Lecture tag: Study of Religion

The Anthropology of Islamic Prayer (MT 14)

Religious Practice in Comparative Perspective Series

The idea of prayer in Islam is vague in the sense that it ranges from the mandatory to the most optional and spontaneous. This lecture will deal with the issue of prayer from an anthropological perspective.

 

Dr Mohammad Talib is lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. He has taught Sociology at Jamia Millia Islamia University (Delhi), from 1979 to 2001. In 2002, he came to Oxford as the Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz fellow in the Anthropology of Muslim Societies at the Oxford Centre for Islamic studies. His research in the anthropology of Islam focuses on Sufi groups, and madrassahs. His current research work: Madrassahs in the Recent History: An Alternative view between Anthropology and International Relations is a critical examination of the state of social science scholarship on Islam in the contemporary world after 9/11. Among his publications are Writing Labour: Stone Quarry Workers in Delhi (2010), Delhi, Oxford University Press, ‘Modes of Overcoming Social Exclusion through Education: Analysis of two Accounts from Pre-and Post Independent India’ in K N Panikkar and M Bhaskaran Nair (eds.) Emerging Trends in Higher Education in India: Concepts and Practices (New Delhi: Pearson Education India, 2011), ‘Predicaments of Serving Two Masters: Anthropologists between the Discipline and Sponsored Research’ in Raúl Acosta et. al (eds.) Making Sense of the Global: Anthropological Perspectives on Interconnections and Processes. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), and ‘Sufis and Politics’ in The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Modern Islamic World, John Esposito (ed). Oxford University Press, New York (2008).

Readings in Phenomenology: Session Two (MT 14)

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century that has had a deep impact on Theology and Religious Studies. The reading group seeks to engage with some of the fundamental concepts of phenomenology that underlie much work in Theology and the Phenomenology of Religion.  This term we will be reading Paul Ricoeur Oneself as Another (trans Kathleen Blamey, University of Chicago Press, 1992). Week 1 we will discuss Chapter one, ‘Person and Identifying Reference, a Semantic Approach.

Readings in Phenomenology: Session One (MT 2014)

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century that has had a deep impact on Theology and Religious Studies. The reading group seeks to engage with some of the fundamental concepts of phenomenology that underlie much work in Theology and the Phenomenology of Religion.  This term we will be reading Paul Ricoeur Oneself as Another (trans Kathleen Blamey, University of Chicago Press, 1992). Week 1 we will discuss Chapter one, ‘Person and Identifying Reference, a Semantic Approach.’

Key thinkers in Hindu Studies – Session two (MT 16)

This seminar series will provide an outline of a discipline with its own dramatic history and discuss some of the different forms that the study of Hinduism has taken with a focus on some of its key thinkers. At the same time, the history of Hindu Studies is inextricably intertwined with the history of the Study of Religion and many key thinkers are shared by these disciplines as demonstrated by the classic example of Max Müller, the indologist who became a founder of Comparative Religion or ‘Religionswissenschaft’. On the other hand, some key thinkers belong to neither of these disciplines, but have had a profound influence on both (such as the sociologist Max Weber). In the seminars we will discuss the work, theories and methodology of some of these key thinkers that remain influential on contemporary approaches to the study of religion in South Asia.

Matter and Religion Seminar (TT 16)

Matter is one of most familiar yet obscure concepts in the modern western account of the world: it is widely taken to explain the very nature of existence, and it has become a pillar of the secular-scientific worldview. Nevertheless the history of ‘matter’ reveals a complicated genealogy of classical concepts concerning atoms, energy, and substance, combined with theological debates about the mysterious status of the reality that surrounds us. Through three short papers and an open discussion, this seminar will explore the concepts and controversies that surround the notion of matter. Spanning western and Indian cultures, and touching on the disenchantment of the world, the disjunction of secular and sacred reality, we will seek to reconsider the pivotal position of materiality in our understanding of the world.

Theories of Life and the Origins of Religion

Religion and the Philosophy of Life Series.

This introductory lecture will examine the idea that the bio-energy of life itself is expressed through religious practices (that are teleological) and theologies that reflect the meanings of practice (and so the meanings of life itself and life mediated through language). In short, religions can be fruitfully accounted for in terms of the transformation of face-to-face social cognition at the level of culture that in turn controls face-to-face interactions through law or religious injunction and narrative.

This entails an empirical claim that the origins of religion can be explained in terms of the evolution of human interactivity that we call social cognition, a historical claim that philosophies of life have been articulated in the history of religions particularly through scholasticism, and a philosophical claim, itself grounded in the empirical and historical, that religions can be understood in terms of a realist ontology of life. All this will be set in the context of contemporary theories of life and the new realism in philosophy.

How do we account for the persistence of religion in human life? To answer this question these lectures will examine the idea of religion in relation to philosophies of life. In particular it will examine the thesis that life itself comes to expression through religions. This entails an empirical claim that the origins of religion can be explained in terms of the evolution of human interactivity, what we call social cognition; a historical claim that philosophies of life have operated within religions in terms of what we might call a transcendent teleology that have continued into secular modernity; and a philosophical claim we can account for the persistence of religion in terms of a realist ontology of life. The three lectures roughly correspond to these interrelated claims.

The Mammoth, Multi-faith Kumbh Mela: A Place of Practical Plurality amid Colossal Chaos

This lecture is based on the 2013 Maha-Kumbh Mela held in Allahabad, in which Kalpesh Bhatt conducted field research as a part of the Harvard Kumbh Workshop. Recognized as the largest religious gathering in the world, the Kumbh Mela is a mammoth, multi-faith event that hosts around 100 million pilgrims from diverse and at times antithetical Hindu traditions ranging from polytheistic to monotheistic to atheistic. Even a few Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, and other South Asian traditions also participate in the Kumbh, making it an intricately convoluted convergence of manifold beliefs, practices, and rituals. The enthusiasm of and differences among the millions of laypersons and ascetics who flock to the Kumbh occasionally culminate into a fierce commotion arising from mundane issues such as space allocation, crowd control, unchecked competition, and crass commercialization.

Despite embodying such a colossal chaos, the Kumbh Mela provides an example of practical pluralism by effecting a mostly harmonious confluence of diverse belief systems and practices. Drawing from textual sources as well as his ethnographic fieldwork in the 2013 Kumbh Mela, Allahabad, India, Bhatt examines how does the spirit of sacrifice embedded in the spatial and spiritual vastness of the Kumbh engender the active seeking of understanding across lines of differences without leaving one’s identities and commitments behind? Although grounded in disparate theological, philosophical, and sociocultural foundations, millions of lay people, religious leaders, wandering sadhus, and solitary ascetics coexist and coalesce, albeit temporarily, in this month-long event. How we can extrapolate this ecumenical model of the Kumbh Mela to embrace pluralism pragmatically in a larger context.

Kalpesh Bhatt joined the collaborative doctoral program at Department for the Study of Religion, Centre for South Asian Studies, and Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, after completing Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Prior to that, fusing his interests in science, religion, and art, Kalpesh led a number of creative projects, including the production of an IMAX film, Mystic India, and a high-tech water spectacular, Sat-Chit-Anand, based on the Upaniṣadic story of Naciketā. Kalpesh’s doctoral project is to do modern Hindu theology from pre-modern Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gītā and study its role in Indian diaspora’s grappling with everyday personal and socioeconomic struggles.

Readings in Phenomenology: Session 5 (HT 16)

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century that has had a deep impact on Theology and Religious Studies. The reading group seeks to engage with some of the fundamental concepts of phenomenology that underlie much work in Theology and the Phenomenology of Religion. This term we hope to read Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Like Heidegger and others, Pierre Hadot felt that it was important for philosophy to recover some of the impulses that had shaped its development in classical culture and religion. Countering the development of phenomenology into an objective ‘science’, Hadot has led moves to reclaim the place of philosophical reflection as a ‘Spiritual Exercise’ concerned with human flourishing, self-development, and humanity’s place in the cosmos. To get some perspective on this development in phenomenology, we will read Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).