** Apologies for cross-posting**
CALL FOR PAPERS:
Aesthetics and the Making of Religious Collectivities
Art, Materiality and Representation
Royal Anthropological Institute / British Museum / SOAS
June 1st - June 3rd, 2018
https://www.therai.org.uk/conferences/art-materiality-and-representation
https://nomadit.co.uk/rai/events/rai2018/conferencesuite.php/panels/6052
Panel Convenors:
Timothy Carroll, University College London email: [log in to unmask]
Alanna Cant, University of Kent email: [log in to unmask]
In his essay Sorcery and the Beautiful: a discourse on the aesthetics of
ritual, Bruce Kapferer (2005) examines the “dynamic logic of aesthetic
processes that are variously realized through performance,” which he
suggests are “symbolically constitutive rather than expressive”. Following
his argument that “aesthetic processes draw human beings towards major
moral issues that are at the center of their existence”, this panel
explores the links between the aesthetics of religious practice and the
making and maintaining of collectivities.
Howard Morphy (1989) has shown that it is through aesthetic experience that
Yolngu people are able to encounter the ancestral dreaming. As such,
aesthetics are neither ancillary nor peripheral to Yolngu religious lives,
but rather, they form a fundamental mechanism through which belief, ritual
and practice unfold and persist. We contend that this is also true in wider
religious, spiritual and transcendent contexts, and that these aesthetic
modalities are central to their collectivizing features.
Within anthropology, aesthetics has been approached through the productive
interplay of three main theoretical concerns: (a) the meanings and
constitutions of elements such as style, form, colour and rhythm; (b) the
captivating enchantment of objects and practices; and (c) concerns with
particular sensory or embodied experiences of the material world. We invite
papers that explore the ways that such aesthetic phenomena work to
constitute religious collectivities through processes of community-making
and/or boundary-making. We are interested in proposals on topics including,
but not limited to:
-
the making, use, or veneration of art-like artefacts
-
symbolic forms
-
ethics and aesthetics
-
performance and practice
-
aesthetics of place and space
-
mediation
-
objects, bodies and dress
-
the everyday versus spectacle
-
circulation and commoditization
-
ritual and aesthetic orthodoxy or heresy (doing it right, doing it wrong)
-
aesthetics in collective effervescence
-
anaesthetics
-
aesthetics in non-religion/secularism
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: January 8th 2018
Please contact Timothy ([log in to unmask]) or Alanna ([log in to unmask])
with any questions, or if you would like to discuss applicability of
possible topics.
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