Page - 9 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/02

Using Media in Religious Studies | 9www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/2, 9–15 Bärbel Beinhauer-Köhler Using Media in Religious Studies Strategies of Representing Religion in Scholarly Approaches Editorial As a student in the 1980s, I was first made aware of the existence of different cultures of “doing humanities” by three professors at the University of Göt- tingen. the medium they used in their lectures and seminars was their own personality and rhetorical style. the philologist reined in the personal, in an un- charismatic but very structured and reflective way of lecturing, as he tackled Is- lamic cultural history. only later would i realize that this approach had parallels with the theoretical debate within German religious studies over the cultivation of distance from one’s subject of research, over controlling one’s emotions, which otherwise might hinder objectivity. Another professor, who had a quite good sense of humor, was fond of highlighting the facts of his subject – reli- gious studies – with little narrations: the Hindus he saw one year in a procession in Benares took the exact same route the following year, but as a house had been built on their path, the whole procession entered through the front door and left through the kitchen door toward the garden. this account generated a little laughter and, subsequently, a critical postcolonial debate over whether it was right for the professor to encourage his students to laugh about a foreign culture. Nevertheless, the students had learned that rituals can be character- ized by a certain stability. the third professor, with a Near eastern and Muslim background, liked to display a U.s.-american professorial habitus. a communi- cative and charismatic person, he used stories from his cosmopolitan daily life to engage students’ interest in a certain topic before teaching his own social- science and theory driven field of Near Eastern politics. Even if these styles of mediating knowledge about religions were different and even contradictory, we certainly learned a lot in every lecture. Reflecting on styles of teaching can be a starting point for deeper debate about using media in (re)presenting religions in the humanities. everyday lec- turing can be done in very different ways, and anyone who has attended an international conference will be aware of the variety of speech-making cultures. distinct from personal style or regional culture, younger academics are now DOI: 10.25364/05.3:2017.2.1