Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the educative role of the conception and uses of Time as it emerges out of the temporalities of the Athonian ‘landscape’ and 'taskscape’ in formulating the ‘self’ in relation to others, the natural environment, and the ‘world’ out-there.

Paper long abstract:

Since the turn of the millennium, the educational role and vocation of the monastic institutions of Mount Athos go through rapid changes. New hardware and software technologies of reproduction, the explosion of social media, and emerging technologies of communication and networking, revived the role monastics play in making and engaging with the emergence of a new world society, in respect to the Anthropogenic natural environment and this moment of material History. This paper looks at how the uses of emerging technologies contribute to the evolution of the character of monastic education and the changing role monastics play towards socio-materiality of the Athonian ‘landscape’ and ‘taskscape’, focusing on inter-performative and interpersonal aspects in the cultivation of a ‘self’ via reinvented techniques and technologies of the body. The paper aims to highlight the revived educational role played by monastic institutions and challenges following their expanding vocation beyond the geographical limits and traditional prohibitions associated with the place, whilst offering alternative and healthy ways of sustainable living, emerging from and formulating the Athonian timescape in direct association with the ‘world’ out-there. The paper will reflect upon the relevance of the educational role of monasteries as eigenstructures of world society and politics between anthropocentric (anthropological) and Christocentric (monastic) approaches to the Anthropocene.