The home of Martin Luther for thirty six years and seat of the
German Reformation, Wittenberg, Germany is now a UNESCO World
Heritage site. Wittenberg has long been Protestant sacred space,
but since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the city and
surrounding region have been developing their considerable cultural
capital. Today, Wittenberg is host to two large-scale annual
Luther-themed festivals, and is becoming a center for pilgrimage
and heritage tourism. In a recent study, Charles Taylor notes that
festivity is experiencing a renaissance as "one of the new forms of
religion in our world." Festivals and pilgrimage routes are an
integral part of contemporary religion and spirituality, and
important cultural institutions in a globalized world. In
Performing the Reformation, Stephenson offers a field-based case
study of contemporary festivity and pilgrimage in the City of
Luther. Welcome to Lutherland, where atheists dress up as monks and
nuns for Luther's Wedding; conservative Lutherans work to sacralize
the secular, carnival-like festivities; and medieval players,
American Gospel singers, and Peruvian pan flute bands compete for
the attention of the bustling crowds. Festivals and tourism in
Wittenberg include a range of performative genres (parades and
processions, liturgies and concerts, music and dance), cut across
multiple cultural domains (religion, politics, economics), and
effect connections and shifts among identities (religious, secular,
American, German, traditional, postmodern). Incorporating visual
methodologies and grounded in historical and social contexts,
Stephenson provides an on-the-ground account of the annual Luther's
Wedding Festival, the Reformation Day Festival, and Lutheran
pilgrimage. He also brings his case study into dialogue with
important methodological and theoretical issues informing the
fields of ritual studies and performance studies. A model of
interdisciplinary research, the book includes a DVD with over 2.5
hours of material, extending and animating textual accounts and
interpretations.
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