Body and Religion

Annual theme 2024/2025 of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics”

In the world’s religions, the body is both an object and an expression of religious ideas. This is the issue that the Cluster of Excellence is exploring in the 2024/2025 annual theme “Body and Religion”. Whether healing and purification rituals, asceticism and fasting, head coverings and tattoos, or practices on the dead body – religious ideas about people, gods, and the worlds beyond are reflected in how people have treated the human body across epochs and cultures. The lines of tradition stretch from ancient polytheistic religions to today’s interpretations of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The annual theme presents the Cluster of Excellence’s current research on “Body and Religion” in an exhibition and an extensive programme of events that allow researchers and the general public to come together for discussion.

Body. Cult. Religion: Perspectives from antiquity to the present

Exhibition at the Archaeological Museum and the Bible Museum of the University of Münster in the Cluster of Excellence’s “Body and Religion” annual theme

At the centre of the annual theme is the exhibition “Body. Cult. Religion: Perspectives from antiquity to the present”, which can be seen at the Archaeological Museum and the Bible Museum of the University of Münster from 25 October 2024 to 26 February 2025. It explores how religious practices and traditions shape and influence the human body.

Programme of events for the exhibition

The Cluster of Excellence’s 2024/25 annual theme “Body and Religion” features an exhibition that is accompanied by a diverse programme of events that offer the general public insights into the diverse relationships between the body and its conceptions in past and present religious ideas. The programme includes panel discussions, lectures and films, guided tours of the exhibition with the curators, as well as the opportunity to “walk and talk”. Visitors are invited to think about and discuss the themes of the exhibition and its presentation in the museum, as well as to reflect on current issues relating to the body, health and spirituality, and religious clothing in public spaces.

Podiums and lectures

Two panel discussions deal with religious experience in the field of tension between spirituality and biology, and the role of clothing in the staging and control of the body in various religions worldwide. One lecture deals with the “auto-icon” of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, whose mummified body is still on public display today, as well as with the ideas behind the preservation of one’s own body beyond death.

Lecture and reading series: Aesthetic conceptions of the body between religion and politics

Conceptions of the human body are not naturally given; rather, they are historical, social and cultural constructs. Religious rituals and ideas, legal and political regulations, medical rules and hygienic practices – these shape the body through language, image and power. In literature and the visual arts, the exposed body manifests the often conflict-ridden or violent interplay between individual and society – be it in the form of martyred and sacralized bodies, in deformed or beautiful, flawless bodies.

Hans Blumenberg Professorship: Deborah Kapchan

The Hans Blumenberg Professorship will also explore the relationship between the body and religion. The anthropologist and Professor of Performance Studies, Deborah Kapchan, from New York University Tisch School of the Arts will be a guest in Münster in the 2025 summer term. Her English-language lecture entitled “Face to Face with the Spirits: Paradox and the Anthropology of the Esoteric” will talk about her research on rituals of spirit possession in Morocco.