KNAW Akademie Colloquium. Making Sense of Religious Texts: Patterns of Agency, Synergy and Identity. Day 2: Authority and Practice

Organisers: Sabrina Corbellini, Mladen Popović, and Stefania Travagnin (University of Groningen)

Texts and textual analysis are still a much-discussed topic in social and cultural research. Foundational arguments on textual analysis have contested the role of language and logocentric expressions, however the study of religious cultures seems to be strongly text-coded, and indeed the study of and on texts has always been crucial in the academic research and teaching of religion. Up to date scholarship have discussed ‘text’ within one specific religious tradition, with the effect that ‘text’ has been debated within the boundaries of one religious identity and not from an inter-religious and inter-cultural perspective. Furthermore, texts have been assessed through an interdisciplinary perspective that sets the ‘textual’ in relation and dispute with the ‘extra-textual’ (such as rituals and material culture).

This Colloquium will gather scholars in different fields and work on texts and with texts, in order to provoke a debate on textuality that goes across religious traditions and academic disciplines. The Conference Committee is formed by three scholars from the University of Groningen: Sabrina Corbellini, Mladen Popović and Stefania Travagnin.

This debate on ‘text’ will be organised around the following five key issues: (1) modality (of texts), (2) authority (of/on texts), (3) practice (visualizing and ritualizing texts), (4) materiality (texts as objects) and (5) transmission (translation and transmission of texts).

Website

Day 2: Authority and Practice

28 October 2015

• 9.30-11.00: Panel Authority of/on Texts I
  • Eyal Poleg (Queen Mary University of London), Conversion and Sacred Texts
  • Fiona Somerset (University of Connecticut), When is a text no longer a text? A case study of complex transmission
  • Robert Ford Campany (Vanderbilt University), Shanqing Scriptures as Vehicles for Performing Identity

• 11.00-11.15 Coffee break
• 11.15-13.15: Panel Authority of/on Text II
  • Hindy Najman (Yale University), Philo’s Life of Moses II: Extension and Expansion of the Figure and Text of Moses in the Hands of Philo
  • Anders Petersen (Aarhus University), When Texts become Ritual Artefacts: The Re-Emergence of Archaic Religion in an Axial and Post-Axial Age Context. A Cultural-Evolutionary Perspective on the Problem
  • Fabrizio Pregadio (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg), Text, Authority, and Argumentation in Daoist Internal Alchemy: The Daode jing and Neidan
  • Arie Molendijk (University of Groningen), Translating the Orient: The Edition of the Sacred Books of the East and the Reversal of Authority
• 13.15-14.30: Lunch
• 14.30-16.00: Panel Practice (Ritualizing & Visualizing Texts) I
  • Gideon Bohak (Tel Aviv University), Consuming Texts in Jewish Rituals: Between “Magic” and “Religion”
  • Rina Talgam (Hebrew University), The Role of Texts and Images within the Church and the Synagogue in Late Antiquity: Some Comparative Aspects
  • Lucia Dolce (SOAS, University of London), TBA

• 16.00-16.30: Coffee Break
• 16.30-17.30: Panel Practice (Ritualizing & Visualizing Texts) II
  • Anna Dlabačová ( Leiden University) , Text and Image on the Early Printing Press: The Complementarity of the Textual and the Visual in Antwerp’s Religious Book Production, 1480-1500
  • Nikolas Broy (Leipzig University), Buddhist Words, Sectarian Acts: Buddhist Texts in the Milieu of Popular Religious Sects in Late Imperial and Modern China and Taiwan
• 19.00 Dinner

See also:

Day 1: Modalities and Day 3: Materiality and Transmission