CALL FOR PAPERS
10th EASA Biennial Conference
Ljubljana, Slovenia
August 26-30, 2008
Body and Soul. On Corporeality in Contemporary Religiosity (W 011)
Convenors:
Anna Fedele (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, EHESS, Paris; EASA Anthropology of Religion Network)
Ruy Llera Blanes (ICS, University of Lisbon; Leiden University; EASA Anthropology of Religion Network)
Contemporary religiosity is defined by new ways of conceiving faith and the body, either opposing or recovering "traditional" senses. In this workshop we propose to assess the importance of the body and its perceptions in religious faith, calling for ethnographic contributions focusing on these aspects.
Corporeality has always been a key locus for the definition of belief and religious experience: in Christianity, for example, it has ranged from the blood of Christ to the Pentecostal tongues of fire. Contemporary spiritual experiences (Neopaganism, Neo-Pentecostals, Falun-Gong) have produced new instruments for conceiving faith and the body, opposing or recovering "traditional" senses. Anthropologists have been, over time, developing multiple strategies to describe and analyse this kind of spiritual bodily experiences: from Evans-Pritchard's description of Nuer conceptions of the soul to Constance Classen's insights on Inca cosmology and the human body, Paul Stoller's postmodern approach on sorcery apprenticeship in Niger and Thomas Csordas' study on the fenomenology of healing. In this panel we intend to discuss these and other possible approaches calling for papers on ethnographic contributions focusing on the connection between "body" and "soul" and
the perception of corporeality in contemporary religious faith.
The call for papers will be open between January 20, 2008 and March 31, 2008.
Papers should be proposed using the online form linked from each workshop page (see www.easa2008.eu). This workshop appears as W 011, you can access it directly through this link:
http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa08/panels.php5?PanelID=228
Any questions can be adressed to Anna Fedele ([log in to unmask]) or Ruy Blanes ([log in to unmask])
|