All in Articles
How can atomic power be interpreted through the lens of spirituality and mythology as a cultural response? The author shows us by focusing on the Chernobyl explosion in 1986. She proposes the innovative idea of a ‘radiation culture' where nuclear radiation has evolved from a purely scientific concept, first observed in the controlled environment of the lab, to a culture with its vivid beliefs and folklore.
The sport of CrossFit can be studied as meaningful material practice via the use and display of t-shirts. The author provides us with a unique case study and encourages us to look at the domain of sport with new eyes, one where materials, artefacts and practices are simultaneously part of the mundane world but also transcend the ordinary and manifest transformative values.
The Japanese conch shell trumpet is associated with practitioners of Shugendo. By studying some different trumpets in museum collections, the author argues that their sonic and apotropaic power in rituals and their status in the popular imagination reinforces their use as talismans.
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.
The author describes contemporary Mongolian funerary practices that are based in shamanism but mixed with other traditions as well, providing material intermediaries for the care of the disembodied soul.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
David Morgan comments on the entanglement of body, material culture, and lived religion in this article. Of particular use, he offers a set of operational definitions regarding material culture, embodiment, lived religion, aesthetics, and the material economy of the sacred.
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.
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.
A set of reflections on the author’s training in visual and material culture at University College London and how that facilitated insights regarding her ethnographic study of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
