Art and Religion

Krista Andreson: Art and ReligionKeywords: sacral art; art and religion; „art as religion“Summary:On October 10th and 11th, the Autumn School “Art and Religion” took place in the Department of Art History at the University of Tartu, in the course of which, art historians, theologians and philosophers spoke about the relations between art and religion, as well as their fields of meaning from the Early Christian period to the present day. The focus of the first day, with the subtitle of “Images and the Church”, was on sacral art. The presentations dealt with the “picture question” in the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity, the various functions and possibilitiesfor the interpretation of the works of art in the service of  medieval Catholicism and post-Reformation Lutheranism, as well as the contacts between ritual and religion in the Early Modern period, based on the example of 17th-century portraiture. On the second day of the Autumn School, with the subtitle “Art and/as Religion”, the focus was on religious themes in connection with contemporary “autonomous” art. The opposite ends of the axis were examined – the alienation between art and religion, as well as the reinterpretation of the relationship on new bases, including the impact of different religions of the 20th century and the various forms of expressing religiosity on the art world. The presentations showed that Christian art and religiousthemes have not disappeared, however a significant change hasgenerally occurred in the bases of this art and within the framework of certain works. As one of the main topics of the second day, the trends that have developed inside and adjacent to “mainstream” art emerged. These are on the one hand characterised by the emergence of the artist’s “me” – art has become the new religion and the artist has become God. Thus, along with the contrasting, one can also notice a certain analogy,including between the operational mechanisms of art and religion. However, these trends are often marked with the impact of modern “substitute” religions or new forms of religion, including various “secret sciences” with a spiritual background.CV:Krista Andreson is a research fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Tartu. She has studied in Germany at the University of Kiel, as well as held shorter academic residencies in Leipzig and Greifswald. From 2003 to 2010, Andreson was a research fellow at the Niguliste Museum (branch of the Art Museum of Estonia). Her main area of research is medieval ecclesiastical art and iconography and she has published several research papers on the medieval wooden sculptures and altarpieces in the Baltic Sea Region. The topic of Krista Andreson’s doctoral thesis is “The Relations between Art and Culture in Old Livonia Based on the Example of Ecclesiastical Art: Wooden ScuSculptures from the 13th Century to the First Half of the 15th Century”

The Presence of the Sacred: A 13th-century cult image from Saaremaa (Estonia)

This article undertakes a closer examination of the small (52-cm) oak figure of the crucified Christ on permanent exhibit at the Saaremaa Museum in Kuressaare. The original crossbar of the crucifix has not survived, it is covered with modern polychrome and there is no definitive information on which church the sculpture initially belonged to. If we wishto reconstruct the initial function of the sculpture in the sacral context, we must rely primarily on the object itself, its particular iconographical properties and style of depiction, as well as the results of technologicalresearch. In addition, we can seek additional information from the network of relationships between visual objects and liturgy of the past. On the one hand, Saaremaa’s crucified Christ is characterised by an “old-fashioned” method of attachment to the cross using four nails, and on the other, Christ’s chest wounds and the traits characteristic of a tense, hanging body are emphasised. Since changes in the number of nails and method of attachment to the cross started to appear in the middle of the 12th century, and the great breakthrough did not occur until the late 1210s and early 1220s, and it became prevalent by the middle of the 13th century at the latest, this time period establishes the temporal framework for the completion of the Saaremaa crucifix. The Saaremaa crucified Christ is also characterised by a specific iconography, which alludes to Passion piety and respect for the bodily Christ in the first half of the 13th century. Recent technological research provides a basis to believe that the back (and probably the head) of the figure initially contained a sepulchrum, which traditionally contained a relic or piece of the Host. As such, the Saaremaa crucified Christ is a medieval cult image, and in addition to the existence of the repository, is unusual due the fact that it dates back to the period of the first written information on the existence of Christian houses of worship on Estonian territory. However, the Christianisation of the Estonian area had yet to be completed and the network of churches was still in the process of being developed. The sculpture’s artistic parallels point to a group of  crucifixes of German origin completed in the second quarter of the 13th century – to comparative material from a region, from which, along with ecclesiastical and political contacts, artistic impulses arrived in Saaremaa, and more broadly in Livonia during this period

Mothers in the Family of Saints: Gender and Race in the Making of Afro-Brazilian Heritage

Candomblé temples produce histories and subjectivities at the nexus of Africa and the Americas. The dissertation combines historical and ethnographic methods to show how Candomblé priestesses and “matriarchy” are constructed, ritually valued, and externally rewarded as key sources of African heritage in Brazil. The dissertation tacks between the concept of Black matriarchy as understood within the ritual family of saints and as appropriated in the public and political sphere. The convergence of the central symbol of gestation in the religion’s initiation process on one hand, and understandings of sex and kinship as defined by birth, on the other, make women especially respected because of their vital role in perpetuating both ritual and biological lineages of African descent. When biological and ritual notions of kinship align through the figure of “matriarchy,” claims to ancestral knowledge and African religious authority exert the strongest impact on the Brazilian public. Temples able to persuasively present the ideals of “African” matriarchy are therefore most successful in gaining recognition from the state as bona fide sites of cultural heritage. Popular and scholarly depictions of Candomblé have differentiated the nações (nations) by the gender of their leader, upholding the “matriarchal” status of the Yoruba, while portraying the Angolan nation as predominantly male-led, and less African, often placing Angolan temples at a disadvantage in the cultural heritage market. My research demonstrates that regardless of the temple’s ritual nation or the gender of their ‘official’ leader, Candomblé practitioners value Black Mothers as the most powerful cultivators and propagators of the African ancestral force in Brazil. Within the ritual family traditional notions of femininity as domestic motherhood restrict female-born initiates who must perform labor based on their biological sex. The reverence for Black Mothers specifically within the family of saints creates a hierarchy among the possible expressions of gender and sexuality, some of which are deemed more valuable and permissible in the ritual system than others. The ethnography demonstrates how femininity is a more accessible ritual category than masculinity, contributing to the prominence of the “effeminate male” figure in the family of saints. However, full expressions of gender non-conformity are restricted by biological understandings of sex, marginalizing masculine cisgender women, as well as transgender and travesti initiates. By revisiting the histories and contemporary roles of the Candomblé priestesses—the Mothers—in Brazil, the dissertation documents how select priestesses seek recognition from the state as official Afro-Brazilian “heritage,” for the stakes of financial resources and land titles. The state’s recognition of Candomblé as cultural heritage has mostly been contingent on the presence of Black female leadership, widely considered as a crucial “African” contribution to social organization in Brazil. The problem is that cultural heritage policies directed towards the Candomblé temples draw from tropes of Black women as key cultural figures without addressing structural inequalities, religious racism or the legacies of state persecution that continually affect Candomblé communities.PHDAnthropology and HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163114/1/ajamie_1.pd

The Development of Yoruba Candomble Communities in Salvador, Bahia, 1835–1986. Miguel C. Alonso, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 200 pp.

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146627/1/jlca12371_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146627/2/jlca12371.pd

Time-dependent Robin boundary conditions in the dynamical Casimir effect

Motivated by experiments in which moving boundaries are simulated by time-dependent properties of static systems, we discuss the model of a massless scalar field submitted to a time-dependent Robin boundary condition (BC) at a static mirror in 1+1 dimensions. Using a perturbative approach, we compute the spectral distribution of the created particles and the total particle creation rate, considering a thermal state as the initial field state.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. To appear in proceedings of Conference on Quantum Field Theory under the Influence of External Condition

Effect of simultaneous inoculation of commercial yeast starter cultures on Kombucha fermentation

Kombucha – a spontaneously fermented tea beverage, produced by SCOBY (a symbiont of bacteria and yeasts), has become popular in recent years. Its functional properties and features for industrial production and treatment remain largely unknown, however. Our aim of using additional yeast cultures during the primary fermentation was to modify and ultimately improve the sensory properties of the kombucha beverage. During five fermentation experiments the total viable count (TVC) of microbes was determined both in Kombucha and SCOBY samples. The first four fermentation experiments were conducted to stabilize the growth of SCOBYs that were initially of different origin. The last (5th) fermentation contained the simultaneous inoculation of three different active S. cerevisiae cultures into the sweetened black tea together with the SCOBY and was followed by a sensory analysis. Two samples remained as control samples without additional yeast starter culture. The yeast starter cultures affected the microbial counts of Kombucha, but the effect on the microbial count of SCOBY was not statistically significant (p >0.05). The Kombucha containing wine yeast culture had the lowest sensory quality, while Kombucha containing brewer's yeast had the most pleasant flavour and aroma. In conclusion, the simultaneous fermentation with commercial yeast cultures had a minor effect on the microbial counts in SCOBY when compared to the fermentation time, but all added cultures clearly modified the taste and aroma properties of the Kombucha drinks