Dear Colleagues, 

In recent decades, material culture studies have become part of a vast variety of disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, cultural geography, religious studies, art history, visual studies, and museum studies. With that “material turn”, there has been a broader shift toward material things and practices as primary evidence in the study of culture. Clifford Geertz’s conceptualization of religion as a web of meanings, i.e., a system of symbols, has been accused of foregrounding language, reducing things to meanings. More recently, religion has been described as a web of relations, instead (Robert Orsi 2005). With an understanding of religion as shaped by its community, its discourse, institutions, and practice (Bruce Lincoln), and the recognition that everything exists in a web of relations, the contributions in this volume seek a middle ground. Just as facts do not have a specifically historical sense in themselves, meaning or significance, and instead acquire sense only in a certain temporal and semantic relationship to other facts, so do objects instigate a response only in a particular context. Taking its lead from cultural studies this volume investigates how religion materializes through things, bodies, spaces, and practices. It is only the thing that matters to us that, consequently, also acts on us. However, if matter matters, it is the cognitive mental framework assigning it meaning in particular religious, cultural or institutional contexts that provides the explanatory pattern for why it matters. Its involvement in a historical process and its function in a particular context provides it with agency. Thus, the inquiry into art in ancient Near Eastern religion turns into a distinctive category of art in action, of art and spaces indexing human agency (Gell 1998) on one hand and of being fully agentive themselves (Latour 1993) on the other. The study of the materiality of religion, consequently, becomes a study of agency. However, as “no human being can have direct knowledge of any ‘thing’” (Carruthers 1998), “but depends rather on memory and active recollection – working, essentially, by association”, knowledge gleaned from textual sources where it is available should equally inform the investigation (Pongratz-Leisten/Sonik 2015)

The contribution of the new materialism of the recent years amounts to the recognition that things are not inanimate, passive, and neutral but act in concert with their circumstances or contexts, including human actors. Although religion is a human construct, religions are riddled with nonhuman actors including floods, stars, meteors, comets, earthquakes, storms, eclipses, the lunar cycle, winds, droughts, rain, and animals. As omens or forms of divine punishment, they kill, maim, warn, doom, and starve human beings. Beyond its teachings and dogmas, religion also consists of feelings, acts, and experiences of the individual or the community, and it is here that things come into play. Feeling, affect, emotion, and sensation are key features for the study of the material culture of religion because they register the nonrational response to and engagement with objects, spaces, and events that are so much part of human embodiment and experience (David Morgan 2021).

It is important to understand religion not only as a projection of the human mind but also the human being, while performing and presencing religion, being at the interface and communication with environments, and so investigate the intricate relations between the body and the world (Merleau-Ponty). It is the shared “techniques of the body”, i.e., the social nature of the habitus, routines of behavior that help to render the world intelligible (Morgan 2021), which turn religion into a collective thing. Religion is presenced or mediated through action and through things, mental and material images of the divine, adornment and dress, pharmacological substances, performance of worship, songs, prayers, and ritual action more broadly, enlivened landscape, the agency of the temple, stories or myths, i.e., a historical, inherited tradition that is ever evolving. The Flood Story teaches us that the relationship between humans and gods is reciprocal, that gods need humans and depend on offerings and sacrifices, as humans need gods. Artifacts, bodies, substances, and environments produce and maintain a web of relations generating what matters to humans: their people, land, gods, ancestors, the life beyond, the mythic past or the world as it ought to be. “The material study of religion means studying what things do to make religions happen” (Morgan 2021), how physical characteristics of things and bodily practices generate thoughts and feelings, how materiality shapes ideas, discourses, and ethical claims, and vice versa. Practice and materiality of religion are at the very origin of ideas, as ideas shape practices and the materiality of religion.

Prof. Dr. Beate Pongratz-Leisten
Guest Editor

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• materiality
• context
• agency
• cognition
• experience
• mental framework
• memory
• meaning