1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Material Religion
The Routledge Handbook of Material Religion places objects and bodies at the center of scholarly studies of religious life and practice.
Propelling forward the study of material religion, the Handbook first reveals the deep philosophical roots of its key categories and then advances new critical analytics, such as queer materialities, inescapable material entanglements, and hyperobjects that explode the small-scale personal view on religions.
The Handbook comprises thirty chapters, written by an international team of contributors who offer a global perspective of religious pasts and presents, divided into four thematic parts:
- Genealogies of Material Religion
- Materializing the Terms of the Study of Religion
- Entanglements, Entrapment, Escaping
- Hyperobjects, or How Ginormous Things Affect Religions
In these four parts, the study of material religion is redirected towards systematic, critical interrogations of the imbrication of religious structures of power with racial, economic, political, and gendered forms of domination.
From Spinoza’s political theology to African philosophies of ubuntu; from the queer materialities of Mesoamerican religion to the Satanic Temple of the United States; from Islamic love and sacrifice in human-animal entanglements to Shia militants’ attachment to weaponry; from epidemic cataclysm in Latin America to vast infrastructures and the gathering of millions in India’s Kumbh Mela, the study of material religion proves to be the study par excellence of the human condition.
The Handbook is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, anthropology, history, and media studies, and will also be of interest to those in related fields such as archeology, sociology, and philosophy.
Editors' Introduction: The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of the Study of Material Religion
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Jennifer Scheper Hughes, and S. Brent Rodríguez-Plate
Part I: Genealogies of Material Religion
1.1 Spinoza: Arch-Father of the Material-Religion Approach
Pooyan Tamimi Arab
1.2 Material Theories in Japanese Buddhism: What Kūkai and Dōgen Thought about Things
Pamela D. Winfield
1.3 Gender, Ritual, and Dancing Images: Jane E. Harrison’s Aesthetic Approaches to the Materiality of Religion
Ulrike Brunotte
1.4 The Philosophy of Ubuntu and Material Religion in Africa: Engaging Henry Rowley’s Mid-Nineteenth-Century Perspective on the Materiality of Religion
Kapya J. Kaoma
1.5 Mesoamerican Nightlife and the Queer Materialities of Religion
Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez
1.6 Comparison after Materiality
Johan Strijdom
Part II: Materializing the Terms of the Study of Religion
2.1 Books in Religious Studies: From Relentless Textualism to Embodied Practices
Katja Rakow
2.2 Of Manuscripts That Can’t Be Read and Roads That Can’t Be Seen: Historical Matters among Chams in Cambodia
Emiko Stock
2.3 The Recursivity of the Fetish
Roger Sansi
2.4 Animism? Animated? Ensouled? The Active Lives of Balinese Masks
Laurel Kendall and Ni Wayan Pasek Ariati
2.5 "Brainsmithing" African Material Religion
Allen F. Roberts and Mary "Polly" Nooter Roberts
2.6 Crossing Heritage: Material Religion at the Humboldt Forum
Duane Jethro
2.7 Material God Mengdu: A Symbol and Real Presence
Yohan Yoo
2.8 Three Sacred Mouthfuls: Transformed and Transformative Materiality of Sacred Food in Hindu Publics
Tulasi Srinivas
2.9 Dark Mirroring: The Satanic Temple’s Queer Material Religion
Sharday Mosurinjohn
Part III: Entanglements, Entrapments, Escaping
3.1 The Entanglements of Religion and Things
Ian Hodder
3.2 Measuring Entanglement in Material Traces of Ritualized Interaction: Preferential Attachment in a Prehistoric Petroglyph Distribution
Tom Froese and Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta
3.3 "Disentangling" as an Everyday Practice: Material, Visual, Sacred, and Commodity features of "Puja Things"
Vineeta Sinha
3.4 Broken Buddhas: Reflections on (Im)Materiality and Impermanence
S. Romi Mukherjee
3.5 Buddhist Practice, Recreation, and Fun: Entanglements of Popular Culture and Material Religion
Inken Prohl
3.6 Christmas Gifts at the Turn of the Twentieth Century in Santiago, Chile: From a Gift Economy to Commodity
Olaya Sanfuentes
3.7 The Jewel of Men: Weaponry as Material Religion among Muslim Communities
Younes Saramifar
3.8 Human-Animal Entanglements and the Anthropology of Sacrifice: Practicing Qurbani in Mumbai
Shaheed Tayob
3.9 Borrando La Frontera: Ana Teresa Fernández’s Transborder Communion
Barbara Sostaita
Part IV: Hyperobjects, or How Ginormous Things Affect Religions
4.1 The Erie Canal and the Birth of American Religion: Infrastructure as Hyperobject
S. Brent Rodríguez-Plate
4.2 The Kumbh Melā as Hyperobject: Sound, Scale, Nation, Environment
Amanda Lucia
4.3 Sonic Religion: The Analysis of Atmospheric Half-Things
Patrick Eisenlohr
4.4 Mortandad as Hyperobject: Colonial Death Worlds and Epidemic Cataclysm in Las Américas
Jennifer Scheper Hughes
4.5 Virus as Hyperobject: Early Atlantic World Jews and Yellow Fever Epidemics
Laura Arnold Leibman
4.6 On Human Extinction
Evander Price
Index
Biography
Pooyan Tamimi Arab is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University.
Jennifer Scheper Hughes is Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside.
S. Brent Rodríguez-Plate is Professor, by special appointment, at Hamilton College, NY.
