Measuring the World against the Body: Materialities and Meanings of Magnification and Miniaturisation in Religious Communication in Antiquity and Modernity

This year’s IGS Spring Conference is dedicated to the relationship between humans and the human body and enlarged or reduced objects, things, buildings and concepts in socio-religious practices, under the title “Measuring the World against the Body: Materialities and Meanings of Magnification and Miniaturisation in Religious Communication in Antiquity and Modernity”.
Even if humans are not the measure of all things, the human body is often a measure for engaging with the material world. Whether life-sized, oversized or undersized, the human body and its scale influence how we conceive of the nature, the material world or the imagined world around us, how we interact with it and how we relate to it. Enlargement or reduction, monumentalisation or miniaturisation as strategies in anthropogenic ‘products’ used in religious rituals enable increases in attractiveness, wonder or deterrence, in order to move further away from the world or deeper into it. As Hartmut Rosa aptly puts it (2019, 47): “Any elementary analysis of the way in which people relate to the world, experience and perceive it, act within it and orient themselves in it, cannot but begin with the body.” This starting point is expanded in this conference to include the concept of scale.
Building on Rosa’s new sociological theory of resonant self-world relations and its particular emphasis on our bodily relationships, this conference aims to examine, from various disciplinary perspectives, the actors and forces that influence the phenomena of enlargement and reduction.

The conference will take place in collaboration with the University of Liverpool and the Centre of Excellence Urbnet at Aarhus University as an online event from 24–26 February 2021.

 

The call for papers can be found here.

A report on the conference “Measuring the World against the Body: Materialities and Meanings of Magnification and Miniaturisation in Religious Communication in Antiquity and Modernity” can be found here.