Study of Religions

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Alfred Elmore: life, work and context
(University College Cork, 2017) de Bhailís, Caoimhín; Dooley, Brendan
Alfred Elmore R.A. was a prominent and prolific Anglo-Irish artist during the nineteenth-century. Since his death, in 1881, he has largely disappeared from the study of Art History with the exception of a few of his works that have been examined in terms of gender studies of the period. It has also been asserted that other paintings from his oeuvre exhibit anti-Catholic tendencies. This thesis seeks to reposition the artist and his religious paintings as being, if not overtly pro-Catholic, at least neutral in their intention. As a painter across all genres of the period, Elmore’s narrative paintings suggest a unique approach to ‘narrative’ painting that allows the viewer free-play in the construction of internal, imaginative, narrative creation. Elmore’s narrative paintings will be compared with familiar works by other artists of the period in order to locate these paintings within the genre and highlight his approach to rendering narrative. Described as ‘ahead of his time’ Elmore’s drawings display a modernity that belies his nineteenth-century, British context and allows for a reassessment of the status of British artistic practice during that period. As an exercise in connoisseurship and contextual interpretation, this thesis proposes that Elmore was an artist who either was a unique and exceptional artist in his output and mode of creation or that an examination of other neglected artists of the period that might exhibit similar artistic properties to Elmore will allow a renewed evaluation of British art and artists of the Victorian era.
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.
“… as the young girl told them so”: Women and Old Calendarism in Interwar Romania
(Brill Academic Publishers, 2021-04-16) Cindrea, Iuliana; Horizon 2020; European Research Council
This article explores the role of women and young girls in Old Calendarist communities in Romania and presents new sources relating to neglected history of the practice of incarceration in Orthodox monasteries in the region. The community developed into a spiritual mass movement that soon became the target of the secret police. Women played an important role within these communities in terms of membership but also in relation to the preservation of Old Calendarist ideas. Explored through the prism of the former secret police archival documents, these women were deemed dangerous and were accused of luring people into the Old Calendarist groups. In contrast to the extremely negative representation of these women that we find in contemporary Orthodox Church publications, police reports and popular press articles, the letters and postcards that they wrote from detention offer us an insight into the private life, personality and motivation of these women.
Bishop Evloghie and his prayer beads
(Lit Verlag, 2020-10-01) Șincan, Anca; Kapalό, James A.; Vagramenko, Tatiana; Horizon 2020; European Research Council
'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.
Buddhism
(ABC-CLIO, 2015) Padoan, Tatsuma; Laycock, Joseph P.
Clerical agency and the politics of scriptural translation: the 'canonisation' of the Gagauz language in southern Bessarabia
(Legenda, 2010) Kapalό, James A.; Pyrah, Robert; Turda, Marius
Creating a community of praxis: integrating global citizenship and development education across campus at University College Cork
(UCL Press, 2022-12-13) Cotter, Gertrude; Bonenfant, Yvon; Butler, Jenny; Caulfield, Marian; Doyle Prestwich, Barbara; Griffin, Rosarii; Khabbar, Sanaa; Mishra, Nita; Hally, Ruth; Murphy, Margaret; Murphy, Orla; O'Sullivan, Maeve; Phelan, Martha; Reidy, Darren; Schneider, Julia C.; Isaloo, Amin Sharifi; Turner, Brian; Usher, Ruth; Williamson Sinalo, Caroline; Irish Aid
The Praxis Project, established at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland, in 2018, seeks to assess possible models of best practice with regard to the integration of global citizenship and development education (GCDE) into a cross-disciplinary, cross-campus, interwoven set of subject area pedagogies, policies and practices. This study – the first part of an eventual three-part framework – asserts that the themes, theories, values, skills, approaches and methodologies relevant to transformative pedagogical work are best underpinned by ongoing staff dialogue in order to build communities of support around such systemic pedagogical change. This article is based on a collaborative study with the first cohort of UCC staff (2020–1), which demonstrates many ways in which staff and students realised that smaller actions and carefully directed attention to specific issues opened doors to transformative thinking and action in surprising ways. From this viewpoint, the striking need emerged for taking a strategic approach to how GCDE is, and should be, integrated into learning across subject areas.
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.
Dei treni e dei riti. Politiche ferroviarie e memoria estetico-rituale nella Tokyo contemporanea
(Aracne, 2012) Padoan, Tatsuma; Mangano, D.; Mattozzi, A.
Domestic religion in Soviet and Post-Soviet Moldova
(Nomos, 2018-12) Kapalό, James A.; Schnabel, Annette; Reddig, Melanie; Winkel, Heidemarie
The term domestication has been used by a number of scholars of religion in Eastern Europe to describe the relocation of aspects of public worship and community religion to the domestic sphere during communism (Dragadze 1993; Kononenko 2006; Rogers 2008, 2009). As such it has been deployed as a socio-spatial category to encapsulate “the idea of shifting the arena from public to private, from outside the home to its interior” as well as to signify “the harnessing and taming of that which had seemed outside the control of ordinary people”, having been previously restricted to religious specialists (Dragadze 1993: 150). There has, however, been little critical engagement with the term and what it might usefully be employed to signify. In this chapter, following a brief description of traditional religious practices associated with the home, like for example the veneration of icons, and the main aspects of domestic religious practice in Eastern Orthodoxy, I introduce some of the ways that Soviet policy generated a re-distribution of religious materials and agencies in the Soviet Union. Ethnographic studies that engage with the problem of domestic religion have focused on Georgia and Azerbaijan (Dragadze 1993), Ukraine (Kononenko 2006) and Russia (Rogers 2008, 2009) amongst others. During the communist period, religious practices and materials such as sacred objects, books and even furniture shifted location, with the home taking on greater significance and meaning extending earlier domestic forms of religious practice like icon veneration and healing practices. In many cases, this process enhanced the religious role of women in the religious sphere. As such, scholarship on domestic religion informs our understanding of everyday family life and the position of women in Soviet and post-Soviet societies.
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.
Echoes of Cucova
(Lit Verlag, 2020-10-01) Cindrea, Iuliana; Kapalό, James A.; Vagramenko, Tatiana; Horizon 2020; European Research Council
Editorial [vol. 1]
(ISASR in association with the Study of Religions, University College Cork., 2014) Kapalό, James A.; Shanneik, Yafa
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.
Etnografia e semiotica: su divinità, asceti, pietre, e altri soggetti recalcitranti
(Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2018) Padoan, Tatsuma; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
Exhibitions as tools to think with: On impact and process
(Lit Verlag, 2020-10-10) Nicolescu, Gabriela; Kapalό, James A.; Vagramenko, Tatiana; Horizon 2020; European Research Council
Feasting and fasting: The evidential character of material religion in secret police archives
(Routledge, 2021-08-13) Kapalό, James A.; Kapaló, James A.; Povedák, Kinga; Horizon 2020; European Research Council
This chapter explores the value of textual data on material religion in secret police files for contemporary research on religious transmission and ritual life during communism. Based on examples from an operation targeting Inochentist-Stilists in 1950s and 60s Romania, I highlight the significance of the numerous insider-informer surveillance reports that focus on the foodways of the community. Although not qualitatively the same as ethnographic sources, I view the reports composed by these informers, as “surrogates” of the performances that led to their creation allowing the researcher today to access material, spatial and somatic aspects of religion that are often overlooked in readings of secret police files. Through the presentation of a series of brief examples, I illustrate how alternative readings emerge when data on religion is taken seriously and not discounted simply as an reflection of the ideological vision of the regime. The data we find presented in the files invites us to question its evidential status, both at the time, as evidence of criminal or anti-state activity, and for the scholar of religion as evidence of religious practice, meaning and agency. I argue, that when viewed through a material lens and situated within a broader appreciation religious lifeworld and cultural context, the texts and images in the archives reveal aspects of the material aspects of the transmission of religion in the underground that remain relatively under-explored and little analysed.
Femeile Stiliste în documentele de archivă
(Fundaţia Culturală Magazin Istoric (F.C.M.I.)., 2019-01) Cindrea, Iuliana; Horizon 2020; European Research Council

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