Taxonomy, Differentiation Processes and Metaphor in the History of Knowledge, including Religion
CERES-Palais, Raum "Ruhrpott" (4.13)
The workshop is organized by the Collaborative Research Centre 1475 (CRC 1475), and the international Multilingualism Research Group (Vienna / Oslo / Rome), represented by its speaker Velizar Sadovski and a number of its founding members and partners from Norway, Great Britain, Italy, and Switzerland.
The Center for Religious Studies (CERES) where parts of the CRC are located, and the Multilingualism Research Group (MRG) share a series of research interests. The key topics “Multilingualism” and “Listenwissenschaften”, represented in several MRG conferences between 2008 and 2024, bring additional inputs to the research themes: cognitive aspects of the relation between language and social experience; lexical and terminological differentiation and the history of knowledge; religious experience and social pragmatics in the context of ancient societies; relevance of linguistic forms of expression for the questions of social message, institutional communication and “invention of traditions” within a specific socio-political system, e.g. in the dialectic conditions of a multilingual state; social dimensions of literary genres; ways of addressing the use and misuse of languages for establishing group identities, focussing on antagonistic social groups on various levels of a society, etc.
Within this research framework, the workshop, “Taxonomy, Differentiation Processes and Metaphor in the History of Knowledge, including Religion” is designed to foster dialogue among scholars of religion and philologists. The workshop invites exploration of various captivating topics, including differentiation processes, metaphors, and taxonomies.
The keyword “differentiation” refers to the fact that, with increasing complexity, societies begin to differentiate themselves internally according to spheres such as politics, law, economics, medicine, art, and religion, each of which fulfills a specific societal function. This process ends in the modern, functionally differentiated society, but already began in the early societies of antiquity. The differentiation process finds its linguistic expression in corresponding text documents, so that the respective societal structure can be inferred from them. In this way, philology, historical linguistics, and sociology can cooperate.
Welcome Address
Volkhard Krech and Velizar Sadovski
10:15–11:00
Philology, Conceptual Metaphors, and Comparative Study of
Religion: an Introduction to CRC 1475 Metaphors of Religion
Kianoosh Rezania
11:00–11:30
Coffee Break
Session 1: Taxonomies and Poetic Catalogues
11:30–12:15
Taxonomies and Poetic Catalogues in the Oldest Indo-Iranian
Religious Texts
Velizar Sadovski
12:15–13:00
Taxonomies of the Macro- and the Microcosm in the Poetic
Catalogues of Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days
Athanasios Vergados
13:00–14:30
Lunch Break
Session 2: Metaphor and Ritual
14:30–15:15
Metaphorization of the Bovine Sound in Ancient Vedic Culture
Between Poetry and Ritual
Paola M. Rossi
15:15–16:00
How to Metaphorize Devotion: Meter, Poetry and Dance in
Sanskrit and Hindu Tradition
Domenico Muscianisi
16:00–16:30
Coffee Break
Session 3: Metaphors and Cosmogonies, Cosmologies, and Eschatologies
16:30–17:15
Transcending the Boundaries of the Immanent World in Early
Mesopotamia: Making the Intangible Tangible
Gebhard Selz
17:15–18:00
Metaphors in the Koran: The Role of Figurative Language in the
Composition and Redaction of Islam‘s Holy Book
Amund B. Haave
from 18:30
Dinner
Friday, 27 June
Session 3: Metaphors and Cosmogonies, Cosmologies, and Eschatologies (cont.)
09:30–10:15
Metaphors of Creation in the Slavonic Apocalypse of Enoch
(2 Enoch)
Florentina Badalanova Geller
Session 4: Differentiation Process and Evolving Metaphors
10:15–11:00
When is a Metaphor Not a Metaphor?
Mark J. Geller
11:00–11:30
Coffee Break
11:30–12:15
Religion Within Differentiation Processes of Ancient Societies.
Syntactic, Pragmatic, and Semantic Aspects from a Sociological
Perspective
Volkhard Krech
