Disrupting Individualism through the Intimate: A Review of 'The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices' (Routledge, 2024)

Citation: Cieslik, Emma. “Disrupting Individualism through the Intimate: A Review of ‘The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices’ (Routledge, 2024)” The Jugaad Project, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2023, www.thejugaadproject.pub/disrupting-individualism [date of access]

Book Discussion Event held on January 19, 2024

In her edited volume The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices (2024), anthropologist Urmila Mohan takes a critical approach to how the social is made through belief practices, including its affects and effects. In the Introduction she sets out the conceptual framework for the book, grounding it in material culture studies, and challenges the notion of the self-managing individual by pointing out that the terms we use (individual, subject, actor), convey different analytical and theoretical expectations regarding the effects of practices. For instance, in Durkheim’s[1] notion of solidarity and togetherness it is the ‘individual’ who is compelled and must feel obligation to others. Instead, Mohan urges that we go beyond the idea of autonomous, self-regulated individuals coming together and proposes intimacy as an efficacious means of building worlds through objects, subjects, and their bodies. Intimacy as interactional “belief-in-motion” (pg. 1) forms connective threads throughout this book.

Efficacious intimacy, modeled in this volume through religious and political embodied experience, proves individualism and its imaginaries illogical by situating relationships in proximity of contact and/or feelings and the making of deep connections. Mohan states “navigations of closeness-distance impact living in a world that is constantly being made through actions, and as a result is both made by its inhabitants as well as making them. By connecting long-standing interests in how societies, groups, or ‘communities’ are formed through the matter of life—especially our bodies—efficacious intimacy serves as a useful critical concept for the study of religious and political materiality and embodiment.”[2] Belief has increasingly become the subject of studies centered on power relations and knowledge-making, and “what we come to know as ‘religious’ or ‘political’ is mediated by ways of making and doing.”

While it disrupts individualism and foregrounds transformation through subject-object interactions, the concept of efficacious intimacy does not deny agency, in fact, rather the opposite as it helps understand the conditions under which agencies are made and exerted, is useful in critiquing images of ‘freedom’, and helps relate and recognize different entities as part of social interactions and formations. Applying Francis Nyamnjoh’s idea of incompleteness,[3] the various chapters suggest that people are fundamentally incomplete and that part of ‘living’ is to exist through and in the bodies and minds of others by including the natural and supernatural. This mutualistic approach is evident in several of the book’s chapters in peoples’ relation with the land and nature (Simashree Bora, Sonali Huria, Elena Romashko), spirits (Patricia Rodrigues de Souza), art installations (Lindsay Polly Crisp, Claire Le Pape), and belonging and solidarity (Steve Marotta, Lira Anindita Utami).

The idea of efficacious intimacy was developed during Mohan’s doctoral ethnographic research at University College London (UCL) on clothing as a devotional practice in a globalizing Hindu group based in India called ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness).[4] She states, “It was a way for me to grasp the sociality of a group through two clothing and affective modes—personal clothing as well as the dressing of their deities, and how by making these devotional items or dressing themselves devotees shape themselves as well as the world around them. It was also a way to understand how embodiment theory could be used to study clothing (both as noun and verb) via processes of subject- and object-making.”

“Here,” Mohan continues, “there was a fortuitous intersection between my interests and the work of the Matière à Penser group where embodiment is studied as incorporation as opposed to objectification. Of course, in action, both processes happen together but it is a question of emphasis and what we encounter as ethnographers. I was also theoretically inspired by a 2014 UCL conference on religious subjectivation that I organized with Jean-Pierre Warnier and the special issue that came out of it. So, these ideas and conversations have been percolating for a while. During the pandemic in 2020, I was working on a book on masking practices where I became interested in the relationship between the real and imaginary in making the covidscape as well as Nyamnjoh’s idea of incompleteness to understand some of the dynamics we were witnessing in politics and society.”

This recognition of the importance of ‘incompleteness’ speaks directly to how this volume came to be. The Jugaad Project (TJP) is a volunteer-run editorial group and open-access journal founded by Mohan in 2019. But TJP actually began in 2014 with the Material Religion Blog and during the COVID-19 pandemic, hosted virtual workshops about efficacious intimacy. Mohan views these conversations and the relationships built through the lens of personal and scholarly jugaad, a South Asian term that suggests a range of meanings but that she prefers to use as a way to study social connections via bricolage and innovation. It is through a jugaad approach to scholarship that the book acknowledges the incompleteness of knowledge production; the scholars featured in this volume venture into examples extrapolating a wider framework that is still being explored.

The grounding of this volume not only in social scientific and other ideas but in relationships built over the period of the making of the book reminds[5] me of how the work of writing and editing is often invisibilized. In the image below, mycorrhizal network fungus connects trees to one another through threads of mycelium. Instead of viewing trees (comparable to phenomena visible to scholars) as isolated plants we can think of them as offshoots of an underground web in a forest that is one living, breathing organism. In this sense, the book itself becomes a world held together by connective threads, inhabited by diverse entities.

Mycelium of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi with false color. Credit: Oyarte-Galvez, published by AAAS and UrekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/986302

In conversation with chapters by scholars from religious and cultural studies, cultural geography, design, art, and the social sciences, efficacious intimacy addresses a significant gap—how viewing a person as individual, separate, and complete in themselves fails to recognize that the ‘illusion’ of completeness is based on intimate experiences with other people (Steve Marotta, Lira Anindita Utami); landscapes (Simashree Bora); animals (Sonali Huria); spirits (Patricia Rodrigues de Souza); objects like baby carriers (Susan Rodgers), art installations (Lindsay Polly Crisp), and masks (Urmila Mohan); and substances/materials, like edible liquid Qu’ranic verses (Hanna Neiber) and nuclear radiation (Elena Romashko), impacting how they think and act. The case studies are global and are drawn from research conducted in parts of Africa, Europe, the Americas, and South and Southeast Asia.

The volume is split into 13 chapters, including an Introduction from Mohan and Afterword from Rose Wellman. Efficacious intimacy “helps us trace how people sustain, make do, and challenge powers in exchanges between the mundane and otherworldly, imminent and transcendent” (pg. 4). By recognizing how these people, objects, and experiences prompt discussions of inequity, power, agency, and materiality, by studying efficacious intimacies, scholars can explore how worlds are created, maintained, deconstructed, and contested. Each chapter explores one of these worlds. As Mohan explains: “what makes this volume unique is that it asks how intimacy can be regarded (or believed) to be efficacious and how this aids the formation, enactment, and sustenance of sociality. People choose to interact with certain entities over others and prefer certain techniques and materials over others because they believe—know, feel, and perceive—that they are efficacious in worldmaking.” The authors utilize terms and concepts such as closeness, merging, attachments, connections, ties, assemblage, and others in relation to social relationship, providing a framework to greater understand their meaning and the usefulness of efficacious intimacy.

In the first section, “Making the innermost,” Hanna Neiber explores the practice of drinking the Qu’ran in Zanzibar, Africa. Pouring water over Qu’ranic verses written in saffron ink and thus imbibing the verses is an experience of bodily intimacy, viewed as medicinal. Patricia Rodriguez de Souza follows by exploring the exchange of objects, including dolls, between embodied spirits and devotees in Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion centered on bodily experience and intuition in making offerings. This section ends with Lindsay Polly Crisp’s exploration of British artist Michael Landy’s sculptural, drawing, and collage work that act as assemblages and negotiate his father John Landy’s experiences of disability as well as the artist’s relationship with his father.

In the second section, “Techniques and rituals of intimacy,” artist Claire Le Pape weaves together actual bodies in her performance art piece Tisser du lien, and in the process, critiques how the rhetoric of the powerful fails to capture the political value and agency of craft action. Simashree Bora zooms out in the next chapter, focusing on ritualistic interactions between the land and human activity, and social relationships between the dominant Hindu monasteries and communities in Majuli, a river island in Assam, India. Building on Le Pape’s textile focus, Susan Rodgers explores the protective power of being wrapped in a traditional Batak Ulos wrapper, and how the sacred is carried and held in one’s body. Lira Anindita Utami rounds out this section by exploring the efficacious intimacy of the ethos of kokoro-dzukai in Japanese daily life, design, and faith practices, wherein the practice of consideration creates and maintains closeness.

The last section, “Intimacies of (dis)enchantment,” begins with Elena Romashko’s analysis of how locals make boundaries between their bodies and radioactivity as a result of a forced, deep intimacy between the two after the 1986 Chornobyl explosion. Steve Marotta shifts the next chapter to mass protests in Portland, OR, following the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. In highly confrontational interactions with the police, protestors created shields and defensive objects with everyday items—the practices of which were efficacious in contributing to in/out group boundaries as aesthetic form and social attachment. Sonali Huria returns to the topic of nuclear imaginings in India, dissecting India’s intimacies with nuclear power and how they are challenged by the Bishnoi community in Haryana, India, that sees ecological preservation as a social, faith practice. Finally, Mohan rounds out the last chapter, focused on how, during the early months of the U.S. pandemic, volunteers created masks by themselves or in large groups to protect their families and communities. With the politicization of masks, the body became a battleground with breathing and masking practices recognized as political actions. This final chapter cements the importance of this volume as an essential read for any social scientist, especially one interested in religion, politics, economics, gender, and more.

This volume explores how intimacies themselves are charged experiences. In conversation with feminist[6] and queer scholarship[7], the various authors argue that unpacking whose intimacies are recognized, valued, socially acceptable, and protected is critical to understanding how social, economic, and political power affects and legitimizes some peoples’ experiences over others.

I asked Mohan whether the ideas in this volume could be used to address the hegemony of Judeo-Christian frameworks in religious studies and she observed that, while she is not a scholar of religious studies, she is inspired by how there is no absolute distinction between human and divine beings in Hinduism; and that this is a term given to a way of life. She also noted how historically, Indologists and Orientalists, such as Max Müller incorporated a Christian goal of inward spiritual development into studies of India, and we see this even today when belief is approached in Christian sects as something interiorized and the result of individual will and decision. Subsequent scholarship has, of course, challenged these approaches.[8]

Colonial Christian thought has deeply impacted how Hinduism is viewed even today, for instance, by emphasizing the codification of religious thought in the form of texts (or exegesis of existing texts)—a process that also influences how material culture studies is perceived. “Neither of these kinds of knowledge,” Mohan extrapolates, “is more or less important but one must be aware of this or risk marginalizing bodies, their drives, and conducts, and their relation to worldmaking, from material culture scholarship. Ethnography, and its analysis within the social sciences, is very useful here because it becomes a way to interact with people, observe practices, and understand different subjectivities beyond the idea that they are restricted to logos or verbally expressed thought.” This volume, Mohan hopes, will inspire anyone who is interested in the effects of making and contexts of what is considered effective to consider the power of intimacy in their research and as such connect mundane actions or relationships to wider experiences of belief and embodiment as well as political action and protest.

“Scholars do welcome these approaches but we always have to keep thinking about how we can break down disciplinary boundaries in the arts, humanities, and social sciences productively while keeping the best of what each field has to offer. …if reading this book helps soften the boundaries between the self and other, the subjective and objective, artistic and academic, or encourages us to take belief more seriously as an analytical tool of practice then I think it has been successful.” Mohan speaks to this in the volume’s introduction, arguing that studying dynamics of intimacy today necessitates being open to various efficacies, bridging disciplinary boundaries and religious/political worldviews.

References

[1] Durkheim, E. (1997[1893]). The Division of Labour in Society. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: The Free Press.

[2] Throughout this review, the author draws on a written interview with Urmila Mohan on November 8, 2023.

[3] Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2015). “Amos Tutuola and the Elusiveness of Completeness”, Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien [Vienna Journal of African Studies], 29(15): 1–47.

[4] Mohan, U. (2015). Dressing (for) God: Clothing as ‘efficacious intimacy' in Iskcon (Doctoral dissertation, UCL (University College London)).

[5] https://www.nationalforests.org/blog/underground-mycorrhizal-network

[6] Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

[7] Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive limits of “Sex”. London: Routledge. Crenshaw, K. (1989). “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1(8): 139–167.

[8] For more see, Morgan, D. (2021). The Thing About Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions. Chapel Hill: UNC Press.