Study of Religions - Journal Articles

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Mysticism: No Experience Necessary?
(British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR), 2006) Bocking, Brian
Robert Sharf argues that if a religious or mystical experience conveys any meaning at all, that meaning derives from shared public discourse, not from the experience as such. Sharf’s argument is, or should be, unsettling for anyone who naively thinks that religious beliefs are grounded in religious experiences. In this paper I examine Sharf’s arguments and suggest another way of approaching the notion of mystical or religious experience within the study of religions. Distinguishing between mystical experience and mystical teachings can help to explain how ‘experience’ can retain a meaningful place in mysticism.
The first Buddhist mission to the West: Charles Pfoundes and the London Buddhist mission of 1889 – 1892
(British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR), 2014) Bocking, Brian; Cox, Laurence; Yoshinaga, Shin'ichi
This article challenges two general assumptions shared by scholars of Western Buddhism: (1) that the earliest Buddhist missions to the West were those established in California from 1899 onwards; and (2) that Ananda Metteyya‘s (Allan Bennett‘s) London mission of 1908 was the first Buddhist mission to London and thus to Europe. Recent collaborative research by scholars in Ireland and Japan demonstrates instead that the Japanese-sponsored ‗Buddhist Propagation Society‘ (BPS) launched in London in 1889 and led for three years by the Irish-born Japanese Buddhist Charles Pfoundes predates both of the above-mentioned ‗first‘ Buddhist missions. In this article we offer a first attempt to document the nature, activities and significance of the London BPS, drawing on Japanese and UK sources to examine Pfoundes‘ role and that of his Japanese sponsors. We discuss the nature of Pfoundes‘ Buddhism, the strategy and activities of the London BPS and the reasons for its eventual demise. The conclusion examines the links between the BPS and the later ‗first‘ Japanese Buddhist missions in California and asks what hidden connection there might be between Pfoundes‘ missionary campaign in London in 1889-92 and Ananda Metteyya‘s return from Burma as the ‗first‘ Buddhist missionary to London, almost two decades later.
Editorial [vol. 1]
(ISASR in association with the Study of Religions, University College Cork., 2014) Kapalό, James A.; Shanneik, Yafa
Drawn by images: control, subversion and contamination in the visual discourse of Tokyo metro
(Università di Torino, 2014-11) Padoan, Tatsuma
This paper intends to investigate the active role of images in shaping contemporary urban life, by exploring the trail of strategies, actions, counteractions and transformations produced by a particular corpus of subway posters. Since September 1974, the Tokyo Metro subway company has been distributing a series of posters which invites, in a humoristic style, to respect the “good manners” inside its stations and trains in service in the Japanese capital. The name assigned to these adverts is Manner Poster. The three editions from 2008 to 2010 are particularly striking for their irony and visual impact. Produced by the graphic designer Yorifuji Bunpei, they depict — in a comic–strip style and using white, black and yellow colours — narrative situations inside the subway stations and trains, where one or more persons perform, under the astonished eyes of the other passengers, actions considered as “ill–mannered”. The images present a large variety of such situations, ranging from occupying priority seats for elderly people and pregnant women, to rushing to board as the doors are closing, from throwing waste tissues on the ground, to blocking entrances with suitcases and backpacks. They actually suggest paradoxical narrative sequences, visual hyperboles which exaggerate actions considered as impolite, trying to emphasize the negative effects on the other passengers. And the messages written above the images do not leave any doubts about the target (Enunciatee) of the posters: “Please do it at home”, says the one above the instant ramen (noodles soup) devourer, “Please do it at the office” says the message over the businessman engaged in writing notes while talking on the phone in the train. According to the author Yorifuji, the messages convey “the repressed frustration of the typical commuter” who is emotionally affected by the impolite behaviour. These posters, in other words, construct a form of subjectivity for the metro passengers, posing everyone under the gaze/judgment of the other commuters, and prescribing situations and places which are appropriated to take specific courses of action. They are “regulators of the social life”, which charge everyday actions with thymic — i.e. positive or negative — values, according to their spatial–temporal localisation. However, the analysis of this “subway etiquette” discourse and of its development along the three editions, reveals a particular linguistic and visual differentiation of identity, which points to models of behaviour and sociality very different between each other, according to the Japanese or foreign origin of the passengers to which the poster’s persuasive action is directed. I will therefore try to demonstrate, on the one hand, how the interactions between poster–actors and human actors try to define distinct regimes of political enunciation (Latour 1999), on the other hand, how parodic translations of the Manner Posters — which immediately proliferated on web–sites and magazines in Japan — also lead to modes of negotiation of the values and social bonds prescribed.
Editorial [vol. 2]
(ISASR in association with the Study of Religions, University College Cork, 2015) Shanneik, Yafa; Kapalό, James A.
Editorial [vol. 3]
(ISASR in association with the Study of Religions, University College Cork., 2016) Butler, Jenny; Shanneik, Yafa; Kapalό, James A.
'Blood' kinship and kinship in Christ's blood: nomadic evangelism in the Nenets tundra
(De Gruyter Open Ltd, 2017) Vagramenko, Tatiana
The article addresses a conflicting encounter of two ideologies of kinship, ‘natural’and ‘religious’, among the newly established Evangelical communities of Nenets in the Polar Ural and Yamal tundra. An ideology of Christian kinship, as an outcome of ‘spiritual re-birth’, was introduced through Nenets religious conversion. The article argues that although the born-again experience often turned against ancestral traditions and Nenets traditional kinship ties, the Nenets kinship system became a platform upon which the conversion mechanism was furthered and determined in the Nenets tundra. The article examines missionary initiatives and Nenets religiosity as kin-based activities, the outcome of which was twofold. On one side, it was the realignment of Nenets traditional kinship networks. On other side, it was the indigenisation of the Christian concept of kinship according to native internal cultural logic. Evangelical communities in the tundra were plunged into the traditional practices of Nenets kinship networks, economic exchanges, and marriage alliances. Through negotiation of traditional Nenets kinship and Christian kinship, converted Nenets developed new imaginaries, new forms of exchanges, and even new forms of mobility.iage alliances. Through negotiation of traditional Nenets kinship and Christian kinship, converted Nenets developed new imaginaries, new forms of exchanges, and even new forms of mobility.
Representing Sikhism: Essays in memory of the Irish scholar Max Arthur Macauliffe
(ISASR in association with the Study of Religions, University College Cork, 2017) Shackle, Christopher; Bocking, Brian
This is an introduction, by the guest editors, to the special issue of JISASR (Vol 4, 2017) entitled 'Representing Sikhism: Essays in Memory of the Irish Scholar Max Arthur Macauliffe'. The genesis of this special issue lies in pioneering work on Macauliffe's Irish identity and personal and scholarly life undertaken by Professor Tadhg Foley (Galway). The active interest and support of members of the Sikh community in Ireland led to a conference, hosted by the Study of Religions Department at University College Cork, held to mark the centennial of Macauliffe's death on 15 March 1913. After some brief comments on past and present trends in the study of Ireland-Asia connections in the field of religions, we discuss Macauliffe's significance for modern representations of Sikhism and offer some contextual observations on each of the four papers. The article concludes with a brief resumé of the 2013 conference at which the papers were originally presented.
"Liminal" orthodoxies on the margins of empire: Twentieth-century "home-grown" religious movements in the Republic of Moldova
(Taylor & Francis, 2017-01-20) Kapalό, James A.; European Research Council; Horizon 2020; Royal Irish Academy
In the 20th century, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Romanian Orthodox Church, and the Soviet atheist state each pursued missions that attempted to transform Moldovans into loyal and trustworthy subjects and to integrate them into new state structures. This article explores the "liminal" character of Moldovan identities forged on the Russian and Romanian borderlands through the prism of Moldova's "home-grown" religious movements. Grassroots movements led by charismatic and "trickster" religious figures "played" with dichotomies of the hidden and the revealed, innovation and tradition, and human and divine, succeeding in transforming the subject positions of whole segments of Moldovan peasant society. The resulting forms of "liminal" Orthodoxy have proved enduring, perpetually critiquing and transgressing canonical norms from the margins and subverting the discourses and narratives that seek to "harmonize" identities and to consolidate nation, state, and church in the Republic of Moldova.
Mrs Pounds and Mrs Pfoundes: A futuristic historical essay in honour of Professor Ursula King
(British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR), 2018-04-27) Bocking, Brian
In this short essay written for Professor Ursula King’s Festschrift I reflect on the general problem of researching and recovering events and individuals previously ‘lost’ to historians of religions, taking as my example recent collaborative research into forgotten early Irish Buddhists. I consider also the problems of researching other traditionally under-represented figures, including many women; for example, the wife (Rosa Alice Hill) and mother (Caroline Pounds) of the Irish Buddhist Charles Pfoundes. In the second and rather more speculative part of the essay I look at some ways in which increasingly sophisticated and increasingly accessible technological developments, allied with growing ‘crowd’ participation in the provision and analysis of historical data, might in future enable us to discover far more than we currently can about events and individuals in the past.
În clandestinitate: minorități religioase nerecunoscute de lege în arhivele Securități
(Academiei Române din Tîrgu Mureş, 2019) Șincan, Anca; Horizon 2020; European Research Council
The present article discusses the terminology that the repressive state imposes on underground religious communities and the limits these terms impose on the current theoretical language researcher and communities develop for describing the religious life during the communist regime. Based on archival work with CNSAS files and on oral interviews in Greek Catholic and Old Calendarist Orthodox communities the article hypothesizes that three decades after the fall of communism we (researchers and communities alike) are still indebted to the vocabulary used by the Secret Police in the surveillance activity against the religious communities of the underground.
Femeile Stiliste în documentele de archivă
(Fundaţia Culturală Magazin Istoric (F.C.M.I.)., 2019-01) Cindrea, Iuliana; Horizon 2020; European Research Council
The appearance of saints: photographic evidence and religious minorities in the secret police archives in Eastern Europe
(Taylor & Francis, 2019-04-20) Kapalό, James A.; European Research Council; Royal Irish Academy; Horizon 2020
I present here examples of the photographic presence of a religious minority community in the secret police archives in ex-communist Eastern Europe. The use of secret police archives by researchers to trace the history of repression and collaboration and to understand the methods employed by totalitarian regimes to control their populations is well established. The significance of these archives for the study of material religion, however, has been largely overlooked by scholars. The Secret Police archives in Romania and the Republic of Moldova constitute a hidden repository of confiscated religious materials and photographs which often sit alongside photographic images created by the secret police in the course of their investigations into criminal religious activities. These archives, therefore, represent an important resource for understanding both how religious groups chose to represent themselves and how the totalitarian system created images of religious others in order to incriminate and produce anti-religious propaganda. In this paper, through the presentation of example cases from state security files, I discuss the dual character of the photographic traces of communities in the archives as both religious justification and incrimination, and suggest ways of approaching these images through their materiality in the context of contemporary post-communist society.
Reassembling the Lucky Gods: pilgrim economies, tourists, and local communities in global Tokyo
(Berghahn Journals, 2019-08-01) Padoan, Tatsuma; British Academy
This article intends to analyze the emergence of new subjectivities and economic discourses, and the semiotic construction of sacred places in global Tokyo as inventively constituted within the popular urban pilgrimage routes of the Seven Lucky Gods (shichifukujin). While a specific neoliberal discourse in Japan linked to tourism and the media has promoted the reinvention of traditional pilgrimage sites as New Age “power spots” informed by novel forms of temporality and subjectivity, urban communities living in those places, with their specific concerns and problems related to the local neighborhoods, often generate pilgrimage spaces that are radically different from those of the “neoliberal pilgrims.” I will thus argue that the pilgrimage of the Seven Lucky Gods emerges as a double discourse through which religious institutions and urban collectives semiotically assemble themselves not only by rebranding older sites as neoliberal power spots through media and tourism practices, but also by creatively producing hybrid subjectivities, sacred places, and alternative ontologies that are set apart from neoliberal economies.
Imagini din galerii secrete
(Revista Tribuna, Ministerul Culturii, 2020-01-01) Nicolescu, Gabriela; Vagramenko, Tatiana; Povedák, Kinga; Lisnic, Dumitru; Horizon 2020; European Research Council
Visual glossolalia. The spiritistic photography between science and religion
(Mimesis Edizioni, 2020-12) Padoan, Tatsuma
In 1895 Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of sémiologie and modern linguistics, was called by his colleague Théodore Flournoy, Professor of Psychology at Geneva University, to examine a curious case of spirit possession. The case regarded a lady, known with the pseudonym of Hélène Smith (1861- 1929), who had attracted attention from several scholars thanks to her paranormal activities, manifested under a state of trance and somnambulism, which were examined under the label of “glossolalia”. A few years later, in 1905, another group of scientists and scholars of international fame which included Pierre and Marie Curie, and three other future Nobel Prizes like physicist Jean Baptiste Perrin, physiologist Charles Richet and philosopher Henri Bergson, were gathering in a flat in Boulevard Saint-Germain, in Paris, to study a famous medium of Italian origins, Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918), whose possessions and paranormal activities had captured attention from the scientific world. For all these researchers, spirit mediumship needed to be studied not to unmask any magic or tricks, but as possible paranormal exploration of the boundaries of science itself. In this paper, we will explore these themes through the semiotic analysis of a photographic corpus including these and other analogous cases, then examining more closely the work of William Mumler (1832-1884), first example of spirit photographer. By drawing on de Certeau’s definition of glossolalia, based on Saussure’s analysis, as transition from silence to speech, and construction of a vocal place of circulation of meaning, we will examine this corpus as a form of visual glossolalia – in which spirit photography inaugurates a space suspended between non-life and non-death, marking a passage between visible and invisible, between the here and the beyond of world and representation. A space in which ghosts with indefinite contours, portrayed next to the living, show the movement of visual enunciation itself and of its realisation, both questioning and founding at the same time the status of the image.
Performing clandestinity: The religious underground, the secret police and the media in communist Eastern Europe
(British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR), 2020-12-15) Kapalό, James A.; European Research Council; Horizon 2020
The Cold War was frequently cast in the West as a religious war, a conflict between Christianity and atheism of the Marxist-materialist kind. Propaganda narratives produced by the opposing sides pitted faith against godlessness or science and progress against superstition and exploitation. The religious underground, which was at the centre of much of this propaganda activity, had both a metaphorical and literal meaning. With the opening of the secret police archives in the region, scholars of religions have been presented with important new sources to understand the relationship between anti-religious propaganda, western projections of religious life under communism and the actual clandestine practices of underground religious groups. Whilst the textual materials found in the archives have been the primary focus of attention for both historians and transitional justice projects, the search for ‘truths’ about the past has largely overlooked the visual and material traces of religion produced by and about religious groups. In this article, I explore the complex intersection of the religious underground and the secret police and how this was reflected in the public media and film during communism. Through an exploration of photographic and filmic representations of religious clandestinity produced by or with the help of the secret police, this article illustrates how such imagery, despite its complicity in the construction of a certain image of the religious underground, nevertheless also reveals aspects of the lived reality, creativity and agency of underground communities. This research is based on the findings of the European Research Council Project, Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: Hidden Galleries in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe (project no. 677355)
Dal simbolo al rito (passando per il tartan)
(Meltemi Press srl, 2021) Padoan, Tatsuma
In this article I investigate the relation between symbols and ritual, by contrasting Hobsbawm and Ranger's classical "fabrication" argument in The Invention of Tradition, with Roy Wagner's perspective on "creativity" in The Invention of Culture. In order to do so, I explore different "isotopies" or trails of meaning produced by the tartan kilt, from an "object of value" defining Scottish identity, to a Freemasonry symbol, widely used in ritual and video arts. By discussing Umberto Eco's notion of "symbolic mode" as a textual practice producing new lateral meanings, between tradition and revolution, I will thus advance the argument that ritual too might follow the same dynamics, in a continuous oscillation between continuity and discontinuity, institutional and charismatic power.
Methodological notes on visual ethics: ‘Choosing not to reveal’
(National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Bucharest, 2021) Povedák, Kinga; Horizon 2020; European Research Council
KGB photography experimentation: Turning religion into organized crime
(Slavica Publishers, 2021) Vagramenko, Tatiana; European Research Council; Horizon 2020; European Cooperation in Science and Technology; Irish Research Council

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