Gabriele Rosenthal

Conference
Aura and Effect.
The Media of Religion
16–17 June 2011
IFK
Reichsratsstraße 17, 1010 Vienna
Abstracts
Heike Behrend
Contesting Visibility:
The Production of Aura in Wedding Photography along the East African Coast
Wedding photographs (all over the world) are inextricably tied to the ritual work of weddings. As
act and object of the ritual performed wedding photography creates a specific quality that could be
called auratic. In my contribution I attempt to show how in the context of a globalized bridal
industry wedding photographs destabilize the relation between aura and art à la Walter Benjamin.
I will explore how aura as a specific brightness and glare that gives to see while blinding and
dazzling at the same time is produced in wedding photography on the East African Coast. I am
interested in complicating the concept of (visual) mediation inscribed into the camera by
connecting it to local practices that have perfected an aesthetics of giving something to see and at
the same time withdraw it from visibility, ―vor Augen und außer Sicht‖, as Benjamin characterized
it.
Suzanne Blier
―The chicken captured by the hawk knows that the hawk will
kill it, but it still cries out—not to be saved, but so that everyone
knows what happened to it.‖ (Igbo Proverb)
Anger and Social Violence at Ife: Towards an Archaeology of Yoruba Affect
In 2004, the year I first traveled to Ife, to research on early art and historical traditions associated
with the ancient Yoruba capital in southwestern Nigeria, Ife was in the early stages of recovery
from recent civil war. The latter events had embroiled lands in the western edge of this ancient
center of circa 300,000 inhabitants. I was living in this same Modakeke sector, now the ―strangers
quarter,‖ and around me were a large number of burned out, vacated buildings destroyed in this
devastation, which along with rare rifle shots at night, made me all the more cognizant of how
violence had impacted this otherwise very peaceful and thriving center. Whatever the causes, this
area has witnessed social breakdown linked to issues of affect, anger and fear among these. Among
the subjects I researched were ancient (c.1250-1350 C.E.) archaeological sites that had also been
associated with violence. One of these ancient sites of violence, Obalara’s Land, is located very near
to where I was staying. Here, archaeologist Peter Garlake excavated a remarkable find in the early
1970s, featuring among other things, carefully triaged human skeletal remains, including a pile of
skulls, positioned on top of these the upside-down ceramic torso of an enormously obese man, its
face deformed by fat, and its mouth opened wide to reveal an extended tongue. It is hard not to
see in this grouping remains and artifacts, striking concerns with affect, in particular anger,
outrage, fear, and pain, works that stand in marked contrast to other ancient Ife arts that are
notable for their exquisite calmness and serenity, this calls out for closer examination. So too does
the site itself, and its location in a part of the city (Modakeke) that is known to have given rise to
civil wars over the course of the kingdom’s history.
Thomas Fillitz
Gods, Images, and Contemporary Art Practices in Africa
Two concepts are central in my contribution: a) Alfred Gell’s thesis that art is about doing: his thesis
was mainly fed by reflections on the art of kula. For Gell the power of the picture resides in the
non-human dimension of the high skill in the representation. b) Clement Greenberg had expressed
the famous thesis regarding contemporary art that art should free itself from the representation of
images of the world and should concentrate on its own media, namely the canvas and colours.
These two theses will frame my considerations on contemporary art of Africa. Religion and aura do
not seem as relevant as it is in works created according to traditional canons. While taking up
techniques and materials, which have traditional ritual contexts, many artists insist that no religious
consideration is being transferred into their art works.
The question, however, is not that easy. I shall deal with three examples in order to show a more
complex interrelationship between the artwork, religious considerations or the production of an
aura. I shall aim at showing that in some cases religious considerations do affect the production of
pictures, and I shall show a technique applied by an artist to create an aura of his artwork, thus
producing a narrowing and emotional approach between the picture and the audience.
Karl-Heinz Kohl
Feeding the Grindstones.
Commensality as a Medium to Communicate with Non-Human Agents:
Some Remarks on Religion and Entertainment in East Flores Lamaholot Culture
Since the joint publications of Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, social anthropology has exerted
a strong influence on drama studies. Theatre scholars gained many new insights by applying
anthropological theories of ritual to classical and modern stage productions. Social anthropologists,
however, are still hesitating to use the models created by drama scholars for analysing their own
empirical data. In my paper I will interpret the traditional ritual practice of East Flores Lamaholot
culture as an enactment which aims at integrating non-human spirits into the village community by
inviting them to communal meals. The quality and amount of food offerings differ according to the
importance attached to the imaginary guests. An example is the ritual cycle at the beginning of the
harvest season. Grindstones, bush knifes and threshing mats are fed with small amounts of cooked
rice. Then, ancestor, mountain and sea spirits receive the blood of chicks. For the god of the sky and
the goddess of the earth, however, the villagers sacrifice goats and pigs. The blood of the animals is
given to the deities by allowing it to seep into the ground, while the humans share the flesh. As in
many other religions, eating together is a means of mediating between humankind, spirits and
gods. But in Lamaholot culture, the hierarchy existing between the different kinds of transcendent
beings requires dividing the ritual performance into particular acts. These acts are ordered as a
dramatic progression that culminates in the ritual decapitation of a great number of goats and pigs.
The carefully staged performance consisting of prayers and food offerings, of singing, dancing,
killing, slaughtering and eating in traditional Lamaholot rituals also reveals an aspect of religious
practice often overlooked in ethnographic documentation: its entertainment value.
Birgit Meyer
Effecting Spiritual Presence. Pictures and Christian Animation Practices in Ghana
My presentation will be based on my long-term research on the video-film industry in Ghana. Produced
by independent producers who depend on the approval of their audiences in order to sustain their
business, many of these movies are made to resonate with a broadly shared popular imaginary that is
indebted to Christianity. My approach of these movies is grounded in a conceptual framework that
understands media as intrinsic to religion. Instead of approaching ―religion‖ and ―film‖ as two
separate spheres—that of ―belief in spiritual beings‖, on the one hand, and audio-visual technology,
on the other, my starting point is the entanglement of film and Christian practices of animation. The
central point is to argue that the use of audio-visual technologies is embedded in a Christian
imaginary, bringing about what I call a ―techno-religious realism‖ through which film images are
vested with an aura of truth. Tying into popular Christian understandings of vision and animation,
the camera features as the all-seeing eye of God, for whom nothing is hidden from view. Through
special effects and techniques of montage that bridge ―the physical‖ and ―the spiritual,‖ audiences
are offered a glimpse of this divine capacity to see beneath the surface, deep into people’s minds
and into their hidden operations and secret interactions with spirits. The interference of spirits and
video-film technology, as I will show, pertains not only to the movies as appealing finished products,
but also occurs in their production: ―fake‖ and the ―real thing‖ easily get blurred through a logic of
techno-religious animation. The presence of spirits is effected through audio-visualization and
imagination. Importantly, these movies offer researchers not only insights into a broadly shared
popular imaginary, but above all lay bare a particular phenomenology of looking according to
which reality is more than meets the naked eye and into which a modern medium as video-film is
seamlessly incorporated.
David Morgan
Iconicity and Aura in Modern Visual Media
An enduring category in art history and visual culture studies in ―icon.‖ Or perhaps it is better to
regard the term as a family of variously related concepts, a rather loose category that is widely used
in the study of everything from Byzantine holy images to movie stars and commercial branding.
Icons also populate the screens of personal computers. Indeed, it would seem that visual media
today is pervasively structured by icons of many different kinds. The same general category joins
commerce and the sacred, the mass-produced and the hand-made, the mechanically reproduced
and the ―made without human hands‖ (acheiropoetos). Why has the category persisted over so
long a time and across such diverse phenomena? My presentation will explore different forms of
iconicity, focusing particularly on popular, mass-produced visual media, with special attention to
desire, the real, and aura.
Allen F. Roberts
Producing Immediacy: A Comparison of Visual Efficacies in Senegal and Mauritius
A most vibrant visual culture of devotion characterizes the cities of Senegal. Most Senegalese are
Muslims and follow one of four major Sufi paths, two local to the country. Of these, Mourides are
by far the most active artists, and they are transforming—indeed, refabulating—inner city
neighborhoods based upon very particular visual efficacies. ―Refabulation‖ refers to the choosing
of new fables, histories, and allusions to make places more suited to the felt needs of those seeing
to such transformation. The colonial lieux de mémoire of Dakar are being reconceived, renamed,
and rebuilt by Mourides who cover walls with portraits of Sheikh Amadou Bamba (d.1927), the saint
central to their movement. A very distinctive Mouride visual piety has emerged, based upon the
understanding that the portrait of Bamba is an icon—an active presence that conveys a blessing
energy called baraka to all those viewing or passing it by. As the façades of homes and shops, the
walls of schools and cemeteries, and the interiors of workshops and homes are graced with images
of the Saint, the very streets become talismanic, promoting and protecting those who live there.
The profundities of ―mystical graffiti‖ will be presented through the case of Pape Diop, a street
artist whose ―mystical graffiti‖ reveals ―signs of God‖ (aya) and an astounding sense of place as
defined by visual practice.
Comparison will be drawn to visual culture associated with Shirdi Sai Baba (d.1918), a South Asian
saint who rejected the religious nationalism of his day, and refused to reveal whether he was born
a Muslim or a Hindu. Visual epistemologies of both faiths are implicated in devotions to Baba, with
similarity to the visual efficacy of Senegalese Sufis, but differences also exist due to principles of
darsan, the Hindu way of seeing and being seen by a saint. In particular, images of Baba
miraculously produce sacred ash on the glass covering them that proves active presence while the
ash itself is talismanic. Recent research among followers of Baba in Mauritius and Germany will be
compared to Senegalese visual efficacies.
Curricula Vitae, Publications and References
Heike Behrend is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of African Studies of the University at
Cologne, Germany. She has conducted intensive research in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria;
currently she is studying media—video and photography—in Africa and continuing investigating
the relationship between religious change, violence and war in Uganda. She has been teaching as a
visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, in the African Studies program of North
Western University, Evanstone, and at the University of Florida, Gainesville. In 2007, she was Senior
Fellow at the IFK in Vienna and in 2010 she worked as a visiting professor at the Tokyo University of
Foreign Studies in Japan.
Publications (among others): Populäre Fotografie, Ästhetisierung und das „Islamische Bilderverbot―
an der ostafrikanischen Küste, in: Ilka Brombach, Dirk Setton, Cornelia Temesvari (eds.),
Ästhetisierung. Der Streit um das Ästhetische in Politik, Religion und Erkenntnis, Zurich, 2010; To
Make Strange Things Possible: The Photomontages of the Bakor Photo Studio in Lamu, Kenya, in:
John Middleton and Kimani Njogu (eds.), Media in Africa, International African Institute, Edinburgh
2009; Geisterfotografie: Bruchstücke einer interkulturellen Mediengeschichte der Fotografie, in:
Volker Gottowik, Holger Jebens, Editha Platte (eds.), Zwischen Aneignung und Verfremdung.
Ethnologische Gratwanderungen. Festschrift für Karl Heinz Kohl, Frankfurt/Main 2008; History of
Photography in East Africa, in: Robin Lenman (ed.), Companion to Photography, Oxford 2005;
Photo-Magic. Photographies in practices of healing and harming in Kenya and Uganda, in: Birgit
Meyer (ed.), Journal of Religion in Africa 33, 2, 2003 (=special issue on Media and Religion in
Africa).
Suzanne Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African
American Studies, Harvard University, 2011–2013 Member Collège de France International Scientific
and Strategic Committee (COSS) Paris: Selection: Assembly of Professors, 2008–11 Board Member
Society for Architectural Historian, 2005 Chair Editorial Board, Art Bulletin, 2005 Ad. E. Jensen
Memorial Lectures, Frobenius-Institut, University of Frankfurt, 2001-04 Getty Center for the History
of Art and Architecture, Collaborative Research Grant (Bamum Art Worlds), Team Leader.
Fellowships: The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C (2009–10), the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard
University (2005–06), the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (2000–01), Seaver Foundation
(1993–98), Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities (1990–91), John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Fellowship (1988–89), School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
(1988–89).
Publications (among others): with Joseph C. Miller (eds.), book series: Worlds of Experience: a
History, Oxford; Imaging African Amazons: The Art of Dahomey Women Warriors (forthcoming);
Past Presence: Ancient Ife and the Yoruba c.1300 (forthcoming); Picasso's Demoiselles: Africa,
Darwin, and Pornography (forthcoming); Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and
Identity c.1300. Cambridge, New York 2012 (forthcoming); with Joseph C. Miller (eds.), Africans'
Worlds: a History, Oxford 2012 (forthcoming); (ed.), Art of the Senses: Masterpieces from the
William and Bertha Teel Collectio, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2004; Butabu: Adobe Architecture
in West Africa (photographs by James Morris), Princeton Architectural Press 2003; African Royal Art:
The Majesty of Form, New York 1998.
Thomas Filitz, Associate Professor of Social Anthropology, and director of the Department of Social
and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. He has taught at varied universities in
Europe. Currently, he is Secretary of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). His
field research has been in West Africa (mainly Francophone) and Europe, his research interests are:
art worlds and global art, visual culture, globalization and transnational processes. His ongoing
research is on art biennales as a global culture, focussing in particular on the Biennale of Dakar,
Dak’Art.
Publications (among others): Challenging the Global Art World. Anthropological Perspectives on
Global Art, in: AAS Working Papers in Social Anthropology / ÖAW Arbeitspapiere zur
Sozialanthropologie 14, 2010 Pp. 1–12; Contemporary Art in Africa: Coevalness in the Global World,
in: Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), The Global Art World. Audiences, Markets, and
Museums. Ostfildern 2009, Pp. 116–134; Präsentation und Repräsentation als Blickregime, in: Igor
Eberhard, Julia Gohm, Margit Wolfsberger (eds.), Kathedrale der Kulturen. Reräsentation von
Ozeanien in Kunst und Museum, in: Novara – Beiträge zur Pazifikforschung Bd 5. Wien, Berlin
2008, Pp. 17–32; with Andre Gingrich and Lutz Musner (eds.), Kulturen und Kriege. Transnationale
Perspektiven der Anthropologie, Freiburg i. Br. 2007; Zeitgenösssische Kunst aus Afrika. Vierzehn
Künstler aus Côte d’Ivoire und Bénin, Wien 2002.
Karl-Heinz Kohl, Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the Goethe University and
director of the Frobenius-Institute. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in New Guinea, East
Flores and Nigeria. From 2001 until 2002, he taught as Theodor-Heuss-Professor at the New School
for Social Research in New York. In 2007 and 2009, elected president of the German
Anthropological Association, member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science.
Publications (among others): (ed.), Gestalter und Gestalten. Hundert Jahre Völkerkunde in Frankfurt
am Main, Frankfurt/Main 2006; Die Macht der Dinge. Geschichte und Theorie sakraler Objekte,
Munich 2003; Der Tod der Reisjungfrau. Mythen, Kulte und Allianzen in einer ostindonesischen
Lokalkultur, Stuttgart 1998; Abwehr und Verlangen. Zur Geschichte der Ethnologie, Frankfurt/Main,
New York 1987; Entzauberter Blick. Das Bild vom Guten Wilden und die Erfahrung der Zivilisation,
Frankfurt/Main 1986 (2.ed.).
Birgit Meyer, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the department of social and cultural
anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. She works on African Christianity; Pentecostal
churches; religion, media and the public sphere; and (audio)-visual culture, aesthetics and the senses.
Vice-chair of the International African Institute (London), a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of
Arts and Sciences, and one of the editors of ―Material Religion‖. Between 2000–2006 she directed the
―PIONIER‖ research program ―Modern Mass Media, Religion and the Imagination of Communities.
Different Postcolonial Trajectories in West Africa, Brazil, India and the Caribbean‖. Currently she
directs the research program ―Heritage Dynamics: Politics of Authentication and Aesthetics of
Persuasion in Brazil, Ghana, South Africa and the Netherlands‖ in the framework of the NWO
program ―Cultural Dynamics‖. In the academic year 2010–2011 fellow at the Institute for Advanced
Studies in Berlin where she works on a book manuscript titled ―’Your World is About to Change.’
Video-Movies, Spirits and the Popular Imagination in Ghana.‖
Publications (among others): Mediation and Immediacy. Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and
the Question of the Medium, in: Social Anthropology 19, 1, 2011, Pp. 23–39 (=Special issue: Patrick
Eisenlohr (ed.), What is the Medium?); There is a Spirit in that Image. Mass Produced Jesus Pictures
and Protestant, Pentecostal Animation in Ghana in: Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52,
1, 2010, Pp. 100–130; (ed.), Aesthetic Formations. Media, Religion and the Senses, New York 2009;
Powerful Pictures. Popular Protestant Aesthetics in Southern Ghana, in: Journal of the American
Academy of Religion 76, 1, 2008, Pp. 82–110; together with Annelies Moors (eds.), Religion, Media
and the Public Sphere, Bloomington & Indianapolis 2006.
David Morgan, Professor of Religion at Duke University with an additional appointment in the
Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. PhD in Art History at the University of Chicago.
He taught art history for many years at Valparaiso University, where he was Duesenberg Professor
in Christianity and the Arts. At Duke he convenes the American Religion Doctoral Track and is
Associate Director of the Graduate Program in Religion. Editor of the journal ―Material Religion‖
and co-editor of a book series at Routledge entitled ―Religion, Media, Culture.‖
Publications (among others): The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of
Feeling, Berkeley 2012 (forthcoming); (ed.), Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture, London
2008; The Lure of Images: A History of Religion and Visual Media in America, London 2007; The
Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practic, Berkeley 2005; Protestants and Pictures:
Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production, New York 1999; Visual Piety: A
History and Theory of Popular Religious Images, Berkeley 1998.
Peter Probst is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at
the Departments of Art History and Anthropology at Tufts University in Boston. His main field of
expertise is African visual and material culture. After his training in anthropology (Berlin &
Cambridge) he taught at various German universities before relocating to Boston in 2005.
As a disciplinary hybrid his interests range from issues of monuments, heritage, and memory to
religion, media, and aesthetics. In 2008 he was Senior Fellow at the IFK in Vienna and in 2010 fellow
at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT) where he now directs the Tufts research group on
media aesthetics.
Publications (among others): Osogbo and the Art of Heritage. Monuments, Deities, and Money,
Bloomington 2011; (guest editor together with Ferdinand De Jong), Hybrid Heritage (= African Arts,
Vol. 42, No. 4, 2009; (guest editor), Visual Publics (= Critical Interventions. Journal of African Art
History and Visual Culture, Vol 1, No. 2,2007; Kalumbas Fest, Berlin 2005; with Jan-Georg Deutsch
and Heike Schmidt (eds.), African Modernities, Oxford 2002.
Allen F. Roberts is trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist and is Professor of Culture and
Performance in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los
Angeles. He studies African arts and humanities, most often through research, writing, and museum
exhibitions undertaken with his spouse, Dr. Mary Nooter Roberts. The Robertses’ books have won
the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Award of 1996 for outstanding museum scholarship, as
the first Africanist study to be so honored; the Herskovits Prize of 2003 for the best African Studies
volume in any academic field; and the Arnold Rubin Award of 2001–2003 for the best work on
African art. Dr. Roberts’ historical ethnography, ―.
Publications (among others): A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo,
Bloomington 2012 (forthcoming); with Mary Nooter Roberts, Visions of Africa: Luba, Milan 2007; with Mary
Nooter Roberts, A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal, Seattle 2003; with Mary Nooter Roberts,
MEMORY: Luba Art and the Making of History, Munich 1996.
Organisation:
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