The 'Magritte Effect' in the Study of Religion, Part I and II

The 'Magritte Effect' in the Study of Religion, Part I and II

Jean-Pierre Warnier

In this theoretically rich piece, the author discusses the entanglement of ‘things’ and their representations. In most religious traditions, this topic plays an important historical role in determining how devotees respond to imagery and materiality, especially as these media convey or embody their most important religious concepts. Cycles of iconophilia and iconoclasm relating to this issue form a central thread in the Abrahamic faiths, for instance. Warnier insists that scholars of religion need to be more circumspect regarding the ‘cognitive gap’ that exists between the praxeological ‘things’ of a religious tradition and the representations of those things.

Material, Embodied and Lived Religion: Basket Divination in Practice and Theory

Material, Embodied and Lived Religion: Basket Divination in Practice and Theory

Sonia Silva
Articles

The author draws upon her ethnographic work with basket diviners and their clients in northwest Zambia, Africa, to argue that the practice of basket divination is a material and embodied one. Further, it is a lived religion defined by the precariousness of human life and the transformative force of suffering. Without this broader existential context, basket divination would not be a lived religion.

Between Temples and Toilets: Sanitation Worship in India

Between Temples and Toilets: Sanitation Worship in India

Jacqueline Cieslak
Articles

The author artfully describes the complicated relationships between sanitation, reverence, and political contrivance in contemporary India. She focuses on the phenomenon of ‘The Toilet’ and its objectification as artefact and cultural institution. She argues that officials have not simply recruited religious imagery but that sanitation itself has become an object of worship.

Aura and Inversion in a Marian Pilgrimage: Fatima and her Statues

Aura and Inversion in a Marian Pilgrimage: Fatima and her Statues

David Morgan
Articles

The author analyses Marian devotion as an ‘economy of the sacred’, mediated by the statue of Our Lady of Fatima. Through data gathered in churches in the U.S., Morgan shows how a divine economy relies on material devices and embodied practices to satisfy a specific Christian theology, helps devotees render penance and devotion to the Virgin, and ensures her grace in return.

Food for Thought: The Contributions of 'Matière à Penser' to the Study of Material Culture

Food for Thought: The Contributions of 'Matière à Penser' to the Study of Material Culture

Jean-Pierre Warnier
Articles, Reviews

As one of the founding members of the ‘MaP’ (Matière à Penser) working group and author of “The Pot King”, Jean-Pierre Warnier authored this brief description of the main ideas of the group, belatedly turned into an informal network, and devoted to the study of bodily and material culture with an emphasis on empirical field research and on theoretical sophistication.

Thinking with the Tabot: The Material Dimensions of Waiting in Addis Ababa

Thinking with the Tabot: The Material Dimensions of Waiting in Addis Ababa

Alexandra Antohin
Articles

Alexandra Antohin uses the material analogy of the Ethiopian tabot to explore alternative dispositions to waiting and indeterminacy. She explores how ‘moving foundations’ of the home and church facilitate conditions of sustaining instability. This thought-provoking discussion considers how dilemmas of displacement and the manipulation of time during crises, such as urban resettlement, can revise sociocultural assumptions about the march of time as moving fast and forward.

Tracing the Many Lives of Religious Structures

Tracing the Many Lives of Religious Structures

Uthara Suvrathan
Articles

Uthara Suvarathan emphasizes the importance of alternative traces in exploring the complex life-histories of Buddhist and Hindu religious structures in Banavasi, South India. By paying attention to ephemeral as well as more long-lasting religious material culture she offers a way of studying changing patterns of religious practice and cultural memory formation.

Intimacy 2.0: Guru-Disciple Relationship in a Networked World

Intimacy 2.0: Guru-Disciple Relationship in a Networked World

Yael Lazar
Articles

Digitally networked media has influenced the possibility and nature of an intimate guru-disciple relationship in the 21st century. This article examines the case of Sadhguru and the Isha Foundation in light of both the tradition from which they emerge and the larger technoculture in which they operate. The author Yael Lazar argues for a new form of intimacy that might be different from the tradition but not necessarily less intimate or real.

The Church-Museum: Context and (Dis)connection in Public Religion

The Church-Museum: Context and (Dis)connection in Public Religion

Alexandra Antohin
Articles

Museum-ification of churches in Ethiopia, Russia and the U.S. establishes active reference points for new forms of public engagement. Antohin draws upon her experience of these sites as well as contextualization theory to explore how religious media are included in the interpretative space of ‘church-museums’. She suggests that in Ethiopia, where tourism is still a new industry, multiple subjectivities and modes of interpretation may emerge through the display and reception of religious media in a public context.

Immaterial Religion – Yves Klein’s Ex-voto to St Rita of Cascia

Immaterial Religion – Yves Klein’s Ex-voto to St Rita of Cascia

Jessica Hughes
Articles

An essay on the details and aesthetic significance of a votive offering that artist Yves Klein made to St. Rita of Cascia. While art has always played an ineliminable role in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it seems that Klein was particularly sensitive to the entanglement of votive offering, economic sacrifice, and the experiential dimensions of ritual. In many of Klein's works, it would seem that the subsumption of art into religion has been inverted.

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