K. M. University, India Christianity in the Land of Santhals: a study of Resistance and Acceptance in Historical Perspective(03U)

Singh, Rana P. B.

Banaras Hindu University, India

Pilgrimage & Sacred Places: Canon of Peace and Ecological Harmony(01L)

This panel considers the idea of reverential development as a force integrating dharma (moral code of conduct) and karma (right action), an integration which ultimately results in peace. Understanding pilgrimage is vital to this process, which since ancient times, has promoted the human quest to experience nature and its inherent spirit. If pilgrimage systems and ecological harmony can be integrated correctly, this can contribute significantly to sustainable development and environmental conservation on ethical grounds.. The focal theme of the panel invites scholars from different fields to discuss three broad themes which are illustrated in the religious traditions of Oriental culture and South Asia: (A) Evolution and Symbolism: textual, contextual and memorial; (B) Ritual Landscape: processes, landscape and sacred systems; and (c) Ecological Harmony and Peace Formation: Cultural interaction, deep ecology and mass awakening.

Organized panel, * Session Abstract, English
Singh, Rana P. B.

Banaras Hindu University, India

Gaia and Ecological Awakening: Message of Hinduism for Global Peace(01L)

Lovelock's theory of Gaia, which refers to Earth as a living organism, has its roots in the Vedic literature. The Atharva Veda (XXX.1.63), c. 10th century BCE, narrates the Earth as 'Go' ('cow') who provides milk to her calves in the form of life substance. This shows Gaia in a spiritual dimension that helps us understand nature or the earth-spirit as a living organism. Ancient Hindu thought proclaims the need for the sustenance and uplift of human society as an integral part of environmental healing. Hinduism, with its multiple doctrines, varieties of deities, and different types of people from various levels, promotes a sensibility to deep ecology where the Earth is symbolised as mother. Absence of religious studies and environmental ethics in South Asia has been a major reason for the underdevelopment of ecological awakening. However, inter-religious dialogue seeks to spread a message of global understanding and peace as a service to humanity.

Organized panel, English
Sjoblom, Tom Mikael

University of Helsinki, Finland

Narrative Minds: Historical Evidence and the Theory of the Modes of Religiosity(16U)

In a number of recent publications, the anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse has put forward a new theory of religious transmission based on two divergent modes of religiosity. The theory is ambitious in scope: it proposes to identify the broad, cross-culturally recurring patterns in which religious traditions may be transmitted and give a systematic explanation of the process involved. Since 2001 a large team of scholars from different disciplines has been testing and critically evaluating this theory under the auspices of an international project. A number of research volumes from this project has now been published. With the wealth of critical evidence now in our hands, a more searching overall critical examination of the theory may be attempted. In this paper, I will focus at the historical evidence and discussions presented in the volume Theorizing Religions Past: Archaeology, History, and Cognition (eds. H. Whitehouse & L. Martin, 2004) with a view to evaluating the theory's usefulness and explanatory power in the historical study of religious phenomena.

Organized panel, English
Soares, Benjamin F.

Afrika Studiecentrum, Netherlands

From Debate and Deliberation to Conflict and Violence: Religion and the Public Sphere in West Africa(05H)

In this paper, I use a series of case studies about proselytism in order to build theoretical tools for thinking comparatively about religion and the public sphere in plural societies at a time when the modalities of religious expression have been changing. First, I consider some of the ways in which new forms of associational life, increased transnational and global interconnections, and the use of new media technologies have helped to change proselytizing by various groups of Muslims and Christians over the past decade in Mali and Nigeria. Second, I focus on specific cases of proselytism in order to identify occasions when the public sphere--that idealized space of liberal political philosophy--has indeed been an arena for debate and deliberation, but also instances when it has become the setting for inter- and intra-religious conflict and violence in these two countries.

Symposium, English
Sokolova, Anna

Moscow State University, Russia

Religious Situation in Modern Russia: Examples from Vladimir Region(16E)

Recent changes in Russian society substantially affected the religious situation in the country. The Vladimir region is a historical center of Russian culture and the Russian Orthodox Church and provides a good example demonstrating the nature of this process. A preliminary search of mass media demonstrates that apart from the Russian Orthodox Church (traditional for Central Russia) and Western branches of Christianity (traditional for Western countries) new confessions and denominations are rapidly developing. Russia now hosts a broad spectrum of religious movements, including the Russia Orthodox Authomic Church, the well-known International Society for Krishna Consciousness and a new religious movement "Anasthasya," which participated in recent Parliament elections in Russia. This paper reports the results of field research on the religious situation in some districts of Vladimir Region.

Organized panel, English
Solihin, Sohirin Mohammad

International Islamic University Malaysia, IIUM, Malaysia

Religious Violence in Indonesia: Jihad in the Qur'an between Comprehension and Apprehension(05O)

In the past, Muslim leaders had different opinions with regard to the state constitution. During the parliamentary debate, nationalist groups defeated them and eventually they governed the country using what so called Pancasila state philosophy. This paper tries to highlight their involvement of Muslims in religious violence with the use of religious motives. The main focus is to see the characters of doctrine, perception, and comprehension toward the concept of jihad as contained in the textual evidences. In view of this, paper tries to reveal their motives on targeting Western communities which, more likely link with Israel-Palestine conflict. At the end, it will analyze their reading materials that can be considered as the main factors to incite the spirit of jihad.

Organized panel, English
Sonehara, Satoshi

Tohoku University, Japan

Nikko Toshogu and Ise Jingu: Shogunate and Emperorship in the Edo Period(09P)

In the early modern period, the Nikko Toshogu shrine, built to worship the ancestral spirits of the Tokugawa shogunate, was conceived as the seat of absolute power. For this reason, the Tenno's relationship to Ise Jingu in this period is highly problematic. In the middle of the 17th century, a shogun erected the Toshogu shrine as the sacred center of the Bakufu, and presented the "Tosho-sha Engi" to the shrine. In this text, the Tenno is depicted as a "rimin" – one who rescues people – and is regarded as the protector of the laws of the shogunate. In contrast to this, from the middle of the 18th century onwards, beliefs centered around the Toshogu shrine, which had originally been limited to the warrior class, became popularized. As the authority of the Tenno was employed by the shogunate to justify its rule, there eventually emerged the idea of his supremacy over the shogunate. I want to discuss the significance of these two religious centers, Ise Jingu and Toshogu shrine, in light of how the relationship between their respective deities reflected this political situation.

Organized panel, Japanese
Song, Hyun Ju

The Academy of Korean Studies, South Korea

A Study on the Formation of Religious Studies in Modern Korea: with Lee Neung-Wha as the Central Figure(16L)

This paper aims at tracing the formation and development of religious studies in Modern Korea and revealing some characteristics of them. It focuses especially on the works of Lee Neung-Wha, one of the greatest religious scholars in the early 20th century of Korea. The formation of scholastic concern about religion had very significant meaning. The Korean nationalists regarded religion as a root of Korean cultural identity and a key to restore national strength. Beyond those general emphases and fragmentary knowledges about religion, it was required to get into studies for the essence, origin and history of religion. Lee Neung-Wha made such a initial step toward a so-called genuine study of religion. He left not only many writings about particular religion like Buddhism, Christianity and Shamanism, but also many comparative-systematic studies about religion. His study, however, was unique and limited by the conditions of his times.

Symposium, English
Sonntag, Mira

University of Tokyo, Japan

Christianity in Japan and Japanese Cristians abroad(03W)

*chairperson

Organized panel
Sonntag, Mira

University of Tokyo, Japan

Communal Life and Religious Education: Lessons that Private Schools Can Teach(06L)

Permitting religious education only in private schools, Japan's lawmakers sought to stay in line with the directives of separation between state and religion and of religious freedom as given by the post-war constitution. Clinging to legal issues while still demanding enforced value education the public discourse often ignores deeper relationship between religious tradition and value education, furthermore it lacks acceptable value notions. Another problem is the way, in which religious education is practised. Schools that manage to influence the values and moral convictions of their students do so not by means of classes on religion, but rather outside of class by contact with lived values through communal life. Learning from Christian Aishin High School this paper argues that value education in the broader sense cannot be successful unless it is related to communal life. This means that value education in general must be designed in a new way.

Organized panel, English
Sonoda, Minoru

Kogakkan Univesity, Japan

Toward a Multi-disciplinary Approach in the Study of Shinto History(01Q)

In approaching the historical reality of Shinto from a broad religious, cultural history or comparative perspective, we must inevitably adopt a viewpoint and a methodology different from that of established Shinto studies. This is so because, aside from the modern period, Shinto's historical identity was always overwhelmingly bound up with Buddhism in the phenomenon known as shinbutsu shugo or as a cultural amalgam of one sort or another; Shinto was never a self-contained religious entity. In that sense, what is needed is a study of Shinto from a religious history perspective, one that understands Shinto in its own right in its structural relationship to Confucianism and Buddhism; Shinto in the broader context of Asian religious history where it has survived in amalgamation with, as supplementary to, Japanese Buddhism and Japanese Confucianism. Here there arises a need to reach a structural understanding of Japanese religions.

Organized panel, Japanese
Sonoda, Minoru

Chichibu Shrine, Japan

(06D)

Organized panel, Japanese

Sørensen, Jesper

University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

Ritual and Cognitive Aspects of Agency(01K)

This paper discusses cognitive aspects of agency in relation to ritual behaviour. In it, I discuss several cognitive and semiotic aspects of how rituals alter conceptions of agency and thereby actively enhance representations of so-called 'magical agency', I.e. some ritual entity believed to contain an essence that enables the ritual action to have some sort of efficacy.

Organized panel, English
Sørensen, Jesper

University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

Reconceptualising Magic: From Ethnocentric Condemnation to Ritual Practice(06K)

The concept of magic has been through a thorough criticism within both the History of Religion and Anthropology. Several writers have argued that the concept is best abandoned and can be thrown in the conceptual waist bin together with other obsolete concepts, such as mana and totemism, without any analytical problems. It is argued that magic has a long history as a polemical concept designating other people's ritual practices and as such has an inherent derogatory meaning. The question is whether conceptual cleansing solves the problem. In this paper I will argue that (a) we need a concept like magic, and that abandoning it would add confusion, not clarity; (b) that the concept of magic points to aspects of ritual practices that can be fruitfully analysed through cognitive theorising; and (c) that through such analysis new understanding of the dynamic relationship between institutionally approved rituals and 'illicit' or non-institutional ritual practices can be reached. Thus, instead of abandoning the concept, it must be reconceptualised and thereby turned from a polemical into a scientific concept.

Symposium, English
Sotelo, Laura

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico

Mayan Gods in the Codices(03R)

This work sets out to study the set of Gods that during the Late Post-classic was venerated by the Mayans. In order to know them, we used three types of sources basically: the news that briefed the Spaniards when being in contact with the enemy of the Mayan world, the transcribed indigenous sources in Latin characters, and the Mayan codices. Most of the references to the Mayan pantheon appear in ritual or mythical contexts, and are enunciated in a symbolic language that express a complex system of beliefs in which the deities are the origin and the cause of existence, are the important explanation of occurrences in their diversity, and of the permanence of the cosmic order.

Symposium
Sousa, Domingos

Nanzan University, Japan

The Significance of the Awareness of One's Own "Evil" (Aku): A Focus on Shinran's Thought(05I)

At the core of Shinran's thought lies the awareness of radical evil permeating human life. According to Shinran, evil is not simply a contrasting reality to goodness, or a particular act of the self, existence itself is evil, and arises from ignorance and self-attachment. While human beings can do nothing to extract themselves from the evil of self-attachment, through Amida's gift of shinjin they can attain the realization of their Buddha nature. This gift gives rise to a completely new life, and a sense of compassion for all beings. The problem remains, however, whether the experience of shinjin, being Amida's work rather than the empirical human agent's act, can provide a sense of ethical will and moral vision to positively transform the affairs of the world. My presentation tries to examine the problems concerning the relation of Shinjin and social action in dialogue with Christian thought.

Organized panel
Staemmler, Birgit

Tuebingen University, Germany

Virtual Kamikakushi A Traditional Religious Concept on the Internet(16T)

Kamikakushi is a traditional Japanese term explaining the sudden disappearance of individuals through their abduction by deities. Most references to kamikakushi on the world wide web are to the recent anime Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi. Apart from that, however, there are people discussing kamikakushi online and individual pages as well as entire websites dedicated to kamikakushi. Interestingly online kamikakushi is firstly most often presented from the missing person's point of view and, secondly, closely linked to concept of 'getting lost' , whereas traditionally instances of kamikakushi were reported by neighbours and relatives of the missing person. This paper illustrates traditional instances and images of kamikakushi and juxtaposes them with definitions and contexts of kamikakushi present on the WWW. The central question it raises is: to what degree are the traditional aspects of kamikakushi reflected on the Internet.

Organized panel, English
Staley, Jaffrey L.

Pacific Lutheran University, USA

"Clothed and in Her Right Mind:" Mark 5:1-20 and Postcolonial Discourse(10N)

Clothing has always been an important marker of colonial power and mimicry. In the 1870s, Reverend Otis Gibson, a missionary in San Francisco, California, penned the story of his first woman convert, Jin Ho. He wrote of her: "She is now clothed and in her right mind and enjoys a good hope of eternal life. . . . Such . . . Is Jin Ho, the first Chinese woman that sought refuge in the Asylum of the Methodist Mission." Years later, my wife's grandmother, Ma Chun ("Maud") Lai, was raised in this "Asylum" after having been sold as a debt slave at the age of three and then rescued from a San Francisco Chinatown brothel when five years old. My presentation intertwines the text of Mark with Methodist missionary materials and family history in order to illustrate how clothing functions as a metaphor for the ambiguities of postcolonial power.

Organized panel, English
Stark, Laura

University of Helsinki, Finland

Apocalyptic Evil or Glorious Modern Future? Popular Trauma and Resistance in a Secularizing Finland 1860-1940(06S)

With as little as 2% of the population attending church regularly, Finland is often cited as a good example of a secularized society. In Finland, the rapid materialist and secularist transformation of the nation has been hailed as a success story. Yet, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ordinary rural inhabitants spoke of the trauma of rapid secularization through widespread folk narratives, in which new technologies and modernizing changes were depicted in terms of religious apocalyptic discourse, as wonders heralding the end of the world and seen only by those with second sight. Rather than viewing secularism as progress and the inevitable triumph of rationality these narrators, whose world view was dominated by Scriptural themes and images, saw modernization as the abandonment of a Christian utopian future for a chaotic and incomprehensible one. My presentation speaks more widely to the experience of imposed secularization in other cultures in the world today.

Organized panel, English
Starr, Martin P.

The Teitan Press, Inc., USA

Chaos from Order -Cohesion and Conflict in the Post-Crowley Occult Continuum(14G)

An overview of the post-1947 attempts to craft new religious movements in the United States of America from the elements of the occult orders and writings of the English esotericist and prophet of the Law of Thelema, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). The varied approaches to Crowley's abundant esoteric and literary legacy often developed a compelling unity of purpose within the small hierarchically-organized collectivities espousing Crowley's beliefs despite the seemingly antinomian overtones of the thelemic maxim "Do what thou wilt." At the same time the religious texts of the Thelemites gave license to protracted polemics with those outside the immediate group which from an outsider's perspective shared many of the same religious ideals and structures. The paper will focus on the development of the "Solar Lodge" and show how its conflict with society led the surviving members of Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis to band together to restart their religious order.

Organized panel, English
Stasulane, Anita

Daugavpils University, Latvia/Lettonie

The Search for Universal Peace: N. Roerich's Case(13G)

The Russian artist N. Roerich (1874-1947) and his wife Helena Roerich (1879-1955) compiled their own doctrinal variant of Theosophy - the teaching of Agni Yoga or Living Ethics. Having claimed to encompass and synthesize the philosophies and religious teachings of all ages, N. Roerich dedicated his activity to the idea of synthesis of cultures. His effort to focus international attention on the importance of preservation and protection of the world's cultural heritage culminated in an international peace pact, the so-called Roerich Pact (1935). The paper intends to formulate N. Roerich's understanding of peace, to discuss his motives of the propagation of peace, to evaluate the inherent aspects of N. Roerich's approach to peace. Finally, on the basis of his writings, the paper deals with the symbolical meaning of the banner of peace, proposed by N. Roerich for the protection of mankind's cultural achievements.

Symposium, English
Stausberg, Michael

University of Bergen, Norway

Towards a Religious History of Bombay City(06S)

Implicitly, more often than not, religion in India is mostly conceived as a rural phenomenon. If cities attract attention, then mostly traditional centers such as Varanasi etc., whereas the modern Indian megalopolis is mainly studied with regard to political, economic, ecological, architectural, and related issues. Apart from some noteworthy exceptions merely confirming the general rule, religion also tends to be neglected in the study of the history of Bombay. This paper wants to fill that lacuna by inviting the audience to reflect on the research-agenda of a 'religious history of Bombay'. On the one hand, Bombay seems to epitomize the idea of a 'secular city': the 'city of gold', where economics rules, the most important financial hub of the subcontinent. On the other hand, though, right from the city's early history under British rule, it has had a strong appeal to a great variety of religious groups. Hence, Bombay may be considered as a microcosm of religions in India (and quite a contrast to the idea of the 'cosmic city' preferred by much earlier research). The paper will sketch some perspectives to map the religious history of Bombay and discuss the religious morphology of the town.

Organized panel
Steineck, Christian Carl

Bonn University, Germany

Spirituality and Modern Medicine: Friends or Foes? A Philosophical Analysis(13J)

In many countries, modern medicine is based science, technology and experimentation. Yet a niche remains among large parts of the population for 'alternative medicine'. The more ardent proponents of such alternative methods castigate technological medicine for being reductionist and inhumane. Scientifically minded physicians retort by labeling alternative methods as a mere hocus-pocus. There is little doubt that modern medicine can cure many inflictions that used to be fatal a century ago. But, many ask, how well does it heal human beings in other domains? On the other hand, can the 'spirituality' that modern medicine is said to lack be reconciled with the paradigms of contemporary science? The paper analyses these problems from the point of view of Cassirer's "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms". It assesses the status of scientific medicine and explores a possible understanding of "spirituality" as a complement to science in the modern world. I argue that a reflective form of spirituality can serve as a necessary complement of science in a rational world-view.

Organized panel, English
Stringer, Martin

Burmingham University, UK

The Local Management of Religious Diversity in a Multi-ethnic Inner-city Neighbourhood in Birmingham(03L)

In this paper I intend to focus on the discourses that ordinary people in an inner-city neighbourhood in Birmingham use to talk about, and manage, questions of religious diversity. I will use a number of case studies to highlight the way in which religion, and those of other religions, are expressed by people who do not claim a religious identity for themselves (the majority of the white population in the areas concerned). These case studies will focus on debates about buildings, street festivals and a recent controversial play set within the Sikh community that was put on at a Birmingham Theatre. My argument will focus on the blurring of the boundaries in everyday speech between religious and ethnic identities and how the ability to move between discourses on religion and discourses on ethnicities (or other communal identities) allows ordinary people to manage their relations with those of other faiths. A similar blurring of boundaries also allow people to define or categor! Ise social groups within their neighbourhood and so, once again, allows them to manage their relationship with the communities that make up the neighbourhood as a whole.

Organized panel, English