Jenny Ponzo

In this volume, some of the most reputed scholars in the fields of religious studies and semiotics propose contributions on a crucial and cross-cultural issue: in what ways do religions conceive the contact with the sacred, through what paradigms of mediation or immediacy? The publication explores the nuances, subtleties, and contradictions of this dialectics, through essays that bear on several religious cultures and historical epochs.

Religion, like any other domain of culture, is mediated through symbolic forms and communicative behaviors, which allow the coordination of group conduct in ritual and the representation of the divine or of tradition as an intersubjective reality. While many traditions hold out the promise of immediate access to the divine, or to some transcendent dimension of experience, such promises depend for their realization as well on the possibility of mediation. Traditions that imagine a separation between a transcendent dimension and an immanent one are nevertheless bound to posit channels of communication and exchange between these two dimensions, as in the case of sacrifice as theorized long ago by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss (Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, 1899). A semiotic approach to the understanding of these dynamics is therefore necessary even and especially when mediation is denied by a tradition in the name of the “ineffability” of the deity or of mystical experience.

Exchange between immanence and transcendence involves signs, which are codified into hieratic languages, sacred texts, and liturgical performances. Such codification entails a dialectical movement between the desire for immediacy and the longing for mediation; this desire is never static, but dynamic and tensive, being expressed in a successive attraction to one or the other pole. On the one hand, many if not most religious cultures represent places and moments where the barrier between immanence and transcendence is suddenly abolished, thus allowing immediate and unmediated contact between them; mystical rapture is the epitome of this. On the other hand, religious cultures tend to restructure spiritual immediacy into ritualized formulas, which are not exceptional any longer to the extent that they can be shared by a community and handed down by a tradition.

The dialectic between these two tendencies is not always peaceful. On the contrary, several religious conflicts might be explained as resulting from such a dichotomy and the consequent tension. Stanley Tambiah’s concept of “ritual involution” was an attempt to formulate this process in terms close to the concerns of semiotics (“A Performative Approach to Ritual,” 1978). Tambiah focused on the contribution of the formalization of communication to ritual performance, but left the explanation of revolts against formalism as a desideratum for the study of religion. The dialectic between mediation and immediacy provides a useful shift of perspective on this problem, as ritual involution can in many cases be interpreted as resulting from an insistence on immediacy.

The growing recognition of the importance of mediation is signaled by several recent developments, including: the rise of the subfields of material religion and the aesthetics of religion, the latter especially in German-language traditions of religious studies; the special issue of Signs and Society 2, No. S1 (2014), “Representing Transcendence”; the Social Science Research Council (U.S.) project on “New Directions in the Study of Prayer”; and the emphasis on the importance of “semiotic ideologies,” particularly in understanding processes of modernization in Europe and its colonies, where the idea of a distant or inaccessible deity among certain Protestant groups contributed to the dislocation of older structures of mediation and articulated with new imaginations of spontaneity and immediacy. 

The symposium will promote interdisciplinary and cross-cultural reflection on the semiotic nature of such patterns and ideologies of religious communication and their historical transformations. Various religious cultures will be considered, as well as the relation between the dialectics immediacy/mediation in religion and the same dialectics as it finds expression in the “secular” world (crisis of political mediation, utopias of information without professional media, projects of non-hierarchical construction of knowledge, and other 2.0 trends).

The proceedings of the conference will be published.

This issue of “Lexia” will study the codification of martyrdom in the modern and contemporary era, from a semiotic and historiographic perspective.
The notion of martyrdom, as we generally mean it today, has been codified within Christian religious thought. Augustine (De civitate Dei) defines the martyr as a witness to the true faith. Lambertini, who wrote a fundamental treatise for the codification of sanctity (De servorum Dei Canonizatione et Beatorum Canonizatione, book III, ch. 11), underlines that martyrdom entails “willingly bearing or tolerating death for the faith in Christ […]. In fact, two persons must intervene in martyrdom; that is, the persecutor or tyrant must absolutely be a person distinct from the martyr, since, on the one hand, the persecutor or tyrant must inflict the punishment and, on the other hand, the martyr must suffer it”.
Whereas the notion of martyrdom mainly developed within Catholicism, it has assumed a much wider scope within Western culture and is now employed with a multiplicity of connotations in different socio-cultural contexts. Therefore, this issue of “Lexia” aims at exploring the plurality of both religious and non-religious meanings related to martyrdom, as well as the figure of the martyr as a thematic role set within well-defined narrative programs.