This emphasis channels research on religion(s) in both a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Scholarship in this area focuses on religious practices and the history of religion, as well as discourses within and on religions. The individual fields of research were developed in long-term projects with national and international visibility. Distinguished research centers and colleges (ZAR, IKGF) organize the fields’ interdisciplinary networks and cooperation within the faculty and beyond. Moreover, elite programs such as the successfully established master’s program “Ethics of Text Cultures” and the new degree in “Standards of Decision-Making across Cultures” further support the research emphasis’s interdisciplinary focus. Scholarship in this area is distinguished by research across religious and disciplinary boundaries: approaches in cultural studies, philology, and historiography are aligned to engage in fruitful discussions on diverse practices and discourses in different religions and in various historical and cultural contexts. Although the religious character of practices, objects, spaces, persons, and discourses has been and is being repeatedly attested, it is also possible to attest that religion rarely has been clearly defined. It is necessary to negotiate time and again what can be referred to as “religious.” Therefore, of importance are particularly questions regarding how orders, convictions, and practices attained a religious connotation. This can be researched both transculturally and transregionally. However, the research focus does not merely aim to develop a closed-off systematicity of how the religious is constructed. It promotes and interweaves individual research projects that analyze how that which is understood as “religion” transformed and was negotiated within its concrete historical contexts. To achieve this, the research focus provides a scholarly platform where diverse projects can be interwoven to stimulate interdisciplinary synergy. “Religion as Practice and Discourse” is a product of several joint research projects, such as the Research Unit “Sacrality,” and, since 2011, the Central Institute of the Anthropology of Religion(s) (ZAR). This is accompanied by intense discussion on possibly innovative thematic emphases regarding future joint research projects:
Knowledge – Temporality – Cultural Comparison
Concepts of Boundaries in the Middle East
Cultural Difference and Transcontinental Connectivity in Antiquity