Material Religion, Conflict, and Violence

Abstract

This volume explores relations between materiality, conflict, and religion. Although connections between religion and materiality, and between conflict and religion are currently widely studied in academia, the intersection between religion, conflict, and materiality remains underexplored. This is, as we will show in this introduction, not surprising. Scholarly understandings of conflict are often focused on political, historical, and socio-psychological models that tend to obscure how perspectives on materiality may contribute to efforts to comprehend conflict. We seek to foreground relations between materiality, conflict, and violence by using insights from different academic fields like religious studies, conflict studies, and anthropology. Doing so, we argue, creates possibilities to understand how things matter in religion-related conflict, what they do, and how they contribute to how people understand the causes, dynamics, and effects of violent conflict. As such, this volume addresses the following key questions: How do religious actors engage and mobilize 'things' to physically and symbolically position themselves in conflict situations? What role do sensational experiences of violence have in religionrelated violent conflict and in processes of reconciliation? How do things mediate 'presence' of divinity/ies, spirits, powers within conflict situations? And finally: how do things contribute to religious infrastructures that play a role in violence and conflict dynamics?Building on insights developed in different academic fields, particularly the so-called 'material turn' in religious studies, and research on the role of religion in violent conflict, this introduction sets the stage for the development of conceptual and methodological directions in the study of religion-related violent conflict. Specifically, we aim to discuss the questions introduced above by focusing on two ways in which the intersection between materiality, religion, and (violent) conflict can be understood, namely (1) how conflicts arise around specific things that symbolize what particular religious communities hold 'dear' and 'special' and/or that mediate divine presence, and (2) how 'religious infrastructures' -understood as the material arrangements on which (religious) practices of particular religious communities depend -are shaped by, and simultaneously affect conflict and violence.