PROGRAMME AND ABSTRACTS - Università degli Studi di Messina

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literature, civil history and ecclesiastical history. He oversaw the compilation of the
Enciclopedia Italiana, he was author of a Storia della Compagnia di Gesù, some writings on the
Jesuits and especially he conceived and executed the project of a Storia delle Religioni. The
five editions of this Storia, published between 1934 and 1954, are closely linked to the birth
and the forms which the discipline History of Religion assumed in Italy in those years.
Tuula Sakaranaho, University of Helsinki, Finland
Religion and Collective Memory. Rhetorical Viewpoints
Wed 16 th , 16.00, Classroom 9
In the study of religions , one of the main challenges is to describe what is distinctive to a
religious tradition but also to show how religious traditions also overlap. In this paper I will
focus on the first named question and will propose an approach by which to elicit from world
religions the main poinst of reference by which they can be set apart from each other. I will do
this by utilising the theories of religion and collective memory developed in French sociology
by Maurice Halbwachs and Daniele Hervieu~Leger. The keyterm in these theories is
recollection, which will be conceptualised here as a rhetorical process.
Carles Salazar, University of Lleida, Spain
Tue 15 th , 15.00, Classroom 5
Cognition, Evolution and Symbolism: New and Old Approaches to the Anthropology of
Religion
Traditional anthropological analysis of religious symbolism has been recently challeged by
cognitive and evolutinary approaches. The need to see religious phenomena within a wider
theoretical framework which can relate the cultural to the natural sciences explains the success
of these new perspectives. Yet there are some outstanding themes in the analysis of religious
experience that have been blatantly disregarded by cognitive and evolutionary scholars.
Prominent among this is the question of meaning and intentionality in the constitution of the
religious. The purpose of this paper is to tackle this issue and to explore ways in which
intentionality and meaning can be analysed within a cognitve-evolutionary theoretical
framework. The nub of the argument to be developed is that religion should be seen as a byproduct
(spandrel) of evolved cognitive structures without being reducible to them. From this
perspective, the so-called problem of meaning of religious experience consists in grasping its
hybrid constitution, biological and cultural simultaneously, thus it should be located at the
cross-roads between different, incommensurable but complementary theories of culture.
Marco Antonio Santamaría, Universidad de Salamanca, Spain
Orfismo y mundo helenístico
Wed 16 th , 17.40, Classroom 13
En la época helenística la cultura griega sobrepasa el marco de referencia de la polis y se hace
común a grandes extensiones territoriales. Esto incide en la práctica religiosa, ya que se busca
en ella la seguridad y la salvación personal frente a las nuevas dimensiones de la existencia.
Los cultos mistéricos, y entre ellos el orfismo, experimentan importantes desarrollos. En este
período se componen obras importantes de la literatura órfica, como las Rapsodias, un
compendio ampliado de antiguas teogonías, o la Teogonía de Jerónimo y Helanico, en la que se