Aesthetics of Religion
Final Report Abstract
The main goal of our collaboration was to advance an understanding and theory of aesthetics as a framework that can fine‐tune discourses in study of religion on materiality, spatial analysis, ritual studies and sensational religion. On the methodological level, this included finding and defining a position towards the growing field of cognitive study of religion. The AESToR network proved to be productive both as a social group as well as on the level of theory development enabling us to connect various understandings of aesthetics and its elaborated subcategories. Both the high number of meetings as well as the accompaniment by STS opened up the rare opportunity for deep self‐reflection during our process of foundational theorizing with a view to an appropriate anthropology, epistemology, methodology and comparative histories. This turned out to be crucial in order not to underestimate the fallacies of the endeavour. An aesthetics of knowledge, for example, is an outcome of our collaboration that demonstrates how the acquisition, legitimation of knowledge and scholar‐ ly debates are dependent upon and – often without awareness of the scholars – are structured by aesthetic categories like symmetry, variation, appeal. The aesthetic categories we developed and our insights into dynamics were applied to an extensive number of case studies covering diverse media, times, and cultural settings. Developing an aesthetic vocabulary was a vital step to performing the outlined goals. Aesthetic strategies are dedicated to laying open how religions systems structure and are structured by sensational and stylistic norms. The analysis of manipulation, disciplining of bodies and groups can take a start from here. Aestheticscapes are sensational environments that include and intermodaly interrelate the sensory systems. This is innovative inasmuch as not only the classical five or six sensory systems are theorized but also temperature, humidity, rhythm, light, spatial coordination, decay, pain and many more. Only a dense description of these interferences, together with attention to the sign and symbol systems in their display or material‐sensorial representational forms, enables us to render a full and appropriate picture of religious phenomena, their effectiveness, attractiveness and power. Finally, as experienced teachers ourselves, we reflected on the aesthetics of the teaching process itself and challenged ourselves to employ new methods in teaching the aesthetics of religion. We developed a connective vision of aesthetics of religion. We summarized the state of the art and opened it up to international collaboration in our Handbook that systematically unfolds the approach. And, finally we particularly elaborated the concept of narrative cultures in the aesthetics of religion offering a platform for all scholars in study of religion working with textual sources and narratives.
Publications
- Conference report: Narrative Cultures and Aesthetics of Religion: Storytelling – Imagination – Efficacy, 16.–18.06.2016, Oslo, H‐Soz‐Kult, 2016
Anne Koch, Jens Kreinath
- Aesthetics of Religion. A Connective Concept (Religion and Reason 58, edited by G. Benavides, M. Stausberg, A. Taves), New York, Berlin: De Gruyter 2017
Alexandra K. Grieser, Jay Johnston (eds.)
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110461015) - Der spatial turn in Theologie und Religionswissenschaft, Verkündigung und Forschung 61.1 (2017) 1‐72
Anne Koch, Henning Theißen (eds.)
- The Aesthetics of Civil Religion (special issue), Journal of Religion in Europe 10.1/2 (2017) 1‐239
Anne Koch (ed.)
- Bloomsbury Handbook of Cognitive and Cultural Aesthetics of Religion (HCCAR), London et al.: Bloomsbury Academic 2019
Anne Koch, Katharina Wilkens (eds.)
(See online at https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350066748) - Religionsästhetik (special issue), Verkündigung und Forschung 63.2 (2019) 81‐159
Anne Koch (ed.)
- Narrative Cultures and the Aesthetics of Religion (Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion), Leiden, Boston: Brill 2020. xvi, 376 S.
Anja Kirsch, Dirk Johannsen, Jens Kreinath (eds.)
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004421677)
