Material Religion

Abstract

This chapter introduces material studies, a theoretical field rooted in performance studies, embodiment phenomenology, critical theory and post-functionalist anthropology. It lays out central analytical points and presents four approaches that can be used in the study of NRMs: 1) material mediation – the process by which objects and bodies are transformed into mediators of the otherworldly; 2) material socialization – how practitioners learn religion by acquiring correct ways of relating to objects and material worlds; 3) circulation of artifacts – how religious objects are produced, distributed and used; and 4) foodways – the process where food and drink is cultivated, prepared and consumed, and its importance for the cultivation of religious communities. The chapter includes an example of how material theory can be applied, and a discussion of how such perspectives can contribute to, and further, the study of new religions.

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“…The material turn of the late-twentieth century saw the rise of scholarship interested the lived experience of religion, material culture, and visual religious culture (Moberg, 2016: 1–2), with the likes of David D. Hall (1997), who addressed the diversity of Christian expression in everyday life, and Collen McDannell (1995), who critiqued the dichotomy of the sacred and profane in the study of Christianity. In the early 2000s, Robert Orsi (2003) reflected upon the usefulness of this approach and argued that the strength of a lived religion approach was its ‘radical empiricism’(Orsi, 2003: 174), as it works in ‘disentangling us from our normative agendas and defamiliarising us in relation to our own cultures’(Orsi, 2003: 174).…”