BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//ceres.rub.de//events//
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-TIMEZONE:UTC
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Modes and Models of Religious Attraction
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20101115
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20101119
DTSTAMP:20260419T080745Z
UID:modes-4@ceres.rub.de
CATEGORIES:
DESCRIPTION:Location: Musisches Zentrum\, RUB / „Situation Kunst“\, Bo
 chum-Weitmar\nFlyer\, Poster\nProceedings of the annual conference on “M
 odes and Models of Religious Attraction” of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg R
 esearch Consortium on the “Dynamics in the History of Religions between 
 Asia and Europe”\, 15 – 18 November 2010\nAt the heart of the annual c
 onference 2010 of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg on “Dynamics in the History
  of Religions between Asia and Europe” was the term “attraction” or 
 “attractor” and its derivatives – a term which boasts a rich traditi
 on and has been put to the test in physics\, sociology and media theory. V
 arious aspects of religious “attraction” were discussed under the head
 ing “Modes and Models of Religious Attraction” from the perspective of
  the dimensions “materiality” and “experience”. The aim in this co
 ntext was not to expose “attraction” as a psychological category or as
  a factor in identity within a subject-object dialectic\, but rather as a 
 specific dynamic factor in the context of religious densification\, delimi
 tation and repulsion. Our interest therefore did not focus so much on indi
 vidually identifiable charismatic figures or on a diffuse agency as the st
 arting point\, nor on their followers as identifiable recipients of attrac
 tive messages\, but instead on the religious intrinsic dynamics of these c
 ontinued processes of exchange\, which significantly determine the formati
 on and dissolution of religious networks of tradition. Particular topics o
 f discussion were the interplays which lead to the creation of religiously
  efficient material and thus to the formation of attractors\, and furtherm
 ore religious interactions from which various auratisations of bodies or o
 bjects emerge. These include religiously encoded elements which gain or lo
 se attractiveness due to shifts in power within the religious field\, and 
 which can transfer their charisma synchronically onto other elements (for 
 instance\, holy oil onto a religious symbol anointed with it) or diachroni
 cally restore it (for instance through the reinterpretation and incorporat
 ion of former places of worship). What was particularly instructive here w
 as the way in which the media work which not only accompany religious burs
 ts of attraction but also codetermine their direction and efficiency and w
 hich can act as transformers or generators within the inter and intra-reli
 gious communication processes. Beyond this\, the specific conditions and p
 ossibilities of religious attraction\, which  is perceived and conveyed a
 s individual experiences of transcendence\, were discussed in greater deta
 il\, for instance the suggestive power of alternative offers of salvation 
 in situations of religious competition or the forces of attraction which c
 an manifest themselves in the various forms of mysticism or mystical exper
 iences. It became clear that the various effects of linguistic\, visual\, 
 audio and performative media and their respective religious encoding play 
 a key role in the dynamics of the religious field.\n \nThe first section 
 entitled The Conceptualisation of Aura\, Charisma and Transcendence\, chai
 red by Gesche Linde (Frankfurt a.M.\, Germany)\, explored the terminologic
 al and conceptional environment of religious attraction and repulsion\, in
  particular in terms of its material and media context. At the heart of th
 e debate was the question of to what degree definitions of aura\, charisma
  and transcendence can contribute to  theoretical clarification\, above a
 ll of the relational aspects of intra and inter-religious dynamics.\nAt th
 e start of the section\, in a contribution entitled Sacrifice\, Martyrdom 
 and the 'Nachleben’ of Religion\, Martin Treml (Berlin\, Germany) highli
 ghted the aesthetic dimension\, which anticipates and refers back to relig
 ious practice\, and which also and especially becomes apparent in the “N
 achleben” of religious aura in the secular aura of works of art. The cul
 tural techniques described by Aby Warburg as “pathos formula”\, which 
 condense religious experience\, process it by forming and shaping it\, thu
 s enabling its transmission and possibly re-use in other religious or secu
 lar contexts\, seem to be of particular significance for religious dynamic
 s. Explicit reference was made to the significance of the – as yet insuf
 ficiently incorporated –  approaches from the early phase of the Warbur
 g school for religious research in general and specifically for the concep
 t of a relational form of research on religion.\nAs is well known\, the te
 rm “Nachleben” has proven extremely productive in the diachronic obser
 vation of ancient art history\, and indeed not just in terms of its many C
 hristian and later secular “renaissances”\, but also – as illustrate
 d in the lecture by Ioannis Mylonopoulos (New York\, USA) on The Beauty of
  Simple Things: Simplicity and the Visual Construction of the Divine in An
 cient Greece – for the Greek cult tradition itself. Starting from the st
 riking thesis - “In the beginning there was the image” – aniconic sc
 ulptures of early times\, colossal statues\, “classical” humanisations
  of idols and experimental and historicising tendencies of Hellenism were 
 used to describe different strategies of religious attraction through visu
 al constructions of the divine. The dichotomy developed by Mylonopoulos be
 tween two differently oriented charismatic interactions appeared to be par
 ticularly revealing in this context : between a communicative dynamic\, wh
 ich formed out of directly sensuous factors of attraction (through shaping
  the human body into beautiful forms) or out of decidedly simple\, archais
 ing forms (which thus suggest dignity).\nKnut Martin Stünkel (Bochum\, Ge
 rmany) then undertook the promising attempt in his lecture on Aura as Prop
 ensity. Towards a Non-Intentionalistic Description of Attraction to render
  the concept of religious attraction more concrete by converging Benjamin
 ’s theory of the aura and Popper’s “propensity” concept\, to then 
 go on to link both approaches to Bruno Latour’s blueprint of hybrid netw
 orks. The advantage of this initially surprising constellation is above al
 l that it can grasp phenomena of attraction in their specific dynamic betw
 een convergence and distance. Religious attraction would therefore not be 
 defined as a state or trait of an auratic cult object\, but rather as a co
 ntinued “unfolding”\, whose condensations appear neither predictable n
 or controllable\, and so cannot be explained by the intentions of the subj
 ects or collectives involved either.  Aura\, charismatics and religious m
 aterial thus are not in a causal but in a relational relationship which re
 sults from a sequence of processes of attraction and repulsion.\nThe gener
 al discussion highlighted once again that with regard to the communicative
  dynamism between statues of the gods and the community worshipping them\,
  especially from relational points of view\, it is virtually impossible to
  imagine a clear separation between cult and art objects. Furthermore the 
 point was made that it is necessary to take into account the relevance of 
 description or textualisation or even visualisation\, and consequently the
  translation into another medium as a factor of self-reflection and self-r
 eassurance of religious aura.\nPicking up on the initial deliberations on 
 terminological clarification\, the second section\, chaired by Arie L. Mol
 endijk (Groningen\, Netherlands) on Creating Typologies for Charisma and T
 ranscendental Experience aimed to differentiate more precisely between the
  different fields of forces in which aura\, charisma\, transcendence and t
 ranscendental experience can take on concrete form. Here the question was 
 also what significance the translation and communication of religious expe
 rience through media would have in a typology of religious and non-religio
 us attractors. Dimitri Drettas (Erlangen\, Germany) demonstrated in his co
 ntribution on Dream Divination and Dream Exorcism in Chinese Household Enc
 yclopedias the significance of soothsaying using the example of predictive
  techniques in China\, whilst showing how the interpretation of dreams and
  apotropaic means\, which have a long tradition in Daoism in warding off e
 vil spirits\, can converge. Dreams are understood in this context as a mul
 tifaceted interaction between various spirit beings\, ancestors\, diviniti
 es and demons which temporarily enter into an exciting dialogue with the d
 reamer\, which later is continued in the process of interpretation of drea
 ms. The experience of transcendence and the reflection of transcendence\, 
 as they manifest themselves in the corresponding books of dreams\, appear 
 in all of this as complementary factors of attraction which can both cance
 l out as well as intensify the dynamics of charisma and transcendental exp
 erience.\nNaomi-Feuchtwanger-Sarig’s contribution (Tel Aviv\, Israel) en
 titled Between Mundane\, Sanctified and Holy: Re-Defining Jewish Ritual an
 d Ceremonial Objects continued the discussion on a differentiation and pos
 sible typologisation of aura and charismatics with a series of specific ex
 amples from the Jewish tradition\, which – ranging from Dura Europos up 
 to the present – highlighted different ways of dealing with auratic obje
 cts or different purity rules and procedures to secure ritual status. Whil
 st on the one hand the speaker showed how the rules handed down from gener
 ation to generation\, for example on the production and inscription of Tor
 ah scrolls\, continue to be observed in the minutest of detail\, on the ot
 her hand she noted that from a Jewish point of view\, ceremonial objects\,
  cannot actually be rendered profane at all as their status is after all d
 efined by God’s word and thus their material aspects as well as their po
 ssibly being endangered are of secondary importance. With regard to inter-
 religious spheres of contact and conflict\, several notable cases of the c
 onversion of Jewish cult objects merited particular attention\, which – 
 in what circumstances it is unfortunately unclear – had been used in Chr
 istian liturgy.\nReal or virtual inter-religious conversions were also dis
 cussed in the next contribution by Sven Bretfeld (Bochum\, Germany). Under
  the heading of Materiality of Religion and the Aesthetic Dimensions of Or
 ientalism\, the speaker concentrated on two prominent examples of religiou
 sly loaded Orientalism from the 19th century. Starting with a precise des
 cription of Arthur Schopenhauer's study and the significant positioning of
  a Buddha statue\, first the oscillating powers of attraction and repulsio
 n of the then little-known Eastern religions on the atheist philosopher an
 d his theological opponents were discussed and then contrasted with the es
 oterically influenced convergence with Buddhism by the American attorney\,
  journalist and first president of the of the “Theosophical Society”\,
  Henry Steel Olcott\, half a century later\, who after his conversion wrot
 e an - in terms of intra-religious reception - rather controversial Buddhi
 st catechism according to Western criteria. In both cases\, the complement
 ary - and in itself certainly contradictory – relationship between exper
 ience of transcendence and transcendental reflection is a constitutive fac
 tor in inter-religious attraction.\nIn the general discussion on the secti
 on’s contributions there was an emphasis on the need to start less with 
 auratised objects or the people affected by them when creating a typologic
 al distinction and instead to focus on the processes of attribution\, the 
 forms of communication and the media involved in these.\n \nThe third sec
 tion Re-Constructing Auratic Material\, chaired by Marion Steinicke (Bochu
 m\, Germany)\, dealt with processes of loading with religious meaning\, re
 interpretation\, re-evaluation as well as the reclaiming of cult objects a
 nd sites\; at the fore was the search for specific processes which lead to
  the distinction between religious and secular material as well as the spe
 cial factors of attraction of religiously loaded material. The section ope
 ned with a lecture by Carmen Meinert (Essen/ Bochum\, Germany) Striving fo
 r Perfection in Central Asian Buddhism: Non-Conceptionality in Medieval Da
 oism on Dunhuang on the Silk Road\, once a prominent place of worship for 
 Buddhism and its intra-religious confrontations\, whose significance manif
 ests itself in its architectural and visual art design - particularly inte
 resting in terms of the media aspects of religious attraction – as well 
 as in extremely rich text production. The speaker concentrated on the idea
  of “non-conceptionality” which is constantly a central theme in the w
 ritings as a soteriologically decisive experience concept in Buddhism\, wh
 ich on the one hand (in the direction of Tibet) exerted a remarkable pull\
 , and on the other was received with remarkable indifference (in the direc
 tion of China). Especially against this – and not least also politically
  explosive – backdrop\, Dunhuang is a significant example of the interac
 tion of different attractors which condition the genesis\, condensation an
 d dissolution of a religious centre of gravity\, without – regardless of
  the various secondary modes of reception (interventions\, restrictions or
  attempts to control) – identifying primary intentional steering or orde
 ring structures.\nFollowing on from this\, in her contribution on Embodied
  Transcendence: Energetic and Physical Cultivation in Medieval Daoism Livi
 a Kohn (Boston\, USA) used an in-depth discussion of the Daoist concept of
  physicality to highlight that the “occidental concepts” of spirituali
 ty and materiality\, of immanence and transcendence (irrespective of their
  many differentiations\, especially in the context of religious and philos
 ophical debate) have always been the subject of controversial discussion w
 ith regard to Daoism. Although the terminology appears to be problematic\,
  in the Chinese context\, too\, there are traces of “notions of Western-
 style transcendence” to be found\, notably in the form of Dao as an othe
 rworldly god and creator. In “medieval Daoist culture” these different
  dimensions are activated through the medium of the body. The human body a
 s a mirror of the cosmos can thus be understood as a sacred topography wit
 hin which immanence and transcendence complete one another as part of a pr
 ocess and thus transform the human physis itself into a primary field of f
 orces of different religious factors of attraction and repulsion.\nIn the 
 following contribution on Recreating an Ancient Attraction: The Buddha’s
  Cave and the Sixteen Pilgrimage Sites in Sri Lanka\, Kevin Trainor (Burli
 ngton\, USA) used a specific case study to describe the restoration of los
 t\, forgotten or forsaken Buddhist holy relics in Sri Lanka and the attemp
 ts to revive past pilgrimage sites connected with this. The speaker analys
 ed a series of legitimisation strategies which intended to both legitimise
  and increase the concrete topography of the restored pilgrimage network a
 nd its religious attractiveness. This includes the supernatural manifestat
 ions transmitted in various ways and communicated through media which char
 acterise a specific cult site\, the corresponding legend literature which 
 tells of this and also the non man-made religious images belonging to a pa
 rticular cult site. Exhibitions of reproductions of such archaic or even o
 nly archaising visual works made it possible to authorise the respective l
 ocation of a restored holy site.\nIn contrast to this\, in Making Attracti
 ve what is Already Attractive: Roman Catholicism in Early Modern South Ind
 ia\, Between Missionary Accommodation and Grassroot Syncretism\, Paolo Ara
 nha (Florence\, Italy) investigated various Christian mission strategies i
 n the area of the Indian subcontinent\, notably in Goa. The missionary act
 ivities carried out by the Roman Church with significant involvement of th
 e Inquisition are characterised by three diverging\, and because of this v
 ery fact\, efficient trends\, which the speaker subsumed under the terms 
 “repression” (of existing ritual acts and destruction of places of wor
 ship)\, “adaption” (absorption of non-Christian religious customs\, fo
 rms of worship or festivals into Christian cult practices) and “attracti
 on” (specific coordination of Christian cult practices with indigenous t
 raditions). Of particular relevance in this context is the principle of 
 “accommodation”\, which proves to be a key attraction factor in the In
 dia mission – thus differing from the missionary endeavours in other par
 ts of the world. Here\, within the new Christian communities\, common ethi
 cal and social concepts – such as the caste system – are tolerated as 
 is the continuation of archaic ritual acts or their discrete integration i
 nto the Christian mass through inter-religious reinterpretation or convers
 ion. Furthermore\, the participation of non-Christians in Christian proces
 sions is allowed and membership of a community of worship is not determine
 d by a rigid inclusion and exclusion procedure.\nWith her paper on Creatin
 g Transcendental Feelings: Fantasies of the Milky Way in the Contemporary 
 Japanese Organization World Mate\, Inken Prohl then drew attention in the 
 final part of the section to the different conditions\, prerequisites and 
 specificities of “World Mate”\, a version of new religiosity in contem
 porary Japanese society\, whose “transcultural events”could raise impo
 rtant questions on the margins and interfaces of religious and secular att
 raction. The paper concentrated on the two-fold question of  “How peopl
 e are bound?“\, and “How people react?” In answer to this question\,
  numerous examples of cult objects were presented which\, according to cer
 tain concepts in the history of art\, would have come under the category c
 ommodity aesthetics and that the speaker herself dubbed “Walt-Disney-Sty
 le”. The “customer-orientation” of this community of worship was con
 sequently underlined\, which in an attempt to attract new members evidentl
 y makes use of tried and tested marketing strategies.\nThe lecture offered
  opportunity for terminological self-reflection in several respects. In th
 e section’s closing discussion\, on the one hand\, the difficulty of def
 ining “religious feelings” or religious experience without social or c
 ultural contextualisation was broached\, whilst\, on the other hand\, the 
 need to distinguish between the terms transcendent and transcendental espe
 cially from relational points of view was underlined.\n \nThe subjects of
  the fourth and final section Inter- and Intra-Religious Dynamics of Trans
 cendental Experience\, chaired by Heinz Georg Held (Pavia\, Italy)\, were 
 the processes of attraction and repulsion\, which\, on the one hand\, dete
 rmine the fascination of transcendence and\, on the other\, motivate the d
 iscursive reflection and media propagation of transcendental experience. U
 p for discussion first and foremost were the questions of the specific rol
 e of individual media as well as of the intrinsic dynamics of religiously 
 determined communication or its significance for the turbulences and emerg
 ences of the religious field. To start\, Christophe Nihan's contribution 
  (Lausanne\, Switzerland)\, entitled Qumran and the Dynamics of Religious 
 Attraction in the 2nd Temple Period\, described the intra-religious differ
 entiation process between “Tora” and “Temple” –  which - appare
 ntly paradoxically – contributed in reciprocally and also socially encod
 ed delimitation and exclusion towards an increasing auratisation of both i
 nstitutions and beyond that towards the establishment of a host of also po
 litically significant in-group practices. It is in specifically this field
  of conflict that the speaker sees the source of Jewish mysticism\, which 
 breaks through the clerical privilege of interpretation of the Torah and o
 ffers what is historically\, too\, a long-term “alternative attraction
 ” with the complementary phenomena of the individualisation of religious
  practice and the textualisation of religious experience characteristic of
  the Qumran. Nihan underlined the significance\, not just for the intra-re
 ligious development of Judaism\, but also from a comparative perspective\,
  of ritual and liturgy as key factors of attraction and also potentially o
 f repulsion.\nThe contribution by Ada Rapoport-Albert (London\, UK) 'Dropp
 ing out’ into Hasidism extended the line of tradition dealt with in time
  and space to the Hasidim movement\, which evidently in the present day in
  particular\, seems to be exerting special appeal. In this special manifes
 tation of Jewish mysticism\, which\, on the one hand\, unmistakably has me
 ssianic traits\, but\, on the other\, also shows inter-religious influence
 s\, for example\, from Sufism\, the omnipresence of God in nature or in th
 e material world is presupposed and thus themselves are given their own au
 ra and perceived as a spiritually fulfilled reality. The characteristics o
 f this movement\, which the speaker was able to illustrate through several
  striking examples\, include the mutual (and not\, as in comparable conste
 llations\, one-sided) attraction which must exist between a charismatic le
 adership figure and his or her pupils and followers. The relationships wit
 hin this intra-religious network therefore are determined through active a
 s well as reactive processes of convergence and also possibly of distancin
 g between individuals. In terms of cult practices\, too\, individualisatio
 n plays a key role as a factor of attraction.\nOn the basis of a concrete 
 case study - Connecting Transcendent Attraction and Attractive Objects: Th
 e Case of Elisabeth of Schönau - Anne Clark (Burlington\, USA) then moved
  on to the tradition of Christian mysticism\, which she above all discusse
 d from the point of view of its liturgical inclusion\, and thus in the med
 ia context. The visions of the Benedictine nun in the 12th century\, accor
 ding to her thesis\, cannot be understood without the direct link to ritua
 l practice\, in equal measure as material as well as a motive of mystic at
 traction. In addition to visualisation and textualisation\, the speaker po
 inted to the central role played by music in the meditation and ecstasy te
 chniques of mysticism. Overall\, according to the speaker\, in the Christi
 an tradition mystical experience was the highest and most extensive articu
 lation of religiosity and would thus represent a decisive factor of attrac
 tion within monastery life as the condition for making this transcendence 
 and transcendental experience possible.\nUnder the heading Enchanted by In
 tra’s Net: Some Random Reflections on Textual Images of Transcendence an
 d their Role in Religious Contacts Jörg Plassen (Bochum\, Germany) used t
 he example of the Avatamsaka sutra and its reception within various Buddhi
 st currents as well as the interpretation by Western philologists to inves
 tigate structural influences of visual language forms which relate to tran
 scendent spheres and which due to their special suggestiveness\, their aes
 thetic qualities or their illustrative power of persuasion exert a lasting
  attraction in intra and inter-religious contact. The speaker\, citing int
 er alia the work of Lakoff/ Johnson\, Blumenberg and Taureck \, explicitly
  emphasized the ambivalence of metaphors\, which in part can trigger very 
 different\, certainly opposite\, and thus even contradictory reception pro
 cesses by transferring religious ideas to other religious or secular areas
  or connecting with other religious or secular contents. With his fundamen
 tal deliberations on the status and meaning of rhetorical figures\, metaph
 orical language and metaphors\, Plassen drew our attention once again to s
 ignificant shortcomings in the differentiation of terms and the heuristic 
 evaluation of intra and inter-religious translation processes.\nThen\, fin
 ally\, the contribution by Christoph Auffarth (Bremen\, Germany) on Innerw
 ordly Transcendence as the Attractiveness of the – Material – World to
  Come: The Third Reich brought together some of the most important questio
 ns of the conference once again\, highlighting their complexity as well as
  their reach in terms of cultural history. At the same time\, the speaker 
 extended the largely historical thrust of the discussion into the 20th ce
 ntury\, not just to underline the current pertinence of the debate on “r
 eligious attraction” beyond the limits of the specifically religious fie
 ld\, but also to thereby explicitly take into account the decisive relatio
 nal aspect of the observer perspective. Using the example of the millenari
 an concept of the “Third Reich” and its terminological history\,  Auf
 farth demonstrated the intrinsic media dynamic of religious terminology\, 
 which due to its manifold semantic links has been subject to new or re-int
 erpretations. Evidently we are looking here at something more and differen
 t than intra-religious reception behaviour (as is shown for instance in th
 e adoption and interpretation of the concept by puritans\, radical pietist
 s\, adventists etc.). Auffarth focussed his talk on the multifaceted topic
  of the role and status of religious prophecies and their expected fulfilm
 ent within secularised societies\, such as in the “Sattelzeit” between
  1750 and 1850\, which transformed the religious concept of the thousand y
 ear kingdom of peace into a revolutionary utopia of the human race\, or in
  the first half of the 20th century that seized its for totally unholy pu
 rposes and ends\, and finally in the present\, which was able to integrate
  it into its political and military logic of confrontation.\nThe explanati
 on of this strange persistence of religiously loaded notions\, which– in
  particular through their intra and inter-religious migration potential 
 – become largely autonomous attractors and can gain new dynamism time an
 d again by being associated with current ideas\, is one of the key tasks i
 n a relational form of research on religion\, the specific objective of wh
 ich was made clear once again by Volkhard Krech (Bochum\, Germany) in his 
 closing summary and thematic situating of the different conference contrib
 utions. Krech underlined the consortium's research interest in the energet
 ic conditions of an inter and intra-religious power play\, which\, on the 
 one hand\, auratises ritual sites and objects\, attributes them religious 
 impact and increases their charismatics through discursive\, figurative an
 d performative forms of attraction\, and which\, on the other hand\, allow
 s individual and collective experiences of transcendence  to emerge befor
 e a religiously charged horizon of expectation and forms new religious net
 works through their media interdependence.
URL:https://khk.ceres.rub.de/en/events/modes/
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR