Material culture of religion Research Papers (original) (raw)

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- Religion, Ancient History, Cultural History, Cultural Studies

Photographic representations of the Meiji emperor began to circulate to select gov- ernment officials in 1873, but their sale in general commerce was banned in 1874. In sharp contrast, the government attempted to mandate the display of jingū taima, a Shintō amulet that bore the seal of the emperor, in every household from 1871 to 1878. This paper explores how the early photographs of the emperor and the amulets were distributed within the fluctuating context of the early Meiji years. By considering in tandem two objects that played pivotal roles in defining the public image of the little-known emperor, this article departs from previous studies in an attempt to articulate the roles of the distribution systems in construing images of the Meiji emperor.

Ornament as Argument explores notions of ornamentation and materiality in 10th and 11th-century Christian manuscript illumination. In particular, the book investigates the function and metaphoric meaning of so-called textile pages—images evoking the weave patterns of Byzantine and Islamic silk. An analysis of a broad range of objects situates textile pages in the context of medieval reading practice, visual exegesis, and worship. Based on various theological arguments that bear on the images and the book as an object in itself, the illuminations emerge as powerful textile metaphors. These concern material approaches to scripture, textile readings of the incarnation, and the physical book as body. Ornament as Argument thus contributes to a new understanding of the vital role illuminated manuscripts played in medieval material culture.

In Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism, Urmila Mohan explores the materiality and visuality of cloth and clothing as devotional media in contemporary Hinduism. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the global missionizing group “International Society for Krishna Consciousness” (ISKCON), she studies translocal spaces of worship, service, education, and daily life in the group’s headquarters in Mayapur and other parts of India. Focusing on the actions and values of deity dressmaking, devotee clothing and paraphernalia, Mohan shows how activities, such as embroidery and chanting, can be understood as techniques of spirituality, reverence, allegiance—and she proposes the new term “efficacious intimacy” to help understand these complex processes. The monograph brings theoretical advances in Anglo- European material culture and material religion studies into a conversation with South Asian anthropology, sociology, art history, and religion. Ultimately, it demonstrates how embodied interactions as well as representations shape ISKCON’s practitioners as devout subjects, while connecting them with the divine and the wider community.

- by Urmila Mohan
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- Performance Studies, Material culture of religion, Anthropology Of Art, Embroidery

The early ethnological works of Alfred Métraux are analysed bearing in mind his first fieldwork trip to the Chiriguano, in 1929. The paper discusses personal, academic and professional features of Métraux’s ethnological experience, the nature of the 1929 trip and his concrete relationships with the Chiriguano groups and individuals. Next, we analyse his ideas on material culture as a privileged means of understanding the synthesis of Andean, Chaco and Amazonian cultural influences. Finally, the dilemmas and limitations of his analytical approach regarding Créole cultural influence and social and cultural change are discussed. [Key words: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, material culture, change.]
Se analiza la etnología temprana de Alfred Métraux a la luz de su primer viaje de campo a los chiriguanos, en 1929. Se discute el perfil personal, académico y profesional de Métraux, las peculiaridades de su trabajo de campo en 1929 y sus relaciones concretas con los indígenas chiriguanos en el terreno. Se examinan luego sus ideas sobre la cultura material como campo experimental privilegiado para rastrear procesos de síntesis de influencias culturales andinas, chaqueñas y amazónicas, así también sus dilemas y límites a la hora de interpretar el factor de la influencia criolla y el proceso de cambio social y cultural en un sentido amplio. [Palabras clave: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, cultura material, cambio.]

- by Diego Villar
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- Religion, Cultural History, Ethnohistory, Sociology
- by Arturo Sanchez Sanz
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- Architectural Engineering, Religion, History, Ancient History

In the collection of Vatopediou Monastery (Mount Athos) there is a Late Byzantine vestment called by the monks the “Arabic stole” (arabikon ōmophorion). This quite unique vestment probably owes its name to two bands of embroidered Arabic inscriptions on the lower part of each end. It is one of the very few known Byzantine religious objects to feature legible Arabic inscriptions, a visible symbol of Islamic otherness juxtaposed with the standard Christian iconography. Apart from bringing into the spotlight a medieval vestment that has been overlooked by scholars, this article traces possible sources of artistic transfer through a discussion of texts and extant objects. Finally, it aims at expanding our understanding of the reception of Islamic art in Late Byzantium, a time of both political decline and cultural renewal.

In this extract from his recent book, A History of Religion in 5½ Objects, S. Brent Plate discusses the grounding of language and meaning, especially metaphor, in bodily experience. Adapted from: (2014) Plate, S. Brent. A History of Religion in 5½ Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Studies in material religion often chart a distinction between wordbased religious analysis (a doctrinal and sacred textheavy Protestant hangover) and the spaces, activities, and objects of human bodies ritualizing and symbolizing in the physical world. The old model is (rightly) problematized for overemphasis on ancient dead http://materialreligions.blogspot.com.es/2014/11/the-materiality-of-metaphor-on-words.html 2/3

- by S B Rodriguez-Plate
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- History of Religion, Material culture of religion, Metaphor
- by Tim Hutchings
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- Religion, Sociology of Religion, Atheism, Museum Studies

For the published version, see Adam Bursi, "Mijn poep, mijn zelf. Identiteit en religie door de lens van ontlasting," in Wie is er bang voor religie? Waarom kennis van religie belangrijk is, ed. Joas Wagemakers and Lucien van Liere (Almere: Parthenon, 2019), 246-252. Please be aware that the published and the preprint version are not 100% the same. This preprint version is deposited under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC) licence. This means that anyone may distribute, adapt, and build upon the work for non-commercial purposes, subject to full attribution.

This thesis examines the long-term transmission of a distinctive corpus of religious images in later European prehistory. These are depictions of birds which, often together with solar motifs, formed a recurrent design element on Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age metalwork. Objects with this type of imagery were deposited in different contexts, across Central Europe, for about eight centuries, from the 12 th century BC to the first half of 5 th

Drawing upon the notions of nature as a community of other-than-human persons and of relational cosmos, the overarching aim of the CAMNES webinar is to discuss and highlight different ways of understandings the relationships occurred between human beings, animals, plants and the land in the religious life of ancient societies. During the online conversation, scholars of different disciplines (archaeology, anthropology, iconography, philology, history of religions) will explore the perception of nature and its other-than-human inhabitants and readdress some notions about nature, personhood/agency, divinity/sacrality, and materiality/spirituality in religions and cosmologies of ancient communities inhabiting both the Old and the New World. Especially we wish to pinpoint those beliefs, representations and practices that express relational and non-binary ontologies, epistemologies, cosmologies, according to which nature is a place of agency, relationality and spirituality, and that challenge dualities such as immanent/transcendent, material/spiritual, body/soul, disclosing a multiplicity of relationships. In this line, the conference aims at promoting starkly inter-disciplinary and religious-anthropological approaches to definitions of ‘sacred nature’ that will take on the categories of animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism as analytical concepts that can enhance the investigation of human-environmental relations in the ancient religious conceptions, representations and practices. Finally, in order to uncover and further explain the connection between nature, the sacred, and the materiality of ancient religions interpreted as embodied experiences, particular emphasis will be devoted to those researches finalized at answering questions related to how nature materialized cosmological and spiritual essences.
Free Online webinar ... limited spot available .. You can enroll at the following link: https://camnes.it/sacred-nature-workshop

Accumulations of pot shards, many of them from common vessels and deposited below surface, are ubiquitous phenomena in Greco-Roman sacred places. The modern denomination of this pottery in fills, terraces, or pits, as 'sacred waste' falls short, since it implies its use- and meaninglessness after deposition. The first part of the article sets out to discuss the life cycle, transformation and potential agency of these ceramic remains in order to reveal their continuous impact on establishing the places as sacred places through their embeddedness in religious practices. Drawing on examples from Archaic to Roman Imperial times I explore in the second part the production, consumption and deposition of the pottery objects as elements in the chain of interactions with human agents. I argue that very mundane, even invisible, pieces of pottery, due to deposition, establish memories and contribute to the religious significance of the places over generations.

- by Andrew Spicer
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- French History, Early Modern History, Material culture of religion, Urban History

Decoration on ceramics can be viewed as internal history, as the functional equivalent of the Anabaptist annalistic record. A significant part of the large Anabaptist archive survived in the so-called chronicles (240 are known today) that functioned as history books and have been transmitted to every new generation. As a result of the aggressive Habsburg policy against religious minorities, the Anabaptist communal organization was dissolved in 1685. A sudden decrease in written record followed. Around this date, the continental chinoiserie style appeared on Anabaptist ceramics. After careful visual analysis, these ornaments become narratives alongside the chronicles. Ceramics helped to keep the collective memory and Anabaptist identity alive. Both the texts and the ceramics were part of the same successful strategy of identity preservation; this rich heritage held together the Anabaptist communes from the sixteenth century to the present.

This paper reviews the evidence for Neolithic burial practices in SE Arabia, focusing in particular on sites in the Ja'alan region of eastern Oman. Attention is given to the nature of material buried with human remains, including jewellery and, most interestingly, the bones and shells of green turtles in the burials of Ra's al-Hamra 5 and 10. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possible evidence for "necrophobia" at the 5 th millennium BC Neolithic necropolis of Suwayh 1.

- by Vincent CHARPENTIER
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- Religion, Prehistoric Archaeology, Anthropology, Death

Christianity is basically understood as the scriptural religion; a religion, which presents a book, the contents of which are made known by preaching and listening. The truth of Christianity – and of every other ‘book religion’ as well – can therefore only be found by deciphering the Holy Scriptures, so the religious experts insist.
Besides holy texts, most religions, however, also offer an extremely rich visual cosmos, consisting of architectural works, sculptures, statues and paintings of saints, prophets, teachers, demons, angels, mythical animals, monsters, gods and goddesses.
It may be a truism that religion expresses itself in texts, images and actions, but the scholarly treatment of religions has exclusively (and astonishingly) privileged the study of texts over a long period of time.
If we regard Christianity not exclusively as a text-based but also as an image-based religion, it is worth asking how the visual universe was perceived and transformed wherever it was transmitted to non-Western cultures by missionaries.

- by Ana Paula Scarpa and +4
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- Religion, Material Culture Studies, Material culture of religion, Mediterranean Studies

The human body serves as a symbolic bridge between communities of the living and the divine. This is clearly evident in mythological stories that recount the creation of humans by deities within ancient and contemporaneous societies across a very broad geographical environment.
In certain circumstances, parts of selected humans can become an ideal proxy for connecting with the supernatural, as demonstrated by the cult of human skulls in Near Eastern Neolithic communities, as well as the cult of relics of Christian saints from the early Christian era.
To go deeper into this topic, this volume aims to undertake a cross-cultural investigation of the role played by both humans and human remains in creating forms of relationality with the divine in antiquity. Such an approach will highlight how the human body can be envisioned as part of a broader materialization of religious beliefs that is based on connecting different realms of materiality in the perception of the supernatural by communities of the living.

- by nicola laneri
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- Religion, Archaeology, Material Culture Studies, Material culture of religion

Summary. Seven small tiles of green porphyry
and one of serpentine have been found in Sigtuna.
They are likely to have been used in portable
altars. This high number is unique in Scandinavia
and can only be compared with six porphyry
tiles found in Hedeby/Schleswig.
Red, black and green porphyry was prized by
the emperors in Rome and Constantinople and
later by Early Medieval monarchs. Green porphyry
was quarried in Greece. These quarries
were not in use during the Early Middle Ages.
Instead, the material was scavenged from the remains
of Roman buildings and reused e.g. to
cover the reliquaries in portable altars.
The Sigtuna tiles probably came from the ruins of
Cologne.
The Sigtuna tiles are particularly interesting
since they were not found in Medieval churches,
but when excavating the town plots. They appear
in contexts dated to the 11th and 12th centuries.
The earliest finds date from a time when there is
no archaeological or written evidence of any
churches, even wooden ones, in Sigtuna. It is
therefore suggested here that Christian cult then
took place in private banqueting halls, which
seem to have stood at the far end of each of the
more than hundred town plots in Sigtuna.
The first wooden churches were probably
built c. 1060 when a bishopric was established in
Sigtuna. About 1100 the building of six or seven
Romanesque stone churches commenced. They
are among the oldest masonry structures in all of
Sweden. Except for the cathedral in the middle
of town, all churches were built along a new
street, parallel to and north of the main street and
the settlement area. Sigtuna’s church topography
reflects an intention to create a sacred townscape
for ceremonial processions where both King and
God were praised. It also reflects the idea of the
holy and heavenly city.

- by Sten Tesch
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- Material Culture Studies, Material culture of religion, Relics (Religion), Porphyry

A SENSE OF MIGRATION
Place, Materiality and Religion in exhibitions at the Danish Immigrant Museum and the Museum of Copenhagen
This thesis explores both how place, the museums role as a social agent, and religion are relevant for the production of migration at the Danish Immigration Museum (2012) and the exhibition Becoming a Copenhagener (2012) at the Museum of Copenhagen.
The study is based on a display analysis using sensory ethnography, in order to explore how the exhibitions produce aesthetic and transformative experiences. This analysis is related to interviews with relevant museum professionals and the directors of the museums, and to a selection of written material by or about the museums.
As a general feature of the analysis of the thesis, the concept of materiality is used as a way of approaching the empirical material: In a topographical sense to explore the museums' relations to place, but also to explore how the exhibitions produce sensual and aesthetic experiences to communicate a highly politicized subject.
Immigration has been a general topic in the public Danish debates on cultural and value-based policies since the late 1990s. These debates particularly contextualized the immigrant as the 'religious other'.
The display of immigration as well as religion has generally not been subject to museal interest in Denmark. The opening of the two exhibitions therefore marks not only a turning point for Danish museums, but also tap directly into a highly policized field. The analysis of the thesis shows that the scaling of immigration, the production of aesthetic and epistemological experiences, and the production of religion as either an acceptable or problematic category, are applied as means to differentiate the concept of migration and distance the exhibition from the public debates on immigration.
Building on the study of the two museums exhibitions, the thesis point at an absence of the display of religion in the production of new Danish history at museums in general. I argue that this absence is cause by the protestant-secular logic that dominates the practices and traditions of the museums, and that this logic considers religion to be irrelevant in the public sphere and a potential threat for the founding elements of society. The mutual relation between museum and society have already been the object of study in major museological works, that point to museums being co-producers of the social and scientific categories and identities that we take for granted: nations, cities, women - as well as migrants and religion. Thus, the thesis argue, the museums' production of (material) religion is a very relevant - but sparsely explored field - from the perspective of sociology of religion.

Recently there has been considerable discussion on the concept of 'artificial life'. The very idea that life can be imagined outside of the body unsettles our habitual way of thinking. It opens up horizons of post-biological or extra-bodily life. Yet this notion would not have seemed so strange in ancient China, for the early Chinese idea of life is anything but bodycentric. For the ancient Chinese, the essence of life, far from being confined to the body, resided in the breath or qi, vital energy that permeates both the cosmos and the human body. Concentration of qi creates life; its dissipation spells death. So in the early Chinese context,
the line between 'artificial' and 'natural' was elusive. This view of life and the cosmos, as we shall see, informs the fundamental nature of the hu.

- by Eugene Y Wang
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- Ancient History, Archaeology, Art History, Chinese Studies

In an attempt to assist postgraduate students in the production of new knowledge about religion and religions David Chidester (2013:5-7) has offered for more than a decade a compulsory course on critical concepts at the University of Cape Town. In order to produce 'new' or 'original' knowledge in religious studies students are encouraged to 'look at something new in an old way' or to 'look at something old in a new way', but are simultaneously advised that a mere 'looking at' religious phenomena would not produce new knowledge. New knowledge in religious studies, Chidester (2013:6) is convinced, would be produced, when our analyses, arguments, interpretations and explanations are 'theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous'.
In this presentation I will take a critical 'look at' Chidester's theoretically informed use of 'the fetish' as a concept that has guided his own search for new knowledge on religion and religions, select case studies from his oeuvre to illustrate his use and application of this analytical term and identify a tension in his work that I will argue need further elaboration.

Regarding traditional beekeeping in Crete, based on the beekeeping methods and hives that have been recorded in recent centuries, we can distinguish two areas: central-western Crete, where vertical hives with movable combs were in use, and the eastern part of the island, where a horizontal hive with fixed combs was used. Hives with movable combs (or top-bar hives) were constructed from various materials such as clay, woven wicker branches or more rarely from wooden boards. The clay ones were the most widely used and were usually constructed by travelling potters, who organized artisanal groups (guilds) and travelled around the island selling their wares. The wicker top-bar hives, which usually did not have a base, were used in western Crete, mostly for migratory beekeeping, while the rectangular wooden top-bar hives were used only rarely in certain areas such as Sphakia. In eastern Crete a horizontal, ceramic beehive open at both ends with a truncated-cone shape was in use, usually placed in rows. All the hives in Crete were covered with various materials for protection from the elements and were often placed inside bee enclosures. The knowledge of traditional Cretan beekeepers regarding bees was limited. Despite this fact, however, the users of hives with movable combs practiced beekeeping in the most rational and effective way that has been recorded prior to the invention of the modern hive. In doing so, they executed a series of beekeeping tasks that were not possible for users of other types of hive. But even the beekeepers in the eastern part of the island, where a horizontal hive with fixed combs was used, applied certain unique methods, which are a testament to the advanced level of beekeeping knowledge they possessed.

- by Doug Bailey
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- Archaeology, Prehistoric Archaeology, Visual Studies, Art History

The personal perspectives, professional interests, and visual models that influenced Horatio Greenough in crafting paired busts of “Lucifer” (ca. 1841–42) and “Christ” (ca. 1845) reveal both the aesthetic concerns of his era and the transnational nature of his sculptural enterprise. Examining links between objects and their beholders and the fraught relationships between sculpture and spirituality, past and present, in the United States, this article highlights Greenough’s ambitious efforts to produce a spiritual spectacle through this little-studied pair. As later iconoclastic reactions to Greenough’s busts also suggest, particularly in America embodied images possess the power to disturb or enthrall.

- by Jeffrey Richmond-Moll
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- Religion, American Studies, Art History, History of Religion

The Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion at Yale University (MAVCOR) does not simply, or even most fundamentally, shape a physical center at Yale University. Although MAVCOR organizes events at Yale and coordinates project cycles involving Yale affiliates as well as scholars from other universities in the United States and around the world, much of MAVCOR’s activity is conducted online. MAVCOR publishes a born-digital, open-access double-blind peer-reviewed journal, MAVCOR Journal. It also features a born-digital exhibition space, the Material Objects Archive. In at least two ways, MAVCOR is deliberately interstitial, invested in the connective spaces between both disciplines and technologies. First, the Center emerged from a desire to promote interdisciplinary conversation among scholars of religion, art history, anthropology, and others engaged with our subjects of inquiry. We have aimed to accomplish this goal by shaping a forum for conversation and an archive for mutual use. Second, MAVCOR engages the need to form a space for peer-reviewed content online in a manner that emphasizes the mutually beneficial relationship of print and digital modes of inquiry. In this work, MAVCOR’s overarching commitment is to promote innovative, substantively researched, thoughtfully constructed scholarship, with robust interdisciplinarity as a fundamental element of form and content.

- by Emily Floyd and +1
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- Art History, Digital Humanities, Photography, Open Access Publishing

This article explores some of the myriad connections between geometric visuals, magic, and altered states of consciousness, more specifically looking at the colocation of geometric visuals and experiences of intermediary beings. The main focus here is on how geometric visuals relate to the consciousness experiments and magical practices of American author William Burroughs (1914–1997) and his Swiss-English collaborator Brion Gysin (1916–1986). Such an analysis will also dive into the broader intellectual currents that influenced Burroughs and Gysin’s uses of geometry, yielding more abstract conceptions of how geometry relates to altered states of consciousness and intermediary beings. Furthermore, understanding how geometric manipulation of the mind works has important consequences for multiple fields outside of the history of esotericism, including market-oriented disciplines like architecture and industrial design. As such, this essay proposes that the historical study of esotericism can promote and conduct itself as an interdisciplinary space that communicates the value of its data to market-oriented fields through “material approaches” to religion à la Birgit Meyer.

- by Hillary Kaell
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- Material culture of religion, Pilgrimage, Anthropology of Christianity