KFG 17: Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective.

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Practices for predicting and manipulating contingent life events are globally widespread and attest a striking resilience in spite of powerful discourses of science and technology. Based on a heuristic working definition of esoteric practices, the goal of the project is (1) to map the field of such practices from a global and transcultural perspective, (2) to systematically compare the practitioners, their interpretation, rationalisation and legitimisation strategies, and (3) to develop an explanatory model for the persistence of such practices in spite of globally powerful discourses of science and technology. (4) Through developing a nuanced second-order language, the taxonomical assessment and scholarly classification of such practices will be improved. Finally, (5) the project ties on recent debates on the possibilities and limits of non-essentialist comparative research. It thus intends – through the format of the Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe – to explore new avenues for assessing and mapping such a broad research field despite the typical specialisation and regionalisation of modern research in the humanities. The project has a transcultural and contemporary focus and combines methods from cultural and social anthropology, religious studies, the area studies and philology, sociology as well as political science. The format of Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe allows for bringing together a large number of scholars from different disciplines, who work on esoteric practices and practitioners and the alternative rationalities associated therewith in different cultural and regional contexts, in order to gather and compare their research findings – thereby generating analytical insights on the level of the level of data, method and theory that cannot be produced by individual studies or their mere concatenation. In this regard, the Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe intends to develop a cultural theory of esoteric practices that helps to explain the resilience of esoteric practices, their typological similarities across a large number of examples, as well as their – from an intercultural perspective – very different social and discursive evaluations. Special attention will be given to the question of why esoteric practices are continuously ostracised in certain cultural settings, whereas they remain accepted or even institutionalised in others. To that end, theoretical models from different domains will be taken into account – especially from the realm of the cognitive and social-psychological study of religion and ritual, but also from the fields of anthropology, sociology, philosophy and deviance studies in the history of religion.