Pilgrimage in graeco-roman and early christian antiquity seeing the gods Elsner,JaŚ and Rutherford,Ian (eds.)

ABSTRACT

This study is an ethnographic and conceptual analysis of religious objects, their uses, and mediation of authority within the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Universal Church) in Brazil. Drawing on scholarship within media studies, religion and media, and material religion, I distinguish between artifacts used to cement implicit contracts between Universal Church followers and their church community, which I call contractual media, or swag, and those that followers bring to meetings to be blessed and then take home to mediate both good and evil forces in family, work, and social life—these I call portable media. While portable object media are seen by their owners as powerful tools, contractual media, on the other hand, create implicit power relations that keep followers tied to the institutional church in a reciprocal exchange predicated upon expected prosperity as evidence of faithful attendance, fidelity, and personal sacrifice. The physical exchange of material goods in religious spaces constitutes a perpetuation rather than a disruption of institutional religious authority. As infrastructure, contractual object media establish and maintain conditions for otherwise mundane materials to mediate power on a daily basis. Through attention toward portable and contract object media, as part of what I am calling material microstructure, we can further complicate religious authority as it is mediated through objects, not just in one-way flows but as dynamic exchanges and trade-offs between personal empowerment and institutional control.     

Media and the senses in the making of religious experience: an introduction

ABSTRACT

This introduction places the articles presented in this special issue in a broader frame by outlining current issues in the study of religious material and visual culture. It argues for an understanding of religion as a practice of mediation to which media, understood as “sensational forms” are intrinsic. Such sensational forms are central to construing specific religious subjectivities, generating religious experience, and calling upon the divine by appealing to, and tuning, the senses and the body in ways peculiar to the specificity of religious traditions.     

Presence in Absence: The Formation of Reliquary Shiʿism in Qutb Shahi Hyderabad

This paper focuses on relics as indexical forms of remembrance that are powerful manifestations of the “presence in absence” of the Shi?i saints and Imams. Examples of representational material religious culture in Shi?ism include relics, replicas of tombs (?arī?, tābūt, and ta?ziya), battle standards (?alam), funerary biers (nakhl), sacred foot- and handprints, posters, and votive talismanic objects. Relics assumed a defining role in shaping a specific form of religious material culture that would find spiritual and political valence among the diverse religious and ethnic polities of the Deccan region of south central India during the Qutb Shahi period (ca. 1518–1687 ce). This paper describes how the Qutb Shahi sultans encouraged the translation of Shi?ism from an essentially Persianate form into an Indic and Deccani idiom through several complex processes of translation and indigenization that transformed the ritual-devotional, literary, architectural, and reliquary material practices into systems that were mutually intelligible to a diversity of Hindu and Muslim communities alike.     

Mediality and materiality in religious performance: religion as heritage in mauritius

ABSTRACT

In Mauritius, religious performance often doubles as officially recognized diasporic heritage, institutionalized as a component of Mauritians' “ancestral cultures.” Such forms of religious expression not only point to a source of authority outside Mauritius but also play a key role in legitimizing claims on Mauritian citizenship. In this article, I examine two kinds of practices that help to instantiate religious links as heritage: ritual performance combined with the cultivation of “ancestral language” in the context of a Hindu pilgrimage and the role of sound reproduction techniques in popularizing a particular genre of Islamic devotional poetry. I argue that these embodied and material practices illustrate two contrasting modes of engaging with spatially and temporally removed sources of authenticity. While the pilgrimage aims at naturalizing diasporic links through their objectification and iconization, uses of sound reproduction technology in Islamic devotional contexts establish links to sources of religious authority under the assumption that the medium used is relatively transparent. Ultimately, the modalities of materiality presupposed in the ethnographic examples account for the authenticating effect of religion as heritage.     

Plastic marine debris: sources,impacts and management

Marine plastic has many negative impacts on coastal countries, including Vietnam. Vietnamese waters face problems of marine pollution owing to plastic waste. There are few studies on controlling marine plastic waste generated by marine-based activities. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a general view of marine plastics based on existing academic articles, and the impacts on marine animals and on human health. The paper includes a brief account of the quantity of marine plastic waste on coastal Vietnam and offers some recommendations for Vietnam to minimise and manage plastic waste generated by ships.     

Islam,Heritage, and Preservation: An Untidy Tradition

Abstract

In this article I argue that the study of cultural heritage preservation practices in the context of Muslim societies has been constructed—and obstructed—through specific historical trajectories and challenges. These originate within the field of cultural heritage preservation, through its own history and principles which have complicated the interplay between heritage and religious values and uses. As a result, situated studies of preservation practices in and by Muslim communities are in their infancy. In this article I revisit the points of contact between the emergence of a Eurocentric preservation dogma and its encounter with different articulations and practices related to Islam that are now approached as part of heritage assemblages and debates. I consider specific biases inherent in these discourses and propose, as a result, to approach the study of Islam and heritage in its own terms—rather than as an alternative to Western preservation paradigms.     

Scents,Community, and Incense in Traditional Chinese Religion

In a religious context incense is used for a variety of reasons in various cultures, usually for the purposes of healing or purification. In traditional Chinese religion, incense and incense objects are essential for making a connection with spiritual beings as well as establishing and maintaining religious communities. For Chinese religious practitioners, burning incense opens up communication with deities, and incense ash is required to found new temples. Through pilgrimage, incense is used to demarcate the territory of a deity and maintain relationships between temple communities. Chinese communities have also had a long history of forming voluntary associations, religious and otherwise, that have been organized around the use of incense objects. This article examines the use of incense in traditional Chinese religion, how incense objects are used to build and maintain communities, and how incense acts as a tangible bridge between the spiritual and material.     

The materialization of religious structures in the time of stonehenge

ABSTRACT

Both ritual and religion share a common ontology, in that they are materialized through practice—they are technologies of the body and material world as much as of the mind and immaterial. Acknowledging such offers considerable prospect for archaeology, inasmuch as it implies that the generation, reproduction, and transformation of religion will be worked through and given dimension by material forms that are recoverable. The latter might include the construction of shrines, temples, and other architectural foci for veneration and spirit communication, attendant practices of deposition, and ceremony itself as embodied within architectural forms. Working through details of architectural form, cosmology, materiality, and the sequence of monument construction in the Stonehenge region of Wiltshire, this paper provides an interpretation of the history of religious practice during the later Neolithic (c.3000–2300 bc) of central southern England.     

A Tale of Two Façades: Archaeology and the Secularization of an Islamic Past

Abstract

This article examines how certain forms of preservation work to recast the past in rigid terms of secular and religious. Focusing on a series of early Islamic period sites in the Levant, collectively known as the Umayyad qusūr (sometimes referred to as “desert palaces”), this essay traces the ways in which scholars signal the realms of the secular through interpretation of architectonics and iconography. This process of secularization is then further advanced through practices of preservation and display within colonial and nationalist museum contexts on a grand scale. At stake are ethical claims about the value of religion, specifically Islam, in larger discourses of culture and civilization. The paper explores the role played by these approaches to the material past of the early Islamic world for how they perform and police the boundaries of religious and secular materiality.     

Understanding the impact of cultural and religious water use

This paper investigates the effect that cultural and religious backgrounds have on water consumption patterns among ethnic minorities in UK cities. District meter area data were combined with ethnicity and religion data from the 2001 UK census to highlight particular areas of interest. The research identifies startling differences in water use patterns, which are clearly linked directly with religious and cultural practices. The overall conclusion is that it would be extremely unwise to exclude these social parameters in any further research into understanding domestic water demand. The research has application in the wider context of research or practice outside the western world, where the factors identified in this research may characterise the vast majority of water supply systems.     

新媒体与城市规划公众参与

随着新媒体技术的发展,社交网络、位置服务、移动终端等新媒体工具逐渐应用到城市规划实践。新媒体及其产生的“大数据”作为研究“人”的新工具,一方面形成了新的城市规划公众参与方式,另一方面为城市规划研究提供了新的分析工具。结合近年来的若干案例,初步分析了新媒体技术在城市规划公众参与,尤其是第三方参与中的应用,并提出了公众教育、舆论参与、信息分享、数据分析等应用模式。本文还以笔者参与的“钟鼓楼片儿区关注团队”、“梅州围龙屋关注团队”的实践为例,阐述了相关技术的实际应用方式。     

Incarnations: The Materiality of the Religious Gazes in Hindu and Byzantine Icons

This study reflects on the current “material turn” in religious studies, in particular on the issue of material agency. Some scholars, such as Ingold and Latour, have seen the concept as both a form of naivety and anthropocentrism. On the other hand, exponents of the so-called “new materialisms” have banned phenomenology, understood as the way in which material agency can impact humans, as anthropocentrically biased. Through the adoption of the notion of focal object, as formulated by Morgan (2014) and informed by Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh,” this paper investigates the epistemological implications of a materialist approach to religion. Comparison between Rajasthani folk Hinduism and Byzantine Christianity aims to stimulate a broader reflection on the role of images in regulating the relationship between the worshipper and the holy, which in this paper is understood in phenomenological terms as a mutual exchange of gazes.     

Apotheosis and memory: Ishii jūji,a savior for our times

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between history, sacred architecture, and the production of meaning. In particular, it discusses the way in which the historical figure of Ishii Jūji (1865–1914), a renowned child relief activist and religious utopianist of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Japan, becomes constituted as a sacred symbol through the interplay of architecture, displays, and iconography at the Ishii Jūji Museum in the grounds of the Ishii Jūji Kinen Yūaisha (the Ishii Jūji Memorial Center of Loving Friendship; hereafter Yūaisha). Through its commemoration, the Yūaisha draws upon a complex historical legacy as the source of its present vision and attributes to Ishii a divine status through material representations in the form of texts, photographs, objects, and religious iconography. Moreover, the Yūaisha, propelled by Ishii as sacred symbol, has come to produce new material spaces, through the construction of buildings, fields, gardens, through which its vision of social care may be realized. As a result, history and material religion collide to produce new spaces of meaning in the present.     

female figurines in early christian egypt: reconstructing lost practices and meanings

Abstract

This paper addresses the great diversity of female figurines produced during the Christian period (iv–vii ce) in Egypt, from Aswan to Karanis to the Abu Mina pilgrimage city. While not documented in any texts, by their sheer number the figurines offer important evidence of local religious practices performed under the aegis of Christianity (e.g., at saints’ shrines) yet without any ostensible connection to Christian liturgy or mythology. Their usage seems to have been predominantly votive, signifying a desired procreative body to deposit in hope, while the diversity of figurines points to an autochthonous, rather than imported or imposed, ritual tradition. The paper, part of a larger project on the local sites of Christianization, uses these figurines and their forms to reconstruct the iconographic strategies of the workshop, the ritual procedures of the client or ritual subject (at shrine or tomb), and the nature of domestic altars as stages for images.     

Of faith and visual alertness: the message of “mediatized” religion in an african pentecostal context

Pentecostalism and its recent progenies, the Charismatic movements, have within the last three decades moved from the periphery to the center of Christian life in Africa (Asamoah-Gyadu 2005; Gifford 1998). An unprecedented use of the mass media by these relatively new religious collectivities has contributed significantly to the visibilities they enjoy. This paper looks at the relevance of visual media in contemporary African Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity. I will first place the movements in question in their proper religious context and then examine how they have colonized public space through an extensive appropriation of modern media technologies, and what this teaches us about this type of African Christianity. The sub-Saharan African country, Ghana, is the immediate geographical context for the study. In this paper, “Pentecostalism” refers to the spirituality of Christian churches and movements, which in continuity with occurrences in the Acts of the Apostles, value, affirm, and consciously encourage the experiential presence of the Holy Spirit as part of normal Christian life and worship. The coterminous expression “Charismatic” usually refers to historically younger streams of Pentecostal groups that function within existing historic mission denominations as “renewal movements.” Drawing their members mainly from among disenchanted youths of historic mission churches, several of these charismatic renewal groups have since the late 1970s been incorporated as autochthonous churches operating in urban settings in Africa. In Ghana, the new churches are popular referred to as, Charismatic ministries (CMs).     

Iconic Religion in Urban Space

Abstract

In order to understand current dynamics of religious diversity, a focus on the tangible presence of religion and the co-existence of new and longstanding religious buildings, sites and artifacts in urban spaces is a fruitful starting point. Launching the notion of iconic religion, this introduction seeks to contribute to developing a scholarly framework for the nexus of religion and the city from a spatial, material, aesthetic and semiotic angle. Situated in the interface between matter and religious meaning, religious icons are not simply carriers of meaning, but make it present.     

The look of sympathy: religion,visual culture,and the social life of feeling

ABSTRACT

Religions are powerful communities of feeling, compelling ways of experiencing connections with others. As such, they structure human relations in patterns that rely on media and the arts to accomplish significant cultural work such as nurture children, disseminate information, and order forms of association by arousing and managing common sentiments. A textual and visual discourse in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and North America considered “sympathy” or fellow feeling to be the basis of moral conduct and the glue of social life. Images have played an important role in mediating sympathy by promoting moral causes, acting as propaganda, and eliciting deeply felt reactions to injustices. Yet the felt-life of religion exhibits a tension between compassion and solidarity. By scrutinizing how images were used to generate sympathy, we are able to see how the sense of community depends on both feeling for some (sympathy) and feeling against others (antipathy). Moreover, investigation of the relationship between the felt-life of religion and visual practices shows that the study of visual culture should not be isolated from other forms of sensation and representation. Seeing is part of the embodied experience of feeling, and therefore is properly understood as a fundamental part of many religious practices.     

浙江省台州市新农村公共文化设施中的宗教建筑调查研究

以浙江省台州市新农村宗教建筑现状问卷调查为基础,分析了台州市村落在新农村规划建设过程中宗教建筑现状、宗教文化活动的开展情况等,总结出台州市新农村建设过程中宗教及其建筑发展特点,并对新农村规划建设过程中如何保护宗教建筑,促进宗教建筑的发展提出建议。