The Agency and Materiality of Sacred Texts in Armenian Christianity

The Anthropology Research Center of Ilia State University, together with the PhD Program in Social and Cultural Anthropology, invites you to a seminar by Konrad Siekierski on March 31 at 17:00: “The Agency and Materiality of Sacred Texts in Armenian Christianity”.

The seminar will take place at Ilia State University, Room A103 32 Ilia Chavchavadze Avenue.

This lecture will discuss the social lives of Armenian Christian books and scrolls, which act as sacred thing-beings endowed with supernatural power and agency, having life histories and personalities. Drawing on literature on material religion and ethnographic examples from my research, I will ask what these texts are, what they do, and how they relate to people. To respond to these questions, I will examine the phenomenon of ‘home saints’ venerated in unofficial shrines across several regions of Armenia and in Armenian-populated parts of Georgia, where they afford the Armenian Christians the experience of a ‘radical presence or realness’ (Orsi 2008: 14) of the sacred. Then, I will turn to the Matenadaran (the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts) in Yerevan. In this state repository, research centre, and museum, Armenian religious texts have been protected, renovated, studied, and displayed as precious pieces of tangible national heritage. However, some of these manuscripts have resisted secularisation while preserving the traditional roles of powerful thing-beings which/who attract not only visitors but also pilgrims to the Matenadaran.

Konrad Siekierski holds a PhD in social anthropology from the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London.  Konrad is a co-editor of Armenia: A Modern Culture from an Anthropological Perspective (2014), Armenians in Post-Socialist Europe (2016), and a special issue of the Entangled Religions journal on “Religion and Pandemic” (2022).