Interrupting Time: Feast as Play and Art (original) (raw)
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The Feast: sense and fullness in the experience of finite
RAPHISA REVISTA DE ANTROPOLOGÍA Y FILOSOFÍA DE LO SAGRADO, 2019
The feast introduces an interruption in the flow of everyday life. Within the limits marked by such an interruption, a form of experience different from the ordinary takes place. The time of feast evokes and makes present the sacred time in which events that founded human society took place. In festivals, on one hand, one can grasp and represent the meaning that grounds human experience; on the other hand, a form of full life takes place. In the modern era, festivals lose their connection with the religious dimension, and such features fade away. Yet they do not disappear entirely. They are grasped in a fragmentary way, and this is enough to turn them into marks of resistance against the reduction of human experience to a purely utilitarian dimension.
Re-imagining the Feast: ritual commensality and funerary experience
My paper details my research into the design and performance of funerary practices, with a focus on the reimagining of feasting in increasingly secularised and spiritual but not religious (SBNR) societies. Recent studies note the increasing trend for ‘deadly individualisation’ pervading the funeral, with the communal rituals of religious practice replaced by personally tailored experiences. I propose that whilst these communal rituals often bear little or no meaning to the deceased or to those left behind, and indeed have the capacity to leave us further bereft, without them, we have lost essential loci in which to collectively experience loss. Using a critical event studies lens, which sees the events of death and funerary practice as social rupture, I suggest that feasts, a form of ritual commensality, can be reimagined to once again form part of ‘what must be done’ to support the communal restoration of social fabric rent by loss
International Review of Mission, 2020
This article explores the symbol of the feast, as proposed by the 2012 World Council of Churches’ affirmation Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (TTL). The feast is introduced as an appropriate hermeneutic tool to account for the multi‐layered and dynamic reality of human life in the presence of others and in the presence of God. Interpreting the feast, together with TTL, as a symbol of the liberation and reconciliation of the whole creation and of the celebration of life in response to the outreaching love of God, the article reflects on some contemporary theological voices arguing that God’s invitation to the feast of God’s kingdom is a central element of Christian existence. Such feasting is, among other things, characterized by the dynamics of facing, the presence of the other, the awareness of human corporeality, and the particularization of the other that can overcome the idolatrous power of death. Entering this conversation, the present article will argue that the symbol of the feast can helpfully be understood in its two‐fold dynamics of promise and resistance. While giving assurance about the transformation of all reality in the coming reign of justice and peace, the symbol of the feast, with its emphasis on inclusiveness and equality, also empowers people to resist all life‐denying forces. Walking with the rest of the creation “together towards a banquet,” Christians are thus enabled, it will be asserted, to discern and actively live their vocation.
2009
This collection of essays, papers originally given at a colloquium in Oxford 2008 involving scholars from the universities of Oxford, Leiden and Bonn, focuses on the theme of Feasts and Festivals in Biblical and extra-Biblical traditions. The topics include studies of the festal gathering in Deuteronomy and funerary rites for children in the Hebrew Bible, feasts in some extra-biblical texts (including 2 and 3 Maccabees), through to treatments of a number of New Testament themes and topics in the gospels and Paul. The focus on the theme of 'feast' brings out new aspects of some well-known texts and sheds new light on a number of themes in ancient Judaism and in early Christianity. This volume will be of interest to all those engaged in Biblical studies and its ramifications in the study of Judaism and early Christianity.
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: Discursive monument, Symbolic Feast 1
In The Forms, his arguably greatest work, Durkheim explicates the elemental social basis of religion to uncover its ultimate foundation in the “real,” declaring from the outset that “there are no religions that are false” (EFRL:2).1 Religion for Durkheim emerges from the substratum of the social since what the collectivity values “is the source of all religious experience” (cf. EFRL: 274; Milbrandt and Pearce 2011:269, 270). Broadly defined as a system of obligatory beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, religion is no mere epiphenomena; rather, it has been a necessary and constitutive element of all viable collectivities (EFRL:429), from the White Cockatoo clan of pre-modern Australian totemism to contemporary Canadian society. Today, we extend this to the globe, as witnessed by such things as the collective effervescence of World Cup football, communicated by the collective representation of the “buzz” made ubiquitous by vuvuzelas emanating from televisions around the world, transcending and linking societies together in a vibrant cosmopolitanism “from below” (Datta 2012:531; Turner 2006a; Inglis 2011; Inglis and Robertson 2008). We invite the reader to apprehend The Forms as a discursive monument, one that occupies a strikingly nodal place within the discursive networks of the social sciences. As a discursive monument, The Forms has been “left by the past” (Foucault 1972:7) and yet it stands. Its production is a singular “event” (Foucault 1972:8) affecting the human sciences as a monumental work in many major theoretical traditions both positively and negatively. The Forms can also be taken up as part of a symbolic feast of social analysis, nourishing a range of interpretive approaches. This circumstance, we are pleased to say, is evinced by the range of contributors’ work here. Most significantly, they are reminders of the salience of the questions Durkheim posed concerning the very constitution of social life (cf. Milbrandt and Pearce 2011; Ramp 2010; Datta 2008). The analytical and explanatory power of the concepts in The Forms makes it possible to extend Durkheim’s conception of how collective power is symbolised in enduring, existentially meaningful, consecrated, totem-like forms beyond his immediate empirical referent of central Australian tribes. This applies to a wide range of phenomena, from the rather ordinary ritual and meaning of donning one’s “Sunday best,” to extraordinary global social facts such as the revolutionary collective effervescence witnessed in Eastern Europe in 1989 (Tiryakian 1995). Many recent theoretical developments, notably heterogeneous, build upon The Forms constructively. These include Jeffrey C. Alexander’s sociological conception of justice developed in The Civil Sphere (2006) and Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalysis of revolution in Revolt, She Said (2002), among many others. The Forms also functions as an on-going foil for Giorgio Agamben’s influential genealogy of politics, religion and economics (2009).
Revista de Antropología y Filosofía de lo Sagrado, 2018
A very special kind of feast belongs to the Christian Orthodox tradition: there is a specific liturgical celebration of the Images in the so-called Sunday of Or-thodoxy. While in many cultures images are employed in order to celebrate an historic event, this is the only feast in which, on the contrary, images are celebrated for themselves. Nonetheless, the role of images in Orthodoxy is not univocally and positively accepted. In fact, the title's expression «the wolf as a shepherd» belongs to a Desert Father and refers to the role of images in our mental life. This is not reported by a heretical iconoclastic document, but by the well-known Philokalia, a kind of handbook of Orthodox Aesthetics. This paper aims to present these two aspects in their paradoxical partnership. First, I will present some historical, symbolic and liturgical aspects of this feast. Thus, we should be able to understand better why many contemporary authors claimed that the origins of our visual culture can be traced in this Feast. However, if we comprehend the philosophical value of Byzantine icons, we realise that they have little to do with our contemporary images, no matter whether we mean artistic, religious or media images. We often talk about the «power of images», but just to blame them-as if they were autonomous entities-or to praise them, in a generalized aestheticization of contemporary life. Iconophobia and iconodoulia, I claim, are emerging as ontologically impoverished versions of the former Byzantine theoretical models. What falls into oblivion is the paradoxical status of the image as «appearance of the essence of Being» that demands as a condition of its own existence its self-sublation. These dialectics, conceptually inspired by the Hegelian logic, are fully present in Byzantine Aesthetics, where the feast is considered as a precarious image, held in memory of a future image loss event known as eschaton.
In Nietzsche’s thought in the middle to late period concerning the relation between life, knowledge and art, the festival or feast forms an intersection of several issues of importance. Focusing on ‘Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft’ (FW) and the late Nachlass, this paper will attempt to trace the meanings that are attached to the festive aspect of art in order to provide a fresh angle on Nietzsche’s philosophical endeavour to reconfigure the central values of modernity.