Anne Koch

»Religionshybride«. Gegenwart Religionswissenschaftliche Analyse anhand des Harry-Potter-Phänomens

Das Harry-Potter-Phänomen ist hybrid, da es einen neuartigen Imaginationsund Handlungsraum über nationale Gesellschaften hinweg erschafft. Seine Wirksamkeit wird hier damit erklärt, dass es 1. als Literatur das kollektive Imaginäre beliefert; 2. im Motiv des bedrohten Retterkindes Heilshandeln verkörpert und ein Modell anbietet, Hybridität zu bewältigen; 3. als Publikumskult und Jugendszene niederschwellige Vergemeinschaftung mit entspannenden kollektiven Ritualen bietet; 4. die mediale »Intensität« religiöser (christlicher wie esoterischer) Elemente in der Weltsicht des Rezipienten erhöht.

Competitive Charity: A Neoliberal Culture of ‘Giving Back’ in Global Yoga

Abstract Recent developments in global yoga show a tendency towards social activism in the charity market. As part of this, Yoga Aid World Challenge 2012 (founded in 2007) is a good example of how neoliberal organisational culture and generosity may become entangled. Competition stands out as an unusual strategy in the predominantly gentle type of modern postural yoga. During this 24-hour event, yoga is practised across 25 countries worldwide, following the course of the sun. Corresponding social networks and digital media strongly promote, months before the event, the joy of practising yoga and equate the meaning of life with giving. This is interpreted with findings from behavioural economics on altruism and from new institutional economics on the organisers’ communication and event marketing. This article paints a picture of hybrid social network formation and a cluster of affects, including competition, gratitude, and a sense of obligation.

Holistic Medicine between Religion and Science: A Secularist Construction of Spiritual Healing in Medical Literature

A particular formation can be observed in the discourse of spiritual healing and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Explanations of the effectiveness of spiritual healing by medical doctors and psychologists sometimes include ideological and non-scientific conclusions and concepts, which are similar to but also different from New Age science on healing. With discourse analysis discursive nodes and strategies are identified in international medical and psychological research journals at the boundary of CAM, traditional medicine, and psychosomatics from the last decade. The article develops the category of secularism to describe these propositional formations and contributes to the larger debate of postsecular societies. Postsecularism not only puts public religion but also secularisms back on the agenda. This particular secularism in the field of spiritual healing is based on transfers of knowledge and practices between subareas of a functionally differentiated society: esoteric and scientific cultural models shift into medicine, and continue into the area of health care and healing. The article demonstrates how this secularism gathers around key concepts such as emergence, quantum physics, and physicalism, and is engaged in a permanent boundary work between conventional and alternative medicine, which is governed by the notion of holistic healing.

Sympathetic Arousal during a Touch-Based Healing Ritual Predicts Increased Well-Being.

Objective. There is mounting evidence that more elaborate treatment rituals trigger larger nonspecific effects. The reasons for this remain unclear. In a pilot field study, we investigated the role of psychophysiological changes during a touch-based healing ritual for improvements in subjective well-being. Methods. Heart rate, respiratory rate, and skin conductance levels (SCL) were continuously assessed in 22 subjects before, during, and after a touch-based healing ritual. Participants rated their expectations and subjective well-being was assessed before and after the ritual by the “Short Questionnaire on Current Disposition”. Results. Subjective well-being increased significantly from before to after the ritual. The analysis of psychophysiological changes revealed a significant increase in respiratory rate from baseline to ritual, while skin conductance, heart rate, and heart rate variability did not change. Increases in SCL as well as decreases in respiratory rate from baseline to ritual were significantly associated with improvements in subjective well-being. Regression analyses showed increases in SCL to be the only significant predictor of improvements in well-being. Conclusion. Higher sympathetic arousal during a touch-based healing ritual predicted improvements in subjective well-being. Results suggest the occurrence of an anticipatory stress response, that is, a state of enhanced sympathetic activity that is known to precede relaxation.

Psychische und vegetative Eff ekte des geistigen Heilens in ihrem rituellen und religionsgeschichtlichen Kontext: Zwei exemplarische Falldarstellungen

Das Gesundheitswesen steht vor einer Kostenexplosion, die Regierung von Angela Merkel kundigt im November 2009 kontinuierliche Erhohungen der Krankenversicherung gleich fur die nachsten Jahre an; ein Auseinanderdrift en in eine Versorgung fur Wohlhabende und armere Menschen zeichnet sich selbst in sozialmarktwirtschaft lichen Landern ab; regional starten Programme gegen eine hausarztliche Unterversorgung. In dieser Situation kann es nur von gesellschaft lichem Interesse sein, die Ressourcen, die in alternativen und komplementaren medizinischen Angeboten liegen, auszuloten. Seit den 1970er Jahren sind im religiosen und im therapeutisch- medizinischen Feld zunehmend geistige oder spirituelle Heilweisen aufgetreten. Geistiges Heilen ist dabei eine Selbstbezeichnung mancher Formen, die hier rein arbeitspragmatisch ubernommen wird. Kennzeichnend ist, dass meist mit holistischen Konzepten des Organismus und der Einbettung des Menschen in kosmische Zusammenhange gearbeitet wird. Der kulturelle Transfer, der aus indigenen Heiltraditionen hier vorgenommen oder auch nur von den Akteuren konstruiert wird, und das Heilwissen, das in Stromungen der jungsten Religionsgeschichte wie der Gottinnen- Spiritualitat, des New Age, christlich-neupfi ngstlerischen Stromungen, der Neuen Heilungsbewegung (Beckford 1984) oder der »Naturlich Leben«- Bewegung geschaff en wird, sind nicht mehr eine exotische Randerscheinung wie noch in fruheren Phasen, sondern geistiges Heilen hat sich uber viele Anbieter, Bucher, Ausbildungsinstitute organisiert. Religionssoziologisch muss die Kombination von schul- und alternativmedizinischen Praktiken bzw. geistigem Heilen als die Regel gesehen werden (in den USA bei mehr als einem Drittel der Bevolkerung, Walach 2005). Selbst in traditionell christlich sozialisierten Schichten werden mannigfache Formen von Handaufl egungen, Energie- und Chakrenarbeit angetroff en (Ebertz 2005, Bochinger et al. 2005). Vor diesem Befund der massiven Umwalzungen und Herausforderungen des Gesundheitssektors ist die Erforschung der gegenwartigen hybriden Heil- und Gesundheitslandschaft in Deutschland ein groses Desiderat: sowohl religionsgeschichtlich wie methodisch liegen nur sehr vereinzelt Studien zu geistigem Heilen vor.

Yoga as a Production Site of Social and Human Capital: Transcultural Flows from a Cultural Economic Perspective

From a cultural economics perspective, transcultural flows in yoga are analyzed using field study data from German yoga institutions and an international Anglophone resort in Thailand. Yoga is seen as a production site of value creation. Through the internalization of the mental model of yoga, several forms of human capital are built up. An eminent external effect of regular yoga practice may be the production of public or social goods, such as a more attentive attitude towards the human and natural environment. On a macrolevel, the partial yoga markets are characterized by diversification dynamics and path dependency. Within the dimension of informal structures, like accumulated body capital, reflexive belief systems are established that also influence, for example, behavior at work or health prevention strategies. Here, materialist interests regularly interrelate with postmaterialist aims, such as increased autonomy. However, the community of practitioners is transient and with a low level of commitment, the experience of like-mindedness is important for the subjective quality of the courses offered.

Museum in Context

In using the critical term museality in aesthetics of religion, it is our aim in this article to reveal the socio-cultural embeddedness of museums in Western societies and beyond. To do this we draw on two distinct cultural and sociological models of society, dispositive theory and Luhmanns communicational systems theory. Dispositive theory allows us to include non-discursive practices and materialisations in the aesthetic analysis of religious identification strategies mediated through museums and exhibitions. The boundaries, environment and self-referentiality of the system museum are discussed with a view to the shifting place and visibility of religious and secular messages in museum contexts. The focus on museality leads beyond museums to discover object wanderings, religious re-interpretations and museum displays in a number of other socio-cultural fields.

Introduction: Revisiting Civil Religion from an Aesthetic Point of View

This special issue enquires into aesthetic ways of newly creating or re-shaping and re-presenting civil religion and its central characters, symbols, or figures. Normally, civil religion addresses value-orientation and social integration. In addition to these features, the papers make the aesthetic performance of civil religion the subject of discussion. The reason for taking this path is the altered aesthetic circumstances of highly mediatised and consumerist societies. Before this backdrop, images, literary figurations, movie sequences, and brands in media, public and national discourse are examined in various case studies from Italy, Finland, the UK , France, the former GDR , and Switzerland. At the same time, the negotiation and aesthetic plausibility of aesthetic styles, pragmatic power, and particular media logics are evaluated. The concept of civil religion deserves this closer re-definition also with respect to past and recent (post-)secularisation and non-religion discourses. Hopefully, this multi-layered analysis of aesthetics and aesthetic pragmatics of civil religion will shed some light on the persistent appropriateness of the ‘civil religion’ concept and its capacity to be introduced into various methodological contexts in combination with the aesthetic perspective.

Alternative Healing as Magical Self-Care in Alternative Modernity

Alternative healing, including spiritual healing, unconventional, traditional/folk, and complementary medical treatments, is an increasingly relevant health-care resource in contemporary health-care systems, and a broad, constantly changing, and heterogeneous field of medical pluralism. Some suggestions for classifying spiritual healing as presented in the academic and gray literature are summarized and discussed. The findings are interpreted in terms of the paradigm of alternative modernities. In the direction of, but also in addition to, this paradigm, magic is introduced as a concept to denote certain highly ambiguous occurrences in the alternative modern. Magic is still very much alive and not easy to identify merely as a counterpart of rational, knowledge-generating, disembodying modernity. In this setting, spiritual healing might be seen as a form of magical self-care. Magic is neither modern nor traditional nor irrational per se, but has to be contextualized and described in terms of characteristics like holistic diagnosis, interpersonal congruence, the imaginations of agency, and efficacy.

Thinking through the Body. Essays in Somaesthetics

270 dress embodying a sense of “ordinariness’” which also “transcends identity” (132). Rather than being pre-given, determining the “modest” or “halal” nature of a particular dress is therefore subjected to continuous discussion and interpretation (see for instance Moors (29), Cameron (145)). This is also clearly illustrated through the contribution of Barbara Goldman Carrel who offers a nice ethnography of how Boston-based Hasidic communities are involved in a continuous adjustment or “Hasidification” of manufactured and designer clothes. This ranges from learning techniques to re-adjust the dress to fit one’s standards (re-adjusting the neckline, shoulder size) to inscribing one’s preference for designer clothes into a discourse of royalty that confirm the Hasidim in their position of spiritual superiority (109). Understanding how the negotiation of these boundaries takes place would, however, be impossible without understanding the central role of the Internet in this respect. A second aim of this volume is therefore to underscore the central role of the Internet in the emergence of this “modest fashion industry” and how Internet platforms provide for a unique vantage point to not only determine what counts as modesty but to equally enable discussions in this respect. In Emma Tarlo’s contribution we are witness to how modest fashion not only enables interconfessional encounters between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women but also how the Internet (and the anonymity it offers) plays an important role in bridging these boundaries (78–9). The importance of the Internet also lies at the heart of Reina Lewis’s contribution. Yet in this account the Internet not only acts as a passive platform but is understood through its own logic of advertising, of hyperlinking, and of restructuring the religious communities (e.g. 54). She looks, for instance, at the central role fashion bloggers play and how they not only act as main alternative to the offline fashion magazine for modest fashion style, but also how these same fashion bloggers almost emerge as semi-formal new (female) authorities in the religious field (52); see also Moors’ contribution (28–9). Finally, Liz Hogard pays attention to the media framing of “modest fashion” which highlights the way in which the female body remains a central site of surveillance—as epitomized through the Nigella Lawson burkini controversy in 2011 (187). Through the adoption of such a comparative approach, the volume nicely captures the complexity that surrounds modest fashion and for the most part manages to avoid essentializing accounts that take religion and gender as incompatible. However, not all contributions succeed this endeavour. In a remarkable intervention, Elisabeth Wilson addresses the by-now classical question of veiling and patriarchy, yet does so in a way that it reproduces many of the clichés that were criticized and deconstructed by the various contributions in the same volume. Yet aside from these unfortunate exceptions, Modest Fashion remains an interesting contribution to the literature on fashion and religion through the attention it accords to the role of the Internet, the broad interfaith approach it adopts, and the analytical reflection it offers on how through the category of modesty traditional gender roles, dominant beauty standards and interfaith relationships are continuously redefined.