Jens Kreinath is teaching Antrhopology at Wichita State University.
Besides holding degrees in Theology and History of Religion as well as in Philosophy – all received from the University of Heidelberg – he received in 2006 his doctoral degree in social/cultural anthropology form the same university.
As a member of a research group on ritual theory and the history of religions, he carried out research in 2000 on the Yasna, a daily performed ritual of Zoroastrian high-priests. Together with Refika Sariönder, he conducted fieldwork in 2002 in Istanbul among the Alevi on the reflexive dynamics of the cem, a weekly observed community ritual.
His current research is primarily on Christian and Muslim communities in Antakya (formerly Antioch). He is member of an international research collaboration, “Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource,” funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
Selected Publications:
- Johannsen, Dirk, Anja Kirsch & Jens Kreinath (eds., 2020): Narrative Cultures and the Aesthetics of Religion. Series: Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 14, Leiden: Brill.
- 2019: “Methodology”, in: Anne Koch und Katharina Wilkens (Hg.): Handbook of Cultural and Cognitive Aesthetics of Religion, London: Bloomsbury, 47-57.
- 2015 “The Seductiveness of Saints: Interreligious Pilgrimage Sites in Hatay and the Ritual Transformations of Agency,” in: Michael A. Di Giovine and David Picard (eds): The Seductions of Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys Afar and Astray in the Western Religious Tradition. Farnham: Ashgate.
- 2014 “Virtual Encounters with Hizir and Other Muslim Saints: Dreaming and Healing at Local Pilgrimage Sites in Hatay, Turkey,” in: Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia: 2 (1), pp. 25–66.
- 2012 “Discursive Formation, Ethnographic Encounter, Photographic Evidence: The Centenary of Durkheim’s Basic Forms of Religious Life and the Anthropological Study of Australian Aboriginal Religion in His Time,” in: Visual Anthropology 25 (5), pp. 367–420.
- 2012 “Naven, Moebius Strip, and Random Fractal Dynamics: Reframing Bateson’s Play Frame and the Use of Mathematical Models for the Study of Ritual,” in: Journal of Ritual Studies: 26 (2), pp. 39–64.
- 2009 “Virtuality and Mimesis: Toward an Aesthetics of Ritual Performances as Embodied Forms of Religious Practice,” in: Bent Holm, Bent Flemming Nielsen, and Karen Vedel (eds): Religion – Ritual – Theatre. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp. 219–249.
- 2006 “Semiotics,” in: Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg (eds): Theorizing Rituals: Vol I: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts (Numen Book Series: Studies in the History of Religion 114-1). Leiden: Brill, pp. 429–470.