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Cosmology, Music, and Identity in the Andes View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cara Schreffler
Music has long been one of the ways people signal their beliefs, identity, and culture. In the public sphere, music can serve to maintain a people’s religious and cultural practices despite the pressures that incur societal change: environment, colonialism, diasporic movement, economics, the introduction of other religions, and so forth. Through the continual performance of particular, specific musics in their appropriate ritual and spiritual settings, the Quechua, Aymara, and Chipaya peoples of Peru’s Altiplano region have retained much of their pre-Columbian cosmology and identity. The foundational concept of indigenous Andean cosmology is the idea of duality– more specifically, a gendered duality– and many of those dualities are represented in musical aspects of Andean cultures, including melodic structure, musical instruments, performance practice, and music’s role in public festivals and daily life. Many of those beliefs are expressed through and adapted to modern Christianity and social systems, as Andean indigenous religious practices were incorporated into Catholic ritual and expression. The syncretic nature of both Andean religious practice and music performance has helped the indigenous peoples to maintain their dualistic worldview and, by extension, their cultural identity.
Civil Religion and Nationalism: A Godly-Civil Continuum View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eyal Lewin
This study defines religion and then shows how the operative definitions are just as relevant to other phenomena such as patriotism and nationalism. To a certain measure when examining nationalism and religion, we are dealing with variations of similar occurrences, strongly intertwined with each other. This paper takes the task of solidly framing the concept of civil religion by presenting a general model that puts into one cohesive context civil religion and traditional one. The new paradigm suggested in this research is that the relations between traditional religion and civil religion are merely a representation of a struggle many centuries long between godly authorities and civil authorities. Hence, the two forms of religion never occur in the form of a dichotomy; rather, there is a continuum stretching between two poles, with states and nations falling along a range, some of them closer to the extreme traditional religion end of the scale and others located near the opposite extremity of the civil religion.
Will There Be Races in Heaven?: Identify and the Afterlife View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nathan Placencia
Drawing on work in the Philosophy of Race, this paper argues that the existence of races in heaven is either incompatible or only questionably compatible with the mainstream Christian view of the afterlife. However, it also argues that there is a phenomenon adjacent and related to race that can exist in the afterlife, namely racial identity. If one thinks of racial identity as a kind of practical identity, it turns out that racial identity is primarily psychological. Thus, its existence in heaven is compatible with the mainstream Christian view that people with some semblance of human psychology continue on after death. Furthermore, the paper offers reasons to think that we will need racial identities in the afterlife to facilitate forgiveness and reconciliation. Finally, it suggests that preserving racial identities from this life to the next is, on balance, preferable.
