Abstracts
The Devil’s
centres of operation’: English theatre and the charge
of blasphemy, 1689-1714
David Manning
‘Profaneness and even blasphemy was too
often the wit and entertainment of our scandalous playhouses’
(Josiah Woodward, 1699).
‘Can persons who frequent the playhouses,
and are not displeased to hear almighty God blasphemed…be
thought to have any sense of religion?’ (Anon., 1704).
England, during the reign of the last two Stuart
monarchs, was a deeply religious society vexed by a perceived
rise in immorality and irreligion. To the pious majority, licentious
behaviour was at best a scourge on the respectability of society
and at worst a threat to the very salvation of the nation. In
1698, Jeremy Collier’s A Short view of the immorality
and profaneness of the English Stage, sparked a debate in which
the most zealous tracts and sermons demonized the theatres and
accused some plays and actors of blasphemy. In a period of cultural
transition and commercial difficulty for English theatre, my
paper will explore how and why the particular accusation of
blasphemy was made against theatres, plays and actors and what
reaction such accusations provoked. The investigation will touch
upon the nexus between theology and morality, the perceived
complicity of audiences, and the conception of malicious intention
and interpretation, to present a view of blasphemy that was
more than a one-dimensional notion of intolerability. In turn
this will aid our understanding of how drama can be perceived
in a profoundly religious society.
Silence as a Way of Knowing
in Yolngu Indigenous Australian Storytelling
Caroline Josephs
Silence is a way of negotiating the
sacred not only within a culture, but also between cultures.
As a non-Yolngu, I tell of silence in relation to one Yolngu
story and its telling.
Yolngu (northeast Arnhemland) Indigenous Aboriginal
storytelling invokes silence in a number of ways.
Silence can invoke the sacred.
I cover three aspects of silence, in relation
to one particular story -- The Wagilag Sisters Story:
1. Protocols of storytelling. This is a story
I cannot tell. Storytelling protocols for Yolngu relate to various
aspects of cultural practice. Story is deeply connected with
country out of which it has emerged. Custodians hold various
parts of the storytelling. Three major ceremonies are associated
with the story. I tell of how the story came to me, and the
journey it took me on.
2. Inside-outside knowledge. Notions of Yolngu
‘inside’ (secret, sacred) and ‘outside’
(public) knowledges are introduced, as they relate to storytelling,
as well as to the silence surrounding women’s business.
3. Embodiment (through dancing) as silent knowing.
I tell a personal story of being in Yolngu country, to demonstrate
how dancing may be experienced as a silent way of embodying
Reality, of dancing country.
Forms of Presentation
Various forms of storytelling -- braiding genres
of personal, cultural, conceptual storytelling.
The Body of Christ:
Blasphemy, Eroticism and Transgression in Martin Scorsese’s
The Last Temptation of Christ
Glenn and Carolyn D'Cruz
Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation
of Christ (1988) has polarised critics and audiences for almost
two decades. The film is most often remembered for offending
the religious sensibilities of fundamentalist Christians, who
objected to Scorsese’s representation of Christ as a neurotic
figure who struggles to reconcile his divinity with his sexual
impulses.
Even critics who reject the fundamentalist accusations
of blasphemy are divided about the film’s value. For example,
Rolando Caputo praises the film as an unrecognised masterpiece,
which confirms Scorsese’s status as an auteur. Conversely,
Leonard W. Levy, dismiss the film as having little artistic
merit. This paper re-evaluates the film as a serious theological
text by re-examining the film in the light of Michel Foucault’s
essay ‘A Preface to Transgression,’ arguing that
the film can be read as a sophisticated attempt to examine the
connections between corporeality, divinity and human subjectivity.
Sexing the Divine:
Writing Sacred, Erotic Theo-Poetics
Deborah J. Rasa
What would happen if a postmodern lesbian were to experience
contemplation, ecstasy, and dare I say, mystical union with
the Divine through a fully embodied, fully fleshy, fully incarnational
sexual experience? How would a Christian theology of sexuality
be constructed to reflect such a lived experience? Drawing on
the insights of queer theory, feminist theology, postructuralism,
and poetics, this paper explores the interrelationship among
three foci: an erotic sexuality, contemplative spirituality,
and theo-poetics. Using poetics as an alternative genre for
both deconstructing and reconstructing Christian theologies
of sexuality and contemplative practices, the paper will explore
a poetic understanding of what it means to be an embodied, queer
female in the dialectical process of becoming and transformation.
On the topic of spirituality, Rasa’s implicit underpinnings
are rooted in a network of apophatic and cataphatic trajectories
within both eastern and occidental Christian mystical theologies
and are further informed by her own contemplative, meditative
practice of nearly three decades. The title of this paper, “Sexing
the Divine: Writing Sacred, Erotic Theo-Poetics” points
towards the construction of an artistic theological representation
for a sacred sexuality and an embodied spirituality, which has
generated audience responses and controversies, including whether
such theologically iconoclastic representations are blasphemous
and sacrilegious. Throughout the paper, Deborah will share select
haiku and other poems from her collection of theo-poetics that
give voice to her own untamed, incarnational wilderness and
divine mystery, infusing the body human and cracking open a
site for an aesthetic celebration of an embodied sacred, erotic
sexuality-spirituality.
Blasphemy and
Sacrilege in the Arts: The Challenge of Kim Scott's Benang
Veronica Brady
Blasphemy, if we define it as the profanation
of what is sacred, is a culturally- conditioned term, bound
up with notions of identity and value—at least if one
accepts
Durkheim’s and indeed Marx’s idea of the link between
religion—as distinct from faith, which is a different
matter—and society. For marginalised and oppressed groups
to assert a separate identity therefore it can be part of the
struggle for power which is associated with identity in general
and its representation in particular.
Kim Scott’s novel Benang, a novel which
attempts to rewrite the story of settlement seen from the other
side of the frontier, the side of Aboriginal people of the south
west of Western Australia, can in this sense be read as a blasphemous
work, since it profanes the assumptions and institutions of
mainstream society, especially the assumption that ‘whiteness’
constitutes the ethical as well as social norm. As Homi Bhabha
points out, at the best of times identity is an elusive matter.
Scott’s novel, however, sets in train a production process
which seeks to bring into existence an ‘Aboriginal’
story and identity repressed and rendered invisible identity
and set of values which threaten the accepted pieties of mainstream
Australia.
Shekhina: From
Sacred Texts to Plastic Culture
Jennifer Dowling
In 2002, Leonard Nimoy published a collection
of photographs, which honours, he says, “the divine feminie
presence” created by God to dwell among humanity, The
collection, entitled Shekihna, was praised by some for the photographic
talent but was also condemned to an extent that it has been
compared to the Robert Mappelthorpe controversy in 1989. The
criticism went beyond a conservative distaste of nudes to condemn,
among other things, Nimoy’s blasphemy and sacrilege.
This paper will present an historical inspection
of what the Shekhina is in Jewish mysticism, its place in theosophy
of the Kabbalah. It will discuss the evolution of the concept
from the possible Gnostic origins to its inclusion in Medieval
Jewish mysticism, which was the intellectual property of the
elitest of the educated males. From this limited dissemination,
it captured the imagination of the populace through poetry and
prayer, and became interwoven into the mythology of the Diaspora
and now into present-day popular culture.
From such an overview, it will be then possible
to understand and analyse both the inspiration and condemnation
of the collection.
Votive: sacred & ecstatic
bodies
Chris Braddock
Chris Braddock will talk about issues of blasphemy in artworks
that engage with collisions between sacred imagery and the body.
As artist and curator he recently co-ordinated the exhibition
Votive: sacred & ecstatic bodies including the works of
Ian Breakwell and Cathy de Monchaux (Britian), Pierre &
Gilles (France), and Megan Jenkinson (New Zealand). The exhibition
responded to controversy surrounding Tania Kovat’s exhibit
Virgin in a Condom at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
in 1998. He will also address the work of Andres Serrano. This
talk addresses complex relationships in the artworks between,
on the one hand, attitudes of devotion, and on the other, severe
critique of the Church.
Paradoxical concepts: a way
out from blasphemy
Alireza Majazi Amiri
Negotiating
the Sacred in Iranian Cinema
Michelle Langford
In the post-revolutionary period, Iranian cinema
has been subject to strict Islamic censorship laws that dictate
what can and cannot be show on screen, particularly in terms
of the representation of women and romantic relationships. The
Iranian-American scholar Hamid Naficy, among others, has demonstrated
how codes of modesty in Iranian cinema are often exaggerated
beyond those present in social reality due to the fact that
the film viewer is not only considered to be unrelated to the
characters onscreen, but that the spectator is implicitly considered
to be present during filming, creating the necessity for women
on screen to cover their hair and bodies in private spaces and
in the presence of related men as well as prohibiting all physical
contact between men and women, even if they may in fact be related
in real life.
Taking up this notion of the assumed ‘presence’
of the spectator, this paper will consider some of the ways
in which post-revolutionary Iranian filmmakers appear to transgress
strict Islamic censorship regulations by using certain cinematic
techniques such as framing, editing and mise en scène
that not only suggest prohibited physical contact between men
and women on screen, but generate affective connections directly
with spectators. I will argue that this affective relationship
between screen and spectator hovers on the verge of being sacrilegious,
effectively negotiating and transgressing the limits of sacred
doctrine while still adhering to strict Islamic censorship regulations.
The ethical Immanence
of Art and the anthropological Dimension of the Sacred
Yolanda Espina
My aim is to establish the (necessary) relationship that exists
between an understanding of the ethical immanence of art (which
implies the consideration of this ethical aspect not just as
an exterior element to art, but as something belonging to its
being art and being expression) and the anthropological dimension
of the sacred (therefore, the sacred under the perspective of
a certain universality, which expresses itself differently -that
is clear- in the different cultures).
For this, I will first analyse the foundations of this ethical
immanence of art. That implies its consideration not only from
the point of view of its content, but also of its aesthetical
and formal elements. These elements converge on the configuration
of the content in a particular way, very closely tied to the
ethical signification of the artistic object, so that we will
see that it is impracticable to dissociate the aesthetical aspect
of art from the ethical one. This will already imply a kind
of universality, which will allow us to understand the anthropological
dimension of art. Hence, we will be able to understand the significance
of a epiphany of the sacred precisely in the artistic expression.
Materializing
the Sacred
Dianne McGowan
The aim of this paper is to initiate discussions on what makes
an object sacred. For example, is a ‘sacred’ object
a manifestation of grace, a production of piety or a purchased
passage to virtue? If the object is removed from its ritualized
environment, such as an altar or grove, is its sacredness lost?
Or, does sacredness have a shifting or contested value, dependent
upon public relevance, place and performance paradigms. For
instance, can a sacred object retain its sanctity if its use
is re-scripted by a different set of cultural codes. These questions
are discussed with reference to the contemporary Eurocentric
practices of commodifying, collecting and exhibiting Tibetan
ritual objects.
Du Sublime au
ridicule, il n'y a qu'un pas: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in Grass,
Bulganov, Tournier, Achebe, Garcia Marquez, and Rushdie
Peter Arnds
My paper connects the literatures of several cultures and combines
insights from literary and cultural theory, history, anthropology,
and philosophy. I examine some of the most influential books
of the twentieth century and their subversive use of blasphemy
and sacrilege in order to attack the serious official discourse
(Bakhtin) of totalitarian governments and preserve the spirit
of democracy at times when it is threatened or even disappears.
My project hinges on the
philosophical dichotomy between rationalism and irrationalism,
that pivotal conflict within modernity and its enfants terribles
Nazism, Stalinism, and Colonialism. I am interested specifically
in the reactions of these three political landscapes to myth
and folk culture as alleged products of irrationalism. How do
Nazism, Stalinism, and Colonialism suppress or appropriate the
irrational for the purpose of nation-building, and how does
twentieth-century fiction in preserving or recovering the suppressed
or manipulated myth and folk culture destabilize the ideology
of these three totalitarian forms of governance? My research
and teaching of this material focuses on the work of Günter
Grass, Mikhail Bulgakov, Michel Tournier, Chinua Achebe, Salman
Rushdie, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In more concrete terms
and proceeding from my book Subversion, Representation, and
Eugenics in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (Boydell
&Brewer 2004) and its attempt to go against the rationalist
discourse of the Adenauer period, I want to discover how Bulgakov’s
use of myth in The Master and Margarita attacks Stalinism’s
reduction of myth in the interest of elevating the proletariat,
how Tournier’s The Ogre employs the Erlking myth and the
French fairy-tale tradition to comment on the internationalism
of fascism, eugenics, and the persecution of gypsies, how Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
preserve Hindu myth and Igbo tribal culture, respectively, against
colonial suppression, and how Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude saves the magic of Latin American mythology
from falling victim to the Western emphasis on logic and reason.
Especially in light of the relationship between Nazism and Stalinism,
Mikhail Bakhtin’s work is of particular importance for
our understanding of some of these twentieth-century novels
and their disruption of what is sacred to totalitarian regimes.
My project, however, connects Bakhtin’s theories to other
critical theories with
which they have much in common, above all with Gilles Deleuze’s
and Félix Guattari’s writing on migration and nomadism
and Michel Foucault’s work on madness, as well as with
some contemporary theories of racism (e.g., Giorgio Agamben’s
wolf-man in Homo Sacer) and cultural anthropology (e.g. Victor
Turner’s concept of liminality). Of specific interest
to me is Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. The tyranny of unitary
languages promoted by regimes founded on religious, national,
cultural, and racial monologues is brazenly challenged by his
theory of a carnivalized literature that allows for multiple
voices, particularly those of society’s underdogs, and
by which he implicitly attacked the Stalinist regime. A comparative
look at the above-mentioned novels reveals that through their
polyphony of languages, dialects, genres,
intertexts, and their focus on social outsiders they display
a multiplicity of views and layers of meaning by means of which
they can criticize the monologicity of undemocratic discourses,
whether these relate to the state or religion, to race or class,
but in either case to the marginalized individual. Bakhtin’s
concept of heteroglossia (as a literature that allows for a
multiplicity of voices through a multiplicity of subtexts) corresponds
to the phenomenon of
intertextuality in the baroque picaresque tradition, which centralizes
the nomadic rogue or trickster, a tradition the authors I discuss
try to revive by privileging the profane, insanity, the grotesque
body, cosmopolitanism, homelessness, and nomadism.
The Second Coming:
the sacred and secular rituals of the unknown warrior's return
Kingsley Baird
for many be called, but few chosen
(Matthew 20:16)
On 6 November 2004, near the French village of
Longueval, the remains of an unknown New Zealand soldier, killed
in the First World War, were handed over by the Commonwealth
War Graves Commission to a New Zealand delegation who would
escort his coffin back to his homeland. There are over 9000
missing or unidentified New Zealanders who have died in active
service in overseas wars. He was chosen to represent them.
While he lay in state overnight at Parliament
thousands of his compatriots filed past his coffin to pay their
respects. The following day over one hundred thousand more lined
the route to view the military funeral procession through the
streets of Wellington to the country’s “most honoured
grave” at the National War Memorial.
At the interment ceremony, the Governor General
spoke of the warrior’s sacrifice and the nation’s
debt: “because of him, home is a better place.”
The virtues of “that small remote country” and the
qualities of its people were conflated in a “civil religion,”
founded on the beaches of Gallipoli.
This paper draws parallels between the rituals
and words of Christianity and the secular ceremonies marking
the return of New Zealand’s Unknown Warrior. Notions of
the sacred and sacrifice will be examined in relation to the
young nation’s mythologies of nationalism and the anxieties
of identity.
This presentation will include 35 mm slide images
and sound CD.
Inviting the
devil to dance in the church': Reconciliation through sacrilege?
A case from New Ireland
Antje Denner
While in times of the ‘politics of culture’ the
performance of customary masks and dances in modern contexts
like cultural festivals, school celebrations or certain church
festivities has become a common way of affirming local identities
in Papua New Guinea, the appearance of a masked dancer from
a secret society and the staging of traditional dances during
the opening of a newly-built Pentecostal Church is somewhat
surprising as the doctrine of this evangelistic denomination
condemns many of the local customs. The event took place on
the Anir Islands (New Ireland, PNG) and its contradictory nature
prompted a Catholic observer of the community to comment, “it
is as if they invited the devil to dance in their church”.
However, it also is an example of how in the opposition between
members of two different religious denominations art became
the medium through which their relationship to each other as
well as to culture and ‘tradition’ was reflected
upon and discussed. During the presentation the following issues
will be addressed:
• internal and external circumstances that led to the
performances;
• how members of the community, Pentecostals as well as
Catholics, rationalised and dealt with the event;
• effects the performances had on the relationship between
the two groups;
• the salience of culture and the ‘authenticity’
of the respective performances.
The
Status of Beliefs, Paternalism and Openness to Criticism
Jeremy Shearmur
This paper argues that how we treat people’s
beliefs, and how they conduct themselves in the world, should
be guided by ideas about their status. More specifically, I
advance a (tentative) theory about how we might classify ideas,
in terms of the degree and kind of criticism to which they might
be subjected, and also suggest that those of us who operate
in a sphere in which ideas are routinely submitted to a high
degree of critical scrutiny, should legitimately exercise a
degree of paternalism – in the sense of not necessarily
treating other people’s ideas in the manner in which they
are, prima facie, advancing them, unless they are fully aware
of what the implications of so doing may mean. (Unless the ideas
are being advanced in such a way that they impinge substantively
upon the well-being of others.)
The specifics of these paternalistic
ideas, and the particular theory that I favour – which
is that one distinguishes broadly between tastes, what is considered
locally compelling, and what is claimed to be universally true
(albeit each with some complications) – are set out in
the paper. But I will urge that what is more important is the
broader argument that we stand in need of discussion of these
issues, aiming at an open-ended consensus, and that the best
that we can achieve here should inform our practice.
Blasphemy our troubled History,
our uncertain future
David Nash
This lecture aims to describe how blasphemy has evolved in the
west and to note particularly interesting features of this. Investigating
the cultural and legal developments that have created, nurtured
and sustained blasphemy as a functioning entity will provide insights
into its longevity. This will also illuminate important issues
in the development of the sacred, of secularization and the coming
of the modern autonomous self. Having sketched what once looked
like a history of modernization we will explore haow thsese assumptions
are unravelling. I will now talk about how this is being rethought
and re evaluated in the light of recent events in the West. The
religious, the irreligious, the artistic, the curious and the
academic must now ponder new agendas about cultural exploration
as well as the limits of rights and responsibilities.
“Les fees ont soif”: Feminist,
Iconoclastic or Blasphemous?
Maria Suzette Fernandes-Dias
In his book, Sorcières (1862), French historian,
Jules Michelet describes fairies as the proud and fantastical
queens of Gaul, who brazenly turned their backs on Christ and
his apostles and continued to dance. For this impudence, they
were imprisoned in containers that would be opened only at the
end of time. Drawing on this metaphor, in her play, Les
fees ont soif (translated by Alan Brown as The Fairies
are Thirsty), Québécoise playwright, Denise
Boucher attempted to deconstruct the role played by myth, image
and language in the formation of women’s socio-cultural
identity by creating an iconoclastic feminine trilogy of the
Virgin Mary, the Mother and the Whore as a satirical counterpart
to the Holy Trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,
to depict how patriarchal tradition has incarcerated women in
stereotypical roles of submission. The three characters rebel
against their archetypal roles and invite the audience to “imagine
… imagine … imagine” a different world, recreated
by women.
Les fees ont soif (1978) roused a controversy and was
banned because of its polemical attacks on the Québécoise
society, the Church, marriage as an institution, the judiciary
and its blasphemous depiction of the Holy Virgin. After much
religious denunciation, cultural upheaval, intellectual debate
(Julia Kristeva and Simone de Beauvoir being among international
intellectuals who protested against the censor) and judicial
imbroglio that dragged until 1980, the play has been staged
several times (even during the papal visit to Canada in 1984
and as recently as July 2005 during the Festival de Fringe
in Montreal) without being decried as blasphemous or scandalous.
In the literary and in the cultural paradigm, Les fees ont
soif is considered as a prominent marker of the post Quiet
Revolution assertion of the feminine identity and the social
rupture from religious dogmatism in Québec.
In my paper, I will present the elements of the play that were
considered to be blasphemous and examine the socio-cultural
factors that contributed to its immanent succès de scandale.
By analyzing the contemporary relevance of the thematic content
and the reception of the play, my contention would be that sacrosanctity
is a mutable construct, conditioned by the socio-cultural and
spatio-temporal aspects, and blasphemy in the arts can serve
as a counter-tool to dismantle existing structures of conservatism,
orthodoxy, intolerance, oppression and domination.
