Event

LUNCH & SYMPOSIUM - F65 Huntsman Hall, Univ. of Pennsylvania  

11:45am - Lunch 

12:45pm - Welcome and Opening Remarks

1:00pm - Kaja McGowan, Cornell University, “‘Till We Have Faces’: Ritual Offerings, Coins, and Other Fertile Currencies”

2:00pm - Christoph Emmrich, University of Toronto, “What Have I Got, What Do I Need: The List in Newar Ritual Writing”

3:00pm - Anna Kim, University of Virginia, “Real Space, Imagined Place: Reinventing Icon and Vision from Byzantium to Rome”

RECEPTION & KEYNOTE LECTURE - Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, 6th floor Van Pelt Library, Univ. of Pennsylvania  

4:30pm - Reception - with Book Announcement for Material Culture and Asian Religions, ed. Benjamin Fleming and Richard Mann (Routledge Research in Religion, Media and Culture; London: Routledge 2014).

5:00pm - Keynote Address: David Morgan, Duke University, “Phenomenology & Network Theory: A Collaborative Model for the Study of Religious Material Culture” - ABSTRACT: The study of material culture is challenged by the need to integrate human actors into the larger assemblages that engage them, but to do so without losing access to the dynamics of embodiment. Phenomenology represents a subtle and insightful method for describing sensation, felt-life, and processes of perception. But Bruno Latour famously dismissed phenomenology as a retrenchment of the hermetically sealed human subject engaged in a dualist construction of reality. This presentation seeks to refute Latour’s claim through the example of a material analysis of a religious artifact, showing how effectively phenomenology and network theory can work together toward accounting for agencies that stretch from the body to the networks in which it performs.

 

For more information, contact pfackler@sas.upenn.edu