Chair person
Dr. Christiane Brosius
Christiane Brosius, assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology at the South Asia Institute, has researched and published widely in the fields of visual and media anthropology, South Asian diaspora, Hindu nationalism, urbanisation and globalisation. Currently, she is completing a manuscript on lifestyle aesthetics, rituals and media flows in the context of the emergent Indian economy. Brosius was a fellow at the School of Arts & Aesthetics at Nehru University in Delhi and is founding member of “Tasveer Ghar” [House of Pictures] - A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture. At the Collaborative Research Centre on Dynamics of Rituals, she heads a sub-project on Agency and Territorial Identity.
P 05 - Ritual and Media
Chair: Dr. Christiane Brosius brosius@sai.uni-heidelberg.de
Download preliminary daily schedule here (pdf)
(for better readability kindly print it out)
Common activities:
Reception
On Monday, 29 September, we will officially open the conference with a
reception from 19.30 to 22.30
Key Note Lecture
Tuesday, 30 September:
Key Note Speaker Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c.
"Magie und Ritual"
Plenary Discussion
Wednesday, 1 October at 18.00 introductory presentation:
Prof. Dr. Christoph Wulf, Freie Universität Berlin
"The Future of the Science of Ritual in a transcultural Context"
Exchange meeting
Thursday, 2 October from 9:00 - 12:00:
Exchange meeting between scientists from
the German Archaeological Institute
and the Collaborative Research
Center SFB 619
Speakers (synonym for referee, panelist, active participant)
Day 1 – Monday, 29 September 2008
9:45-10:30 Erik De Maaker
Mediating Garo Death Rituals
11:00-11:45 Ron Grimes
Mediating the Santa Fe Fiesta
11:45-12:30
14:00-14:45 Elke Mader
Stars in Your Eyes -
Ritual Encounters with Shah Rukh Khan in Europe
14:45-15:30 Felicia Hughes-Freeland
Divine cyborgs? Ritual spirit presence and the limits of media
16:00-16:45 Florence Pasche Guignard
Religious Rituals on the Video Sharing Websites
16:45-17:30 Christopher Helland
From Cyberspace to Sacred Space:
Utilizing the Internet and World Wide Web for Ritual Engagement
17:30-18:15 Madeleine Hurd
Media, Ritual, and the Expression of Ethnic Belonging
in German Borderlands, 1919-21
Abstract
Media play an important role in the interdisciplinary study of ritual dynamics in several ways. Media technologies, especially new media, have emerged as an important tool not only for the study and analysis of rituals, but also for the actual performance and varied presentations of rituals as well as ways of engaging with them. For example, as new media technologies become more and more accessible all over the world, different media are used within rituals, to enhance ritual performance, to make a ritual performance accessible to a wider public, and so on. A range of social agents employs new media technologies to record rituals and circulate them in new contexts and domains, thus creating new identities, audiences and ways of knowing.
Media technologies help establish framing spaces and modes of agency; they may transpose a ritual from a sacred into a secular context, the domain of the everyday to that of the magical, vice versa, or even fuse them. This forces us to address categories such as framing, transfer or agency, all central for ritual theory, in a new light. It also necessitates a fresh look at media and ritual as paradoxically similar and yet different concepts of engaging with and producing the world. How do rituals and their 'liveliness' change when they are transferred from one media context to the other, for instance from stage performance to film to the internet? Can we still talk about a weakening of ritual efficacy through 'mass media' in the light of the growth in online religion, media pilgrimages or televangelism? What happens to rituals and their potential efficacy when they are exposed to a wider, anonymous audience by means of new media technologies? Some of them might be revitalised or essentialised as the common heritage of communities that may not even have known about them before the so called "electronic turn"? The panel also seeks to explore the importance of ritual's visual spaces. How do rituals make use of particular images? How do images within and of rituals work, and what are their effects on spectators, participants and researchers? And finally, how have different media changed the ways researchers focus their analysis of rituals?
