A19–101
The Mediterranean: Material Cultures and the Study of Religion — Understanding the Past
Saturday, 9:00 AM–11:30 AM
InterContinental–InterContinental Ballroom A*
Sponsored by the International Connections Committee
Tim Jensen, University of Southern Denmark, Presiding
This is one of a two-panel session (see A19–200) inviting scholars familiar with the Mediterranean World to analyze the materiality of religion. Focusing either on the implications for understanding the past (Session 1) or for interpreting the present (Session 2), the panelists will examine the uses of material culture, including research that considers art, artifacts, archaeology, or architecture. Among the questions they will consider are the following: 1) What are the diverse functions of artifacts in religious life?; 2) How do artifacts allow the religious to imagine the past and construct collective identity?; 3) How do they orient devotees in space and time?; 4) How do they compete with other artifacts and, thereby, negotiate power as they make meaning?; 5) What do we gain and lose by focusing on artifacts? In other words, what do they illumine and obscure?; 6) To what extent are artifacts mute and in need of texts to give them voice? In that sense, what is the relation between materiality and textuality in religion?; and 7) How do literary texts function as material culture, and how does material culture function as text?
Panelists:
Maria Del Mar Marcos Sanchez, Universidad de Cantabria
Valeria Meirano, University of Turin
Panagiotis Kousoulis, University of the Aegean
Peter Machinist, Harvard University
A19–114
Religion and Diversity in Practice: Christianity and Islam in the Middle East
Saturday, 9:00 AM–11:30 AM
Moscone Center West–Room 2003*
Sponsored by the Contemporary Islam Group and Middle Eastern Christianity Group
Anna Bigelow, North Carolina State University, Presiding
Muslim–Christian relations in the Middle East defy simple categorization as peaceful or conflicted. This panel looks at a range of cases from Palestine, Syria, and Turkey, and at both Muslim and Christian theologians to explore how Muslims and Christians in the contemporary period negotiate with one another and with their respective traditions as they find ways to coexist, engage, compete, and thrive in a variety of contexts. By examining rituals (sacrifice and pilgrimage), theological debates (within and between communities), and legal formulations for defining group identity, the papers presented aim to move our understanding of the theories and realities that shape multireligious life across the Middle East.
Jens Kreinath, Wichita State University
Interreligious Pilgrimages in Southern Turkey: Saint George/Khir, Material Culture, and the Transforming Agency of Local Sacrifice Rituals
Paula Schrode, Heidelberg University
Sharing the Umma: The Ritual-making of Communities in Translocal Muslim Spheres
Sarah Albrecht, Freie Universität Berlin
Dar al-Islam Revisited: Concepts of Territoriality in the Context of Fiqh al-Aqalliyyat
Alain Epp Weaver, University of Chicago
"If I Forget Thee, O Palestinian Jerusalem": The Performance of Palestinian Unity Amidst Political Fragmentation
Christian Krokus, University of Scranton
Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi: A Contemporary Example of Christian–Muslim Encounter
Magdi Guirguis, American University, Cairo, Responding
A19–200
Special Topics Forum — The Mediterranean: Material Cultures and the Study of Religion — Interpreting the Present
Saturday, 1:00 PM–3:30 PM
InterContinental–InterContinental Ballroom A*
Sponsored by the International Connections Committee
Manuel A. Vasquez, University of Florida, Presiding
This is one of a two-panel session (see A19–101) inviting scholars familiar with the Mediterranean World to analyze the materiality of religion. Focusing either on the implications for understanding the past (Session 1) or for interpreting the present (Session 2), the panelists will examine the uses of material culture — including research that considers art, artifacts, archaeology, or architecture. Among the questions they will consider are the following: 1) What are the diverse functions of artifacts in religious life?; 2) How do artifacts allow the religious to imagine the past and construct collective identity?; 3) How do they orient devotees in space and time?; 4) How do they compete with other artifacts and, thereby, negotiate power as they make meaning?; 5) What do we gain and lose by focusing on artifacts? In other words, what do they illumine and obscure?; 6) To what extent are artifacts mute and in need of texts to give them voice? In that sense, what is the relation between materiality and textuality in religion?; and 7) How do literary texts function as material culture, and how does material culture function as text?
Panelists:
Yucel Demirer, Kocaeli University
Yael Munk, Open University of Israel
Magdi Guirguis, American University, Cairo
David Morgan, Duke University
Jeanne Halgren Kilde, University of Minnesota
A20–100
Special Topics Forum — Religion and Constructions of the Mediterranean
Sunday, 9:00 AM–11:30 AM
Marriott Marquis–Yerba Buena 13*
Sponsored by the International Connections Committee
Teresia Mbari Hinga, Santa Clara University, Presiding
Located at the intersection of three continents — Africa, Europe, and Asia — and considered the historical home of three major religions — Christianity, Islam, and Judaism — the "Mediterranean" has long been characterized by immense differences and disputed meanings, religious and otherwise. In addition, it is a center of unsettled global politics where ancient and modern cultures play a fundamental role in defining social reality. This panel interrogates the complex forms, trajectories, processes, ideologies, and power dynamics in — among others — religious, historical, social, cultural, ecological, aesthetic, and literary constructions of the "Mediterranean" as an open, contested, and fluid category. Scholars are invited to examine how the "Mediterranean" has been and can be constructed and interpreted from and through particular identity factors like race, religion, gender, or sexuality. Using different methods and tropes of analysis, panelists will address how the "Mediterranean" is imagined and reimagined in the name of memory, identity, power, and religion in various contexts. They will inquire into what these imaginaries signify; how they have changed; and how — both negatively and positively, as well as both historically and currently — they continue to affect and contribute to the production of different religious and sociopolitical realities.
Panelists:
Marinos Pourgouris, University of Cyprus
Yael Munk, Open University of Israel
Adriana Destro, University of Bologna
Patrice Brodeur, University of Montreal
A20–102
Greco-Roman Cultures and Buddhism
Sunday, 9:00 AM–11:30 AM
InterContinental–Sutter*
Sponsored by the Buddhism Section
Sanjyot Mehendale, University of California, Berkeley, Presiding
This session presents new perspectives on Buddhist contexts for cross-cultural encounters and exchanges between South Asia, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean by focusing on contact zones in northwestern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. New discoveries of documents, inscriptions, archaeological sites, and other materials as well as recent scholarly advances necessitate a reconsideration of models and theories for understanding the historical interplay between Buddhist and Hellenized cultures. Presentations of current research and classroom applications will demonstrate interdisciplinary approaches to clarifying the possible extent and significance of transcultural pollination between the Mediterranean and Buddhist Asia through asymmetrical appropriation of indexical elements by intermediary agents. Participants will contextualize dynamic patterns of historical contact between South and Central Asian Buddhist cultures and Greco-Roman cultures of the Hellenistic East and Mediterranean in order to develop frameworks applicable to other multicultural environments.
Stefan Baums, University of California, Berkeley
Greek Buddhists in Gandhara: Epigraphic Self-representation and Literary Appropriation
Jason Neelis, Wilfrid Laurier University
Hellenistic Afterlives in Gandharan Buddhist Material Culture
Mariko Namba Walter, Harvard University
Indo-Greek Bactrian Buddhist Documents: Remnants of Greek Culture in Afghan Buddhism
Georgios Halkias, Oxford University
The Greek Buddhists of Asia: Interpretations of Sources and Speculations about "Stimulus Diffusion"
Thomas R. Martin, College of the Holy Cross
Encountering the Buddha and Pythagoras: Teaching Comparative Religion with Ancient India and Greece
Todd T. Lewis, College of the Holy Cross, Responding
A20–129
Engaging the History of Middle Eastern Christians: New Studies on the Coptic Papacy
Sunday, 9:00 AM–11:30 AM
Moscone Center West–Room 2012*
Sponsored by the Middle Eastern Christianity Group and World Christianity Group
Jason R. Zaborowski, Bradley University, Presiding
Recovering the history of Middle Eastern Christians is still a work in progress. In this panel, scholars representing a variety of disciplines will offer their assessment of the three-volume series The Popes of Egypt: A History of the Coptic Church and Its Patriarchs (American University in Cairo Press, 2005–2008). Deploying a variety of methods suited to the use of sources available for each period under study and concentrating on the portrayal of the patriarchs in their varied sources, the authors tell the story of the Coptic Orthodox Church and trace the history of Coptic identity-formation and self-understanding. Observing the various methodologies and materials used, the discussants will analyze the significance of these three volumes for the study of Coptic history as well as for related or parallel fields, including the study of other Middle Eastern Christian traditions, Islamic studies, or world Christianity.
Panelists:
Vincent Cornell, Emory University
Robert J. Schreiter, Catholic Theological Union
James C. Skedros, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology
Stephen J. Davis, Yale University
Magdi Guirguis, American University, Cairo
Maged Mikhail, California State University, Fullerton
Mark Swanson, Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago
David W. Johnson, Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley
Nelly Van Doorn-Harder, Wake Forest University
A21–202
Wildcard Session — Gods and Monsters in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Imagination
Monday, 1:00 PM–3:30 PM
Moscone Center West–Room 2022*
Over the course of the last century, Biblical scholars, oral traditionalists, archeologists, and ancient historians increasingly have observed proof of ideological as well as material exchange among Greco-Roman, Anatolian, Mesopotamian, and Levantine cultures. This panel is dedicated to exploring shared religious and mythological themes among these ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean Sea, extending as far east as Mesopotamia, as far west as Greece, and from Egypt in the south to Anatolia in the north. Gods and monsters are a particular focus, but the papers also address various artifacts of ancient Mediterranean religious imagination — art, archeology, poetry, prose, royal annals, law codes, ritual instructions, etc. — stemming from Bronze Age to late Roman civilizations. For future meetings we plan to include papers addressing comparative topics in later periods, such as the early Islamic period.
Margo Kitts, Hawai'i Pacific University
Hearing the Chaoskampf in Iliad 21
Mary Bachvarova, Willamette University
Further Parallels in Greco-Anatolian Disappearing God Rituals: The Hittite Kurša Hunting Bag and the Dios Koidion (Fleece of Zeus)
Robert Littman, University of Hawai'i
Syncresis and the Cult of Isis in the Greco-Roman World
Brian Doak, Harvard University
The Greek Gigantomachy and the Israelite Gigantomachy: Giants as Chaosmacht in Israel and the Iron Age Aegean
Carolina Lopez-Ruiz, Ohio State University
The God Aion in a Mosaic from Paphos and Helleno-Semitic Cosmogonies in the Roman East
A21–236
Mapping Medieval Boundaries: Textual, Physical, and Institutional
Monday, 1:00 PM–3:30 PM
Marriott Marquis–Yerba Buena 3*
Sponsored by the Religion in Europe and the Mediterranean World, 500–1650 CE Group
Constance Furey, Indiana University, Presiding
This session explores the delineation and permeability of religious boundaries in medieval Europe. These include boundaries between sacred and temporal histories, between the various authors of a text, between religious communities, and between ecclesiastical dioceses. Together, the papers in this session will consider what is at stake in maintaining such boundaries and what factors influence their fluidity and malleability.
Katie Bugyis, University of Notre Dame
The Anachronistic Crone: Margery Kempe and the Hands that (Re/Un)Wrote Her Theology of History
Hartley Lachter, Muhlenberg College
Kabbalah for the Masses: Reconsidering the Elitism of Medieval Jewish Mysticism
Sherri Johnson, University of California, Riverside
From Dominican to Benedictine, from Benedictine to Dominican: Religious Women and Reform in Late Medieval Italy
Thomas Barton, University of San Diego
Core and Periphery in Christendom: The Malleability of Diocesan Formation
Martha Newman, University of Texas, Austin, Responding
A21–323
Religion and Law in the Medieval Mediterranean World
Monday, 4:00 PM–6:30 PM
Marriott Marquis–Yerba Buena 3*
Sponsored by the Law, Religion, and Culture Group and Religion in Europe and the Mediterranean World, 500–1650 CE Group
Isaac Weiner, Georgia State University, Presiding
Religion and law were inseparable phenomena in the medieval Mediterranean world. Indeed, if the English word "religion" denotes a shared system of beliefs and practices by which individuals seek a common bond with the divine, then the Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew equivalents of this term are lex, shari'ah, and dat (law). This relationship between religion and law is especially evident in the religiously plural societies of the medieval Mediterranean, in which social and economic relations necessitated the navigation of differences in identity, belief, and practice. Legal thought functioned within this region as a driving force shaping religious communities. Because of its central location within Christianity, Islam, and Judaism during the Middle Ages, comparison of legal norms and related rhetoric sheds valuable light on these religions and, indeed, on the aspects of Mediterranean culture that shape religious thought.
Andrew Salzmann, Boston College
Religion as Law in the Latin West: A Philological and Conceptual Study
Kevin Jaques, Indiana University, Bloomington
Prayer and the Apocalypse of 841/1438
Lena Salaymeh, University of California, Berkeley
Commanding Charity in the Medieval Mediterranean
Brian Catlos, University of Colorado, Boulder, and University of California, Santa Cruz
Religious Orthodoxy, Ethnoreligious Plurality, and Legal Compromise in the Medieval Mediterranean
Gerard Wiegers, University of Amsterdam
Religious Polemics and Legal Boundaries in the Medieval Mediterranean World
David Freidenreich, Colby College, Responding
*Room locations are subject to change. Please check your Program Book onsite to confirm the location when you arrive at the Annual Meeting.
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