Material Religion

Prohibitions against the production and worship of images representing one's own or other deities (oft en referred to in the singular as 'image ban' or Bilderverbot ) -as much as their seeming corollary, the so-called aniconic worship of a single supreme deityare commonly held to be distinctive characteristics of ancient Israelite and Judahite, Jewish and Islamic religion. Th e two aspects (the normative rejection of a given ritual practice and the realization of its opposite as alternative practice) are oft en considered as two faces of a coin. Yet the relation between the two is much more complicated. Th e terms image ban and aniconism are problematic and both certainly need to be properly defi ned and qualifi ed. 1 Scholars such as Tryggve , 2006 ), Brian Doak ( 2015 ), Milette Gaifman ( 2012 ) and others have recently off ered important contributions to that end, focusing on fi rst-millennium-bce Israel, Phoenicia and Greece. Th e present chapter aims at continuing this conversation while putting it into a wider horizon, both disciplinary and theoretical. Neither programmatic prohibitions of cultic images nor de facto abstention from producing and using them in cultic rituals or imageless rituals are exclusive to early West Semitic traditions, Judaism and Islam (see the essays collected in Gaifman and Aktor 2017 ); 2 however, they distinguish these traditions from many others past and present. Moreover, both scholars and the wider public associate these traditions with the concept of monotheism. To be sure, none of the traditions studied by Mettinger, Gaifman and Doak should be considered monotheistic in any way. But the history of Western Asiatic and Mediterranean religion\s since late antiquity seems indeed to privilege an elective affi nity of sorts between the belief in a single, invisible, transcendent deity on the one hand ('monotheism') and the injunction not to represent that deity in a cultic image on the other hand. Monotheistic theologies have 100 Figurations and Sensations of the Unseen in Judaism, Christianity and Islam developed sophisticated arguments regarding the presumed inadequacy of any kind of visual, let alone anthropomorphic or theriomorphic (i.e. human, animal or hybrid), form to convey an appropriate representation of the deity (God, capitalized) or to appropriately mediate a presence which is considered all-encompassing, transcendent or both. Much in the way of an irreducible matrix, these three aspects (rejection of cultic images, 'aniconic' ritual practice and theological assumptions about the deity's/God's invisibility) have long been construed to defi ne a kind of system of belief and behaviour, in which each reinforces the others and is itself stabilized by them. A further characteristic of the so-called Abrahamic religion\s (on which this volume concentrates) is their heavy reliance on the transmission of the deity's will, revealed as 'divine word' by prophetic messengers, and ultimately the scripturalization and canonical fi xation of that will. Reading from scripture and listening to the divine word forms an important part of Jewish, Christian and Islamic ritual, so that in the believers' understanding such reading and listening may be experienced as a process of actual communication mediating divine truth and presence. Framed in such a way, listening to the divine (or divinely inspired) word of the invisible deity may be considered a powerful corollary, and even qualitative improvement, of aniconic worship as such. In a second diagram, each angle again reinforces the other two and the three aspects together again form a kind of system. Beyond 'Image Ban' and ' Aniconism' 101 Once the two triangles are assembled, listening to the divine word (recited or otherwise framed in ways that underline its otherworldly origin) appears to be a strong opposite, and perhaps the ultimate alternative, to encountering the divine in one or several cultic images (cf. Otten 2007 ). Combining the two triangles produces a diagram of even higher systematic ambition and epistemic strength. Th is diagram refl ects a foundational matrix of normative assumptions about how to relate to the one, invisible, transcendent, but all-communicative God. Word, Scripture Th e argument presented so far will sound familiar and appear plausible to many modern Westerners, religious or not. Th is only indicates how much they have been socially and culturally conditioned by a religio-philosophical tradition shared by many Jews, Christians and Muslims since late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Th e conceptual dichotomy of right and wrong, religion and idolatry, word and image (the latter oft en extended from cultic image to icon, and even to image tout court) has shaped confessional polemics since the early modern period, provided a powerful instrument to classify and conquer non-European societies, and effi ciently infi ltrated Western philosophy -not least when the latter sought to emancipate itself from the constraints of religion (cf. Sherwood and Meyer, this volume). Th e matrix is meant to visualize an epistemic formation; it does not necessarily refl ect actual practices. It is a heuristic tool to visualize how conventional modernist discourse on religion, and the discourse of religious studies perpetuating their Protestant ascendancy, construe the relationship of image and word, or the ambiguity of the former versus the validity of the latter, when considering ' Abrahamic religion\s' . Th e four corners of our matrix operate in diff erent ways in various manifestations of the three religions, particularly in their ritual traditions. Both Jewish and Islamic religion usually reject cultic images, which they attribute to the 'nations' , 'pagans' or 'polytheists'; their rituals do not generally make use of images to represent the deity, who is thought to be one and invisible; and they turn to reading from scripture when searching for the deity's will. Th e situation appears much more complex when we consider the variety of Christian religious traditions. Building on ancient Jewish discourse rejecting 'pagan idolatry' , Byzantine iconoclasts and Calvinist Protestants could label 'idolaters' their opponents who valued the use of images in worship; in these instances, the matrix may serve to defi ne a pattern of division within the varieties of Christian traditions and their way to distinguish in their midst 'true' from 'false' religion, or faith from heresy. 102 Figurations and Sensations of the Unseen in Judaism, Christianity and Islam Th at Christianity as such (in toto) should range alongside Judaism and Islam in a discussion of imageless worship is therefore all but obvious. If it does so, nevertheless, this is largely due to the weight of Protestant assumptions in the contemporary discourse on ' Abrahamic religions' . If Protestant religious reformers of the sixteenth century claimed to recover the original purity of early Christian ritual from its distortion by Papist idolatry, they also considered reading, listening to and explaining scripture ( Sola Scriptura ) to be the most important element in the worship of the true God. It is along similar lines of thought that modern scholars of religion classify Protestant Christianity, particularly the Reformed and Calvinist traditions, among the 'aniconic' and even iconoclastic, thus ranging them close to Judaism and Islam in their rejection of cultic images and the valuation of scripture as the sole (or most eminent) medium through which the faithful may encounter God. From a historical, non-theological point of view, many aspects of the development of image-related ritual and theological discourse (that is, iconophile and iconolatrous positions) in early, medieval and early modern Byzantine, Catholic and Oriental Christianities may be regarded as creative receptions, perpetuations and reinterpretations of pre-Christian ('pagan') traditions and ritual practices. One would be hard-pressed to range these traditions among the anti-iconists. Early Islam originated in the late-antique Middle East as a kind of reformation movement directed against both domestic 'idolatry' and various forms of Jewish and Christian religion. Invoking Abrahamic descent ( d î n Ibrahim ) and the tradition remembering Abraham smashing idols worshipped by the society he had been born into served Muhammad to claim ritual and genealogical precedence over Jewish and Christian claims to true religion; a similar argumentative strategy had already served Paul to claim religious superiority for early Christian versus Torah-obedient Jewish faith. Should we then consider the matrix described above to represent something distinctively ' Abrahamic' in the fi rst place? Or does that label only serve as a convenient pretext for lumping together three religions which, aft er all, diff er considerably, internally and among each other, in their interpretation of a putative 'image ban' , 'aniconism' and the pre-eminence of the revealed word? From the point of view of a historian of religion\s, the label ' Abrahamic' is problematic if it obscures the many diff erences among the streams, sub-streams and confl uents of the three traditions. Th eir many entanglements, and the variety of practices with regard to images particularly within the Christian traditions, cannot easily be homogenized in a simple genealogical model as implied by the ' Abrahamic' metaphor. Historians of religion\s should therefore critically assess rather than step in and follow this ' Abrahamic' genealogical discourse, which is of very recent conjuncture and, in my view, of little analytical use. Biblical tradition concerning Abraham (most prominently, Genesis 12-25) does not relate Abraham to specifi cally 'aniconic' forms of worship, nor to any kind of 'image ban' (the latter is brought much later into the biblical narrative, when Moses and Israel meet Yahweh at Mount Sinai, Exodus 20). It was Jewish Midrash which

Among the most ubiquitous ritual implements in modern Taiwan, the ritual whip functions to dispel demons and to summon spirit soldiers, the material embodiment of a fearsome serpent deity. Known as Saint Golden Whip, a standard ritual whip has a wooden handle carved in the likeness of a snake, a dragon, or a hybrid of the two, and a thong at least six feet in length, woven from straw rope. Despite the prevalence of these ritual whips, scholars have yet to examine the people involved in making them; the stories of these artists have largely been lost to history, their methods unrecorded and unknown. This article details as a case study the production of a single ritual whip, telling the stories of the carver who shapes its handle and the weaver who braids its tail. Both artists discover their own improvisations to navigate the space between invention and inheritance, highlighting how cultural traditions take on new forms and find new expressions, as these traditions move forward from person to person, from one generation to the next.

This article examines a ritual called the rushen (“Embedding the Spirit”) as it takes place in Taiwan. The second in a traditional series of three consecration rituals, the rushen involves the transformation of varied materials and their subsequent assemblage inside of a nascent deity statue. How do statue carvers, ritual specialists, and patrons express what the ritual achieves? This article argues that the rushen aims to purify, potentiate, and protect the interior space of a young statue. To this end, the ritual achieves the conception of a spirit embryo (shentai) inside the statue’s body. The concurrent assemblage of consecrated materials thereupon works to nourish and protect this incubating divine presence as it continues to grow in subsequent weeks. From the moment of the rushen, the spirit embryo, like a newly planted seed, gestates under the statue’s surface, protecting the image from malevolent spirits and engendering it with divine capabilities. Hidden beneath the surface, the spirit embryo awaits the kaiguang, the final ritual of animation, the moment when the statue will come to life as a spirit image, like a seedling sprouting up through the soil, like an infant emerging from the womb.

Occurring in the 19 th century, the Kalighat painting became a 'visual archive' of the bustling urban culture that boomed in Calcutta. On the surface, it was a single-sheet of brightly inked gouache images that often served as souvenirs, satire of the Babus, etc. The paintings are often celebrated for their bold lines, composition and most importantly their commentaries on contemporary life. While modern historical and artistic scholarship has indeed examined its public satire and mass lithography, the niche of female portraiture in the genre somehow remains comparatively understudied. The limited representation of women in the paintings often portray them in contradictory positions such as-Goddess, Sundari (courtesan), Bibi (spouses of the Babus), scandalous wives etc., which essentially indicates deeper confrontations between gendered perspectives.

This article explores the significance of censers with Egyptian forms or featuring Egyptianlooking motifs found in the houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum. I offer the first full publication of seven unstudied bronze censers, many with known archaeological contexts. The typological analyses reveal that five artifacts featuring altar horns or crenellations originated in Egypt and the Levant, while two others, decorated with Egyptian uraeus snakes, are typical Roman tripods. From a modern perspective, these censers seem to reflect the influence of Egyptian culture in Early Imperial Italy. Comparable artifacts and images from the archaeological sites around Vesuvius, however, indicate that, despite their Egyptian origin, not all censers were likely to have been recognized as such. The horned altars can be linked conceptually to Isiac cults, but, like the other censers, they come from houses without any evidence of veneration of Egyptian deities, as would be attested by Egyptian motifs decorating walls or shrines. Being luxurious cult instruments without a demonstratable connection to cult practices, the censers reveal the versatile, often ambiguous ways in which Egyptian artifacts were perceived and used in Roman society. In doing so, they highlight the complex blend of cultural exchange, domestic and public religion, and Roman interpretation of Egyptian motifs.

This chapter analyzes the mediation of spirituality through guided tours of sacred sites of two new religions in Italy and France: the spiritual community of Damanhur in Piedmont and the religion of Aumism in the French Maritime Alps. Through a comparative examination, it highlights how these new religions are generating a peculiar form of cultural heritage, offering visitors an experience of encountering their own spirituality. The heritagization process involves negotiations between religious and secular actors, exposing religious minorities to challenges of visibility and legitimization in the public space.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the fascinating hypothesis of animal religiosity. In this respect, we are interested in Donovan Schaefer ' s philosophical proposal, specifically his text Religious Affects. In Schaefer ' s conceptual framework, the ' theory of affects ' finds a privileged place, basically as an emphasis on the importance of the pre-linguistic affective sphere. Here, man and animal can learn about kinship, which, according to Schaefer, also implies religious experience. However, this kind of concept of ' religious feeling ' distances itself from the legacy of the phenomenology of religion. By criticizing this specific aspect, we will try to understand where this proposal can generate aporetic signs of discontinuity with a reliable concept of religiosity. In our concluding thesis, we will show that the importance given to animals, given correct ecological thinking, does not have an enemy in the religious specificity of man.

Essentialist assumptions that sectarian identities are fixed and primordial—and thus the primary drivers of conflict in the Middle East—have been widely critiqued. Scholarship increasingly shows that divisions between Sunni and Shiʿa Muslims are socially and historically produced. While the role of state actors and geopolitical forces in processes of “sectarianization” has received considerable attention, less explored are the everyday, embodied, and material practices through which sectarian boundaries are enacted and contested. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey, this article examines how food practices on the Day of Ashura—an important day for both Sunnis and Shiʿa—serve as a site of gastro-political negotiation. For Shiʿa communities, Ashura commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Husayn through mourning rituals, including the preparation of halva, a flour-based sweet symbolizing loss. Sunni interpretations, by contrast, frame Ashura as a day linked to multiple prophetic events, marked by the preparation of ashure, a pudding made with grains, fruits, and nuts. In Eastern Anatolia, where Sunni and Shiʿa communities live in close proximity, the sharing of these foods constitutes not only an act of religious devotion but also a medium through which intra-Muslim relationships are shaped, strained, and reimagined. This study foregrounds the material and sensory dimensions of religious practice as critical to understanding sectarian dynamics in everyday life.

This article explores the complex entanglements between Vodún and money in southern Bénin, challenging the negative connotations associated with the phrase "voodoo economics." Drawing on ethnographic stories, the article examines the historical and spiritual significance of cowrie shells, the apotheosis of wealth in Vodún cosmology, and the ways in which economic challenges inspire new forms of spiritual adaptation. The rising costs of ritual paraphernalia and the commercialization of Vodún have led to innovative practices, such as the use of plastic cowrie shells and the creation of spiritual contracts. Despite these challenges, Vodún remains deeply intertwined with notions of money and wealth, with spirits like Ajé and Ayĭzàn embodying prosperity and economic power. The article argues that, for Vodúnisants, wealth transcends its negative associations and instead represents a presence of power, responsibility, and the fundamental goodness that animates the world.

For more than 40 years the relationships that exist between divination and knowledge have become central to anthropology's understanding of African religious practice. This paper deemphasizes the commonly mobilized 'divination as knowledge' trope in favor of highlighting its role in achieving well-being. Indeed, I argue that by focusing on divination as a way of knowing ethnographers have inadvertently ignored what happens after said knowledge is acquired. It is these moments that I find to be at the heart of divination's enduring value. Through an analysis of divination rituals, initiations, and material objects, alternative ways to examining divination in the West African rain forest are considered and explored. Looking to Fá divination, one of the major oracular systems employed by Fon speakers in the Republic of Bénin, I turn my attention to the ways in which divination helps individuals fulfill their destinies and achieve goodness in the world. In this way I argue that West African systems of divination are only secondarily about knowledge and first and foremost about achieving a sense of balance (coolness) and well-being.

In this fascinating work, Wilkinson and Althouse argue that soaking prayer functions as a kind of cultural practice that renews individuals and institutions. More specifically, they claim that it is an interaction ritual that both reflects and inculcates a pattern of social interaction which, in turn, gives rise to a distinct culture. They support this thesis by analyzing soaking prayer in terms of a number of sociological models and unpacking how it fits the internal logic or common narrative frame of the charismatic ethos within which it is situated. The merits of the thesis depend primarily upon the sociological models that Wilkinson and Althouse employ to analyze soaking prayer as a cultural practice. Rather than utilizing a single theoretical lens, this text employs a multiplicity of theoretical models to situate soaking prayer. The text is heavy on theoretical models, moving through Pitirim Sorokin's thought on altruism, Randall Collins' Interaction Ritual (IR) theory, Victor Turner on pilgrimage and liminality, Max Weber on charismatic authority, and Robert Wuthnow on forgiveness as a cultural construct. In addition, the chapter on prayer and altruism offers more of a literature review of various sociological approaches to those topics and their limitations than an examination of soaking prayer itself. The use of so many theoretical models is both a strength and a weakness of the book. The strength of so many models is their collective capacity to explain the relationship between interior change and external behavior. Most of the time sociologists measure change in terms of external behavior. It is extremely difficult to describe deepening levels of commitment without some sort of behavioral analysis like how often persons engage in practices such as prayer or church attendance. Henri Gooren's own conversion-career model attempts to do just that. With IR, Wilkinson and Althouse can translate religious language about the Father's love into the language of emotional energy so

This essay uses New Materialist approaches to religious practice to demonstrate that early rabbinic (c. 2nd-3rd centuries CE) Jewish prescriptions for Jewish farmers are part of assemblages of human and material forces. The Jewish farmer must show that his fields, gardens, and vineyards do not contain prohibited “mixed-kinds” (Deuteronomy 22:9-11), but the ways in which early rabbinic literature demands adherence to the commandment take into account forces beyond the human, such as wind, rain, and the unpredictable growth of the crops. These assemblages show the limits of human intention and action, as the Jewish farmer must react to the material world. Moreover, the analyses in this essay show how a New Materialist approach deepens our understanding of the entangled world of Jewish life and practice in Late Antiquity, as well as uncovers a non-anthropocentric view of the human in a material world within the Mishnah itself.

This paper analyzes and re-evaluates the archaeological and historical data related to the ancient city of Hatra, in northern Mesopotamia (2nd–3rd century CE), considering recent architectural studies and approaches focusing primarily on the concepts of nature-based solutions, resilience, and environmental adaptability. This comparative and dialogic approach, which can also be applied to other ancient sites, demonstrates how certain categories within the lexicon of urban layout and architectural design have deep historical roots, extending through traditional or vernacular architecture and converging with archaeology. At the same time, recent architectural and ethnoarchaeological studies, particularly those related to environmental adaptation and strategies for living in climatically challenging contexts, can provide valuable tools for a deeper understanding of these ancient sites. This work, to be considered as preliminary, aims to encourage further studies following this approach and to also promote the (re)use of ancient construction techniques and methods that remain effective today, for example, in the design and development of structures and buildings for archaeological parks.
In questo paper sono stati analizzati e rivalutati i dati archeologici e storici relativi alla città di Hatra, in Mesopotamia settentrionale (II-III sec. d.C.), alla luce dei recenti studi di architettura e degli approcci di questa disciplina che si concentrano principalmente sui concetti di resilienza, nature-based solutions e adattabilità ambientale. Questo approccio comparativo e dialogico, applicabile anche ad altri siti antichi, dimostra come alcune categorie appartenenti al lessico del progetto della città e delle sue architetture affondino le proprie radici in epoche lontane, attraversando l’architettura tradizionale fino a confluire nell’archeologia. Al contempo, modelli e studi recenti di architettura ed etnoarcheologia, in particolare quelli legati all’adattamento ambientale e alle strategie per abitare in contesti climaticamente difficili, possono offrire strumenti preziosi per una comprensione più approfondita degli stessi siti antichi. Questo lavoro, da considerarsi preliminare, intende stimolare nuovi studi secondo tale approccio e promuovere anche il (re)impiego di tecniche e modalità costruttive antiche, ma ancora oggi efficaci a quelli che sono gli impatti dei cambiamenti climatici, ad esempio per la progettazione e realizzazione di strutture ed edifici destinati ai parchi archeologici.

The danka (temple parishioner) system was originally established as a component of the bakufu，s policy of suppressing Christianity, but by 1700 it had become a government-instituted and temple-run system to monitor and control the populace as a whole. Through the issuance of certijicates of temple registration, Buddhist temples participated in this system and benefited from having a stable parish membership and financial base. Once parishioners had become affiliated and registered through a particu lar temple, neither they nor their descendants were able to change sectarian affiliations, except through marriage. Ideally, for the clergy, this hereditary temple ̂ parishioner relationship required both ritual and fiduciary respon sibilities on the part of the danka. Danka were obligated to participate in and pay for funeral and memorial rites that became a standardized funer ary ritual system during the Edo period. The danka were also required to financially contribute to temple fundra...

When, in the 1940s, J. E Holleman, the first professional anthropologist to study the Shona, investigated their kinship system, he drew up a chart: 'My informants were having an argument about the proper term of address for a certain remote relative, and finally suggested one that did not fit the total set-up because it obviously clashed with the broad principles of classification which had clearly emerged from my half-filled diagrams. 'That woman can't be your 'mother',' I corrected the spokesman, 'because you say 'wife' to her brother's daughter. Surely, you can play with her and marry her if you want to?' They looked at me with incredulity. A! . . . A! . . . how did I know that? I showed them my diagrams and recalled the clan-names of the woman which I had recorded a few minutes before. There was no error

In discerning the universal survey museum, Carol Duncan and A. Wallach argue that “the primary function of a museum is ideological as it is meant to impress upon those who use or pass through the society’s most revered beliefs and values” (Duncan and Wallach 1980, 448). They further suggest that museums embody and make the idea of the “state” visible. This aspect is best reflected in national museums, where the variable of what constitutes an “ideal state” is materialized by selecting and arranging the museum’s collection and works of art to best suit the nationalist discourse upheld and propagated by the ruling regime. This strategic disposition of art and knowledge dictates, to a certain extent, the visitor’s experience as a script organizes a performance, almost like a religious ritual in both form and content. By examining the reception history of Buddhism at the National Museum in New Delhi, I aim to demonstrate how museums can serve as spaces that accommodate both hegemonic narratives and counter-narratives while employing the same ritualistic tools and practices.

The experience of a religious ideal through flesh and blood is studied within the field of hagiography, delineating holy figures as they pertain to specific religious traditions. The most numerous primary source used by scholars to understand the significance, role, and purpose of holy figures is overwhelmingly literary. The visual culture of holy figures has traditionally been sidelined in the field, considering objects as secondary sources or not at all. I argue that this hinders full consideration of holy figures, requiring a new heuristic vernacular. Under a phenomenological eye, this paper proposes a schema specific to hagiographic visual culture. The traditional interpretive framework proposed by Panofsky is limited within the field of hagiography. This paper first considers David Dubuission, Brigit Meyer, and Christoph Uehilinger to argue for a  necessary shift from art history to visual culture within comparative religious research. The paper then applies Scott Kugle’s discussion of Farīd al-Zahi’s phenomenological schema of the body to hagiographic visual culture as scaffolding to the proposed schema. A new schema is constructed with concentric spheres delineated as metaphysical, spirituality, latent occult, and active occult as dimensions. These denotations encapsulate the materiality, belief structure, and the potential for thaumaturgical activity within a hagiographic object respectively. Each dimension is defined as it relates to specific functions of hagiographic culture, carefully considering saintly embodiment, memory, and social negotiations that transcend spatial temporal boundaries. This schema is then applied to the Hagia Sophia through Bissera V Pentcheva’s multi-sensory analysis and Anthony K. Cassell’s discussion of Saint Lucy’s iconography.

This article foregrounds transcendence and its definitions to formalize the term's value as a viable analytic for anthropology. It notes the proliferation of transcendences (plural) in anthropological literature and proposes a working typology of transcendence that recognizes the different scales within analysis on which transcendence is being used. Drawing upon this scalar-aware typology, it reviews existing scholarship in the field of anthropology of material religion, characterized by a detailed theoretical treatment of transcendence. Finally, this article redraws attention to the situatedness of transcendence in the history of anthropology and its attendant Christian legacy, in other words the scale of anthropology itself. It concludes that the most promising value of transcendence as an analytic lies in attending to the tensions between different scales in analysis.

The title alludes to the familiar Protestant hymn, whose imperial reach stretches from the Arctic to the Equator, from a Danish colony to a British one. Rhetorically, the hymn's 'inverted apostrophe' is extended by anaphora: these lands are not addressed by us, as 'O Greenland, O India'; rather, they and their barbaric people call us; they solicit our colonial attentions: From Greenland's icy mountains, From India's coral strand, Where Afric's sunny fountains Roll down their golden sand; From many an ancient river, From many a palmy plain, They call us to deliver Their land from error's chain.

Perumal Murugan is an acclaimed Indian novelist, essayist, and poet who writes in the Tamil language. He has been hailed by readers and critics for his excellent storytelling, attention to detail, and representations of the brutal realities of the rural agrarian communities of Kongu Nadu. 2 Despite the whirlpool of controversies and threats that surrounded Murugan's life and writings, nothing has deluded him from his commitment to use writing as a weapon to expose social inequalities. The present interview revolves around the role of food in his creative works. It includes a discussion of the various culinary traditions and food paradigms of his ancestral village, the reverence for food and environment amongst agrarian communities, the difference that food preferences create amongst people, and the arrival of fast-food culture in Tamil Nadu due to globalization. While the interview discusses a range of literary works, it mainly focuses on Murugan's memoir Amma, where he recollects the cherished food memories of his childhood and also of his mother, whose values and love for cooking have shaped both his identity and culinary preferences. Murugan's narrativizing of these memories through various creative forums has enabled what David Sutton calls "prospective memory", a process of how people plan to remember meals and what they taste like for the future (163).

This paper is focused on how common cultural space in village of Nepal is utilized by different cultural, religious, social and ethnic or caste group for different performances by the villagers in different time is best explained. How these diverse performances in complex, multiplex Nepalese societies have significant role to maintain the diversity, differences, inequalities for the welfare, cooperation, harmony through the interactions, socializations to reduce the gap between the contradict, conflicting societies. The role of such rituals, feast and festivals to resolve the disorder, conflict and misunderstanding as mechanism, events and act or activities of everyday life of the people in the study area, were found very significant. Eight different common cultural spaces were selected as the case study for ethnographic study from each ward. Three level analysis; family community and society indicated that Khotehang villagers have used the common cultural spaces for religious, social, political, economic etc by different communities, at different time can maintain the harmony, cooperation, unity and respect from one to another with religious syncritized, culturally melted and socially accepted and psychologically dignified identity with each other sounds the good example for all diverged, multiplexed and complex society in this world. From the idea of "religion is the Opium of the masses" to "religion is the societal glue of the society" to "religious ritual provide the common spaces for diverse believers" can be visualized clearly with the help of theoretical preposition of structuralism, functionalism, symbolism, interactionism, interpretativism of various contributors form Emile Durkheim to Red Cliff Brown, Malinowski, Clifford, Geertz, to Turner to Sherry Ortner.

How would a switch from the inner to the outer, from the inwardness to the surface, from the habitus to the haptic alter our anthropological thinking about Islam? How do micro matters permeate the terrain of Shiʿi women’s religious practice and Iran’s contemporary politics? Women, Martyrs and Stones in Iran's Post-War Politics explores the haptic relations that connect mothers and wives of the fallen soldiers of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) to their sons and husbands as martyrs. They have played a crucial role in the legitimation discourse of the Iranian state and transformed the very grounds on which religious nationalist and statist projects can be envisioned and practiced. Mourning mothers of martyrs covered in black veils have not only been integrated into a state-revering cult, but have incorporated their conduct into state’s apparatus. This book takes the reader on a journey from women’s dreamworld to their practices of intercession in cemeteries and former battlefields to show material and affective exposures in crafting relics.

What does secularity feel like when blown through the air rather than designated by state secularism? How does dust-wind unsettle the distinction between religion and politics? This article places dust-wind at the centre of an ethnographic engagement with material effects and affective resonances that shape the problem-space of secularism in Iran. In the past decade, the eruption of dust-winds across the Iran-Iraq borderlands has drastically impacted people's relations with their environment: in religious discourse, dust undergirds various modes of veneration and commemoration among the Shi'i inhabitants. However, when risen in the air it intrudes breathing and invokes transgressive interpretations. I analyse material secularity through the phenomenon of bad air and the distinction between the religious 'respiratory sacrifice' and the secular 'right to breathe'. While 'respiratory sacrifice' connotes dust as a reliquary of martyrs, the 'right to breathe' concerns dust-winds and necessary repairs. I draw on two notions of 'atmosphere' , one spiritual and orchestrated, the other, meteorologically hazardous bad air. Together they make up contesting atmospheric collectives that unsettle formal religious scripts. I argue that atmospheric collectives recalibrate environmental protests while dilating dust to produce a secular materiality.

This article investigates the changing role of folk books and folklore research in the history of the Turkish nation state from a global perspective through a material approach to secularity, including superstition as a third category to the secular-religious nexus. I propose to conceptualize folk books as 'religious media' and to use them as legitimate sources to trace the fluidity between Alevis and Sunnis in terms of reverence for Ali, as well as to recognize the agency of Alevis and the role of Alevism in folklore research before the rise of identity politics in the 1990s. I argue that such a shift in perspective and methodology enables us to understand how Alevism was excluded from the realm of religion during the early Cold War. It also contributes to the recent critical research on religion and secularism with an alternative history of Turkish modernity in terms of religious transformation.

Somos um complexo de energia em várias frequências, portanto, estamos constantemente trocando energia uns com os outros e também com a Natureza, de forma consciente ou inconsciente. A qualidade dessa interação será de acordo com os nossos pensamentos e sentimentos.
Nosso corpo energético é semelhante ao Universo. Ele possui milhões de pontos brilhantes. Junto com eles temos vórtices maiores de energia, que se parecem com as galáxias e são vórtices de luz brilhante, girando em alta velocidade. Dentro desses vórtices temos vários outros mini vórtices de luz, que denominamos de chacras.
Somos seres dotados de múltiplas dimensões com diversos corpos anexados ao corpo físico, chamados de corpos sutis. Estes corpos têm centros de energia distribuídos ao longo do eixo central do nosso corpo físico, conhecidos como chacras.
A Doutrina Espírita traz uma grande contribuição para o assunto, abordando a realidade dos fluidos, a imortalidade da alma e a existência de planos espirituais, nos alertando que somos o que pensamos, interagindo o tempo todo com tudo ao nosso redor.
Esta obra está dividida em três partes principais: corpos sutis, chacras e planos sutis, pois esses assuntos estão interligados e consideramos importante a abordagem dos mesmos para uma melhor compreensão do leitor.

Somos um complexo de energia em várias frequências, portanto, estamos constantemente trocando energia uns com os outros e também com a Natureza, de forma consciente ou inconsciente. A qualidade dessa interação será de acordo com os nossos pensamentos e sentimentos.
Nosso corpo energético é semelhante ao Universo. Ele possui milhões de pontos brilhantes. Junto com eles temos vórtices maiores de energia, que se parecem com as galáxias e são vórtices de luz brilhante, girando em alta velocidade. Dentro desses vórtices temos vários outros mini vórtices de luz, que denominamos de chacras.
Somos seres dotados de múltiplas dimensões com diversos corpos anexados ao corpo físico, chamados de corpos sutis. Estes corpos têm centros de energia distribuídos ao longo do eixo central do nosso corpo físico, conhecidos como chacras.
A Doutrina Espírita traz uma grande contribuição para o assunto, abordando a realidade dos fluidos, a imortalidade da alma e a existência de planos espirituais, nos alertando que somos o que pensamos, interagindo o tempo todo com tudo ao nosso redor.
Esta obra está dividida em três partes principais: corpos sutis, chacras e planos sutis, pois esses assuntos estão interligados e consideramos importante a abordagem dos mesmos para uma melhor compreensão do leitor.

Matthew 25 is a chapter of parables in the biblical New Testament. Speaking to his listeners in verses 21 and 23, Jesus says: "Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou has been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter into the joy of thy Lord." These vague biblical promises of future power for the faithful comprise the singular scriptural passage most frequently quoted in both the North and the South during the Civil War, as identified by James P. Byrd, Chair of the Graduate Department of Religion and Associate Professor of American Religious History at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, in his latest book, A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War. Byrd's in-depth volume, on the other hand, is anything but vague. Excellent studies of religion during the Civil War have proliferated in recent decades, typically with the Bible lurking in the background or, at best, serving in a supporting role: George Rable's "civil religion" (God's Almost Chosen Peoples, 2010) and Harry S. Stout's "moral history" (Upon the Altar of the Nation, 2006)-hallmark contributions both-are notable examples. Byrd turns this paradigm upside down, placing the Bible-the most popular book in America in the Civil War era-front and center. As an overarching force enveloping the war, the Bible, for many Americans, continually created and recreated meaning amid an epic struggle over freedom and bondage, victory and defeat, life and death, hope and despair, politics and community. Having honed his eye for the historic role of the Bible in early American life in a previous work, the critically-acclaimed Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution, Byrd in his Civil War study zeroes in on the blood-soaked, battlefield crucifixion of some three-quarters of a century of political secularization beginning with the nation's founding. Voicing virtue but lacking the moral certainty of America's colonial theocratic heritage, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution satisfied neither slaveowners nor abolitionists.

The Śilāhārā dynasty was one of the prominent dynasties in the early medieval Deccan. This dynasty was divided into three main branches, the Śilāhārās of North Konkan being one of them. They had control over the present-day districts of Thane and Raigad of Maharashtra, with their capital at Sthānaka i.e., modern-day Thane. Of the 160 epithets used by them, this paper aims to discuss the following four epithets: Mahāsāmantādhipati-Mahāmaṇḍaleśvara, Tagarapuraparameśvara, Suvarṇṇagaruḍadhvaja and Paścimasudrādhipati, in great detail. The author of this paper intends to highlight the political, social, economic, and cultural scenarios that were prevalent at their times through the analysis of these titles. In the course of this paper, the use of epithets to comprehend the larger historical narratives shall be highlighted.

Mārīcī (Molizhi tian 摩利支天) originated in India and spread throughout various Indian religious traditions. She is also the subject of a crosscultural cult which spread to Central Asia, China, Tibet, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia and generated different iconographies and cults. In each locale, Mārīcī underwent localization or syncretisation with indigenous traditions. The first section of this paper will explore Mārīcī's textual transmission from India to China, including scriptures on Mārīcī in Chinese translations of Buddhist texts, and investigate the characteristics and implications of Mārīcī worship. The second section analyzes texts related to Doumu 斗母-Mārīcī, focusing on iconographies, rituals, and spells. By reading the Yuyin qianyuan dantian leifa玉音乾 元丹天雷法 [Thunder Methods of the Cinnabar Heaven of the Jade-Toned Primordial Heavens] and the Xiantian Doumu zougao xuanke 先天斗母奏告玄科 [Posterior-Heaven Ritual of Doumu's Proclamation to the Profound], this paper investigates the process through which Doumu rituals were transformed into Dipper-proclamation rites, how new Doumu rituals were formed using the framework of Dipperproclamation rites, and how they had a significant influence on later Doumu proclamation.

Introducing the themes and contexts for this special issue of the journal, this editorial reflects particularly on the experience of museums and museum and heritage educators in the UK and Asia in interpreting religions and religious art. It looks at successful examples of specialist museum programs and exhibits on religions; and distance learning resources that include faiths in suggesting new approaches to citizenship education through cultural learning. It looks more broadly at new approaches to religious education that encompass sacred spaces.

This year's student exhibition, Looking to the Stars, Listening to the Earth, presents a set of cosmological figurines and other objects characteristic
of tombs ca. 1200 CE from what is now Jiangxi Province, People’s Republic of China. At that date, the Jiangxi region was governed by the Song dynasty from the capital at Lin’an 臨安 (now Hangzhou) after
the loss of North China to the Jurchen conquest. The tomb belonged not to a member of the Song elite, but to a person of relatively modest social status, perhaps a provincial official. The objects were collected in
the 1930s, and similar examples have been published by archaeologists since the second half of the 20th century.

The figurines are fascinating because of the diversity of divine beings that they represent. Even a relatively ordinary person might have more than two dozen distinct deities represented by figurines buried in their tomb. By examining features of the figurines, comparing them to examples from
other tombs, and reading contemporary written accounts, we can understand who the figurines represent and how they related to cosmological beliefs.

Resumo: Este artigo pretende abordar os blocos afros surgentes de ontologias afro-brasileiras a partir de seus aspectos materiais-instrumentos, música, dança, rituais e demais artigos religiosos-que são mobilizados no âmbito do carnaval de rua de São Paulo. Para isso, analisaremos a atuação do Bloco Afro É Di Santo, localizado no bairro da Piraporinha, zona sul da cidade. É possível identificar que a materialidade religiosa afro-brasileira composta por suas práticas corporais, musicais e instrumentais ao serem agenciadas na construção cotidiana do bloco e em suas apresentações públicas do carnaval, mobilizam diretamente a experiência religiosa de seus integrantes e foliões. Dessa forma, percorreremos as seguintes etapas: 1) Analisar o carnaval enquanto expressividade das religiões afro-brasileiras, ressaltando a história do carnaval negro de São Paulo; 2) Compreender a origem dos Blocos Afro e suas expressões estético-musicais; 3) Analisar a história e atuação do Bloco Afro É Di Santo, identificando o lugar do religioso em seu cotidiano e apresentações, a partir de suas práticas musicais, corporais e instrumentais. Para isso, utilizaremos a Religião Material enquanto método de pesquisa das religiões afro-brasileiras na Ciência da Religião. Logo, o artigo pretende contribuir para a ampliação do campo de abordagem da Religião Material no interior da Ciência da Religião, principalmente por meio da intersecção entre as religiões afro-brasileiras e o carnaval de rua.

Roman Identity and Lived Religion Christianity is considered prevalent when it comes to defning the key values of late antique society, whereas 'feeling connected to the Roman past' is commonly regarded as an add-on for cultivated elites. This book demonstrates the signiûcant impact of popular Roman culture on the religious identity of common Christians from the ûfth to the seventh century in the Mediterranean world. Baptism is central to the formation of Christian identity. The decoration of baptisteries reveals that traditional Roman culture persisted as an integral component of Christian identity in various communities. In their baptisteries, Christians visually and spatially evoked their links to Roman and, at times, even pagan traditions. A close examination of visual and material sources in North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy shows that baptisteries served roles beyond mere conduits to Christian orthodoxy.

The articles in this special issue originated in the international conference we organized, 'Ritual and Materiality in Buddhism and Asian Religions', hosted by Princeton University in June 2023. 1 The conference was immensely exciting, marking a resumption of in-person academic exchange that had halted owing to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. The gathering brought together nearly fifty participants, including a keynote speaker, two discussants, twenty-one panelists, five Princeton University faculty serving as presiders, and twenty graduate attendees.

[abstract of the volume]
The Huangting jing (Yellow Court Scripture) consists of a set of two texts that outline the body vision and key techniques of Daoist meditation. At the center of an extensive literature of both commentaries and exegeses compiled over several millennia, it has been mainly studied from a historical and textual perspective. Supplementing this, this volume explores not only important rhyme structures but also the nature of the body vision presented, the type and quality of the practices involved, and how they compare to modern scientific models as well as to later Chinese interpretations and adaptations, such as medical texts of the Tang and internal alchemy of the Song. It assembles nine presentations of accomplished scholars in the field, bringing the Huangting jing into the limelight and enhancing its in-depth understanding in the greater context of Daoist history and modern science.

This paper will focus on Sanskrit references to maṭhas and maṭhikās in the early medieval epigraphical corpora of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas, Śilāhāras and Yādavas, ruling in the Deccan from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. The most prominent evidence is provided by the five famous Chinchani copper-plate charters covering a period from 926 to 1053 ce, when the Rāṣṭrakūṭas and later the Śilāhāras and their subordinates ruled over the region north of Mumbai. A few late-twelfth-century Śilāhāra stone inscriptions from Kolhapur in south Maharashtra shed light on the multi-functional character of maṭhas. Finally, a Yādava-period stone epigraph from northwestern Maharashtra testifies to the existence of and the endowment for a very special maṭha in 1207 ce.

Much of the art housed in Western museums is religious in nature-the result of how these museum collections were assembled and merged with differing displays over time. The origins of museums and their exhibition activities lie in the vast and myriad collecting histories of ancient, medieval, and Early Modern times, when the avenues of acquisition and display were often intertwined with sacred purposes. As empires, international trade, and missionaries encouraged the movement of people, objects, and ideas, they ensured that the monumental containers meant to preserve and display these collections took on meanings ever more distinct from the original meanings and functions of the individual objects they housed, religious or otherwise. Collections also evolved into "contact zones" between peoples and objects. While the history of display is different from that of museums, because it is premised more on a visiting public than on preservation and study efforts, these approaches to objects merge in the 16th century so that visual comparison and the ordering of displays are seen as a means to develop further knowledge from a collection.

Cosmopolítica y cosmohistoria: una anti-síntesis is a novel collection of six anthropological
and historical essays that engage with the concept of cosmopolitics,
advanced by the philosophers of science Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour,
by examining a range of practices and ways of producing knowledge among or
in relation with Amerindian peoples. In anthropology, cosmopolitics has come to refer to the active participation of human and non-human entities in political negotiations, most commonly in the context of conflicts over territory and resources between indigenous groups and national or international extractivist projects. This book seeks to expand this definition by dwelling on the aspects of uncertainty and potential disjunctions in Stengers’s original proposal. According to the authors, a focus on ontological and epistemological multiplicity and its political effects requires added complexity. When read as a whole, the collection offers a kaleidoscopic view of the cosmopolitical, leaving space for contradiction and invention