Objects, object-ness, and shadows of meanings: carving prayer beads and exploring their materiality alongside a Khaksari Sufi Murshid

Abstract

Prayer beads, through processes of craftsmanship and trade, arrive at meanings, significations, and imaginative associations that are inscribed by religious-cultural codes or social networks. The shadows of meanings overwhelm their material existence as prayer beads despite their lives beginning before their enactment within the socio-cultural and religious networks. Therefore, alongside an Iranian Sufi murshid, I follow the object-ness and the life of rosaries and prayer beads in an "apprenticeship ethnographic" journey. I address the material life of rosaries to explain how their object-ness contributes to their materiality and meaning formation that they gain in a Sufi order. An approach informed by speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO) is chosen to examine what it means to study a religious object-in-itself. I follow the religiously loaded object and its spiritual traces by way of OOO to forgo the meanings and relationships that shadow the objects.

Translation and religion: Issues of materiality

“…For an overview of these approaches see, for example, Hazard (2013), Hicks and Beaudry (2010). See Saramifar (2018) for an object-centred approach which calls for more agency to be attributed to the religious object. 5.…”