11th Spring Porto's Round Table

Porto’s 11th Spring Roundtable
Porto, Faculty of Arts, University of Porto, 22 (Thursday) and 23 (Friday) March 2007
With an opening lecture by Professor James Beckford
- Dept of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK
‘Religion and power reconsidered’ **
Organizers:
DCTP - Department of Heritage Sciences and Techniques, Faculty of Arts, University of Porto, Portugal (represented by Prof. Vítor Oliveira Jorge, researcher of CEAUCP-FCT)
SEFARAD – cultural association, Porto (represented by Prof. Costa Macedo, Faculty of Arts)
With the kind collaboration of our colleagues of the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Arts. Support of the British Council, Lisbon. Collaboration of CEAUCP/FCT.

BELIEFS, RELIGIONS, POWERS.
Individuals and regimes of sociality

Portuguese philosopher Fernando Gil has written: “beliefs include a pretention to knowledge and they function as bridges between desire and action.”
That particular kind of action obviously occurs in many different contexts, with various meanings and at diversified scales. Religions, as shared systems of beliefs, are indeed one of those contexts. But we may also consider, for instance, the permanent dispute for power that human beings carry on in daily life (the famous Foucault’s “micro-physics of power”) , etc. At the level of play, of agency, and of many complex systems of convincing the others to perform accordingly to certain embodied “codes of behaviour”, beliefs are crucial to understand how distinctions are inherited, created, contested or reproduced within societies, how bounderies and frontiers, inclusions and exclusions are constinuously being negotiated in order to direct collective or individual action and establish “legal fields” for its exercise.
In this conference we do not intend to cover so vast matters, but to discuss, with open-minded and free predisposition, some of the complex mechanisms that drive people to action. In other words, how groups of people or systems of belief are ultimately so important in the growth of collective convinction and the individual’s availability to act in certain particular way. The understanding of such mechanisms may be very important to face and to overcome certain difficult issues of the present reality of the world, including violence and intolerance.


The final program will be published until the end of January 2007
Each intervention, with the exception of the opening lecture : 20 minutes
We preview the presentation of c. 36 different papers
debates/coffee brakes
Languages used: Portuguese, Spanish, English, French

Registration and other organization’s practical details: please contact DCTP secretariat from now on. You may register during the conference at the secretariat’ s desk, but it is better to do it in advance.
Contact:
Departamento de Ciências e Técnicas de Património dctp@letras.up.pt
The results of this conference will be published in a book. Each paper shall not exceed c. 10 pages ( 3000 words maximum)

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** ‘Religion and power reconsidered’
Abstract

An article that I published in 1983* tried to analyse some of the powers often attributed to religions and used by human actors: the power to confound, to convince, to contest, to control, to cultivate, and to cure. But when I think about religion today from a sociological point of view I see the need to place religion at the centre of moral, political and legal struggles for power. This is because religion has become more controversial. Evidence for this claim will come from my empirical studies of ‘cults’ and of religion in prisons.


* Beckford, James A. 1983. 'The restoration of "power" to the sociology of religion', Sociological Analysis vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 11-31.
Reprinted in T. Robbins & R. Robertson (eds.) Church/State Problems. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1987, pp. 13-37; and revised for publication as ‘Religion and power’, in T. Robbins & D. Anthony (eds) In Gods We Trust. New Brunswick, NJ.: Transaction Books, 2nd ed., 1990, pp. 43-60.

J.B.

photo's source: http://letras.up.pt