Archives: Lectures

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.

Readings in the Netra Tantra: Week Five (TT19)

The Netra Tantra is an important text that gained prominence in the early medieval (post-Gupta) period. These readings will focus on chapter seven, the sukṣma-dhyāna, using the oldest surviving manuscript from Nepal and making reference to the KSTS edition.

Readings in Vedānta: Rāmānuja’s Vedārtha-saṅgraha: Week Five (TT19)

These reading sessions are intended for students who have an intermediate knowledge of Sanskrit and are interested in Vedānta texts. This term we will be reading the Vedārtha-saṅgraha (“A Summary of the Meaning of the Veda”) of Rāmānuja, the most influential teacher of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta. The Vedārtha-saṅgraha functions as an accessible introduction to his thought.

Before Reform: The Swaminarayan Sampraday and Brahmo Samaj as Early Colonial Religious Polities (TT19)

An attempt to exit the discursive world of religious reform in order to rethink the first emergence of two major Hindu movements that would come to be scripted (each in their way) as reform movements. This paper asks how might we view the work of Sahajanand Swami and Rammohun Roy, respective founders of these two movements, if we thought of them not as reformers but as articulators of two innovative religious polities within a distinctive, if short-lived, early colonial moment?

Phenomenology of Religion (TT19)

Reading: Gavin Flood, The Truth Within, chapter 9 ‘The Historical Self and Comparative Religion’ (OUP 2013)

The purpose of this seminar series is to understand some more recent developments in the study of religions and to raise critical questions about the discipline or subject area. In particular, we will look at the implications of brain science and evolutionary anthropology and its relevance for the study of religions and secondly at philological study and its wider application in the religious field. Throughout we will raise questions about the study of religions, how we do it, and suggest ways of moving forward.

Readings in Phenomenology: Week Five (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.

Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism in Bengal: A Symposium in Honour of Prof. Joseph T. O’Connell (TT19)

Prof. Joseph O’Connell was one of the pioneers in the Western study of Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism, the devotional tradition that emerged in sixteenth century Bengal and, in subsequent centuries, profoundly shaped the religious culture of Bengal, Orissa, Mathura, and Rajasthan. His interest in the ethics of the Vaiṣṇavas of Bengal and his deep concern for human flourishing have profoundly shaped the field. His recently, posthumously published book, Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism in Bengal: Social Impact and Historical Implications (Routledge, 2019)—a summation of his research—exemplifies his lifelong interest in “the relationship between the ‘transcendent’ intentionality of religious faith of human beings and their ‘mundane’ socio-cultural ways of living”, as he put it. It explores the way Caitanya Vaiṣṇavas’ theology and practice informed their varied engagement with both the non-Vaiṣṇava world and their own religious community, from the early sixteenth century to the twentieth century, and addresses such topics as forms of institutionalisation and identity, attitudes to caste and gender, the negotiation of heterodoxies, engagement with changing political regimes, and the interactions with Muslim.

At this symposium, co-organised by The Gosvāmī Era Research Project and the Bengali Vaiṣṇavism in the Modern World Research Project at the OCHS, scholars from across the globe will gather to discuss the themes of the book and O’Connell’s academic work more broadly.

Speakers include: Dr. Måns Broo, Prof. Ravi M. Gupta, Prof. Brian A. Hatcher, Dr. Rembert Lutjeharms, Prof. Kathleen O’Connell, Dr. Jeanne Openshaw, and Prof. Tony K. Stewart.

Attendance is free, but registration is required. To register, please email <info@ochs.org.uk>.

Titian-Tagore-Transition (screening) (TT19)

The screening of this experimental video by Prof. Chris Dorsett will include a short introduction about the origins of the video in Giorgio Agamben’s book The Open: Man and Animal (2004) and will be followed by a discussion.

The Venetian artist Tiziano Vecellio(1488-1576), better known in the art world as Titian, painted The Three Ages of Man and Nymph and Shepherd five decades apart. A correspondence in subject matter has been noted by art historians but the first painting buzzes youthfully with a surfeit of iconographic meaning, whereas the second is considerably darker in mood, perhaps representing the ageing painter’s disenchanted farewell to art.

Chris Dorsett’s video cross-fades these iconic European images with a sound track based on a Rabindranath Tagore song, Hriday aamaar prakash holo. Two recordings were used: the classic 1956 version by Suchitra Mitra made for domestic markets on the Indian sub-continent and Zoe Rahman’s 2012 adaption that speaks to the multi-cultural interests of a present-day jazz audience in the West.

Chris Dorsett is an Artist and Professor Emeritus of Fine Art from Northumbria University. He is currently Research Affiliate at the Pitt Rivers Museum with an interest in South Asian Art, in particular Tantra. His career as an artist has been built on curatorial partnerships with collection-holding institutions. In the UK he is best known for a sequence of exhibitions held at the Pitt Rivers Museum between 1985 and 1994. His many overseas projects include museum ‘interventions’ across the Nordic region and fieldwork residencies in the Amazon and at the walled village of Kat Hing Wai in the New Territories of Hong Kong. He has written extensively about the interface between experimental art practices and the museum/heritage sector. His publications include: ‘Exhibitions and their prerequisites’, in Issues in curating: Contemporary art and performance (2007); ‘Making meaning beyond display’, in Museum materialities: Objects, engagements, interpretations (2009); ‘Things and theories: The unstable presence of exhibited objects’, in The thing about museums: Objects and experience, representation and contestation (2011); ‘The pleasure of the holder: Media art, museum collections and paper money’, in the International Journal of Arts and Technology and ‘Studio ruins: Describing unfinishedness’, in Studies in Material Thinking (both 2018 ).

Readings in Vedānta: Rāmānuja’s Vedārtha-saṅgraha: Week Six (TT19)

These reading sessions are intended for students who have an intermediate knowledge of Sanskrit and are interested in Vedānta texts. This term we will be reading the Vedārtha-saṅgraha (“A Summary of the Meaning of the Veda”) of Rāmānuja, the most influential teacher of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta. The Vedārtha-saṅgraha functions as an accessible introduction to his thought.

Ritual Visualization and Imagination: Representation or Reality (TT19)

In his treatise, Ṣaṭ-sandarbha, the sixteenth century Indian religious thinker Jīva Gosvāmī presents a brief description of a set of pan-traditional ritual visualization practices. Whereas in traditions other than his Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism the visualizations in these rituals are often accepted as being imaginative, his description couches their imaginative content in a paradox, namely: practicing them involves visualizing an imaginal of an object that is non-imaginative. Determining the reasoning for Jīva’s inclusion of this paradox and reconciling it in this way is the strategy I use to illuminate an underlying positive role for imagination in his expression of meditation on a real object. A seemingly straightforward resolution would be to distinguish the mind-dependent image, or imaginal, of this ritual visualization as representing a mind-independent object insomuch as the latter need only be considered real. However, this route to reconciliation is insufficient because Jīva further classifies the mental-image as a non-visually manifest reality. For clarity on this issue, I subsequently turn to the relationship between the mental-image and the real object of this ritual praxis. A relationship of representation between the two cannot be discounted since this is implied in Jīva’s writing. However, what turns out to be important is that reality also applies to the relationship itself. The exploration of this relationship will take us beyond mere mental-images. It leads us to Jīva’s appeal to an ancient dramaturgical theory which his tradition has mapped onto his theology. This theory defines imagination in terms of an aspect of the real participation of audience and actors in a play. For Jīva, this real participation is in an imaginatively enacted cosmic play, the object of which is the deity’s original theatre of activities.

Alan Herbert is a D.Phil. Student in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford.