Description
Featuring the forthcoming edited volume, Beyond Karbala: New Approaches to Shiʿi Materiality (Brill Handbook of Oriental Studies), this roundtable examines visual and material cultures, aesthetic dimensions, and material religion by exploring the various ways objects and somatic and sensorial experiences are represented, lived and embodied among diverse Shiʿi communities. The roundtable brings together some of the contributing authors along with established scholars of material religion to discuss manifestations and transformations of materiality in the life-worlds of Twelver, Alawī-Nuṣayrī, and Alevi-Bektashi communities in Albania, Azerbaijan, Iran, Kashmir, Lebanon, and Turkey. We present empirical inquiries into the complex and dynamic relationship between Shiʿism and material ‘things,’ locating our inquiries in relation to broader debates on material religion. In particular, we sketch a research agenda concerned with the ways in which religious expressivity takes cultural forms, objects, practices, and somatic and sensorial experiences more seriously, and considers affect and matter as integral constitutive elements of religious experience. We seek to expand the study of (Shiʿi) Islam and religion in ways that consider the a) relationship between human and nonhuman actants in religious life-worlds, b) how the praesentia and potentia of nonhuman and more-than-human beings acquire form in the lived experiences of people and communities of faith, and c) how material ‘things’ and aesthetic forms enable imaginal engagements with the Elsewhere and the occult. Finally, we examine d) the politics of material religion and the contested processes of making tangible and intangible religious heritage in light of globalization, localization, sectarianization, and digitalization. Individual presentations: • Nada Al-Hudaid, In the khidma (‘service’) of Ahl al-Bayt: Agency and social capital in religious statue art in Kuwait • Sara Kuehn, The Literal and the Hidden in Bektashi Religious Materialities • Stefan Williamson-Fa, Mediated Devotion: Sound and Media in Transnational Azeri-Turkish Twelver Shiʿism • Fouad Gehad Marei and Yafa Shanneik (editors), Beyond Karbala: New Approaches to Shii Materiality—An introduction • Katja Rakow (discussant), Beyond Karbala: New Approaches to Shii Materiality—A response.| Period | 28 Jun 2022 |
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| Event title | European Association for the Study of Religion Conference 2022: Religions and States of Freedom |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Cork, IrelandShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |