All tagged materiality
This article is based on an extensive study of the textile-making culture of Tenganan Pagringsingan, a village located in the region of Karangasem in the southeastern part of Bali island in Indonesia. In this village, a type of double-ikat woven textile called Gringsing has been produced for generations by the Bali Aga (the indigenous Balinese). It is believed to be a sacred healer and is highly sanctified by both the producing community and the rest of the Balinese Hindu community.
Civil religion refers to citizens’ devotion and loyalty to the nation and state. Like other religions, it needs symbols that bond citizens to different notions and experiences whether non-tangible forms (political beliefs, the law, or a constitution) or tangible (flags, images, statues, and spaces). Visual representations of these forms can unite people around common values, goals, and history. This paper aims to widen our understanding of the importance of material objects in developing and sustaining national bonds in Turkey where objects and spaces have long helped to form and maintain Turkish identity, and mobilize and unite people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
