Resonant Self-World Relations in Ancient and Modern Socio-Religious Practices

In applying for this IGDK, the Universities of Erfurt and Graz plan to foster collaborative research in the fields of contemporary Sociology and Classical and Ancient studies. The aim is to provide an institutional base for studies comparing the selfworld relations that are established or reflected and sustained in social, and especially religious practices in Mediterranean antiquity with those in the contemporary (late) modern period. Combining and confronting different methodological traditions and different periods offers new perspectives for research as well as in the training of doctoral students. Ritual practices have always been a crucial element of cultural research, for they provide a key to understanding differences in cultural belief systems and social order. Thus, the differences and changes within circum-Mediterranean antiquity have been reconstructed as the differences between polytheist and monotheist rituals and beliefs, urban (polis) societies and autocracies. The central assumption of our IGDK is that these ritual practices have to be taken much more seriously and need to be analysed and understood as socio-religious practices establishing highly significant and particular relationships between self and world. We claim that in those ritual practices, particular persons, objects or places are bestowed with a power that makes them resonant, i.e. responsive to the embodied subject, in particular ways. Processes of sacralisation configure and stabilise this kind of resonance. The first phase of the proposed interdisciplinary IGDK aims at an inventory of the various forms that relationships to the world can take by developing typologies of socio-religious practices that establish resonant relations to objects and relationships to the transcendent. The second phase will introduce an analysis of the complex interactions between resonant and non-resonant relationships to the world and to experiences of resonance in particular. The combination of historical case studies from religiously different ancient cultures and contemporary empirical and sociological studies will offer a unique opportunity for comparison and allow the theoretical approaches that inform these studies to be advanced and refined. The types thus identified will serve as historical-heuristic tools for the reconstruction of selfworld relations in antiquity and the present era alike. This will allow for new contextualisations for what have hitherto been considered isolated practices relating to objects, bodies, stories, space and the transcendent realm, but is increasingly considered to be based in fundamental cognitive processes and expressive forms equivalent to intellectual beliefs.

The International Graduate School "Resonant Self-World Relations in Ancient and Modern Socio-Religious Practices" focuses on the question of how ritualised socio-religious practices help people, individuals or groups, to establish self-world relations and position themselves in and towards the world. For this purpose, the researchers compare in historical and contemporary societies how processes of ritualisation and sacralisation stabilise such forms of 'resonance'. This approach is meant to provide a key to understanding differences in cultural systems and social orders. Shifting the focus to experiences of ritual action leads to a different mapping of rituals and their role in establishing world relations and stabilising forms of 'resonance' as a basis of the 'good life' (H. Rosa, 2016, engl. 2019). To this aim, we use the resonance concept, a social theory developed by sociologist H. Rosa, to analyse different constellations and levels of agency, communication, social and material 'others', and transformation processes - also in a historical perspective. Ritualised practices allow for the generation, habitualisation and conceptualisation of different kinds and qualities of world relations. They serve as tools to enable, interpret, and produce meaningful relations and co-constitute resonant relations beyond the religious sphere: culturally shaped sensibilities are linked with experiences of resonance that have become religiously significant through such practices. The research in the Graduate School by doctoral researchers and faculty members focused on four topics: - repetition, taking a more nuanced look at temporal sequencing, modification of rituals and the consequences of replays; - second-order resonance, characterised by references to or memory of such experiences; - power, agency, and resonance; and - the role of objects in establishing lasting relations. The historical and empirical analysis requires a descriptive and interpretative language that catches nuances and differences in practice, experience and habitualisation, as provided by both qualitative research and critical source reading, material culture and gender studies, and exegesis. Our relational approach allowed for the analysis of world relations beyond the level of worldviews to adequately take into account the corporeality of experience and material objects beyond cognitive interpretations. Our set of questions allows for mutual cross-fertilisation of approaches of sociology, the history and study of religions, and of Classics, based on the common understanding of cultures and religions and their entanglement as continuous processes which conceive of the self and the ability to tolerate the 'Other' in ancient and modern societies. Its combination of micro-studies of practices and experiences with large-scale inter-cultural comparison promises to continue to provide highly novel insights into historical and contemporary practices and cultural change.