonial ontopolitics in the era of the Anthropocene.
Paper long abstract:
From a postcolonial perspective, the category of religion (and its paired secular) is a fundamental tool of miscommunication. It misrepresents the Western self to the non-Western other and vice versa and generates “the illusion that today’s dominant system of exploitation and inequality is sane, rational, normal, natural and the only possible game in town.” (Fitzgerald 2021: 269) While in times when the certainties of modernity were in place and the established forms of governmentality and economy seemed to work properly, criticising colonialism and exploitation inscribed in the academic practice of studying religion(s) was a purely academic concern for a narrow cycle of specialists. Now, while we are globally experiencing radical uncertainties as the direct consequences of our modern “certainties” and when our economies, policies, and life on the planet itself face fatal challenges, the question of how to compose the shared world again, but now globally sustainably, the power inscribed within this modern miscommunication strikes back with new force and calls for a radical revision of the discipline itself. In the presentation, I propose how coming back to some fundamental intuitions concerning the productive significance of uncertainty, enables religious studies to leave religion behind and become a relevant discipline within the framework of negotiating the shared world in the Anthropocene.