The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality provides a thoughtfully organized, inclusive, and vibrant project of the multiple ways in which religion and materiality intersect. The contributions explore the way that religion is shaped by, and has shaped, the material world, embedding beliefs, doctrines, and texts into social and cultural contexts of production, circulation, and consumption.
The Companion not only contains scholarly essays but has an accompanying website to demonstrate the work of performers, architects, and expressive artists, ranging from musicians and dancers to religious practitioners. These examples offer specific illustrations of the interplay of religion and materiality in everyday life. The project is organized from a comparative perspective, highlighting examples and case studies from traditions originating in both East and West. To summarize, the volume:
- Brings together the leading figures, theories and ideas in the field in a systematic and comprehensive way
- Offers an interdisciplinary approach drawing together religious studies, anthropology, archaeology, history, sociology, geography, the cognitive sciences, ecology, and media studies
- Takes a comparative perspective, covering all the major faith traditions
Table of Contents:
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: The Persistence, Ubiquity, and Dynamicity of Materiality: Studying Religion and Materiality Comparatively 4
Manuel A. Vásquez
Section I: Religious Bodies 81
Chapter 2: The Incarnate Body and Blood in Christianity 82
Jessica A. Boon
Chapter 3: Perspectives on Rabbinic Constructions of Gendered Bodies 112
Gwynn Kessler
Chapter 4: The One and the Many: Ancestors and Sorcerers in Hohodene Worldview 169
Robin M. Wright
Chapter 5: Cognitive Science, Embodiment, and Materiality 202
Nathaniel F. Barrett
Section II: Practices and Performances 240
Chapter 6: From Bells to Bottus: Analyzing the Body and Materiality of Indian Dance in an American University Context 241
Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger
Chapter 7: Spirit Incorporation in Candomblé 269
Paul Christopher Johnson
Chapter 8: Spiritual Warfare in Pentecostalism: Metaphors and Materialities 310
Simon Coleman
Chapter 9: Consider the Tourist 341
Thomas S. Bremer
Section III: Spatiality, Mobility, and Relationality 380
Chapter 10: Moving, Crossing, and Dwelling: Christianity and Place Pilgrimage 381
John Eade
Chapter 11: Hindu and Sikh Processions in Europe: Material Objects and Ritual Bodies on the Move 415
Knut A. Jacobsen
Chapter 12: Geopolitics, Space Sacralization, and Devotional Labor on the U.S.-Mexico Border 441
Elaine A. Peña
Chapter 13: The Imagination of Matter: Mesoamerican Trees, Cities, and Human Sacrifice 470
Davíd Carrasco
Chapter 14: Material Religion, Materialism, and Non-Human Animals 500
Anna L. Peterson
Section IV: Sacred Objects and Beings 530
Chapter 15: Assembling Inferences in Material Analysis 531
David Morgan
Chapter 16: Woven Beliefs: Textiles and Religious Practice in Africa 569
Victoria L. Rovine
Chapter 17: Beyond the Symbolism of the Headscarf: The Assemblage of Veiling and the Headscarf as a Thing 591
Banu Gökarıksel and Anna J. Secor
Chapter 18: Indigenous Sacred Objects after NAGPRA: In and Out of Circulation 617
Greg Johnson
Chapter 19: Objects of Memory and Authority: Thinking through and beyond the "relic" in Sikh contexts 644
Anne Murphy
Section V: Religion, Food, and Comensality 671
Chapter 20: Religion, Agriculture, and Food: Three Case Studies 672
A. Whitney Sanford
Chapter 21: Vaishnava Vegetarianism: Scriptural and Theological Perspectives on the Diet of Devotion 711
Steven J. Rosen
Chapter 22: Prasada, Edible Grace 742
Andrea Pinkney
Chapter 23: To Eat and Be Eaten: Mesoamerican Human Sacrifice and Ecological Webs 780
Kay A. Read
Section VI: Media and Material Religion 813
Chapter 24: Cinema 814
S. Brent Plate
Chapter 25: Religion and Digital Media: Studying Materiality in Digital Religion 843
Heidi A Campbell and Louise Connelly
Chapter 26: Aural Media 873
Rosalind I. J. Hackett
Section VII: Economies and Governmentalities of Religion 910
Chapter 27: Colonialism, Orientalism and the Body 911
Sylvester A. Johnson
Chapter 28: Dharmaśāstra: Materiality in and of the Hindu Legal Code 949
Patrick Olivelle
Chapter 29: Religion and Ethnicity as Located and Localized 978
Terje Østebø
Chapter 30: Never Again: Religion, Commodities, and the State 1020
Kevin Lewis O’Neill
Index
