Spirits and Symbols
The Biblical Snake in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context: The Symbol of Evil, Good Fortune or the Divine View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Deborah Gruber
The serpent or snake makes an early appearance in the book of Genesis as a symbol of evil, but its appearance throughout the biblical saga constantly changes from a symbol of mischief to one of magic, female fertility and even of the Divine feminine itself. This paper examines the snake in both its biblical and Ancient Near Eastern context with the goal of reassessing and reanalyzing the symbol and role of the snake in its biblical setting.
Spirits and Social Agency View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sanaa Riaz
Spirits occupy a world that simultaneously dwells between the divine and the earthly binary, while speaking to all forces of nature, marginality and extremity in between. A discussion on spirits requires examining the rituals and mediational forces and their performance that allow participants to tackle adversity, voicelessness in the face of colonial oppression, and political, social and economic anxiety and uncertainty. The paper links the conceptualizations, interactions with and experience of spiritual beings in relation to the concept of Self and social agency, in turn defined as a continuum of cooperation leaving those involved with an enhanced or diminished perception of self-agency. It is important to include the pre-colonial repertoire and syncretic imaginations of the spirit, such as their conceptualization in unison with sorcery and spirit possession as central to voodoo practices, neither of which were promoted by the Abrahamic religions during Western colonization, particularly in Africa. Equally important is to subscribe to the power of ritual during rites of passage and examine the interplay between the spectators’ and the performers’ in today’s virtual manifestations. A ritual not witnessed is a ritual not experienced. The streaming broadcasts of spirit possessions and performances in the social media global cosmos present human catharsis, embodied and transformed in and off-screen through ritual. The paper highlights how foundational elaborations on the nature of the spirit inform their transformative power in digital manifestations and possessions to negotiate agency in the digital era.
Religious Freedom as Understood by the UAE and the New Alliance of Virtue: A Conceptual and Historical Analysis
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session C Donald Smedley
In the United Arab Emirates through the work of Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah and the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies (now the Abu Dhabi Forum for Peace), the concept of religious freedom, as presented, has gone through several iterations, at times conflicting, from the Marrakesh Declaration through the Washington Declaration to its present form in the New Alliance of Virtue. In this paper, I argue that the chronology of these conceptual changes, which seem to include at times equivocation and ambiguity, result from successive shifts in meaning. Included in the analysis is the broader context of Shaykh bin Bayyah’s work as well as the related policy by the UAE with its emphasis on tolerance. From this examination, I conclude that the present understanding of religious freedom as offered by the New Alliance of Virtue is an unresolved equivocation that leads either to simple incoherence or to a reduction of the argument of their claim for religious freedom. In response, I offer a possible resolution to this dilemma.
