Néprajz és valláskutatás

What happens when we pitch written archival sources against folk legend, or against press articles or against the voices of the people themselves? In this paper, I will discuss the problems and advantages associated with combining ethnographic and historical methods in research on lived religion. Inspired by recent debates in the anthropology Christianity on questions of transmission and historical change in Christian traditions, and on the insights emerging from the material turn in the study of religions, I explore the ways in which the materialities of religious life, the objects, images, spaces, and environments, are implicated in divergent or competing evidential regimes.

Drawing on a range of ethnographic and archival examples drawn from research in Hungary, Romania and Moldova, I will illustrate the relationship between the materiality of “events” and the emergence of distinct temporal regimes, or new places in history. By approaching materialities as “places” where things happen and “realities” come to be, my lecture will invite us to think about the way in which historical knowledge of religious life is constructed.

Borítókép: Hype&Hyper