Global Humanities

Byzantine canonical, historical, and hagiographical sources often suggest that boundaries between consecrated objects in church treasuries and non-sacred objects of everyday life were clearly defined and strictly controlled. Some texts go so far as to imply that only objects embodying a sense of material, moral, and religious purity were permitted to enter service in the Church. As such, it would seem reasonable to inferthat the Church must have excluded arts from Islamic lands, whose peoples were viewed as religiously heterodox and often as military enemies by the Byzantines. Indeed, a 13th-century historical account written by George Pachymeres betrays anxieties about the presence of Islamic texts in ecclesial settings. Yet surviving artistic evidence paints a more complex picture. The use of Pseudo-Arabic scripts to decorate Middle Byzantine churches is well documented, and there is evidence such scripts may have appeared on Eucharistic objects as well. Eucharistic vessels preserved in the Treasury of San Marco in Venice incorporaterepurposed stone and glass vessels from antiquity and Islamic lands. Church inventories reveal that objects of Islamic origins were not only present in some churches, but also that ecclesial authorities understood and apparently had no objections to their Islamic history. Such examples challenge textual accounts of strictly defined sacred boundaries and suggest that Byzantine religious ritual could be a site of cross-cultural encounter. They raise questions about how and why Islamic elements entered the Byzantine liturgy and the ways in which they were understood.

This volume explores the power of matter and materials in the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium. Recent attention to matter as dynamic and meaningful constitutes an emerging, interdisciplinary field of inquiry known as materiality, new materialism, or the material turn. Materials can be symbolic, but matter can also act on human subjects. This volume builds on these insights to consider the role of matter, materials, form, and embodied experiences in Byzantium. In many respects, Byzantine materiality represents a continuation of its Greco-Roman inheritance, which was also shared by neighboring peoples such as the Umayyads and Abbasids. But the Byzantines also developed their own, unique perspectives on matter and form, as with their parsing of the sacred materialities of icons, the Eucharist, and relics. Chapters in this volume consider the cultural meanings and functions of materials such as gold and ivory, the materiality of icons and relics, experiences of objects, as well as Byzantine philosophies of matter and form. Materiality takes center stage in Byzantine constructions of power, luxury, belief, and identity, which will be of interest to scholars and students of Byzantium and the wider medieval world.

Portable ritual objects of the Eastern Roman “Byzantine” Empire were frequently adorned with religious images, or icons, yet Byzantine sources say virtually nothing about the function of such icons in liturgical services. Ritual objects, such as eucharistic patens and katzion censers, brought icons into direct contact with ritual substances, including eucharistic bread, coals, and incense, in order to help sanctify and transform these substances as liturgical services unfolded. In some cases, the addition of ritual substances extended or transformed these portable artworks as well, producing new “intermedial” or “multimodal” icons. Situating such objects in their historical ritual settings enables us to reconstruct these ephemeral multimodal icons and underlines the importance of material culture for understanding Byzantine ritual.

Despite a recent surge in scholarship on the resettlement of refugees
across many social disciplines in response to current global events, the study of forced migration within archaeology has lagged. There exists a widening lacuna in our understanding of the experiential, affective, and mnemonic engagements of migrant groups due to our field’s continued preference for research that focuses on identifying migration events and mobility patterns. This chapter analyzes the historiographic factors leading to the neglect of migrant experience within archaeology
and advocates for a social archaeology of forced migration that invites research on the restoration of migrant identity and place. Drawing from contemporary anthropological studies of forced migration and landscape archaeology, it is proposed that comparative analysis between built landscapes of origin and resettlement provides an opportunity to address the question of how memory is manipulated and monumentalized through the medium of resettlement. Using the resettlement of the Armenians in the eleventh and early twelfth century in Cilicia as a case study, this chapter offers a look into how the structural and architectural landscape can be used to reconstruct narratives of identity and belonging, as well as understand the role of myth following the trauma of forced relocation.

The debate between realists and constructivists has polarized environmental scholarship in recent years. Situating this debate within the longstanding modernist tradition of categori- cally distinguishing “nature” from “culture,” and the natural sciences from the social sci- ences and humanities, this article suggests that we need to find a non-dualistic space for rethinking cultural-ecological relations. Such a space has been articulated by actor-network theory (ANT), but this theory leaves significant gaps in its understanding of agency and of macro forces. To fill in these gaps, the author draws on perspectives that theorize perception and agency as embodied, animate, and ecologically embedded and that theorize macro forces as discursively shaped and causally multidirectional and multiscalar. The author pro- poses the concept of multicultural ecology as a way of articulating the indivisibility of nature and culture and the multiplicity of cultural-ecological practices, and suggests a normative dimension by which such practices can be compared and evaluated.

Paganism is frequently cast by Anglo-American scholars as a form of “nature religion.” Some have also identified its political leanings as left rather than right. This article tests these preconceptions against the evidence provided by East European, especially Ukrainian, Paganism or “Native Faith.” The author examines Native Faith notions of nature as land, as “blood,” and as “tradition,” and argues that these are underpinned by a concept of “territorialized ethnicity”—the belief that ethnic communities are natural and biological entities rooted in specific geographical territories. The article traces this idea to its precursors in European and Soviet thought, and suggests that it may be more commonly found around the world than Western theorists presume. In light of such a different understanding of nature, the concept of “nature religion” may need to be rethought.

ABSTRACT Several scholars have argued that New Age spirituality is best understood as a form of ‘self-spirituality’ and as an expression of the consumer capitalist tendency to commodify all things, in the process converting religion into a ‘spiritual marketplace’. This article examines the phenomenon of New Age pilgrimage, especially pilgrimage to natural ‘power places’, with a focus on New Age practices at Sedona, Arizona, USA. The author assesses New Age notions of sacred space, nature, and the self, and compares pilgrim practices and sensorial interactions with Sedona’s red rock landscape to forms of tourist practice and com- modification more prevalent in Sedona. He argues that New Age pilgrimage, in theory and sometimes in practice, rejects the consumerist impulse, and that the New Age ‘self’ is both more open-ended and ‘postmodern’, and less central to New Age practice, than is suggested by the characterisation of New Age as ‘self-spirituality’.

ABSTRACT: This article examines the growth of Neopaganism and Native Faith in post-Soviet Ukraine. It traces the historical development of Neopagan ideas and contextualizes their emergence within the cultic milieus of alternative religion and ethnic nationalism. It surveys the main contemporary Ukrainian Neopagan and Native Faith groups and movements, assessing their future growth possibilities and comparing them with more familiar forms of Western Neopaganism. The author argues that these Ukrainian movements have become caught up within a set of ideas which are ideologically right-wing and scientifically insup- portable, but that this represents a phase of development comparable to an earlier phase of Anglo-American Neopaganism, at least in its reliance on “alternative” scholarship and on a strong form of “identity politics.” Like those Western movements, Ukrainian Native Faith might overcome its present-day limitations, but this will be difficult as long as the coun- try continues to face the economic and political struggles within which it has recently been mired.