SCRIPT encourages new scholarship on iconic and performative texts. Our goal is to foster academic discourse about the social functions of books and texts that exceed their semantic meaning and interpretation, such as their display as cultural artifacts, their ritual use in religious and political ceremonies, their performance by recitation and theater, and their depiction in art.
This paper investigates how scriptures are accepted and appropriated by religious people in Korea and demonstrates how sacred status of scriptures are attained and their power is exercised. Examples of Korean religions, including Protestantism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Donghak, and Shamanism turned out to be very useful to show how the performative dimension of scriptures is usually inseparably related to their iconic status and how scriptures are ritualized and performed. These religions of Korea can amply show that the iconic and performative dimensions of scriptures are generally witnessed in any religion that recognizes scriptures. These religions will also show that how the three dimensions of scriptures influence each other and function complementarily in the lives of religious people. Examples from Korean religions will vividly show that the contents of scriptures, the published physical books, sounds reading them aloud, letters in them, and virtual images from them are ritualized to exert sacred power.
This paper focuses on iconicity as a type of memory that is established through discursive engagement with a text, but also serves a distinct and traceable social function beyond the pages of the text. This sponsors a way of remembering the text in a particular landscape that can be established and passed on as an iconic marker of social meaning. I am proposing a new category for a distinct subset of episodic memory—that of iconic memory. Episodic memory leads to articulation of the story, while iconic memory embodies the story and becomes itself a monument or memorial. Such remembering is almost always collective rather than personal. I illustrate this in the genealogy of Jesus, the scroll and the book, Mt. Sinai and Mt. Zion, the cross, the creation, and the tree of Jesse. What is iconic here is a neural process rooted in discursive engagement with the past.
Reading scriptures aloud to congregations is common in many religious traditions. They invest great effort in training people to read correctly, yet congregations also show remarkable tolerance for inexpert oral reading. Reading aloud visible scriptures to congregations mixes expressive and iconic ritualization, which makes it both inspiring and legitimizing, by combining the divine voice of scripture and the community’s voice in the reader whose voice speaks for both. These communities use scriptural performance as a means for including as many people as possible into congregation. Literacy studies document how, even in secular school settings, group reading experiences cast oral readers as representing the audience as much as the author: in reading aloud to a group, the reader expresses the group’s voice. This paper analyzes the social force of this religious practice by testing a theory of ritualizing scriptures in three dimensions against studies of oral readings by literacy scholars.