Lecture tag: Phenomenology

Readings in Phenomenology: Week Five (HT19)

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. This seminar series seeks to engage with some of the fundamental concepts of phenomenology, and has turned in the past to thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Peter Sloterdijk, Quentin Meillassoux, and others.

This term we will be reading Anthony Steinbock’s Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience.

Readings in Phenomenology: Week Six (HT19)

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. This seminar series seeks to engage with some of the fundamental concepts of phenomenology, and has turned in the past to thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Peter Sloterdijk, Quentin Meillassoux, and others.

This term we will be reading Anthony Steinbock’s Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience.

Readings in Phenomenology: Week Seven (HT19)

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. This seminar series seeks to engage with some of the fundamental concepts of phenomenology, and has turned in the past to thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Peter Sloterdijk, Quentin Meillassoux, and others.

This term we will be reading Anthony Steinbock’s Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience.

Lecture 4: Religion as Intimacy (HT19)

This last lecture will attempt to draw together the themes and to develop the importance of human person in any account of religion. The lecture will present the argument of Claude Romano that phenomenology can allow us access to pre-linguistic experience, developing this idea for understanding religion and supporting a human centred approach, again with support from the harder sciences about human inter-faciality. This in turn leads to a reflection on the nature of religion in terms of intimacy, as a third space between the third person account of religion as system and the first person account of religion in terms of verticality or a distinctive kind of experience. Viewing religion in this way is simultaneously to develop a phenomenology of religion that places the human in the centre of inquiry, supported by the other sciences, and sets the scene for future inquiry into religion as it develops through what Helga Nowotny calls ‘the molecular age.’

Readings in Phenomenology: Week Eight (HT19)

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. This seminar series seeks to engage with some of the fundamental concepts of phenomenology, and has turned in the past to thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Peter Sloterdijk, Quentin Meillassoux, and others.

This term we will be reading Anthony Steinbock’s Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience.

Readings in Phenomenology: Week One (TT19)

This term we will be reading Thiemo Breyer’s On the Topology of Cultural Memory: Different Modalities of Inscription and Transmission (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007).

In the wake of the large literature now developed on memory and particularly cultural memory, this book creates a topology of cultural memory, linking anthropological work with phenomenological reflection. Breyer looks at cultural memory, memory as occupying an inter-personal realm, memory in oral and literate cultures, and the philosophical implications of empirical study. I can photocopy relevant chapters.

The spiral conch, home, and body: An Everyday Phenomenology of Sonic Metaphysics in Hindu Bengal (TT19)

This essay brings together decisive sacred archetypes of Bengali homemaking: sounds of the evening shankh (conch), the goddess Lakshmi, and the female snake-deity, Manasa; and argues that the sacred home, body, and world are tied through sonic metaphysics. It analyzes everyday home-ethics not simply through the European category of the ‘domestic’, but conceptually more elastic vernacular discourse of shongshar, which means both home and world. Thereby, it problematises notions of privacy and sanctified interiority of homes, women, and the nation, afforded by postcolonial theory. In understanding shongshar as a religious everyday dwelling, it analyzes (contrary) worship ontologies of Lakshmi, the life-goddess, Manasa, the death-goddess, and the twists of these imaginations engraved in the material contours of the shankh. Moving beyond the interiority-exteriority dialectic, I posit space as an aperture within the folded conch and vastu (home). The shankh, as a quintessential symbol of mongol (wellbeing), and its sonic turns, are analyzed as the material/spatial embodiment of shongshar’s daily texture, including both life and transcendence. Its spiral twirls are also critically linked to tantric ideas of the devotional body which is essentially constituted by and sensitive to various subtleties of naad (sound). Thus the materiality and audition of the conch, home, and breathing body are shown as cosmic counterparts, twisting through fertility and renunciation, interiority and expanse. Based on ritual texts, fieldwork among Lakshmi and Manasa worshippers, conch-collectors, craftsmen and specialists, and immersion in the everyday philosophy of sounds, I explore a new ethical anatomy of the religious home/body, reflected in the echoes of the conch.

Sukanya Sarbadhikary works at the interface of the anthropology of religion, religious studies, and philosophy. In her first work she did an intensive ethnography among different kinds of Bengal-Vaishnavas, focusing on diverse experiences of religious place and sensory affective discourses. Her book, The Place of Devotion: Siting and Experiencing Divinity in Bengal-Vaishnavism’ (University of California Press) was published in 2015. She is also passionately interested in the sociology and philosophy of aesthetics and music, and their relations with sacred embodiment. She is currently working on a range of devotional instruments and traditions of sonic metaphysics.

Readings in Phenomenology: Week Two (TT19)

This term we will be reading Thiemo Breyer’s On the Topology of Cultural Memory: Different Modalities of Inscription and Transmission (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007).

In the wake of the large literature now developed on memory and particularly cultural memory, this book creates a topology of cultural memory, linking anthropological work with phenomenological reflection. Breyer looks at cultural memory, memory as occupying an inter-personal realm, memory in oral and literate cultures, and the philosophical implications of empirical study. I can photocopy relevant chapters.

Readings in Phenomenology: Week Three (TT19)

This term we will be reading Thiemo Breyer’s On the Topology of Cultural Memory: Different Modalities of Inscription and Transmission (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007).

In the wake of the large literature now developed on memory and particularly cultural memory, this book creates a topology of cultural memory, linking anthropological work with phenomenological reflection. Breyer looks at cultural memory, memory as occupying an inter-personal realm, memory in oral and literate cultures, and the philosophical implications of empirical study. I can photocopy relevant chapters.

Readings in Phenomenology: Week Four (TT19)

This term we will be reading Thiemo Breyer’s On the Topology of Cultural Memory: Different Modalities of Inscription and Transmission (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007).

In the wake of the large literature now developed on memory and particularly cultural memory, this book creates a topology of cultural memory, linking anthropological work with phenomenological reflection. Breyer looks at cultural memory, memory as occupying an inter-personal realm, memory in oral and literate cultures, and the philosophical implications of empirical study. I can photocopy relevant chapters.