The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices

Foreword by Jean-Pierre Warnier

Acknowledgments

1.    Introduction: Efficacious intimacies of worldmaking

Urmila Mohan

Part I Making the Innermost

2. Inexpressible reading: The efficacious non-discursivity of drinking the Qur’an

Hanna Nieber

3. Praying through the hands: Making objects and devotees in Umbanda

Patrícia Rodrigues de Souza

4. Objects as bodies in Michael Landy’s Shelf Life

Lindsay Polly Crisp

Part II Techniques and Rituals of Intimacy

5. Tisser du lien: Textile art as a tautological performance and embodiment of an expression

Claire Le Pape

6. Rituals and riverine flows: Negotiating change in Majuli Island, Assam

Simashree Bora

7. Protective cloaks, enveloping baby carriers: Embodiment and ritual practice in Angkola Batak Ulos textiles

Susan Rodgers

8. Kokoro-dzukai as a practice of the heart in Japanese Islam and design

Lira Anindita Utami

Part III Intimacies of (Dis)enchantment

9. Intimate with the enemy: Nuclear presence, vernacular art and Post-Chornobyl transformations Elena Romashko

10. What’s solid about solidarity? Shields and efficacious intimacy in the 2020 protests in Portland, OR

Steve Marotta

11. Grieving as a practice of resistance: Bishnoi entanglements with the Indian nuclear state

Sonali Huria

12. Pause, pivot and (un)mask in early pandemic U.S.

Urmila Mohan

Afterword

Rose Wellman

Biography

Urmila Mohan is an anthropologist of material culture with a focus on embodied belief practices in religious and political contexts. She is the founder of the open-access digital journal The Jugaad Project, collaborates with scholars and educators globally, and is associated with the Matière à Penser group. She has researched and theorized materiality, praxis, and aesthetics in diverse contexts including religious communities and maker groups in India, Indonesia, and the U.S.

“Crossing continents and disciplines, and fundamentally concerned to examine practices of worldmaking, this engaging volume maintains a remarkable unity of purpose. It succeeds admirably in troubling long-standing assumptions about self and subjectivity, proximity and distance, and brings a superbly comparative sensibility to the challenging task of exploring fraught intersections between materiality, experience, and belief. In doing so, it makes us reflect in new and sophisticated ways about something that we thought we knew best, but which we perhaps did not know at all: intimacy.” - Simon Coleman, Anthropologist and Chancellor Jackman Professor, University of Toronto

“This important collection of globally arrayed essays argues for the materialization of belief. Whereas it had become a commonplace that “belief” meant something narrowly Christian—an interior state of volition keyed to creeds or doctrines—this book explores belief in the intimacy of bodies, practices, and material culture broadly understood. The impressive result will help change the conversation. The authors encourage readers to think about belief as part of the spectrum of agencies that propel human behavior—from within and from without. This is a very welcome contribution of original work.” - David Morgan, Duke University 

 

“In this volume artists, scholars, and practitioners use the theoretical framework of “efficacious intimacy” to explore relationships between the body, materials, and belief. With the diversity of perspectives presented, makers from all disciplines will have access to new ways of thinking about their own making, and how a proximate and intimate act resonates beyond the immediate object or action. This collection of essays resists the separation of art from life, situates it firmly within generative experience, and presents new ways of relating to both the natural and built world.” - Wendy Weiss, Professor Emerita, Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design Department, University of Nebraska-Lincoln