Description
Book SynopsisAddressing the relation between religion and things, which has long been conceived in antagonistic terms, the guiding idea of this volume is that religion necessarily requires some kind of incarnation. Exploring the role and place of sacred artifacts, images, bodily fluids, sites and technologies in different locations and religious traditions, this volume re-materializes the study of religion.
Trade Review"Things gathers up a series of lively and provocative essays. Challenging received understandings of religion as primarily about beliefs (in spiritual beings) as historically derived and impossible to sustain, it draws attention to the centrality of the material in religious practices and debates about the world. This volume deserves a place on the shelf of anyone interested in either religion or materiality-or both." -- -Margaret Weiner University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "Things is an essential archive for the study of religious materiality and the material study of religion." -- -David Chidester author of Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa "A highly spirited and robust materialization of a significant trend in the study of religion. The articles in this remarkably coherent collection speak back to iconoclasm and the ideal or ideology of immateriality as found explicitly in certain practitioners of religion and implicitly in its scholarship. They illustrate the various ways in which material objects function as signs, powers, and mediations, and examine as well the intellectual debates and theological disputations about their functions and effects to which things inevitably give rise." -- -Michael Lambek author of The Weight of the Past "... this volume is an invaluable contribution to religious and material culture studies, broadening the scope of both fields by introducing new questions in old contexts, and investing agency in people and spirit in things." -- -Gabrielle A. Berlinger -Museum Anthropology Review
