Purpose and content of the conference

With this conference, the International Graduate School “Resonant World Relations in Socio-Religious Practices in Antiquity and the Present” is launching its work with its first cohort of doctoral students.

The aim of the inaugural conference is to establish a basis for comparing world relations – the relationships of the individual to the social, material, and also transcendent world – as these are established and reflected in various social and, above all, religious practices in antiquity and the present day.

Such practices – in antiquity mostly within religious contexts – have attracted increasing attention in recent research. Thus, the differences and changes in the ancient Mediterranean world have been reconstructed as distinctions between polytheistic and monotheistic rituals and conceptions, or between urban societies and autocracies. Combining methodological approaches from sociological, biblical and classical studies research and juxtaposing them within a diachronic framework opens up new perspectives on ritual practices.

The research projects therefore focus on ritual practices as socio-religious practices that generate, determine or express significant relationships between people and the world – with other people, with objects, with nature, with one’s own self, with heaven or with God or gods. The analysis of such rituals and their dynamics, which transcend any specific social order, brings into focus fundamental cognitive processes as well as their expressive character and the institutionalisation of resonances in sacralisations. A central question is under what conditions and with what consequences such self-world relationships are experienced as resonant, i.e. as dialogical and responsive.

These approaches can provide new contextualisations and explanatory frameworks for practices that have often been studied in isolation to date, practices that create relationships with objects, bodies, stories, space and the transcendent.

 

Participants: PhD students and faculty members of the IGS at the Universities of Erfurt and Graz (https://dk-resonance.uni-graz.at/de/das-doktoratskolleg/faculty/)
Guests: Teresa Morgan (Oxford) and Hubert Knoblauch (Berlin)