Tuesday 16 – 15:30-17:00
Session 10 – Aud. Armfelt A102 – Chair: Terhi Utriainen
Yael Dansac – Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Somatic Pedagogy in Contemporary Spiritual Practices
In France’s and Belgium’s megalithic sites, New Age and contemporary Pagan-inspired practices are held on a regular basis and, from an emic point of view, their aim is to access the local megalith’s ‘healing powers’. Participants use their body to elaborate a meaningful experience of the practice while also experiencing themselves. The body is the place where participants register their sensitive and emotional experiences. Drawing on ethnographic data, this paper reconstructs the somatic pedagogy implemented during these practices. Attention will be given to the individual and collective learning of another sensory language, the relationships between bodily techniques and somatic imagery, and the importance of verbalizing bodily attention.
Nataliia Pavlyk – H. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
The Bodily Practices in Jain Yoga: Learning the Steps to Liberation
Unlike other philosophical approaches, the path of yoga in Śvētāmbara Jainism is not only rooted in theoretical constructs but also uses a system of practices to verify them. The post-canonical period in the history of Jainism (c. 6-12th centuries CE) presents yoga as a psychotechnique – a system of physical and mental exercises aimed at achieving transcendental states of consciousness, mystical self-knowledge and spiritual liberation of a person.
The Jain authors (especially Haribhadra and Hemacandra) claim that further contemplation aiming at mokṣa requires yogic postures (āsana) and breath control (prāṇāyāma). Thus, a turn to bodily-oriented techniques as an essential part of the soteriological way occurs in Jainism. However, the attitude to corporeal methods of yoga is quite cautious and speaks about the external influences of other religious traditions on Jainism.
Ilona Raunola – Freelance researcher
A Process of Spiritual Nutrition
I discuss a case-study of living on light. I have interviewed spiritually committed person who has experienced a phase in her life when she did not eat physical food. Instead she describes how she was completely nourished throug light or prana. In the aspect of learning I am interested about the interaction she had with angels and the spiritual realm. Yet she needed to learn the material conditions of everyday life when she chose to eat food again. My interpretation are based on Actor-Network Theory and close reading. There are three clusters that I will pay attention: the beginning when the transition happend, the middle when she tries to adjust the material needs and the phase when she wanted to start eat again. What kind of learning she has encountered and what remained still to be learnt? What kind of knowledge she gained both individually and universally in the process of this spiritual understanding?
Session 11 – Aud. Westermarck C101 – Chair: Sofia Sjö
Sawsan Kheir – Åbo Akademi University/University of Haifa
Secularization Among Young Adult Minority Students in Israel: Processes of Learning and Unlearning Religious Worldviews
This paper aims to explore the interplay between religion and secularization among minority groups using psychological and comparative approaches. It explores the ways young adult religious minority students in Israel, Muslims and Druze, integrate their religious worldviews within modernity, separately for each group and comparatively for both, with special emphasis the implications of their conflictual position as religious and ethnic minorities, who are natives to Israel, on these worldviews.
The main research question is: How do individuals with multiple minority positions integrate their religious worldviews in light of the secularization processes of modernity?
The findings reflect the various ways in which modernization processes can alter minority students’ religious worldviews through processes of learning and unlearning about their own religion as well as other religions, and they confirm previous findings on the multifaceted manifestations of religiosity and secularization. Furthermore, the findings highlight the indirect and implicit ways in which ”religious/ethnic minority” status may influence these learning processes.
Igor Mikeshin – University of Helsinki
Humility and Obedience: Russian Baptist Conversion as Unlearning
My paper discusses conversion in the Russian Baptist community. During my fieldwork in the rehabilitation ministry for addicted people, I identified conversion as a process of interiorizing the text of the Bible (the Russian Synodal translation) as the language of not merely liturgy and worship, but also communication, thought, and reasoning.
Russian Baptist conversion is a multi-faceted phenomenon. I will discuss it from an ethical standpoint — as a process of unlearning the old ways of living. My current research focuses on gender order, family values, and sex as ethical affordances (Keane 2016) — moral potentialities that essentialize particular human experiences but do not strictly determine behavior. I will demonstrate how juxtapositions between the old ways and the new Christian life, as well as the process of unlearning sinful behavior, facilitate the construction of the Russian Baptist ethical narrative.
Liya Xie – Princeton University
Unlearning Religion in Churches: Why did Soviet anti-religious museums fail?
Soviet anti-religious museums present a curious case study for understanding the top-down mechanisms of unlearning religion and propagating an atheist Weltanschauung. In this paper, I compare the history of two anti-religious museums as a way to understand how Soviet scholars studied and represented religion in the public sphere: the Central Anti-religious Museum (TsAM) in Moscow and the State Museum of the History of Religion (GMIR) in Leningrad. I argue that one of the major reasons why anti-religious propaganda in these museums failed lies in the Soviet scholars’ inability to understand the symbolic meaning of the museum space as well as the emotive power of religious objects. The fact that both GMIR and TsAM were housed in former cathedrals or monasteries and used original religious objects preordained their failure to “eradicate vestigial religious elements” and instill atheism in people’s minds. In this sense, “the space is the message”: the audience did not perceive the content in an amorphous vacuum but in specific forms, whose very spatiality and materiality had the power to evoke religious sentiments.
Session 12 – Aud. Goethe L104 – Chair: Ruth Illman
Lena Roos – Södertörn University
The Green Sabbath Project. A Day for Learning about Our Place in the World
The Green Sabbath Project was initiated by Jonathan Schorsch, professor of Jewish History at the University of Potsdam. Several Jewish and Christian organisations/congregations have joined the project’s network.
The goal is to inspire Jews and others to observe one day a week of rest as a way counteracting climate change. Green Sabbath observance means to strive to consume as little as possible of the Earth’s resources, especially non-renewable ones. Instead of consuming, the participants are encouraged to arrange other types of activities: nature walks, lectures, study circles, picnics, sing-alongs, poetry readings etc. The Green Sabbath Manifesto especially stresses that Sabbath has traditionally been a day dedicated to learning and suggests for instance sermons focused on environmental issues or a free screening of a documentary on an environmental topic. Other forms of learning can include inviting seniors from the area to talk about the history of the place.
Schorsch connects the project to the Talmudic notion that if all Jews would just observe the Sabbath properly once, then the Messiah would come. In Schorsch’s vision, if one billion monotheists, and many others too, would observe a green day of rest each week, this would give the Earth a chance to renew itself, which would be a prerequisite for the messianic age.
Laura Wickström – Åbo Akademi University
Learning About the Environment Within Islamic Tradition
Ecological threats have, already for a longer time, been considered one of the most serious issues of modern time (Benthall 2008: 138). In response to the current ecological crisis, various representatives for Islam attempt, as do most religious traditions, to restore environmental and ecological values in their religious tradition (Foltz 2005: 2651). Especially during the last three decades there has been no lack of courageous new approaches, including environmentalism, within the Islamic theological thought, but whether these thoughts will be developed further by a wider circle of academic theologians depends heavily on the political and social development of several countries in the region (Wielandt 2018: 753). Based on ethnographic research in the region, this paper argues that the learning about the environment in the Middle East is gaining ground within the Islamic tradition but faces simultaneously great challenges.