国際カンファレンスを開催します
以下の要領で、国際カンファレンスを開催します。ReMo研メンバーに加え、海外からEmilia Jamroziak教授とSteven Vanderputten教授を迎え、さらにReMo研のコンセプトである日欧比較をしっかり行うため、日本中世寺社研究の一線で活躍されているみなさんにご協力いただきます。
Transcending the Tangibility and Intangibility: Religion and Media in Pre-Modern East and West Eurasia
有形=無形を超越する─前近代東西ユーラシアの宗教とメディア
Date: 25 and 26 November 2023
Place: Tokyo Metropolitan University, Minami-Osawa Campus
Language: English
The conference will focus on the media produced by pre-modern (medieval and early modern) religious persons and institutions and, using comparative methods of history, clarify their establishment, inheritance and significance from a global perspective. The history of media is well-known from Harold Innis’s “The Bias of Communication” and Marshall McLuhan’s “The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man,” but these works do not sufficiently consider the inseparable relationship between media and religion before the modern era and the impact on media history of religions that were attracted to transcendence and shared diverse missions. This conference therefore aims to elucidate the innovativeness of media produced by religious motives in their respective historical contexts, and to derive the commonalities that can be found across time and regions, and the historical significance of such media beyond a single cultural sphere.
Monks disseminated their religious beliefs using a variety of media, which include literary works, illuminated manuscripts, church decorations, and even pilgrimage, in addition to written documents such as monastic rules and sermons. Each presentation will focus on two characteristics of these media unique to the pre-modern period, namely their tangibility and intangibility. These two natures intermingled in different ways in the post-modern period and had a strong influence on the establishment and succession of religious views and world perceptions, as well as on the formation of order in secular society. Taking the tangible and intangible nature of the media as its main theme, the conference will compare pre-modern Christian monasticism and Japanese Buddhism and Shintoism to identify their similarities and differences.
This academic meeting is the first step for an international joint research project on the creativity of pre-modern religious cultures in the Eurasian East and West (Europe and Japan) and the Americas, succeeding the framework of the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Transformative Research Areas (B) “Religious Movements and Communication Medium /Worldview/Social Integration: A Synthetic Approach of Historical Research” (FY2020-2022).
