Studies in Material Religion and Spirituality

This series welcomes scholarly monographs and edited collections that explore the social, cultural and economic relationship between religion, materiality and spirituality. This series invites cutting-edge scholarly work that critically and imaginatively explores these transformations globally. Focused on contemporary issues and grounded in strong empirical, ethnographic and archival work, volumes in the series speak to multiple audiences in the social sciences disciplines, including anthropology, history, sociology, political science, cultural studies, global studies and area studies, moving beyond well-established paradigms to explore the reconfiguration of material religion and spirituality in the era of globalized production, trade, regulation and consumption.

Series Editors

Julius Bautista ([email protected]) is Associate Professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan. He is the author of The Way of the Cross: Suffering Selfhoods in the Roman Catholic Philippines and Figuring Catholicism: An Ethnohistory of the Santo Niño de Cebu; the editor of The Spirit of Things: Materiality and Religious Diversity in Southeast Asia; and the co-editor of Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity and Conflict.

Johan Fischer ([email protected]) is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University, Denmark. He is the author of Proper Islamic Consumption: Shopping among the Malays in Modern Malaysia; The Halal Frontier: Muslim Consumers in a Globalized Market; Islam, Standards, and Technoscience: In Global Halal Zones; Halal Matters: Islam, Politics and Markets in Global Perspective; Religion, Regulation, Consumption: Globalising Kosher and Halal Markets; and Kosher and Halal Business Compliance, and the co-editor of Muslim Piety as Economy.

Jérémy Jammes ([email protected]) is Associate Professor at the research Institute of Asian Studies at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei. He is author of Les oracles du Cao Ðài: Étude d’un mouvement religieux vietnamien et de ses reseaux and Chrétiens évangéliques d’Asie du Sud-Est: Expériences locales d’une ferveur conquérante, and the co-editor of Muslim Piety as Economy.

Rationale

In May 2019, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, secured a landslide victory for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Modi, who has been Prime Minister since 2014, is a strict vegetarian, and promotes vegetarianism as a national project. Brahmin groups, the Hindu priestly caste that traditionally promotes vegetarianism, and the Hindu nationalist movement of which Modi is at the forefront, have carefully supported this idea, accepting at face value the notion that most Hindus are, or desire to be, vegetarians while Muslims and lower castes are not and do not wish to be. The Hindu concept of ahimsa (non-injury to all living creatures), cow veneration and banning of cow slaughter are essential in contemporary India, even though the country is one of the largest meat producers in the world and most of this production is halal (literally, ‘lawful’ or ‘permitted’ in Islam). In 2011, the Indian state made it mandatory that all processed food and drinks should bear marks to indicate whether products are vegetarian (green) or non-vegetarian (brown). Hindu nationalist discourse commonly asserts that Muslims and Dalits (untouchables) are inferior and violent meat-eaters. This example highlights why and how material religion and spirituality matter in social science (theory) and the modern world. The series speaks to authors and audiences interested in the intersection between material religion/spirituality and ‘green’ ideologies and movements; capitalism/markets; nationalism, violence and conflict; body politics; ethics; nature/ecology/culture; ethnicities/identities; as well as debates over the extent to which the material world is, or should be, an expression of religion/spirituality. What is more, a re-examination of how ‘things’ condition humanity is particularly timely given that tangible objects are increasingly crucial features of the next phase of the digital revolution – for example, intelligent tools and the Internet of things. More than ever, the relationship that people have with objects is a crucial concern in an era of mass consumerism, hyper-commodification and conspicuous consumption in the context of global religious revivalism at all levels of society.