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SVASTI – Essays in Honour of Prof. Hampa Nagarajaiah
term, the use of the term "Aisthetik", which assumes the spelling of the Greek word, will hereby indicate a meaning that includes and goes beyond this established meaning of Ästhetik. Aisthetik includes a wider range of academic subjects and research, such as the body as instrument of religious performance, ritual in all aspects (including, for example, dance movements and the question of religious experience in terms of inner effects by outer stimulation), the interaction of form and content in religious presentation, self-presentation and constituation, and a look at all possible sensory perceptions which are rather seldom observed while looking at a religious phenomenon: not only texts and pictures, but observing, recording and including acoustic elements, haptic elements, olfactory elements that all contribute to a certain cultural performance. According to me, they contribute in a most interesting way to the analysis and understanding of a religious event. Very generally, the analysis and interpretation of a religious performance will gain in depth if the researcher, in field work and in hermeneutic processes at his desk at home, is able to include other sensory data into his considerations. This asks for a wider sensory perception by the researcher himself (to get an idea what to record, what to observe and perceive and to note down while doing his field work), but also for a more flexible theory or method of analysis; it means more and different recording media (not just the photo camera, but also a video camera, an audio recording machine, something to collect elements creating haptic perceptions, even if not all kinds of haptic perception can be caught into a researcher's bag, and maybe a bottle to conserve some fragrant air?); and it means a wider acceptance of scientific means, methods and proofs at least such as audio and video documents, considering that the only traditional way of proving scientific quality is that of reading texts and publishing in form of written texts in scientific journals or books. This should not be a proposal to leave the boundaries of our established system. of scientificness and to accept the most obscure theses without rational argument -- I rather wish to state that there are more perspectives to be taken into account while doing field research, namely, the full range of sensory perception and its cultural interpretations by the religious performers. This fact is not at all accepted in the study of religions, nor in its neighbouring disciplines like, for example, Indology, that still widely remains a pure philological discipline instead of accepting non-textual subjects or non-textual approaches or non-textual proofs of analysis of another culture, in our case Indian culture. There is nothing wrong about texts and their profound philological and hermeneutic analysis; all I want to stress is that our study of religious objects can gain in depth and thereby accuracy by adding additional perspectives. I plead for a concept of scientific approach to religious objects and phenomena in which all qualities of a textual study are combined and enriched with the observing and interpretation of sensory perceptible events.
So by keeping the Greek spelling in English as well, aisthetics of religion, as the study of religious phenomena under the aspect of their sensory perception, is to be
