15:00-16:30

Registration

17:00-18:00

Opening lecture

Graham Harvey (The Open University), “Re-defining religion and scholarship performatively”

If we have wrongly defined religion as irrational beliefs perhaps we have also wrongly defined our scholarly relationship with religions and religious people. Seemingly endless debates about insiders and outsiders, and about objectivity and subjectivity, seem to be predicated on a notion of religion moulded by the Christian Reformation. Academics in various disciplines have, as Bruno Latour and Tim Ingold argue, believed in belief, emphasising interiority and transcendence over participative or performative activities. In the growing resistance to the “world religions” paradigm (in which a religions are taught as systems derived from founders, codified in texts, expressed properly in official dogmas, and believed in only imperfectly by “ordinary” people) there is hope that we might completely re-focus our attention on lived or vernacular religion. To do so, however, we need to do more than merely describe others more accurately. We need to revise our conception and performance of ourselves as scholars. Objectivity is often imagined to be much like surveillance by a transcendent and impassive deity – suggesting that post-Enlightenment scholars have hardly escaped the definitional ideals of Christian Theology. Rather than flipping over to a more subjectivist approach, a more reflexive and dialogical approach can be rooted in understandings of academic practice as also being a participation in the world. In this presentation, I propose to experiment with understandings both of religion and of scholarship as practices by embodied, emplaced and performative persons in a larger than human world. A simple first step might be emphasising that “participant observation” should not cease being participative when researchers begin writing or lecturing. More radical possibilities will be discussed, including rejecting hyperseparation, celebrating presence, and testing the value of indigenous knowledges about the ever-changing and always thoroughly relational world. In short, there should be more symmetry between scholarly performance and other ways of moving through the world.

18:30-22:00

Social event (refreshments provided)

9:00-10:00

Keynote lecture

Zdeněk Konopásek (Charles University in Prague & The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic), “Religion in action: When theology meets Latourian science studies”

In his writings about religion Bruno Latour argues that we should understand religion in its own terms (“religiously”) while seeing it as something “local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, and sturdy”. When talking about religion, we should avoid, Latour insists, turning our attention “to the far away, the above, the supernatural, the infinite, the distant, the transcendent, the mysterious, the misty, the sublime, the eternal”. Only then we can reframe the relationship between science and religion in a new, mutually meaningful and acceptable way. In my presentation I will use empirical data on Marian apparitions in Litmanová (Slovakia) to come with a sympathetic critique of such a position. I fully subscribe Latour's general principles of non-reductionist STS as well as many his specific arguments on religion. I also share Latour's “political” interest in exploring how to talk about religion in a way that would be meaningful for both agnostics and the faithful. However, I will argue that it is misleading to insist that religion must be understood exclusively in terms of presence-making practices, as Latour does. It will be demonstrated that something like quasi-scientific fact-making is not alien to (true) religious talk. On the contrary, it appears an important element of what Latour himself might call “religion in action” - i.e., religion not ready made and undisputed (as is the case in iconographic analyses of religious art), but uncertain, collectively performed, attempted and more or less achieved. In fact, it will be shown that overall Latourian sensitivity for reality in the making seems deficient in his own work on religion and makes it somewhat puzzling and not quite convincing. And yet: if we rearticulate the relationship between presence-making (of religion) and fact-making (of science) in a more subtle way, Latour's main point about how to understand the truth of religion can still be kept. Even more it can be made more sound and elaborated, both empirically and theoretically.

10:00-10:30

Coffee break

10:30-12:00

Papers

Chair: David Zbíral

David Thurfjell (Södertörn University), “The sanctimoniousness of giving voice to the Other: Backfiring attempts of insider inclusion in Romani studies”

This paper presents and reflects on some of the difficulties that surrounds the project of including insiders in the academic production of knowledge about dispossessed communities. Based on some cases from my own experience within the field of Romani studies, the paper describes and problematizes some instances in which scholarly, politically and ethically motivated courses of action and thought have collided. The different Romani communities of Europe live under miserable circumstances in vast societal marginalisation, completely in the hands of the sometimes capricious treatment of the majority. Through history, non-Romani scholars have contributed to their marginalisation by providing power-blind and exotifying descriptions of Romani life and culture that have advised and effected public policy. The insight that this is so has caused many contemporary scholars in the field to take measurements to avoid contributing to the difficult situation of the Roma. Being one of these scholars, I have found that succeeding in this ambition is not easy and that it sometimes can backfire completely. This paper opens up for a discussion on whether the ambition to counteract hierarchies of knowledge production may actually petrify them; on what the role of scholars in this type of field should be, and on whether it is worth sacrificing academic quality on the altar of the morally good.

Milan Fujda (Masaryk University), “What would an informant tell me after reading my paper? A case study of (a)symmetrical approach in the process of analysis”

The proposed paper will highlight theoretical significance of fair ethical treatment of informants byway of reflexive analysis of the case of asymmetrical handling of data during my analysis of instructed action. The data for the analysis were assembled during my ethnographic research of the dance improvisation project. Reading my own conference presentation based on these data I started to question myself what would one of my informants tell me after reading it with me. I was urged to ask this question especially in case of this particular informant thanks to my previous experience with making her angry by asking her some questions I needed to confront her with in order to test some of my provisional interpretations of what is going on in the field. By asking the question: what she might tell me? I realised that the way I am treating her in the analysis is not completely fair and started to search for reasons why it is so. It let me to recognise the importance of some parts of my field notes, which I had previously deleted from a relevant network view in Atlas.ti. Realizing their importance and bringing them back helped me to deepen the ongoing analysis and reveal theoretically relevant aspects of the issue under scrutiny. This particular informant thus gave me a lesson of the theoretical significance of fair ethical treatment of persons we interact with in the field, and helped me to reveal some of the reasons for approaching our data asymmetrically. In my presentation I would like to share what I have learned by this lesson, which contradicts the generally shared ideal of ethical irrelevance of the scientific analysis. In the proposed perspective it might be viewed not just as an ideal which is difficult to practise, but as a theoretically problematic ideal in itself. While the postcolonial critics show on numerous cases how ethically bad treatment of the „research subjects“ produces theoretically bad analysis, I will try to point symmetrically out also how making the analysis ethically better enhances its theoretical quality. It may shed some light on the relation between ethical quality of the research process and theoretical quality of its outcome.

12:00-14:00

Lunch break

14:00-15:30

Papers

Chair: Tomáš Hampejs

Rafael Klöber (South Asia Institute & Heidelberg University), “Studying contemporary Tamil Saiva Siddhanta”

Studies on South Indian religious history are a traditionally neglected area of research. The field of Tamil religion, due to Orientalist and Sanskrit biased “victorious” interpretations of South Asian religions, has been and still represents “losers” in the realm of religious history. Therefore, per se, my research is situated in a historically constituted position of disciplinary asymmetry. However, the enacted traditions, groups and networks of contemporary Tamil Siddhantins examined in this qualitative research are – albeit at the margins of dominant representations of “Hinduism” – far from being subalterns in the Tamil context itself. Drawing on the postcolonial critique of concepts like “religion” and “Hinduism”, as well as the postmodern critique of historiography, the paper will elaborate on the possibilities for a liaison of discourse theory and ANT as presented in my PhD-project. This is attempted by highlighting the complex entanglement of performativity, agency and power in the current religious landscape of Tamil Nadu. Far from subscribing to a positivist understanding of symmetry in scholarly endeavour, my presentation will expound upon the problems of ethnographic research conducted from a German university, but within a South Indian context. These problems include several crucial topics, like (descriptive) language and (in)translatability, identity positioning of the researcher and the researched, as well as the acknowledgment of both their agencies; needless to say, as a result, the researcher will become part of the history of religion itself. Hence, the paper is rather an apologetic attempt at admitting various shortcomings, rather than presenting any sophisticated scientific results.

Nóra Bodosi-Kocsis (University of Szeged), “Authors and texts: Reflections on assymetries in an anthropological fieldwork among Hungarian Krishna devotees”

In postmodern, hermeneutical anthropology the ethnographer’s authority and the context of fieldwork has been a significant issue. My preseantation focuses on some questions I faced while trying to apply the Geertzian approach of textuality to my field experiences among Hungarian Krishna devotees. Regarding the anthropologist as an author and the field itself as a text of hidden meanings which the anthropologist should discover, interpret and describe „thickly” may have various challenges in the making. One of these challenges is the asymmetric relationship between the researcher and his/her field; the researched subjects (or „informants”). During fieldwork, as I experienced, both the researcher and the informants are authors and texts at the same time, they mutually read and interpret each other. Those hidden meanings which the anthropologist aims to interpret and describe are formulated in the intersubjective space between the researcher and his/her informants. The researcher’s interpretation is influenced by the informants’ view on him/her, it is shaped by their interpretations. So, the con„text” (field and its people) is an active agent in the creation of meaning. This asymmetry between the researcher and his/her researched subjects have long been targeted by many authors and methods in cultural anthropology (for instance Renato Rosaldo, Vincent Crapanzano, James Clifford, George E. Marcus or narrative ethnography as the latest method), however these authors and methods still focus mostly on texts: inteviews, life histories, stories told by informants or the act of ethnographic writing, not on the whole, complex experience of being in the field. What are the possibilities of a more symmetric mode and reperesentation of fieldwork?

15:30-16:00

Coffee break

16:00-17:30

Papers

Chair: David Thurfjell

Tomáš Hampejs and Vojtěch Kaše (Masaryk University), “What the humanities offer the science? Towards symmetrical approach in the cognitive science of religion”

This paper is questioning the position of the CSR in the context of other approaches in the study of religion. In last two decades, the CSR criticized the standard ways of producing knowledge in the study of religion rooted in interpretative framework as principally non-scientific. It seems that for some authors, the really scientific study of religion begins with the CSR explicit ambition to explain religion in contrast to interpret it. This opens the question of the role of humanities and their research programmes for the CSR, respectively for the contested field of the scientific study of religion generally. From the point of view of the CSR, the role of humanities is usually imagined in three overlapping functions: (1) the distribution of data, which can be produced only by educated historians and fieldworking anthropologists and sociologists, (2) the importance of these data for ecological validation of experimental work and evolutionary theorizing, (3) possibility of testing hypothesis on the basis of these data. It will be showed that this view is more or less asymmetric, because it places humanities to a subordinate position to the CSR. This paper wants to explore this asymmetry and finally will argue for the necessity of symmetrical relation between humanities and the CSR for successful cooperation in the scientific study of religion.

18:30-22:00

You are invited to join for dinner

9:00-10:00

Keynote lecture

Steven Sutcliffe (University of Edinburgh), “A (qualified) return from the tropics: Why ‘new age’ is key to the study of religion”

Extending the principle of Edmund Leach’s structural analysis of Genesis as myth, J Z Smith claimed that to analyze Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics was just as necessary as to analyze any other meta-text in the Religious Studies ‘canon’. Leach and Smith thus offer opening gambits in the symmetricalization or radical extension of data within and across formations, and thus the start of a ‘de-canonization’ of the study of religion. Widening this principle of inclusion enables analysis of source texts within marginalised historiographies of European religion, such as (in an anglophone context) Kingsford’s The Perfect Way (1895), Gardner’s Witchcraft Today (1954) and Spangler’s Revelation: The Birth of a New Age (1971). Opening a further research seam has enabled scholars to incorporate the practices and behaviours of non-elites in social worlds parallel to source texts, whether these be ‘Christian animists’ talking to ancestors in English graveyards (Stringer 2008) or ‘spiritual holists’ practising firewalking in Scottish new age centres (Sutcliffe 2003). The European location of these examples allows us to see that an expanded register of supernormal agents and special powers interacting with everyday life, previously cast out of Europe and projected into ‘the tropics’, has re-emerged as Latourian actants ‘at home’.

Importantly, data symmetricalization includes critical historiography of the study of religion itself. But despite these research innovations, institutional hysteresis reveals the continuing shadow cast by the ‘world religion’ category and its various declensions. The perceived ‘problem’ of demarcating ‘new age’ exposes the continuing effects of an implicit league table of religion entities derived from a particular ideological prototype. By simultaneously only surviving as a residual academic taxon while flourishing as a key Latourian ‘hybrid’ in the european field of practice, ‘new age’ formations bring into sharp relief ‘at home’ the inadequacies of the dominant taxonomy.

Analysis of new age as the Achilles’ heel of the ‘world religion’ declension suggests how a principle of symmetry similar to Bloor’s can be put to work in order radically to disaggregate, distribute and equalize primary sources within and across formations. Applying symmetricalisation at the level of explanation, in contrast, raises epistemological challenges to a different theoretical principle: ‘difference’ itself. To cite J Z Smith again: “a theory, a model, a conceptual category, a generalization cannot be the data writ large”. A return from the tropics is to be welcomed with the qualification that we extend symmetry of data but retain asymmetry of explanation.

10:00-10:30

Coffee break

10:30-12:00

Papers

Chair: Kamila Velkoborská

David Zbíral (Masaryk University), “Should historians care about symmetry? The example of research into medieval inquisitional records”

In this paper, I will focus on the question of whether historians, who essentially deal with long dead people, should nevertheless pay attention to symmetry in research. The method of source criticism is an essentially – and, I guess, inevitably – modernist and asymmetrical method of data evaluation, but, at the same time, one of the core elements in the identity of historical scholarship – indeed, the most durable and the least questioned. I will present critical postcolonial reflections on research into medieval inquisitional records by Renato Rosaldo and John H. Arnold, and cite some examples in which traditional source criticism is clearly insufficient or invalid. However, I will also discuss a couple of theoretical and practical issues with symmetrical approach in historical research. Most of my examples will be taken from my current biographical research into Christian religiosity based on inquisitional records from Italy and Languedoc from the years 1270-1330.

Dalibor Papoušek (Masaryk University), “Religions of ancient Israel according to textual and material evidence”

The paper reconsiders a/symmetry in the study of religions of the pre-exilic Israel. It deals with different kinds of sources and their methodological relevance for the process of a/symmetric reconstruction of ancient religious life. Besides the “classical” question of a/symmetric relations between Biblical and non-Biblical written sources it is aimed at the archaeological evidence which often provides a radically different picture. The sphere of material evidence raises questions not only about the relation of various sources to the same or similar items but, more often, to qualitatively different aspects and levels of ancient religious life.

12:00-14:00

Lunch break

14:00-15:00

Papers

Chair: Nóra Bodosi-Kocsis

Miroslav Vrzal (Masaryk University), “Sociology which counts on gods? Why is symmetrical approach in the study of religions not a theological perspective”

In my contribution I would like to follow the track of the discussion concerned with the use of the symmetrical approach in religion studies that occurred in the Czech qualitative research magazine called Biograf. The discussion was about the study by Jan Paleček (2010) titled "Virgin’s Mary’s sun miracle in the light of sociology, sociology in the light of the sun miracle". Some commentators of Paleček’s text, which acknowledges the use of the symmetrical approach in terms of the program, discussed here that the author of the text seems to be justifying the existence of 'supernatural' entities such as Virgin Mary, and at the same time he requires them to be scientifically accepted, or that Catholic sociology of religion is directly suggested here. And in my opinion, this discussion illustrates some misunderstandings in connection to the use of symmetrical approach in the study of religions. In my contribution I would like to show that although there really is the need to take ‘gods’ into account in terms of the symmetrical approach (in case our data mention them), it does not mean that it is truly the theologically-oriented approach. While theology or other theologically-oriented approaches to the study of religions (for example phenomenology of religion) presuppose the existence of God (gods), supernatural entities or sacred as an ontological category, the symmetrical approach to the study of religions does not automatically do so. It consistently focuses only on what people do and reflect. Consequently we might even consider ‘gods’ to be real existing entities in the given situation. And that is because people talk about gods employed in their lives and also that they might communicate with them. Nevertheless it does not mean that we need to pre-suppose their ontological existence. We cannot have double standards for their existence and non-existence. Therefore the matter is not to normatively assume or by ourselves prove the ontological status of ‘supernatural’ entities, but not to exclude such entities from the survey situation automatically, in case the data available (reflections and behaviour of people) discuss them.

Kamila Velkoborská (University of West Bohemia), “Reflecting on reflecting in the study of ritual”

The proposed paper will attempt to dissentangle the “reflexivity muddle“ that develops during the field-work study of contemporary ritual practice (in this case pagan, witchcraft and magical ritual practice). Acknowledging the forces that influence his or her ethnographic account, the fieldworker has to constantly reflect on his or her reflecting on the rituals but also on the practitioners´ reflecting on the rituals as well as the anthropologist´s presence in them. The goal is to show the benefits of reflexive approach in this particular area of research as well as to point out its drawbacks. In addition to the author´s own fieldwork data, the paper will draw on the ideas of V. Turner, R. Schechner, M. Stausberg and R. Grimes.

Matouš Vencálek (Masaryk University), “Homecoming experience: Retroactive interpretation or valid analytical category?”

Margot Adler stated that contemporary Paganism is “a religion without converts”. More recently, Graham Harvey wrote that “people do not convert to Paganism”. So called “Homecoming Experience” or “Coming Home Experience” narrative – a subject of great discussion in the field of Pagan Studies – is very common among the Contemporary Pagans; many of them describe that they have “always been Pagans, they just didn’t know it had a name”, and the acceptance of Pagan identity and finding a community of like-minded people often feels like “coming home”. But how to grasp such narratives? Is it acceptable for the academic Study of Religions to consider such narratives as accurate descriptions of the process of one’s affiliation to Paganism? Or should we see it as constructed personal mythology of Pagan affiliates? Aren’t contemporary Pagans affected by Margot Adler and other authors and scholars in their claims about the process of their affiliation?

15:00-15:30

Coffee break

15:30-17:00

Closing panel discussion