Workshop„Media, Material, and Visual Components of Contemporary American Religious Erlebniswelten“

The conference has a tiered registration fee:

• the fee for graduate students will be:
  • 35 EUR if paid by August 1, 2012
  • 40 EUR paid at registration
• The fee for undergraduate students will be:
  • 30 EUR if paid by August 1, 2012
  • 35 EUR paid at registration

Qualified students may be eligible to apply for a fee waiver.
Contact: Sebastian Emling, M.A. (sebastian.emling@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de)

Kathryn Lofton

“Spiritless Space: A Religious History of the Office Cubicle”

In December 2009, Rich Sheridan, CEO of the Ann Arbor, MI software firm Menlo Innovations posted a blog entry to his company's site declaring that office cubicles “kill.” He wrote that cubicles “kill morale, communication, productivity, creativity, teamwork, camaraderie, energy, spirit, and results.” When AnnArbor.com ran an article about his post under the title “Death to Cubicles,” many replied, including its famed mother company. After a skirmish of posts and angry disagreement by critics and connoisseurs, Herman Miller waded into the fray, posting to their own web site a compassionate commiseration with Sheridan, as well as a reasoned reiteration of their own marketing clarity. “For us, the best places to work give people a choice of where to work and how to work-if wide-open spaces suit the kind of work you do, go for them.” This product was-and is-about choice, Herman Milller reminds its buyers. “People will always need privacy, and organizations around the world have found the good old cubicle a wonderful way to organize heads-down work and minimize distractions.”

In the annals of modern design, it is difficult to imagine a more spiritless object than that of the office cubicle. And yet it is to this object that this research will turn, focusing on the ambition of its designer, Robert Propst, and the aesthetic of its producer, Herman Miller, to consider the ideology behind this pervasive sensory experience. Starting in the 1930s under the direction of Gilbert Rohde, Herman Miller mass produced modernism through furniture designed for living rooms and offices. “Modern design...is of our day and our spirit. It arises because there is a need for it,” explained a 1934 catalog. “Modern design seeks to combine...comfort and utility to provide us with furniture that is suited to our living needs and as always, satisfying our sense of the beautiful.” When George Nelson took over as head of Herman Miller design, the research offices focused on reimagining the organization and circulation of information in professional contexts. Propst described the workplace as a place where “workers performed meaningless, cog-turning activities where they had only to execute tasks.” The Action Office emerged from an ambition to counter this meaninglessness with private order and communal spacing. In 1968, Propst modified the original 1964 design for the Action Office to make its components mobile so that everything might be remade. Propst insists that the purpose of the design was to encourage mutability and creativity. “The Action Office was supposed to be invisible and embellished with identity and communication artifacts and whatever you needed to create individuation,” Propst later remarked. “We tried to escape the idea of being stylish, which is gone in five years. We wanted this to be the vehicle to carry other expressions of identity.”

Three intertwined chords of investigation will guide this study. First, how does this design emerge from a specific cultural context of the American 1960s? Second, how does the relationship between spirituality and modernism affect the designs of Herman Miler? And, finally, how does the prescription of creativity and individuality connect to the longer religious history of commodities? Here, finally, I will consider not only the spiritual intonations of the inventors and producers about their utopian product, but also the ritual formats through which commodities develop their ubiquity.

Omri Elisha

“Giving in a Material World: Charitable Gifts, Spiritual Mediations, and the Trouble with Materiality in American Evangelicalism”

My paper explores how problems of mediation and materiality inform the religious lives of evangelical Protestants, and how U.S. evangelicals in particular wrestle with these issues in their efforts to promote the gospel through ministries of evangelism. Building on ethnographic fieldwork, I consider the example of Christian charity, a morally and politically loaded area of ministry in the evangelical subculture, with an eye toward understanding how material gifts and services come to be seen as endowed with redemptive powers (i.e., the "fruits" of divine grace), despite iconoclastic and antimaterialist overtones in evangelical theology. The paper argues that some of the ethical challenges faced by American evangelicals in relation to charitable giving reflect, in part, larger ambiguities about the spiritual and moral significance of material objects themselves. I suggest further that these ambiguities are linked to a general tendency to regard materiality and material wealth in simultaneously positive and negative terms, a tendency that is deeply rooted in American religious, economic, and cultural history.

Kelly J. Baker

“‘The horror! The horror!’: Abject Objects and the Study of American Religions”

Klan robes and hoods, burning crosses, end-times websites, „rapture practice,” prophecy books, zombies and zombie-destroying weaponry might appear unrelated cobbled together as a list, but all appear in my research as artifacts of religious life in America. While it might appear strange or disconcerting to include all of these objects in the study of religion, I would argue that each of these artifacts appear as the material manifestations of the religious life of many Americans. Why do these objects and their evidentiary traces need to be studied in religious studies, particularly American Religious studies? How are they relevant, much less religious? What is to be gained by analyzing objects of the so-called fringes from white supremacy to dispensational pre-millennialism to cinematic and literary monsters? How does the addition of hateful artifacts, embodied rapture theologies, and zombies contribute to scholarly understandings of „religion” in American life? This paper addresses a problem for the study of American religions, which is that some objects prove to be „proper” religion, ripe for study, while others are not. This assumed propriety has consequences for both the study of material religion and religion in Americal life. Claims of illegitimacy and inauthencity function to limit what counts as „religious“ and what does not. This paper, then, problematizes these limits by exploring what we might gain in the study of abject objects from Klan robes to zombies. Judgments about suitable studies emerge in both the hesitance to engage some objects as well as in the reticence to discuss the scholar's often unstated relationship to her evidence.

Registration

Sebastian Emling, M.A. 
Institut für Religionswissenschaft 
Akademie Straße 4–8 
69117 Heidelberg 

sebastian.emling@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de

Venue

Heidelberg Center for American Studies 
Curt und Heidemarie Engelhorn Palais 
Hauptstraße 120 
69117 Heidelberg