Register for a CSMC workshop
Inscribing Initiation: Written Artefacts in Rites of Passage
When: Thursday, 19 January 2023, 6:00 pm – Saturday, 21 January 2023, 1:15 pm CET
Where: Warburgstraße 26, 20354 Hamburg, Room 0001 (Pavilion), and online
Nearly all cultures of the world, both contemporary and now defunct ancient, know initiatory acts by which a person's transition to another social, religious, or political status or standing is ritually expressed and exploited. As a rule, these rituals regularly consist of a combination of acts of speech and signs. Additionally, these acts often involved objects that were necessary to bring about or to guarantee the agency and efficacy of the ritual, or even to record the new status of the person on whom the act is performed. Often these artefacts operate with writing, either by writing something down on or with them, or by bearing writing characters themselves. In the context of the first group of objects fall, for example, documents like the certificate of a monastic profession, which is signed on the main altar of the monastery church during the ritual, but also matriculation books, in which the name and matriculation number of the newly admitted student are entered during the matriculation. While the written form in these cases has more of a documentary function, inscriptions on other objects, such as on Jewish circumcision knives and blankets, sometimes also on baptismal fonts, as well as on oil ampoules associated with Christian ordination ceremonies, have an interpretive function, as they provide information about the content of the (liturgical) act through the inscriptions (and images) attached to them. In some rituals, the affixing of characters or inscriptions is itself part of the performance of the ritual. On the one hand, this refers, for example, to the Egyptian consecration of kings, in whose course characters are affixed to the hand of the pharaoh and then licked off and almost physically absorbed by him. On the other hand, at the beginning of the consecration of churches in the Middle Ages, for example, the Latin and Greek alphabets were inscribed by the bishop with his staff into a heap of ashes on the floor of the church to be consecrated.
The conference will explore the phenomenon of writing and inscription in initiation rituals in a broad cultural-historical context. In doing so, such rites of passage will be analysed from an intercultural, comparative, and interdisciplinary perspective beyond Europe. Especially the objects used in this context will be examined, whether they are documents recording the new status of the person or inscribed objects used in the context of the ritual. Here, the double character of the word ‘inscribe’ will be explicitly assumed, which recurs both to the inscriptions on or with the artefacts and to the inscription as a kind of certification and perpetuation. A particular interest is the materiality of the objects used or possibly produced in the context of the ritual or ceremony, which is often constitutive for the success and completion of the initiation ritual.
Workshop Organiser