Senses and Religion: Ontologies and Secularism Workshop | Day One

This is the first day of a multi-day event.

This workshop aims at staging an interdisciplinary dialogue on the relation between the senses and forms of acting, knowing, and becoming that are framed within religious traditions and ethical frameworks. The workshop will consider questions of sensory perception and the cultivation of senses with the goal of exploring how the study of these forms might expand understanding of religious practice, discipline, knowledge, and experience. Of particular interest is how the above questions can be animated by the current work on secularism and ontologies in anthropology and other disciplines.

The workshop will consist of panel presentations from the following scholars: Daniel Barber (Pace University), Robert Desjarlais (Sarah Lawrence), Mayanthi Fernando (UC Santa Cruz), Eduardo Kohn (McGill), Alan Klima (UC Davis), Niklaus Largier (UC Berkeley), Stefania Pandolfo (UC Berkeley), Peter Skafish (Berkeley Institute of Independent Thought), and Kabir Tambar (Stanford).

To attend the workshop and receive the pre-circulated papers, please email Philip Balboni (pbalboni@berkeley.edu) or Brent Eng (brent_eng@berkeley.edu).

Convened by Professor Charles Hirschkind of the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and the Luce Foundation.