This panel addresses religion’s place in the politics of making memories and how memories shape religious communities and practices. One paper interrogates twentieth-century U.S. civil rights activist Rev. Dr. Murray’s use of memory in forming political and religious activism. A second paper examines the textual, ritual, and material practices of making and remaking the memory of a miracle in Coptic texts from the tenth through eighteenth centuries. A third considers how a guru’s devotees make his memory at his samadhi (burial site) through kinesthetic processes, spatial texts, and material relics. Together, these papers explore the dynamic and contested politics and practices of religious memories.
In January 2024, the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray had her/their visage minted to the back of a US quarter. This act is only the latest, high-profile piece of memory work around Murray, once a little-known civil and women’s rights lawyer, activist, and priest. Much of the discourse surrounding this upswell of memory is suffused with future-oriented, colonial language that frames Murray as a “trailblazer” and “pioneer” who was “ahead of her/their time.” The author contends this framing conceals as much as it reveals. Specifically, it obscures how crucial the past was to Murray and her/their activism. In conversation with Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman, and Anne Karpf, the author contests this concealing rhetoric by analyzing the key role history and memory played in Murray’s legal and religious activism and in her/their survival in a white supremacist, heteronormative society as revealed in her/their family memoir _Proud Shoes_.
Coptic hagiographical texts from Islamic Egypt record a curious miracle—Christians prayed for a mountain to move, and it did! The earliest account comes from the tenth century and the accounts continued expanding until the 18th century, gaining more fantastical elements in the meantime. Over time, it entered the liturgical calendar, ritual fasts, and sacred geography, thus ensuring its embeddedness in Coptic cultural memory until today. In this paper, I argue that the development of this narrative over time—textually, ritually, and materially—was a function of the politics of religious memory. Using the theories of Jan Assman and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, I trace the role of politics in the formation, preservation, and transformation of this narrative as it developed and became embedded in Coptic cultural memory.
This paper draws on ongoing ethnographic research on the samadhi or burial site of Rupa Goswami (1489-1564), a venerated saint belonging to the 16th-century Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. It uses observation, interviews, photos, and video to provide a first-hand account of memory-making practices performed by devotees. Three modes of remembrance will be explored: kinesthetic, narrative, and material relics. The paper will seek to argue that a generative link exists between memory and place using the theoretical principles of memoryscape and place-memory drawn from the emerging fields of memory and landscape studies. The significance of this paper lies in advancing the field of samadhi studies and growing our understanding of how guru-centered ritual practices are captured in architectural settings.
| Rachel Gross | rbgross@sfsu.edu | View |