Description
What happens when we pitch archival evidence against folk legend, or against press articles or against the people themselves? Caves, Rockets and Icons offers an account of the formative events in the emergence of a new religious movement in 1920s Romania viewed through the lens of diverse forms of archival, narrative and material evidence. In the case study I outline here, national political, local and seemingly miraculous events are interwoven in a set of narratives and artifacts from police archives, from press sources and from the religious community. These diverse sources give voice (and sensation) to divergent interests, those of the state, of a group of marginalised people, and of God’s messenger. Inspired by recent debates in the anthropology Christianity on questions of transmission and historical change in Christian traditions, and on the inherent materiality of religion as counterposed to belief-centred approaches, in my lecture I explore ways in which to take objects, spaces, and environments as evidential for the history of religions. In what follows, I engage three materially grounded “events”, centred on a cave, a rocket and an icon, that were crucial in the formation of the Archangelist movement. These events, I argue, were formative of a new reality of the community and the emergence of its own distinct temporal regime, a new place in Christian history as they came to know it. Approaching materialities as “places” where things happen and “realities” come to be, my lecture will invite us to think about the divergent evidential regimes on which historical knowledge is constructed; on the status of evidence for the Romanian police as expressed in their archives, on experience and sensation as evidence for the religious community, and journalistic reporting as proof for the national press in its mission to shape opinion and sell copy.| Period | 17 Apr 2023 → 19 Apr 2023 |
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| Event title | Voices heard and unheard: Authority, Truth and Silence in Historical Perspective |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Vienna, AustriaShow on map |