Relic technics and the extensible memory of coptic orthodoxy

Abstract

ABSTRACTSince the 1950s, the religious growth of Egypt's Coptic Christians has been shaped by diasporic migrations abroad, resulting in new ritual outcomes of representing their cultural and moral origins of communal coherence and periphery. This article approaches the modernizing aspects of Orthodox dispersion from their foundationally mediating locus in holy parts, and more specifically in relics and their technical continuities and discontinuities. Entering into the communicative exhibition of St. Marina's right hand in Egypt, it studies the practical extensions of remembering martyrs across space and time. Relic technics via sensory techniques and cinematic technologies create the very special living properties and metamorphic effects of divine imagination. Ultimately, in gesturing to the materialities of a post-natural body, it seeks to think through what felt fragmentability does for the geographic transmission of a communal body politic—i.e. the material making of the Coptic Orthodox “global” community.