Transgressing religious boundaries: the power of aesthetics in tamil catholic and hindu worship

ABSTRACT

This article discusses shared material culture and sensorial practices in prayer among Hindu and Catholic Sri Lankan Tamils living in Paris, such as the clockwise circling of incense, the use of flower garlands, and the worship of Mother Mary. Rather than classifying these practices into religious categories, I argue for a need to examine how such practices come to be shared. By employing a material approach to religious aesthetics which recognizes that objects or “things” are active and have agency and affect how we sense and thus experience our world, I suggest that common aesthetic elements are able to produce feelings of religiosity and, particularly for people who share a common aesthetic in everyday life, to bridge the levels between humans and the divine.     

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.     

中国传统城市形态的精神功能——以广州为例#br#

中国传统社会中，不同的宗教观念和属于上层社会精英与底层普通民众的思想意识都具有某种精神层面的神秘性，这些思想认识参与社会政治运作后，形成一定的社会价值观。中国传统城市形态也体现出某种神秘性，既对个体产生场所意义，也为构成社会秩序服务，实现精神功能。在说明中国传统社会组织特点基础上，以广州为实例阐述传统城市形态的精神功能，并解读城市形态如何在日常的空间体验中，营造精神氛围，强化社会秩序。     

Cell phones for the spirits: ancestor worship and ritual economies in vietnam and its diasporas

Religion has been thriving in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam since ??i m?i, the onset of market reforms in the late 1980s. Votive paper offerings, part of spiritual and economic well-being, play a crucial role in performing religious practices in the socialist country as well as among diasporic Vietnamese. In urban Hanoi, material objects made from paper are traded in marketplaces and later burned in the streets, in temples and pagodas, in private yards and other places on special occasions in order to be transmitted to the ancestors. In the past few years, the range of votive paper offerings produced, traded, and sent to the deceased has expanded to include new forms and references to new media. Drawing on recent debates in the role of media in religion and in particular on technologies of mediation, I focus on the use of votive paper offerings in the sociocultural context of the Vietnamese spirit world. I explore how new media and media technologies are embedded in multilayered processes of mediation in Vietnam and its diasporas. Taking religious practices of burning votive paper offerings as an ethnographic example, this essay aims to contribute to ongoing debates on popular religion and the sacred life of material goods in late socialist Vietnam, on its transnational ties, and on the entanglements between religion, media and materiality.     

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.     

Postsecular planning? The idea of municipal spirituality

In the contemporary political context, religion is rarely out of the news, usually postulated as a regressive force, battling against modern liberal Western values. However, in everyday life, and specifically with regard to place value, the situation is more complex. This paper addresses the challenge this context and the attendant notion of postsecularism bring to planning practice. It argues that religious and spiritual values can be rearticulated as concepts which add a substantive positive dimension to planning and its conceptualisation and constructions of place. This is done by developing the notion of municipal spirituality, which draws on the theological conceptions of transcendence and the common good to redefine the value of places whose worth cannot easily be made in instrumental terms. In so doing, it challenges the current antagonistic opposition of religious and liberal democratic values, repositioning religious and spiritual concepts in an inclusive way. The idea of municipal spirituality illustrates how planning could have a role in defending and promoting such places. Further, it demonstrates the importance of engaging in agonistic rather than antagonistic debate, rearticulating the criteria on which places can be valued by planning practice.     

The Appearance of Saints: Photographic Evidence and Religious Minorities in the Secret Police Archives in Eastern Europe

I present here examples of the photographic presence of a religious minority community in the secret police archives in ex-communist Eastern Europe. The use of secret police archives by researchers to trace the history of repression and collaboration and to understand the methods employed by totalitarian regimes to control their populations is well established. The significance of these archives for the study of material religion, however, has been largely overlooked by scholars. The secret police archives in Romania and the Republic of Moldova constitute a hidden repository of confiscated religious materials and photographs which often sit alongside photographic images created by the secret police in the course of their investigations into “criminal” religious activities. These archives, therefore, represent an important resource for understanding both how religious groups chose to represent themselves, and how the totalitarian system created images of religious “others” in order to incriminate them and to produce anti-religious propaganda. In this paper, through the presentation of example cases from state security files, I discuss the dual character of the photographic traces of communities in the archives as both religious justification and incrimination, and suggest ways of approaching these images through their materiality in the context of contemporary post-communist society.     

寻景、营景和题景--中国“山水”语境下的风景建筑设计

本文以笔者近年来设计完成的4个风景建筑为例,阐述了笔者在中国"山水"语境下,对风景建筑,及其设计这一命题的认识与思考。笔者认为,中国山水自然观没有主客体之分,人将山水视为有灵的伙伴,因此用"山水建筑"一词来定义风景建筑更为准确。关于它的设计,则应从寻景开始,通过营景完成建筑与环境的对话,最终运用题景,将"景-物-人"三位一体,实现情境的营造。     

杭州城市山地寺院香道景观环境康养效益评价

香道作为山地寺院园林外部山林自然环境最重要的部分,具有森林康养的特点,对人体身心健康产生影响,同时其寺院导览、酝酿宗教情绪等功能亦会对人心理状态产生一定影响。对杭州永福寺、虎跑寺2座城市山地寺院香道景观的空气负离子浓度、PM2.5、温度、湿度等环境康养因子指标进行测量,基于标准规范,评价单因子的康养效益,分析不同康养因子间的相关性。通过主成分分析将环境因子分为3个主成分,计算各主成分得分,加权求和计算香道景观环境康养因子综合得分并进行评价;通过状态焦虑量表及POMS量表反映人群游览香道前后心理状态变化,评价香道景观对人心理恢复的效果。结果表明,不同季节下香道景观环境康养因子对健康均有积极影响;空气负离子浓度与环境温湿度呈显著正相关,与PM2.5呈显著负相关,共同影响香道景观环境的综合康养效益;永福寺香道景观环境康养综合评价得分高于虎跑寺;香道景观及其佛教文化氛围对人心理状态的变化有积极影响。     

Religious Materiality in Elizabethan Essex (1558-1603)

Abstract

Based on an analysis of over 11,000 Elizabethan Essex wills, this article presents the first systematic study of the everyday religious environment of Essex. While scholars of the English Reformation increasingly study the everyday behaviors, routines, and rituals which defined English Protestant life, this article articulates how smaller household objects expand our knowledge of religion, practice, and remembrance in post-Reformation England. It also reinvestigates the potential for using wills as a foundation for the study of objects. This, in turn, helps us better understand and appreciate the substantial role objects had as part of an English Protestant religious identity increasingly built around remembrance and memory and, more broadly, enables us to question our historiographical assumptions about the speed, spread, and efficiency of the Reformation.     

Prophetic products: muhammad in contemporary iranian visual culture

Much like religious objects produced and consumed elsewhere in the Islamic world, images of Muhammad are often associated with acts of play and worship, their power to cultivate joy and direct religious feelings in various faith communities strengthened in large part by their remove from the commodity situation. As scholars of visual and material culture have highlighted, a product is never merely an object to be acquired and used, stripped of symbolic import and application. On the contrary, it is a thoroughly socialized commodity central to cultural practices of exchange—of sending and receiving social messages—that take place in regimes of value. Within postrevolutionary Iran in particular, images and objects depicting the Prophet Muhammad have been manufactured en masse over the past three decades, catering to official regime ideology and popular devotional practices alike. This study explores how these types of prophetic products serve to visually reinforce and materially reify narratives about the ascendancy of the Shi’i faith, the legitimacy of Islamic governance, and the value of martyrdom within the larger religious and political landscape of contemporary Iran.     

中国现代建筑的中国表达

文章提出了“中国现代建筑的中国表达”的问题:是摆脱传统性、民族性的表达,还是需要传统性、民族性的表达,才能使中国现代建筑立于世界之林?如果需要,又如何表达?文章提出要对中国传统文化作哲学意义上的批判性认识,中国现代建筑的传统性、民族性的表达,需要跳出具体的形象,跳出习用的词语,要作“抽象的思辨和精神的凝炼”,探索能和现代建筑艺术和审美意识契合的在精神层面上表达中国的建筑创作之路。做到“不是”,“就是”。     

西藏传统建筑空间与宗教文化的意象关系

西藏传统建筑与聚落是西藏宗教文化的典型代表,也是物质空间与宗教文化结合的范例。通过对西藏传统建筑与聚落的实证与西藏宗教文化的分析,运用"意"与"象"的概念,详述了西藏传统建筑空间形态的中心性,转及内部空间的宗教象征意义与内涵,并探讨了风格与非宗教含义在建筑上的融合。指出西藏传统建筑与聚落空间形态与西藏宗教文化具有同构性质,并归纳了宗教含义在建筑空间中的体现方式,揭示了西藏传统建筑所蕴含的深层次的宗教文化底蕴,以期对地域建筑创作起到参考作用。     

A House of Prayer for all Peoples? The Unique Case of Somerville College Chapel,Oxford

Multifaith buildings have become common in Europe, North America, and much of the world, but they have yet to receive sufficient scholarly attention in the history of religious ideas, or in the theory of material religion. This paper begins to address this lacuna by the consideration of an early, but little known, multifaith chapel donated to Somerville College Oxford in the 1930s, which is unique within Oxford University. Its history, architecture, and artworks give valuable insights into the religious, intellectual, and cultural roots of what would subsequently become a global norm. The chapel can be seen as both a manifestation of the aspirations of liberal Christianity in the interwar years, including the advancement of women and ecumenism, and of the contestation of the role of religion in higher education among elites in the same period. Examining the case of Somerville chapel contributes to the theory of religion by considering how unbelief and multifaith ideas may be attempted to be materially expressed, and how this physical presence subsequently may impact on institutions and people through ongoing contestation, and negotiated use.     

Old stones,new rites: contemporary pagan interactions with the medway megaliths

The Medway Megaliths, a series of seven archaeological monuments located in Kent, South-eastern England, are today viewed as “sacred sites” by practitioners of various contemporary Pagan religions, including Druidry, Heathenry, and Wicca. Examining how these Pagans understand the Megaliths as both ancestral spaces and sources of “earth energies”, this paper then looks at the forms of religious expression that are carried out there, and in doing so examines how this example fits within established understandings of “sacred spaces” in religious studies scholarship. From there it explores how these Pagans express a sense of guardianship over the Megaliths, and how they have interacted with commercial developers, heritage managers, and archaeologists. It thus deals with issues surrounding the contested nature of sacred space and the conflict that can arise when both sacred and secular interpretations of a site clash, before highlighting how areas of common interest have been successfully established between different interest groups, to the benefit of the archaeological sites themselves. In providing a regional case study of how Pagans interact with archaeological monuments, this article hopes to offer useful perspectives for those involved in Pagan studies, public archaeology, and studies into the materiality of religion.     

Art and Fetish in the Anthropology Museum

Between the 1920s and early 1980s an increasing number of African art exhibitions opened to the public in Western Europe and North America. In these exhibitions African religious objects such as masks and wooden figurines were reframed as modernist art. Focusing on the illustrative case of the National Ethnology Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, this article shows that these African art exhibitions offered a powerful alternative to the colonial, religious concept of the fetish. Early scholars of comparative religion claimed that the primitive fetish worshippers were unable to grasp the idea of transcendence. By elevating African religious objects (the so-called fetishes) to the transcendental realm of modernist art, curators of African art helped dispel the colonial concept of the fetish, and change mindsets and worldviews. In their struggle against the notion of the fetish, these curators also engaged with the concepts of art, culture and religion. Mounted on pedestals and bathed by light, the African religious objects became modernist cult objects: cultural artifacts elevated to a higher plane of religious and aesthetic spirituality.     

解读西藏传统色彩与建筑装饰艺术

西藏传统建筑反映藏民族特有的宗教信仰和民俗文化,其建筑装饰无论是色彩还是形式,都与宗教有着诸多关联,蕴含着丰富的宗教寓意,传达着藏族人民崇尚宗教的纯真情感。本文主要从色彩的宗教内涵、建筑色彩等方面来论述传统西藏建筑的装饰特征,以求能更加深入地认识、了解西藏传统建筑。     

Objects,object-ness,and shadows of meanings: carving prayer beads and exploring their materiality alongside a Khaksari Sufi Murshid

ABSTRACT

Prayer beads, through processes of craftsmanship and trade, arrive at meanings, significations, and imaginative associations that are inscribed by religious-cultural codes or social networks. The shadows of meanings overwhelm their material existence as prayer beads despite their lives beginning before their enactment within the socio-cultural and religious networks. Therefore, alongside an Iranian Sufi murshid, I follow the object-ness and the life of rosaries and prayer beads in an "apprenticeship ethnographic" journey. I address the material life of rosaries to explain how their object-ness contributes to their materiality and meaning formation that they gain in a Sufi order. An approach informed by speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO) is chosen to examine what it means to study a religious object-in-itself. I follow the religiously loaded object and its spiritual traces by way of OOO to forgo the meanings and relationships that shadow the objects.     

Incarnating Spirits,Composing Shrines,and Cooking Divine Power in Vodún

In this article I consider the ways in which shrine building, adornment, and the resulting experience of secrecy that emanates from shrines supports the building of new transnational networks and diasporas that are beginning to encourage a conceptual expansion of the African-Atlantic world. To achieve this I focus on how strategic choices in ritual flexibility and experimentation in shrine-building work to support the transnationalization of religions such as Vodún as they move from space to space, and how the religion’s material culture and repertoire re-localize as social and national spaces shift. In so doing, I argue that processes of secrecy, which in Vodún are typically tethered to religious objects such as shrines, encourage – instead of restrict – the global expansion of West African religions.