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《Material Religion》2013,9(2):166-191
ABSTRACT

Religious displays can help foster cross-cultural understanding. However, the extent to which they can achieve this aim is wholly dependent on the museum's displays, community involvement, background fieldwork research, and the educational and public programming provided around the exhibition, among other factors. Well-crafted displays can encourage greater understanding of a community's religious practices, customs, and cultural differences. If crafted badly, however, such displays can have either no effect or, indeed, the reverse, and actually aid in cementing prejudices. The extent to which either of these extremes applies depends on the factors listed above. This article is an observational study of how best to display objects of religious significance in the museum context, based on a detailed analysis of the key factors which contribute to a successful display. It concentrates on the Horniman Museum in south London, critically analyzing its three permanent exhibition galleries: the African Worlds Gallery, the Centenary Gallery, and the Music Gallery. In so doing, it also makes reference to other relevant religious displays. More fundamentally, this study sets out to explore the different forms of displaying religious objects within museums and consider which of these are the most successful in helping visitors understand the significance of those objects, as well as the people and communities from which they originate.  相似文献   

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《Material Religion》2013,9(4):401-432
Abstract

During World War II, US photographers, government censors, and publishers—Catholic and non-Catholic alike—were attracted to images depicting the intersection of Roman Catholic ritual forms and military equipment such as Jeeps, ammunition boxes, cannons, and artillery shells. The motif was seductive in the environment of wartime propaganda for reasons beyond its ideological affirmation of American religious pluralism. Catholic objects—including especially Eucharistic hosts, altars, priestly vestments and bodies, and crucifixes—offered an aesthetically compelling visual match for the objects of war. The spectacle of Catholic materiality also tapped into longstanding fascination with Catholic forms as a quasi-forbidden expression of and invitation to an alternate modernity. The wartime depiction of Catholic forms in martial settings offered a way to signal distance from the logics of modern war without at the same time abandoning the war and the wider US projects to which it contributed. The images thus helped advance a form of Catholic secularism.  相似文献   

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《Material Religion》2013,9(2):183-214
ABSTRACT

The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) maintains twenty-three cemeteries worldwide for American soldiers and war workers killed in the Great War and World War II. This article examines ABMC cemeteries as American sacred space, foregrounding their fusion of Christian and American symbol and text and the barely submerged theologies and mythologies to which they point. ABMC cemeteries have given families of fallen soldiers places to mourn and remember. They have also served as spaces for the United States to tell all comers of the righteousness of the American soldier and the saving power of dying while fighting for the United States. Compelling as these memorial landscapes are, the sacred narratives they construct are often in subtle but real tension with the histories they contain and conceal.  相似文献   

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《Material Religion》2013,9(1):110-120
ABSTRACT

The articles in this special issue demonstrate how objects can be interpreted as agents, as gendered images that make a statement, and how their impacts can be understood and assessed by human actors. They are differentially placed in matrices of power, and they can be manipulated to shift genders, to play with gendered combinations, to expand the limits of a particular gendered domain, to creatively play with reproductive imagery, and even to sell commodities in new and enticing ways in the mass media. Gendered religious objects are “statements” addressed not only to the eye but to the emotions, and part of a complex cultural field in which things can play important roles in people's lives. The links that connect ritual power to other forms of agency and biographical significance are perhaps the most significant links that we need to examine to understand them better in a world of many diverse cultural forms.  相似文献   

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《Material Religion》2013,9(3):336-356
Pentecostalism and its recent progenies, the Charismatic movements, have within the last three decades moved from the periphery to the center of Christian life in Africa (Asamoah-Gyadu 2005; Gifford 1998). An unprecedented use of the mass media by these relatively new religious collectivities has contributed significantly to the visibilities they enjoy. This paper looks at the relevance of visual media in contemporary African Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity. I will first place the movements in question in their proper religious context and then examine how they have colonized public space through an extensive appropriation of modern media technologies, and what this teaches us about this type of African Christianity. The sub-Saharan African country, Ghana, is the immediate geographical context for the study. In this paper, “Pentecostalism” refers to the spirituality of Christian churches and movements, which in continuity with occurrences in the Acts of the Apostles, value, affirm, and consciously encourage the experiential presence of the Holy Spirit as part of normal Christian life and worship. The coterminous expression “Charismatic” usually refers to historically younger streams of Pentecostal groups that function within existing historic mission denominations as “renewal movements.” Drawing their members mainly from among disenchanted youths of historic mission churches, several of these charismatic renewal groups have since the late 1970s been incorporated as autochthonous churches operating in urban settings in Africa. In Ghana, the new churches are popular referred to as, Charismatic ministries (CMs).  相似文献   

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《Material Religion》2013,9(1):88-108
ABSTRACT

Prior to their conversion to Christianity, Asabano boys and women were forbidden to play drums, lest they become aroused and promiscuous. The origin myth of the drum, revealed during male initiations, identifies its sound as that which emanates from a woman's vagina during sex. Therefore, to play the drum is to have sex on a mythological-symbolic level. Boys married only after hearing this myth and drumming in an all-night public celebration. Initiates knew the secret significance of their performance, providing them with a sense of manly security and power. To women who listened and danced, the celebration displayed handsomely presented, marriageable young men. In 1994–5, Christian rhetoric held that prohibiting women from drumming belongs to the Satanic past. Yet, while initiations were no longer held, the drum still figured prominently in celebrations, played only by men. By 2005, both sexes drummed during Baptist church services symbolizing universal access to God's bounty, but outside of church drum making and leadership in performance remained a male activity. In spite of the loss of a religious ideology of male secret knowledge, masculine gender identity retained its strength in part through the continued practice of male drumming.  相似文献   

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《Landscape Research》2013,38(2):213-228

The public space surrounding war memorials and military monuments has always been important in the iconography of remembrance. In the 19th century these spaces often took the form of garden cemeteries and memorial plantations; after the First World War large tracts of former battlefield were preserved as sacred spaces which were essential to the process of ritual pilgrimage. After 1945 there was a considerable shift in the landscapes of war: memorial schemes more often took a pragmatic and utilitarian form, and desolated cities such as Hiroshima (and to a lesser extent Dresden and Coventry) became the cornerstone for anti-war movements in the late 1950s and 1960s. This period saw the emergence of a symbolic landscape of protest, which often co-existed uncomfortably as a place of tourism. Through a study of such sites the various types of 'peace landscape' are analysed, from environmental schemes such as trans-border parks to political interventions in the form of peace gardens. In the final section a recent design competition for a peace park in Turkey is examined and compared with similar complex environments in the US and Northern Ireland.  相似文献   

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《Material Religion》2013,9(1):50-69
ABSTRACT

This paper explores the architecture and sculpture of Jackson Hlungwani's New Jerusalem site at Mbhokota in the Limpopo Province in South Africa, against the background of the theology, architecture, and art of the African independent churches in South Africa. The paper examines Hlungwani's idiosyncratic approach to Christianity and its manifestation in a reworking of ancient stone ruins and the production of an entirely individual body of sculpture. It demonstrates how Hlungwani marries aspects of his Tsonga tradition with biblical imagery, and suggests that it was this marriage that enabled Hlungwani to reconcile the sale of his sculpture with his religious beliefs. The paper also establishes that Hlungwani's iconography is completely independent of orthodox Christian dogmas and is created in the context of an awareness of “art.”  相似文献   

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《Material Religion》2013,9(3):293-321
Abstract

Drawing upon recent ethnographic research (interviews and participant observation) conducted among members of an Orthodox Christian parish (Orthodox Church in America or OCA) located in the southern United States, I explore the ways that contemporary digital and other mechanical modes of reproduction complicate how contemporary American Orthodox Christians integrate icons, two-dimensional images essential to Orthodox worship, into their devotional lives. While theologians have traditionally emphasized hand-painted icons as fundamental to the Orthodox liturgical experience, mass-produced print and digitally downloaded reproductions have largely supplanted such traditionally crafted images in the lived, everyday experience of American Orthodox Christians. A key theme of this paper is the way these developing technologies enhance the agency of my informants as they make critical decisions regarding which images (within a prodigious visual landscape) to accept as “icons” over and against others simply dismissed and disposed of as mere “pictures.” The inherent tensions informants confront in the process of this decision-making as well as the ways they appeal to Orthodox tradition in sanctifying their iconographic selections will be featured in this article.  相似文献   

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Based on an analysis of over 11,000 Elizabethan Essex wills, this article presents the first systematic study of the everyday religious environment of Essex. While scholars of the English Reformation increasingly study the everyday behaviors, routines, and rituals which defined English Protestant life, this article articulates how smaller household objects expand our knowledge of religion, practice, and remembrance in post-Reformation England. It also reinvestigates the potential for using wills as a foundation for the study of objects. This, in turn, helps us better understand and appreciate the substantial role objects had as part of an English Protestant religious identity increasingly built around remembrance and memory and, more broadly, enables us to question our historiographical assumptions about the speed, spread, and efficiency of the Reformation.  相似文献   

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《Material Religion》2013,9(4):418-440
ABSTRACT

This article discusses shared material culture and sensorial practices in prayer among Hindu and Catholic Sri Lankan Tamils living in Paris, such as the clockwise circling of incense, the use of flower garlands, and the worship of Mother Mary. Rather than classifying these practices into religious categories, I argue for a need to examine how such practices come to be shared. By employing a material approach to religious aesthetics which recognizes that objects or “things” are active and have agency and affect how we sense and thus experience our world, I suggest that common aesthetic elements are able to produce feelings of religiosity and, particularly for people who share a common aesthetic in everyday life, to bridge the levels between humans and the divine.  相似文献   

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《Material Religion》2013,9(3):350-369
ABSTRACT

Although chieftaincy has remained a highly contested institution, it is one traditional institution that most Ghanaians identify with: chiefs have been and still are regarded as the custodians of the nation's cultural beliefs and practices. Their position as intermediaries between the ancestral spirits and the people they represent makes them sacred figures and their regalia sacred objects. Chiefs are also very important in facilitating the provision of social infrastructural projects and ensuring law and order in their communities. Such was the power and prestige of chiefs that under colonialism the British administration incorporated them into colonial governance. However, while the nationalist leaders in the immediate postcolonial era did not find it appropriate to incorporate chiefs into national governance, they nonetheless used some cultural materials of chieftaincy to legitimize and Africanize their authority and give the new state of Ghana a unique political identity. By incorporating chieftaincy objects into the newly designed political culture, the state profiled and reified chieftaincy as a national heritage. This article discusses the intricacies of turning sacred objects of chieftaincy into national state symbols.  相似文献   

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In urban studies scholarship, Beirut is often theorized on the frontiers of sectarian conflict as well as on the frontlines of neoliberalism. Entangling real estate, banking and transnational financial circulations, managed by the Banque du Liban, its political economy was – and still is – swayed by the fortunes of war. According to literature on the political economy of violence, profits are often made in times of conflict, a context appropriate to the civil war and postwar eras, during which the spoils of war enriched the pockets of warlords-turned-politicians. Yet as the fighting in Syria spills over the border, encumbering Lebanon's long paralyzed politics and straining Beirut's already deteriorated infrastructure, its political economy prospers – if only for a few – not because of violence but in spite of it. Beirut's skyline is covered in construction cranes erecting affluent, if empty, apartments; the banks are infused with deposits invested in the debt of a sovereign bankrupt in ways not simply financial. Both sectors are said to be resilient, a discourse so often repeated that resilience has become the dominant mode by which Beirut is understood. Excavating these discourses, this article presents Beirut's political economy as an assemblage of real estate investment, sovereign debt and emigration, and in so doing theorizes the Banque du Liban as a city builder fusing the political and the economic into an apparatus of transnational investment.  相似文献   

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《Material Religion》2013,9(3):328-348
ABSTRACT

In Mauritius, religious performance often doubles as officially recognized diasporic heritage, institutionalized as a component of Mauritians' “ancestral cultures.” Such forms of religious expression not only point to a source of authority outside Mauritius but also play a key role in legitimizing claims on Mauritian citizenship. In this article, I examine two kinds of practices that help to instantiate religious links as heritage: ritual performance combined with the cultivation of “ancestral language” in the context of a Hindu pilgrimage and the role of sound reproduction techniques in popularizing a particular genre of Islamic devotional poetry. I argue that these embodied and material practices illustrate two contrasting modes of engaging with spatially and temporally removed sources of authenticity. While the pilgrimage aims at naturalizing diasporic links through their objectification and iconization, uses of sound reproduction technology in Islamic devotional contexts establish links to sources of religious authority under the assumption that the medium used is relatively transparent. Ultimately, the modalities of materiality presupposed in the ethnographic examples account for the authenticating effect of religion as heritage.  相似文献   

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《Material Religion》2013,9(2):168-192
ABSTRACT

The modern Marian shrine in Lourdes (southern France) attracts six million pilgrims every year. While the site is known worldwide for the miracles that occur there, the dominant official discourse hardly recognizes people's miraculous experiences. This ethnographic study focuses on ex-votos, the religious objects by which pilgrims offer their thanks to Mary for working a miracle. These are situated on the contested boundary between pilgrims' lived religion and officially prescribed religion at the Lourdes site. The article aims to understand what power politics are at stake in the handling of ex-votos as well as what motives pilgrims have to leave offerings at the site. This is illustrated by the in-depth analysis of the story of one ex-voto that also shows that the bonds within families, and between families and Mary, are crucial elements of the stories told. By offering an ex-voto, pilgrims not only remember Mary, but also their family and ancestors.  相似文献   

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