Towards a Theory of the Modern Religious Bookshelf

Organised by Christian Meyer (Freie Universität Berlin/EXC 2020), project The Invention of the Modern Religious Bookshelf: Canons, Concepts and Communities (2022-), Research Area 3: “Future Perfect”.

The workshop will bring together an array of experts from fields such as literary, religious, area studies, history and more, in order to advance the theorisation of the Modern Religious Bookshelf. The workshop hereby builds upon the previous work done by the team under the lead of Prof. Christian Meyer. Methodologically, the project is based on discourse and dispositif analysis, with a particular focus on the book industry (book printing and distribution as well as libraries) and their role in the (re)production of knowledge. It also draws on the expertise of library science, the history of knowledge and the sociology of knowledge. Central to our theorisation of the modern religious bookshelf is the Actor-network theory (ANT) developed by Bruno Latour and others. The book as the ‘immutable mobile’ par excellence is gathered with other books in bookshelves functioning as a panopticon. Moreover, its surrounding infrastructures and networks (including libraries, bookstores, but also distribution systems, and various kinds of actors etc.) are seen by us as integral to the formation of knowledge systems. Likewise, literary practices such as writing, reading, publishing, editing, serialising, collecting, canonising, cataloguing, classifying, censoring, shelving, re- and de-shelving are understood as constitutive to the modern religious bookshelf and are our focus.

Guiding questions:

• How, under which global and local conditions and through which channels of transfer has a global religious canon been formed since the 19th century, which can be found in libraries and bookstores, among other places?
• What kind of economic and imperial conditions facilitated this emergence of the modern religious bookshelf?
• Where were these bookshelves created (e.g. the British Library etc.)?
• Who were and are the local communities, translocal and global networks behind the new canon (in its local variants)?
• Who were or are the relevant institutions or agents such as book publishers, libraries and bookstores, academic and other (religious) authors, translators, or readers in creating the Religious Bookshelf and their networks?
• To what extent was (and is) the new “global canon” of the Religious Bookshelf actually the same everywhere, or how much did or does it differ due to local discursive events, legal and social restrictions (taboos, censorship) or other conditions?
• How has it also changed in time through changing receptive milieus and communities? How are systems of book display (“shelving”) practiced locally in the case of religious literatures in comparison? How can these practices be interpreted?
• What definitions of religion were used when compiling the modern religious bookshelf? What religious and political debates surrounded the emergence of these shelves?
• How, using which arguments or strategies (or to what extent), was the claim to represent the religion(s) of humankind contested by groups that emphasised the locally-culturally specific characteristics of their particular religion?
• How do the new religious canons relate to particular ‘local pasts’, transforming them, and often envision a common global future? What kind of alternative modernities are anticipated by them?

Preliminary Programme:

October 24 (14:00-18:00)

Welcome (Christian Meyer)

First Panel: Introduction and Theoretical Foundations of the MRB

Christian Meyer & Anton Terhechte: Introduction to the Modern Religious Bookshelf Project

Coffee Break

Angus Nicholls: The Literary Bookshelf and the Religious Bookshelf: Observations on Secularisation and Canon Formation in Oxford Circa 1870-1910.

Sebastian Lecourt: World Religions and World Literature: The Case of the Anthology

Dinner 18:00

October 25 (09:00-18:00)

Second Panel: Early Genealogies of the MRB and Christian Missions

Katja Triplett: Early Jesuit “bookshelves” in the global Catholic mission

Jade Werner: The Missionary Gleaner’s Bookshelf: Evangelical Print and the Formation of Nineteenth-Century World Literature

Coffee Break

Sulthana Nasrin: Making a Protestant Bookshelf: Agents, Materials and Reading Practices in Nineteenth-Century South India

Third Panel: Forming the Religious Bookshelf as Infrastructure

Arie Molendijk: ‘On us a new light has come’. Friedrich Max Müller’s Bookshelf of Comparative Religious Literature

Lunch 13:00

Alexander Bubb: “My shelf of Eastern Books”: Asian Religious Texts and the Victorian Household

Coffee Break

Laurent Mignon: Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s “Tarih-i Edyan” (History of Religions, 1911): An Ottoman Turkish Contribution to the Modern Relgious Bookshelf?

Florian Zenmin: (Beyond?) Islam as the Standard of Comparison? Religious Studies in Arab Universities

Dinner 18:00

October 26 (09:00-13:00)

Fourth Panel: Formations and Practices of the Modern Religious Bookshelf in the 20^th and 21^st Century

Ionut Bancila: The Bookshelf of the young Mircea Eliade: an early Canon for the History of Religions in Inter-War Romania

Karina Jarzynska: The “Bibliotheca Mundi” Series and its Agents, or the Construction of a Transcultural Canon in the Polish People’S Republic

Coffee Break

Anton Terhechte: The Chinese Bookshelf of Islam: A World Religion’s Place in Modern China’s Literary Landscape

Concluding Discussion

Final Lunch (13:00-14:00) & Departure

Further updates will follow soon.

Freie Universität Berlin
EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities”
Otto-von-Simson-Straße 15
14195 Berlin