The materialization of religious structures in the time of stonehenge

ABSTRACT

Both ritual and religion share a common ontology, in that they are materialized through practice—they are technologies of the body and material world as much as of the mind and immaterial. Acknowledging such offers considerable prospect for archaeology, inasmuch as it implies that the generation, reproduction, and transformation of religion will be worked through and given dimension by material forms that are recoverable. The latter might include the construction of shrines, temples, and other architectural foci for veneration and spirit communication, attendant practices of deposition, and ceremony itself as embodied within architectural forms. Working through details of architectural form, cosmology, materiality, and the sequence of monument construction in the Stonehenge region of Wiltshire, this paper provides an interpretation of the history of religious practice during the later Neolithic (c.3000–2300 bc) of central southern England.     

fallen angel: the consumption of religion through american cocktail culture

Abstract

This essay examines the figure of the cocktail in American cultural history to establish it as a point of convergence between consumer culture and religious expression. The authors set out to understand which structures of religious experience persist within the cocktail, and what about them so captivates American consumers. The structures explored include: the fetishistic and totemic nature of cocktails and their accoutrements; the importance of pilgrimage within cocktail culture; a retention of ritualistic forms; an extant modern desire for transcendence through community; and the surprising relationship between religion and cosmopolitanism. The essay begins by examining the religious mood set by clandestine drinking during Prohibition, and traces that mood through its historical antecedents in alchemy, colonialism, and the medicine industry. The essay continues with an exploration of the process by which totemic images came to be associated with cosmopolitan cocktail culture in Harlem nightclubs, and Cuban and Caribbean tourist destinations. Finally, it compares the commercialized artistic aesthetics of surrealist art installations and the mid-century cult of tiki, in whose temple-styled lounges primitivism, alchemy, symbolism, ritualism, and colonial fetishism all facilitated the fusion of religious feeling with exotic drinks.     

A Tale of Two Façades: Archaeology and the Secularization of an Islamic Past

Abstract

This article examines how certain forms of preservation work to recast the past in rigid terms of secular and religious. Focusing on a series of early Islamic period sites in the Levant, collectively known as the Umayyad qusūr (sometimes referred to as “desert palaces”), this essay traces the ways in which scholars signal the realms of the secular through interpretation of architectonics and iconography. This process of secularization is then further advanced through practices of preservation and display within colonial and nationalist museum contexts on a grand scale. At stake are ethical claims about the value of religion, specifically Islam, in larger discourses of culture and civilization. The paper explores the role played by these approaches to the material past of the early Islamic world for how they perform and police the boundaries of religious and secular materiality.     

Afterword—gendering religious objects: placing them as agents in matrices of power

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.     

Religious displays: an observational study with a focus on the horniman museum

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.     

Mediality and materiality in religious performance: religion as heritage in mauritius

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.     

Altars of Ammo: Catholic Materiality and the Visual Culture of World War II

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.     

The look of sympathy: religion,visual culture,and the social life of feeling

ABSTRACT

Religions are powerful communities of feeling, compelling ways of experiencing connections with others. As such, they structure human relations in patterns that rely on media and the arts to accomplish significant cultural work such as nurture children, disseminate information, and order forms of association by arousing and managing common sentiments. A textual and visual discourse in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and North America considered “sympathy” or fellow feeling to be the basis of moral conduct and the glue of social life. Images have played an important role in mediating sympathy by promoting moral causes, acting as propaganda, and eliciting deeply felt reactions to injustices. Yet the felt-life of religion exhibits a tension between compassion and solidarity. By scrutinizing how images were used to generate sympathy, we are able to see how the sense of community depends on both feeling for some (sympathy) and feeling against others (antipathy). Moreover, investigation of the relationship between the felt-life of religion and visual practices shows that the study of visual culture should not be isolated from other forms of sensation and representation. Seeing is part of the embodied experience of feeling, and therefore is properly understood as a fundamental part of many religious practices.     

Museological Framings of Islam in Europe

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the evocation of the sacred in the realm of material heritage practice, drawing on the creation of Freedom Park, a monumental, state-driven post-apartheid heritage project, as a case of heritage formation. Heritage formation refers to the casting of material cultural forms as heritage through sacralizing practices that set these objects apart at the center of social relations and their maintenance as powerful registers of the past for the “hailing” of collective identities. Specifically, it shows how southern African indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) and religious concepts were appropriated, translated, and employed in the formation of three material elements at Freedom Park: the//hapo, or museum, as recounting a cosmogony of nation, the Wall of Names as generating a transcendent ancestry, and the Isivivane as focalizing a national sacred center. Overall, it serves to expand our understanding of the dynamics of heritage production in a transforming South Africa, the dynamic power and appeal of heritage as sacralized material culture, and the significance of a critical religious studies approach for interpreting the dynamism of contemporary heritage practice.     

Constructing authentic houses of god: religious politics and creative iconographies in dutch mosque design

ABSTRACT

Modern mosques in the West are all too often considered to be anachronistic pastiches of authentic historical examples that are literally out of place in the Muslim diaspora. Whereas this perspective has usually led to projections of nostalgia onto generalized communities, in this article I will take two prominent and enigmatic examples from the Netherlands and trace empirically how their designs have developed. Building on an expanding body of iconological studies of religious architecture, I will present an analysis of the different positions the Muslim patrons who initiated these buildings have taken up in Islamic politics. An empirical reconstruction of their prototypical selections, and how these were used to steer the architects towards the creation of desired drawings, makes their outcomes more intelligible. Whereas both mosques have been modeled on the same historical example, an underlying contestation of religious authorization has led to divergent forms of architectural authentication.     

Shintai and the Empty Cross

This paper investigates the significance of the empty cross in Tadao Ando's Church of the Light (1989) in association with shintai, the Japanese notion of the body. Following the Japanese cultural tradition, in particular the theory of perception and body in the philosophy of nothingness by Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945), the foremost thinker in modern East Asian intellectual history and the father of the Kyoto Philosophical School, shintai is understood as an active, pre-reflective, sensational capacity to embrace and feel the world as the content of the very self. Simultaneously, when its sensational capacity to embrace the world is limited, shintai transcends the horizon of sensation, articulates posturally its reaching out to the world, and enters into the realm of creative act to accommodate the sensational surplus. By referring to this distinctive Japanese notion of the body, the paper illuminates the significance of the empty cross in the Church of the Light, which integrates the natural phenomenal light—it is a slit—and the iconic permanence of the standing body into one indivisible reality. The paper illuminates how the notion of shintai is effective in understanding the simultaneous presence of the phenomenal and the iconic in the cross. It finally shows how one's perception of the cross under the mode of shintai renews the efficacy of the cross's vertical posture as symbolizing the victory and glory of Jesus, not his suffering, as claimed by Daisetz T. Suzuki, a renowned Zen Buddhist, whose references were the Baroque crucifixion and the peaceful horizontal posture of Buddha on his deathbed.     

Interior Design Dilemmas in a Shared Room of Silence

Abstract

This text sheds light on the delicate practice of including different religious as well as nonreligious expressions in a shared room. The effects of design decisions in a “room of silence” at a Swedish hospital are studied over a transitional period of renovation of the space. We observe the impact of materiality in the room’s establishment, renovation, and usage, and show how the room’s interior design, its decor and objects, are conditioned by ritual acts as well by practical and spontaneous place-making processes. By following how the negotiations of the interior space relate to presupposed separations of aesthetic and religious ideals, we see how the design of a room of silence can allow several religious groups to comfortably use one common room; but also how design can cause clashes between different interests and how materiality is forced in the end to advice a clear spatial distinction between different types of usage in the room.     

The modern fear of matter: reflections on the protestantism of victorian science

ABSTRACT

Materiality is a quality of relationship rather than a thing in itself (Ding an sich). These relations vary. An inquiry into late Victorian attitudes towards materialism shows that modern science inherited a certain fear of matter from Protestantism, which identifies a number of these relationships as being at least latently religious. It allows us to specify how culturally and historically particular our understanding of matter, materiality and materialism are.     

Iconic Religion in Urban Space

Abstract

In order to understand current dynamics of religious diversity, a focus on the tangible presence of religion and the co-existence of new and longstanding religious buildings, sites and artifacts in urban spaces is a fruitful starting point. Launching the notion of iconic religion, this introduction seeks to contribute to developing a scholarly framework for the nexus of religion and the city from a spatial, material, aesthetic and semiotic angle. Situated in the interface between matter and religious meaning, religious icons are not simply carriers of meaning, but make it present.     

The ideal democratic apparel: t-shirts,religious intolerance,and the clothing of democracy

ABSTRACT

Studies of clothing highlight the power of fashion and the ways dominant groups police deviant fashion; however, they neglect to analyze how a mainstream fashion item, the T-shirt, also helps monitor the boundaries and norms of American society. This article examines the relationship between the T-shirt form and religious intolerance. Scholars have analyzed nativist rhetoric, polemical literature, and caricatured renderings, yet clothing as a site of religious conflict remains understudied. To address these scholarly gaps, this article first investigates the history and meanings of the T-shirt, and then presents a case study of religious intolerance focused on Islamophobic T-shirts. This analysis builds toward an understanding of the T-shirt as the ideal article of democratic apparel for disseminating religious intolerance. In the end, we see how these T-shirts refashion religious intolerance as American individualism, thus perpetuating the idea that religious intolerance is only an occasional accessory to, rather than a constituent part of the clothing of, American democracy.     

Transgressing religious boundaries: the power of aesthetics in tamil catholic and hindu worship

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.     

Projecting Faith: French and Belgian Catholics and the Magic Lantern Before the First World War

Abstract

Around 1900, the Catholic Church in Belgium and France started to systematically use the magic lantern for religious education, but also as a propaganda tool in their fight against their laic opponents in both countries. In the course of the nineteenth century, the magic lantern had become a major visual mass medium in Europe and the United States. The light beam of the lantern was seen as a powerful means to sustain faith and disseminate the views of the Church. While numerous members of the Catholic clergy embraced the projections lumineuses as a continuation of the long-standing tradition to teach the gospel through images, from glass windows to paintings, they had to face opposition by those who thought the magic lantern unfit to be used to lecture on religious matters. Despite such resistance, the projected image became an important medium used throughout the first decades of the twentieth century by the Catholic Church.     

Seeing the eyes of god in human form: iconography and impersonation in african and hindu traditions of trance performance in the southern caribbean

ABSTRACT

This article links analysis of the body and of visual culture within religious studies through comparative examination of two southern Caribbean ritual traditions: Shango, or Orisha Worship (African), and Shakti Puja, or Kali Worship (Hindu). Both are centered upon subaltern ceremonies of trance performance and spirit mediumship. The article examines a primary difference in the impersonation of divinity evident between the two traditions—performing with one's eyes open on the African side versus closed on the Hindu side—and accounts for this contrast in terms of inverse relations between religious iconography and use of the body as a vehicle of ritualized form, referred to here as inverse conventions of “iconopraxis.” However, this level of differentiation is built upon a deeper, but no less cultural use of the body as a tool of entranced ritual praxis shared by each tradition. Each tradition therefore exploits similar phenomenological affordances of the human body in order to cultivate alter-cultural experiences of ceremonial ecstasy that, in turn, are modulated by differing conventions of iconopraxis. The analysis highlights the polymorphous nature of embodiment in accounting for similarities and differences of cultural symbolism in the ritual arts of trance.     

Introduction: visual cultures of pentecostalism

ABSTRACT

Changes in the sartorial practices of Dutch-Turkish women who wear Muslim headscarves may be summarized as a shift from sober, religiously inspired forms of dress towards colorful, more fashionable styles. A focus on the materiality of headscarves indicates, however, that the relation between Islam, dress, and fashion is more complex. The main motivation for the women to adopt headscarves, including the fashionable ones, is religious. They do so because they consider it a practice prescribed in the foundational Islamic texts and because presenting a pleasant, up-to-date look can be considered as a form of visual da'wa. At the same time, however, wearing particular styles of fashionable headscarves also performs other, non-religious, identities and forms of belonging, such as those pertaining to status, ethnicity, and professionalism. This is evident in how fabrics (such as silk) and shapes of headscarves (square or rectangular) matter. An investigation of headscarves as particular items of dress is, in turn, helpful to understand the limits of a focus on aesthetic styles and fashion. The headscarf format makes these items of dress easy to acquire and hard to discard, because they are often received as gifts. A woman's attachment to particular headscarves—materializing social relations and functioning as souvenirs—goes beyond aesthetic styles and mitigates the force of fashion.