Christina G. Williamson presents a working paper on ‚he strength of festival ties. Intentional networks, ‘portable communities’ and the transmission of common knowledge in the Hellenistic world‘

Panhellenic festivals, such as at Olympia, have long been understood as a major factor in the formation of the Greek community during the expansionist processes of colonisation and dispersal of communities across the Mediterranean in the archaic and classical periods. In the Hellenistic period, a new dimension to this phenomenon appeared as interurban festivals were increasingly being hosted by individual cities, modelled on the great panhellenic games. Delegates, athletes, and performers travelled across the Mediterranean, creating a ‘portable community’ that a trail of honorific monuments, victory lists, and civic decrees. These data lend themselves for analysing the cohesion of this expanding world through the lens of network analysis. Yet contrary to the general model, which presumes that innovation comes from random, or ‘weak-tie’ brokers outside the close knit, i.e. strong-tie group, these festivals operated on a shared concept of the past through which interurban connections were shaped. This paper examines these views of the past, their use in creating intentional connections, and the role of ritual in generating common knowledge as it seeks to gauge the strength of festival connections. As it does so, it argues that festival connectivity was anything but random. Although weak ties will have perpetuated the network in numerous ways, the backbone was founded in the strong-tie connectivity of a presumed shared heritage, however fabricated this may have been.

Aaron Plattner is going to present a working paper on ‚Pausanias in Amyklai and Lebadeia. Apollon’s throne and the oracle of Trophonios‘

Presumably a native of Asia Minor, Pausanias was a Greek writer of the second-century AD, who lived in the period of the Antonines. He is famous for being the author of ten books entitled Περιήγησις τῆς Ἑλλάδος (Periégesis tês Helládos, Engl. Description of Greece). The work’s focus is on the „classical“ Greece of the First Sophistic (5th century BC). Pausanias is mainly interested in the religious sphere of the archaic-classical period as well as its material, mythical, and ritual-performative forms of expression. Although, in his time, these sanctuaries, temples, aetiological narratives, rituals, festivals, cult images, etc. no longer existed to the full extent, Pausanias nonetheless selects some of these to picture them vividly on a textual level for his educated audience. He therefore applies the rhetorical stylistic device of ἔκφρασις (ékphrasis, Engl. description). Thus, it is in many cases hard to distinguish between historic and fictional utterances, especially for those who comprehend the work as a travel report or tourist guide.

Thus, my research project is a contribution to clarifying the question of how Pausanias’ idiosyncratic writing can be adequately described. By the means of a reinterpretation of the work’ intention, based on the analyses of approximately 30 descriptions, it can be shown that Pausanias is neither a tourist guide nor a peculiar historiographical piece of work, but rather a museum guide for educated women and men coming from different ethnic backgrounds and constituting the Roman elite, the museum being Roman Achaea, where the reader encounters the ubiquitous cultural highlights of the Greeks that are part of their collective memory. For Pausanias deliberately creates semanticized space, in which a collection of antiquities is not only admired by the reader, but in which the latter feels addressed by the described places and gains the impression to really be in situ.

The present paper is a first draft of my dissertation’s third chapter, as scheduled. It contains the discussion of two ekphrastic examples, the first being an object description (Apollon’s throne), and the second being a description of ritual practices (oracle of Trophonios). In both cases, the discussion’s aim is to show how the text tries to establish a connection to its reader in order to give him or her the impression of being present.

Thomas Sojer presents a working paper on ‚Apocalypse of the Cross‘

The apocalypse of the cross radically recalibrates the totality of all self-world relationships. It is the consequence of a disruption that is as life-changing as it is unavailable. Because of the apocalypse of the cross, Paul worked from the previously unknown and ‘foolish’ gospel of the cross to the previously known and, crucially, misunderstood scripture. For Irenaeus, scripture was previously like a myth but once brought to light by the cross it becomes the very flesh of Christ. Yet, these theologies of the cross in antiquity as well as in (late) modernity do not merely consist in interpreting the cross as such, but in interpreting by means of the cross the contemporary world, society, and most importantly one’s own cruciform conditio humana. The leftist political theorist Simone Weil experienced the apocalypse of the cross herself through the aesthetic performance of liturgy. However, Weil’s concept of the cross takes on a monstrous character. Imagined as a rape, the cross, for Weil, is bottomless affliction endured by a completely surrendered God facing the virtual omnipotence of evil. Within this tension, the paper portrays the fracture between a pre-modern ‘God certainty’ and a growing spiritual crisis of the modern and even more radicalized late modern religious habitus.

Sanam Roohi gives a working paper on ‚Telugu associations in the US: Caste differentiation and diasporic politics in a transregionally connected social field‘

American Telugu associations, built as a cultural platform to unite spatially dispersed Telugu diaspora have become key political intermediaries linking the US with Andhra and Telangana’s political landscape. Although the term Telugu point to their larger linguistic basis of membership, the caste character of these associations is reflected in the way particular communities exercise control of these associations and the alignments of these associations with caste affiliated political parties in India. In this paper I argue that these diasporic Telugu organisations are performing the role of caste associations, albeit in a refashioned way: as in colonial times, they work to make caste relevant, but now in a globalising milieu. Caste associations, a product of colonial modernity and increasing urbanisation have worked for the dynamically defined ‘interests’ of the community, which changes over time. While in colonial times, caste associations worked to unite sub-jatis, achieve upward mobility in the caste hierarchy, and wrest concessions from the British government, in post-independence era, their tryst with democratic politics have been lauded by scholars. With transnational migration and a sense of disintegration of community and cultural values among migrants in the USA, I argue that it is organizations like TANA and ATA that take up the project of building caste based community cohesiveness transnationally even as they attempt to become political mediators in local politics in India. In doing so, associational politics create a transnational social field where carefully crafted and performed caste differentiation between the two major caste groups – Kammas and Reddys pan out. Whereas Reddys and Kammas often see each other as opponents or rivals, they also regard themselves as the only two legitimate caste groups who can represent Telugus both in America and in Andhra. Therefore, the associational politics in the diaspora also point to how Reddy-Kamma rivalry has subsumed the political possibilities of other caste groups within a trans-regionally connected social field.

Armin Unfricht presents a working paper on ‚The Athenian Tyrannicides – A case study‘

In this paper, I apply the previously developed theoretical framework of my thesis – the sociological concept of the “Sacred”, as well as certain aspects of the “collective-” or “cultural memory”-theory derived from the historical and cultural sciences – to a first case-study, namely the Athenian “Tyrannicides”, Harmodios and Aristogeiton. Focal points of my research were the socio-political implications and forms of representation (narrative, material, ritualistic-performative) of the hero-cult in question.

Daniele Miano presents a working paper on ‚Liber, Fufluns, and the others: rethinking Dionysus in Italy between the fifth and the third centuries BCE‘

In response to a dossier of different theonyms and iconographic profiles for a set of gods in central Italy from the 5th–3rd centuries that correspond to
Dionysus, this chapter considers the relationship between Fufluns, Liber, Hiaco (and other by-forms) with reference to two main concepts.(a) Translation: based on the work of Jan Assman, Homi Bhabha and others, we may investigate to what extent these divine forms were ‘translations’ or ‘interpretations’ of a Greek archetype. (b) Multiplicity: following the work of Versnel, Henrichs and others, we may consider the cluster of gods under the rubric of religious polymorphism: was Dionysus one god or many? The chapter argues for the fragmentation of Dionysus in Italy in the 5th–3rd centuries, and for the significance of local myths and forms of worship of the god as against a generalized ‘Roman’ standard. The discussion focusses on two case studies, Vulci in Etruria and Praeneste in Latium, with particular reference to local colour. The Etruscan evidence surveyed comprises epigraphic and iconographic attestations of Fufluns Paχie on fifth-century ceramics and a fourth-century mirror respectively. Praenestine evidence analysed includes bronze mirrors and cistae which depict Fufluns, L(e)iber and Hiaco. In conclusion it addresses the significance of the fragmentation of Dionysus in Italy for the interpretation
of the Bacchanalian affair of 186 BCE.

Dietmar Mieth gives a working paper on ‚Not at one´s disposition – Inaccessibility‘

The thesis of this contribution – resulting from an oral presentation in the City of Bochum where I have lived since 2017 – , focuses  on  the connection between the dramatic loss of members in  the Christian Churches  in Europe on the one hand and the preoccupation with the relevance of “religious” feelings in the society on the other side, detected and elaborated   by sociologists like Latour, Joas, Rosa. This approach seems – for me – to be very near to the project of “Weltbeziehung” which promotes some approaches in the Max Weber Institute. My intention is to identify and discuss some of the  roots of this contemporary “religious” sensitivity in the medieval tradition of mysticism and especially in the literary reception of Meister Eckhart in the first half of the 20th century.

Gabriel Malli is going to present a working paper on ‚Media – Subjectivities – Religion. Theoretical reflections on subjectivity discourses in religious media‘

The present paper proposes a basic conceptual framework for my thesis and can be considered a first draft for a theory part. In the first section, I review sociological approaches to media – mainly from the field of Cultural Studies –, focusing on the level of media text. In the second part, I deal with theoretical conceptions of subjectivities und subjectivation in (post-structuralist) cultural sociology and try to link them to the approaches reviewed in the first part. Drawing from praxeological concepts of religion, I deal with the construction of “subject models” – understood as templates for desirable and legitimate subjectivities – in religious (media) discourse in the final part.