Research within CRC 1475 is organized into three sections that bring together different perspectives on religious meaning-making through metaphors. The sections serve as key spaces for comparative exchange, connecting projects that work with different sources, languages, historical periods, and religious traditions.
Section A: The Physical
Projects in Section A explore how religious traditions draw on bodily, spatial, and material experience to create and communicate religious meaning. They focus on metaphors grounded in movement, embodiment, space, material objects, and performative practices. The section investigates how physical experience shapes religious imagination and how metaphorical patterns operate across texts, images, objects, and actions.
Section B: The Mind
Section B focuses on metaphors of the self, the person, and the mind. It examines how religious traditions conceptualize thinking, feeling, perception, and cognition, and how metaphors contribute to these processes. Particular attention is given to the relationships between inside and outside, body and mind, and competing understandings of human personhood. The projects analyze how religious discourses metaphorically construct identity, consciousness, and transformation.
Section C: The Social
Section C explores metaphors in relation to social orders. This includes social roles, institutions, and relationships as source domains for religious metaphors, as well as metaphors used to describe and interpret social realities. At the same time, the section explores the social conditions and functions of metaphorical communication, including questions of gender, status, authority, and community formation.
