Opening Conference October 2017
Outline of the conference's aim
With this conference the International Graduate School “Resonant Self-World Relations in Ancient and Modern Socio-Religious Practices” starts its training programme with the first cohort of doctoral students.
The aim of the introductory conference is to provide a base for the research projects comparing the self—world relations that are established or reflected and sustained in social and especially religious practices in Mediterranean antiquity with those in the contemporary (late) modern period. By combining and confronting different methodological traditions – from Sociology, Biblical Studies and Classics – and different periods, the International Graduate School offers new perspectives for research in multiple ways.
Ritual practices have always been a crucial element of cultural research, for they provide a key to understanding differences in cultural belief systems and social orders. Thus, the differences and changes within circum-Mediterranean antiquity have been reconstructed as the differences between polytheistic and monotheistic rituals and beliefs, urban (polis) societies and autocracies. The central assumption of the research projects is now that these ritual practices have to be taken much more seriously and need to be analysed and understood as socio-religious practices establishing highly significant and particular relationships between self and world. They claim that in those ritual practices, particular persons, objects or places are endowed with a power that makes them resonant, i.e., responsive to the embodied subject, in particular ways. Processes of sacralisation configure and stabilise this kind of ‘resonance’.
This allows for new contextualisations of what have hitherto been considered isolated practices relating to objects, bodies, stories, space and the transcendent realm, but what is increasingly considered to be based in fundamental cognitive processes and expressive forms equivalent to intellectual beliefs.
Participants: Doctoral Students and Faculty Members of the IGS from the Universities of Erfurt and Graz (https://dk-resonance.uni-graz.at/de/das-doktoratskolleg/faculty/)
Guest Speakers: Teresa Morgan (Oxford) and Hubert Knoblauch (Berlin)
