13–14 Jun 2022 Conference: Paganism and its Others 8:00 AM – 9:00 PM conference The Department for the Study of Religions at Masaryk University invites you to the academic conference "Paganism and its Others" to be held in Brno, Czech Republic, 13-14 June, 2022.
6–7 Jun 2022 Conference: Hedonistic Occultism - Blood, Desire, Sex & Magic 8:00 AM – 9:00 PM conference The Department for the Study of Religions at Masaryk University and RASWE - Research Association for the Study of Western Esotericism invite you to the academic conference "Hedonistic Occultism: Blood, Desire, Sex & Magic" to be held in Brno, Czech Republic, 6-7 June, 2022.
10 May 2022 Workshop: Dimitris Xygalatas - Ritual and synchrony in the wild 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM workshop I will discuss recent and forthcoming naturalistic research on the effects of ritualized, rhythmic collective behavior. Examples include studies conducted in religious temples, sports stadiums, and other real-life settings. Although, I argue, the questions I am asking go beyond religion, they are key to understanding religious rituals.
9 May 2022 Invited lecture: Dimitris Xygalatas - Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM lecture LEVYNA and HUME Lab cordially invite you to a lecture by dr. Dimitris Xygalatas (University of Connecticut) on Monday 9th May, 17:00 - 18:00, room C43 (Zoom link below). You can find more information about his research at his website (https://www.xygalatas.com/) or via his Google Scholar profile (https://scholar.google.cz/citations?hl=en&user=misuSsoAAAAJ).
14 Apr 2022 CEDRR talk: "Insights from the RIP Project: Simulating Secularising Societies between Norway and Poland" 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM The PI of the research project "Religion, Ideology & Prosociality: Simulating Secularising Societies", Konrad Talmont-Kamiński will give a talk about their approach to modelling secularisation - a complex, multi-level phenomenon - using agent-based computational models.
13 Apr 2022 CEDRR talk: "Discussion on Big Data and Network Research in the Traditional Historiography of the Portuguese Colonial Empire" 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM The Centre for the Digital Study of Religion invites you to their online dicussion: Dr. Agata Bloch (Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences), and Dr. Demival Vasques Filho (Leibniz Institute for European History, Germany) will talk about analysis of historical data through cutting-edge machine learning algorithms to reconstruct and model large temporal social networks of the Portuguese Empire.
8 Apr 2022 Workshop: Luke Glowacki – Building cross-cultural ethnographic databases to study complex social behavior 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM workshop Are there cultural universals? Does human social behavior vary in systematic ways across cultures? Answering questions like these requires detailed data from societies across the globe. Fortunately, ethnographic materials from prior anthropological studies are now widely available online and can be used to construct systematic databases that offer a powerful means to study human behavior. I discuss how to construct such a database using the example of the Natural History of Song project, which contains information on music from a representative sample of the world’s societies. I then discuss an in-progress database on the rituals of peace-making.
7 Apr 2022 Invited lecture: Luke Glowacki – Rituals for war and peace 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM lecture War and peace are both major aspects of human sociality, yet understanding each presents a unique challenge. War is a puzzle because it involves individuals risking their lives to harm others. Peace is a challenge because it involves restoring cooperative relationships after a significant breach. Rituals are an important but unexplored mechanism for promoting both war and peace. In war, rituals are commonly used to alter perceptions regarding the likelihood of harm and foster group solidarity. During peace, rituals commonly function to indicate cooperative intent and cement ties. I use ethnographic case studies from small-scale societies to explore the functions of rituals in both war and peace.