Call for Papers
Making Sense of Religion
Performance, Art and Experience
11th Conference of the SIEF Working Group on Ethnology of Religion
Lisbon, Portugal 22-23 May, 2014

Religion has always been directly connected with embodied experience,
artistic manifestations of ritualism, and creative performances of
getting in touch with the sacred. Classic ethnological and
anthropological theory of performance places emphasis on the ‘social
dramas’, namely the actions of social interaction in the communicational
‘metatheatre’ (Turner 1987) of identity and status negotiation in
everyday life. Religious performance has thus been considered as a genre
of social action, as an art that it is open and liminal, a ‘paradigm of
process’ (Schechner 1987). The study of the performative and artistic
discourses in the field of contemporary religious practice is not new to
ethnology, folklore, anthropology and to the social sciences in general,
however little attention has been paid to the ‘pluri-sensorial’
(Barna-Fikfak 2006, Howes 1991) character of religious experience, and
the creative transformations entailed in the process. Despite the
recognition that bodies are mindful (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987), and
the centrality of sensory perception in any form of performance, art,
and religious act, social scientists continue to ignore the role of the
senses in their analyses of religious practice.
Religious experience has also been tied to other forms of social
expression and production. For example, anthropologists of spirit
possession traditions are prone to associate the experience and content
of such forms of mystical contact to other modes of relation, such as
those engendered in oppressive socio-political and economic contexts.
While also irreducible to this, religious practices such as spirit
mediation are often seen as ways of performatively resisting, if also
reinterpreting and reintegrating, social realities. Performance here is
read not necessarily as a theatrical or intentionally mimetic impulse,
but as the articulation of subjectivities through the acting, moving
body and its manifold, oven covert, registers. It is unsurprising that
an emphasis has been placed in recent anthropology on the phenomenology
(and cognition) of processes of “embodiment” or the “mindful body”.
While classic ritual theory generated concerns with the shaping of
emotional, physical and social experience through techniques (and
disciplines) of the body and its sensorium, performance theorists have
expanded these concerns to include the role of illocutionary, aesthetic,
material and dramatic processes in the expression of religious cosmology
and its dividends. This has also implied a shift towards recognizing the
profoundly self-reflexive, recursive dimensions of religiosity and its
manifestations.
Re-centralizing the importance of sensory perception, we call for
ethnographic and/or theoretical contributions that: a) make sense of
religion through performance and art and b) approach performative and
artistic action as religion in a variety of sociocultural, political,
and spiritual contexts.

This conference thus aims to explore themes within the ethnology of
religion, as well as within folklore-oriented studies, that speak to
their fundamental capacity to sense which performs itself, through and
with its actants, audiences, and media. At stake is a reconsideration of
the universality of distinctions such as those between private and
public religious experiences; the experience of intimate, “real” selves
versus their performance or social construction; the existence of
orthodoxies and established ontologies in counterpoint to their
diversification, globalization, commoditization. We aim to ask not what
the senses and “performance” of religion does to it (corrupts it,
enhances it, promotes it, transforms it), but in what senses religion is
constituted by its virtual or inherent senses, performativities and
aesthetics? We ask how sport, technologies, artistic movements and forms
of consumption, as well as modes of social and gender contestation,
reveal and articulate religious dimensions; as well as how these can
form novel configurations of religions themselves. Taking these points
in mind, some specific topics within ethnology, anthropology and
folklore studies studies we aim to focus are:

- ritual: sensing and performing
- senses, performance and popular religious art
- trends and consume of popular religious art and social contestation
- popular religious art in past and present
- feminism, gender and religious art
- contemporary spirituality and art
- performance, heritage and religious “authenticity”

Format: the conference takes place over two days, followed by an
excursion on the third day. Paper presentations are limited to 20
minutes each, followed by ten minutes of discussion. In total 20 paper
presenters can be selected. Colleagues who do not present a paper are
welcome to participate in the conference and its discussions. A business
meeting of the Working Group will be held during the conference.

Organizers: the conference is organised by the NAR-Anthropology of
Religion Group of the Center for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) and the
Ethnology of Religion Working Group of the International Society for
Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF).

Venue: Universidade Nova de Lisboa-FCSH

Fee: the conference fee is 60 €, incl. conference materials, reception,
coffee, lunch.
Participants are responsible for travel and accommodation; there is no
funding for expenses available.

Application: submit an abstract of your paper of maximum 300 words,
together with your name, position, and institutional affiliation to Dr.
Clara Saraiva [log in to unmask] and Dr. István Povedák
[log in to unmask] by January 15, 2014. The selection of the papers
will be done in collaboration with the Board of the Working Group
Ethnology of Religion. The final selection will be communicated by
February 15, 2014.
Convenors: Clara Saraiva, Diana Espírito Santo,Jenny Roussou
Contacts: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
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