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In the lives of students in Luxembourg's Liberal Jewish complementary school, flexibility and mobility are highly valued as key characteristics of modern living. Complementary school students feel they easily meet these criteria—they are multilingual, cosmopolitan, and their approach to Jewish life is flexible, and equally importantly, they look, dress, and comport themselves "like everyone else." These factors are understood to facilitate multiple movements and belongings in the contemporary world. The students directly contrast their ways of being with those of more observant Jews whom they refer to as "religious"; the material, embodied, and visible nature of observant Jewish life is perceived to be an impediment to participation and success in the secular sphere. However, when Jewishness appears in these students' secular school classrooms, it is most often represented by Orthodox-presenting men—often a man in a yarmulke. Further, these men and their yarmulkes are taken to represent all Jews, framed as a homogeneous group of religious adherents. For many complementary school students, these experiences can be jarring—they suddenly find themselves on the "wrong" side of the religious–secular divide and grouped together with those from whom they could not feel more distant. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a material approach to religion, this article argues that the yarmulke comes to point to different levels and modes of observance and identities and enable different possible belongings in the secular public sphere as it travels across contexts that include different definitions of and attitudes toward religion and Jewishness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction to this special issue, "Subversive Religion and More-than-Human Materialities in Latin America," conceptualizes the transformative force of practices often gathered under the rubric of "popular religion," including Indigenous, Black, and campesino ritual as well as vernacular Catholicism and Pentecostalism. Rather than treating these practices as manifesting an essential alterity to either the modern state or the "West," we frame them as struggles to build a new world order both against and otherwise than frameworks. Exploring the materiality of these struggles across several dimensions—of the earth, of religious objects and rituals, and of the sovereign body—we describe the constitution of what we call the "flesh of justice" and probe its subversive effects. Drawing on the distinctive tradition of Latin American Marxism to contest the separation of the subaltern "otherwise" from the domain of modern politics, we offer two analytics for engaging with the flesh of justice in Latin America: subversive cosmopolitics and theopolitics. Resumen: La introducción a este número especial sobre "Religión subversiva y materialidades más-que-humanas en América Latina" conceptualiza la fuerza transformadora de prácticas muchas veces nombradas como "religión popular", incluyendo rituales indígenas, negros o campesinos, así como catolicismos o pentecostalismos vernáculos. En lugar de tratar estas prácticas como manifestaciones de una alteridad esencial frente al estado moderno o al "Occidente", las entendemos como luchas para construir un nuevo orden mundial en contra de y también de otro modo que esos marcos. Al explorar la materialidad de estas luchas en varias dimensiones—de la tierra, de los objetos y rituales religiosos, y del cuerpo del soberano—describimos la constitución de lo que llamamos la "carne de la justicia" e indagamos en sus efectos subversivos. Recurriendo a la tradición distintiva del marxismo latinoamericano para rechazar la segregación de la "otredad" subalterna de la política moderna, ofrecemos dos analíticas para aprofundizar en la carne de la justicia en América Latina: la cosmopolítica subversiva y la teopolítica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hebraic written stones represent the primary surviving physical testimony to the Jewish past in Portugal, apart from a Medieval synagogue in the city of Tomar. As it is true for other religious objects, medieval Hebraic epigraphic stones have become a heritage asset, opening the way to specific recognition of the Jewish materiality of Portugal. Long after the forced conversion of Portuguese Jews to Catholicism or their exodus, a few epigraphic testimonials were collected, maintained, and displayed. A group of 20th century Jewish and non-Jewish amateur archaeologists and historians assembled manuscripts, books and stones and attempted to establish a museum in the medieval synagogue of Tomar. They dedicated themselves to the study and preservation of this written religious legacy and proposed to focus on the letter as the principal material heritage to represent the Portuguese Jewish past. Drawing on the concept of religious heritage complex, this article describes how letters, as material remains, lead to the cultural renewal of a religious minority's past. The study also sheds light on the cultural and religious consequences of this attention to letters on the heritage-making process itself. Through a combination of archival study, ethnographic fieldwork and comparison, the study sought to better understand the late destiny of the written remains of Judaism in Portugal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the special issue "Material Religion in Central and Eastern Europe" provides an overview of various aspects of material religion in Central and Eastern Europe. It focuses on three major issues and their interconnectivity, which have played an important role in the social, political, and religious history of this macro-region: the much-debated notion of Central and Eastern Europe as a cultural and political region of the continent, the "glocal" aspects of material religion, and the role of material religion in the field of religious studies in this region. The article discusses the major topics and methodological approaches of the contributors of this special issue, highlighting the variety of research perspectives in religious studies in the post-communist regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents selected aspects of Marian pilgrimages in the context of lived Catholicism in Poland. Lived Catholic Mariology is a concept introduced in this paper and discussed in terms of the intimate as well as communal relationships people establish with Mary through and in various rituals (e.g., pilgrimages), sites (e.g., shrines) and objects (e.g., images). Links between materializing Mary through images; affective, sensual and corporeal religious experiences; and community bonding are presented. They are discussed by drawing on approaches that refer to material religion, religion as mediation, concepts of sensational forms, and aesthetic formations. When examining the centrality of Marian images in Polish pilgrimage practices, this paper focuses on earlier developments, especially (1) those connected with the growth of Marian shrines during the Counter Reformation period and (2) the role played by traditional and innovative Marian pilgrimages during the Communist period in Poland (1945–1989). The final part of the paper refers to the recent changes connected with political polarization of Polish society, the process of radicalization through right-wing discourses that embrace Marian imagery and pilgrimages, the decline of Roman Catholicism and Catholic practices among Poles, and emerging alternative currents relating to Mary and pilgrimages in religious and secular contexts. Referring to various historical and current examples, this paper proposes seeing pilgrimages through the lived religion approach with a focus on materiality and mediatory dimension of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to examine and illustrate how the animistic ontology present in neopaganism allows embodied and sensuous interactions with virtual worlds. By considering animism as a strategy with which to rethink human cohabitation with the techno-digital otherness, I will show how neopagans who use computer technology for spiritual purposes experience the online context as an environment where lived religious practices can occur. To do so, I will particularly focus on religious practices taking place in digital games and 3D social virtual platforms due to their ability to induce immersive and interactive experiences. Because neopaganism recognizes the material living world as a central aspect of spiritual experiences, I will explore the ways that the spatial and material dimensions are articulated in neopagan's online performances, the actions they make possible, and how they enable a more intimate relationship with virtual platforms. I will accompany the theoretical reflection with case studies and interviews with technopagan practitioners experiencing their religion with and within computer technology. This paper also aims to show how this new conception of animism connects to what Mikhail Bakhtin calls "dialogism", a condition that recognizes the multiplicity of perspectives and voices and denies the possibility of not getting involved with the otherness. For such reasons, approaching the digital through an animistic ontology can help us acknowledge the convergence of humans with the techno-digital otherness and explore, on deeper levels, sensuous and embodied experiences taking place in the religious context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concentrates on crystal shops and shopping for crystals in Estonia. Consumption and commerce are inherent parts of New Spirituality. Crystals became the most salient commodities in esoteric shops during the 2010s, most of the shops having become "crystal shops" in Estonia. The aim of this article is to analyze the meaning-making potential of the materiality of crystals in shopping, and the material and sensuous aspects of crystal shops. From the perspective of material culture and consumption studies, this case study proposes that crystals are valuable in shopping primarily because of their materiality as a source of meaning and experience. In choosing crystals, people follow their material form and material qualities instead of a textual description of their supportive effects. Crystal shops are generally described as therapeutic places, however as an "experiencescape" they are strictly sensuous and material places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the Africanization of Catholicism in Ghana as a process that embraces activities deriving from the inculturation doctrine as well as those emerging during the most recent process of pentecostalization. The complex and changing historical and current discourses on "African tradition", "traditional religion", and "African spirituality" are presented in relation to the creation of an independent Ghana and the state-instigated concept of "national heritage", as well as the Catholic theological developments strongly shaped by the Second Vatican Council. The influences of Pentecostal and charismatic Churches are described and the pentecostalization of Catholicism is interpreted as a kind of subversive development of inculturation doctrine and practices. The article refers to the material and embodied aspects of religion, pointing to the importance of material culture and "embodied continuation" in shaping contemporary African Christian and African Catholic identities. The article draws on ethnographic material collected in Catholic parishes in central Ghana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, single portraits representing Guru Nanak are very popular among the Sikhs and are frequently hung on the walls of houses and temples. It is during the Singh Sabha Movement from the 1870s that portraits of Guru Nanak came to be hung on the walls of Sikhs' temple and house by the urban middle class. Wall-hung portraits of Guru Nanak symbolises the uniqueness of Sikhism and, since they were painted both in a unique three-quarter face and in a Hindu-like frontal, Guru Nanak portraiture has played a pivotal role in social cohesion among the Sikhs who belonged to different factions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how vendors of Buddhist goods, which are traditionally associated with death and funerary rites in Japan, have responded to religious decline by venturing into alternative spirituality, wellness, and home décor markets. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within Buddhist goods stores, I examine how retailers and artisans have begun re-orientating their business models and product lines from caring for the dead at acute moments of spiritual transition to caring for the living in their everyday conditions of loneliness and stress. By pushing products that generate affects of healing (iyashi) and a calm heart (kokoro), these actors forge a new corporate–spiritual philosophy and religious consumer subjectivity and, in so doing, seek to defend their market share and social relevance in an age of secularism, disconnection, and precarity. However, for commercial actors, the space between religion and spirituality can be surprisingly treacherous and this transition challenges their skills of 'affective retailing'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the basic starting point of the study of material religion, religion is an inextricably material phenomenon. In theorizations of religious conversion, however, materiality is accorded little attention. This article presents a case study that investigates the role of materiality in individual religious change, as well as highlighting the dematerialized underpinnings of modern Western conceptualizations of conversion. It concerns transitions from Lutheranism to Orthodox Christianity in contemporary Finland. In this context, the sensory aspects of liturgical life are often identified as a central pull-factor of Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, partiality towards Orthodox aesthetics is not always considered a proper reason for switching churches. The article analyses interview material gathered from converts and is informed by the concept of semiotic ideology, which it applies to examine the different and sometimes conflicting assumptions regarding material expressions as mediators between humanity and divinity present in the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how a museum built by the Taiwanese Fo Guang Shan (FGS), one of the largest Buddhist groups on the island, triggers emotions and spirituality in its visitors. We explore how the conceptualization of materiality by the founder of FGS, Hsing Yun, is presented to visitors at the FGS Buddha Museum (FGS-BM) and how Humanistic Buddhism is materially expressed at the museum. By analysing the museum space and investigating visitors' responses to the FGS-BM through ethnographic research, we describe how the FGS uses material artefacts, museum space and embodied activities to communicate Buddhist ideology to the laity, triggering some visitors' emotions and leading some to describe the museum as being similar to a temple. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animist cultures around the world are based on interactions among humans and other-than-human beings. Humans are active agents in this process and often establish alliances with other-than-human beings to accomplish a variety of goals. The means of establishing these alliances is an emerging area of interest in studies of animist ontologies. We demonstrate here that these allies are often object-persons specifically made or modified by humans to have desired spiritual and physical properties. Examples of common object-persons range from domestic residences to shamanic drums to sacred bundles used for ritual activities. We further establish that object-persons go through a life cycle typically starting with a process that activates and modifies latent agency. We demonstrate this process using case studies from the North American Southwest, especially during the Medio period (AD 1200 to 1450) occupation of the Casas Grandes region of northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States. Our primary examples are the creation of three Mesoamerican-style ballcourts and a water reservoir at Paquimé, which is the ceremonial and political center of the Medio period world. These examples reflect the underlying animistic ontology of this culture and provide a case study of the relationship between material religion and ritual practice that frames animistic religious practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite official bans, public criticism and concern over pollution, plastics are widely used in Buddhist material culture in the Indian Himalayan state of Sikkim. Using the framework of the seven bowls of water offerings, undertaken every morning to the Buddhas and deities in domestic shrine rooms, and ethnographic observations, as a way to frame discussions of changing material culture, I will interrogate how plastics are used and waste is re-purposed in Sikkimese interdimensional engagements in offerings to the deities and spirits. I will argue that plastics continue to be seen as efficacious and generative for Buddhist communities due to their ability to be repurposed and recycled, acting as exemplars of skillful means that allow for Buddhist communities to exercise their own agency in determining the efficacy of material culture and the making of new futures. This paper engages with scholarship from anthropologists and Buddhist studies scholars on Buddhist materiality, plastic, and waste studies to consider the malleability of plastics, even when they are not malleable, and demonstrate how this malleability generates positive and creative engagements across dimensions that allow for nuanced and complex responses to the anxieties people have about plastic waste in the Himalayas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I explore the contemporary practice of establishing garden shrines in Buddhist rural Java. While on the surface the placement of shrines follows the demands of environmental upgrading and beautification strategies, often in accord with eco-tourist imaginaries, the practice reveals a complex aggregation of material and discursive threads. The article situates the project, ethnographically, as a sensorial practice in which environmental awareness and a sense of "atmosphere" are directly involved. This perceptual domain, particularly the relationship of the villagers to the Sakyamuni statuettes, is simultaneously articulated in continuity with the religious field of Javanese Buddhism, as it encompasses notions of sacralization and rituality. I recover the idea of aesthetic practice in order to bring these sensorial stems on a common platform. In blending discursive and materialist approaches, the article converses with the idea of strata as devised by Deleuze and Guattari as a pivotal image in their work on rhizomes. Through the concept of stratification, I argue, it is possible to apprehend Buddhist shrines as cultural formations in which "everything is involved," that is, as multiplicities in which layers of materiality and discourse are intertwined in meaningful and generative ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hindu texts known as caste puranas (jāti purāṇas) provide the mythopolitical foundation for many of India's castes. These puranas may be said to 'gather' a community audience, and such castes themselves may be thought of as object-oriented gatherings whose affective, ideological, and custodial attachments to their respective jati puranas also include the deification of these texts as revered objects. A caste does more than interpret such a puranic text; the text is continuously made, re-made, and circulated in conjunction with the community's sociopolitical circumstances. The Suthars (hereditary carpenters) of Gujarat afford a special look at the mythopolitics of caste: Claiming to have 'lost' their ancient and 'original' foundational text, the Vishwakarma Purana, many in the Suthar community seek to recuperate it in new compilations, performances, and media. Tracing the mediations of this and other puranas, we argue, can deepen the politico-historical analysis of caste mobilizations and their mythopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of a ritual event memorialised on stone reliefs at the ancient city of Carchemish around 800 BC. It is argued that the reliefs represent a ceremony of investiture, in which boys of royal lineage are handed out toys as oracular instruments to elicit favourable omens for the heir apparent. The inclusion of boys and their toys in the visual commemoration of a political ritual has bearings on three levels of meaning. First, it testifies to a hitherto unrecognised cult practice, involving grouping boys in age classes and harnessing their ludic practices for ritual purposes. Second, it reflects local political preoccupations connected with dynastic controversies, in an attempt to silence counternarratives through the emphatic staging of children. Finally, the chosen imagery conveys complex philosophical ideas about life, education, and individual destiny, connecting with issues of material religion and childhood studies. The study integrates interpretive perspectives from visual semiotics, architectural analysis, and ancient studies to show how, upon specific occasions, marginal groups and everyday material items, such as children and their toys, may play critical roles in collective ritual events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I present a material-centered analysis of a Tamil Christian song titled Tiruchabai Tarattu, which was composed in 1813 by Vedanayaka Sastriar. Through this focused case study, I address the question of what is—or what ought to be—the relationship between material and textual analysis in the discipline of religious studies. Rather than positioning material religion as a discrete approach to the study of religion, one that is often contrasted with textual studies, I propose that textual studies finds in material religion an invitation for significant growth since texts are mediated through the material. I am especially interested in sensory experiences and objects, the mainstays of material analysis, as they are found embedded in texts. By focusing on the sensuous and material elements highlighted by the poet, a study otherwise focused within the bounds of textual sources can pivot and expand to include non-textual sources. My assembly, description, and analysis of sources and experiences that span across media in and outside of texts allows me to build what I call a sensory corpus by which we understand the meaning—better, meanings—of South Asian Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ecology of late-modern askesis through the concept of 'ethical infrastructure': the array of goods, locales, technologies, procedures, and sundry pieces of equipment upon which the possibility of ethicists' striving is premised. By looking at the ethnographic case of halal living among Muslim pietists in post-Soviet Tatarstan (Russia), I advance a framework that highlights the 'profane', often unassuming or religiously unmarked, yet essential material scaffolding constituting the 'material conditions of possibility' for pious life in the lifeworld of late modernity. Halalness is conceptualised not as an inherent quality of a clearly defined set of things, but as a (sometimes complicated) relationship between humans, ethical intentionality, and infrastructurally organised habitats. Pointing beyond the case of halal, this article syncretises theories of self-cultivation, material religion, ethical consumption, and infrastructure to address current lacunas and explore fresh theoretical and methodological ground. This 'ethical infrastructure' framework enables us to conceptualise the embeddedness of contemporary ethicists in complex environments and the process by which processes of inner self-fashioning change and are changed by material worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I have photographed the materialities of devotion to Our Lady as an exercise to understand Catholic devotional practices and this visual essay brings together a selection of Virgin Mary images in the Netherlands. In this case, the ethnographic work led to a contrast with the materialities in my usual fieldwork because it is a secularized European country with a Protestant tradition that leaves little room for this kind of devotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Material Religion studies religion through its material aspects such as food and foodways, clothing, architecture, images, postures, etc. everything that is not discursive. Dealing with body and objects, it breaks with Eurocentric methodologies about religion based on texts only. Little explored in the Brazilian academia, it arouses many doubts, since it is not only a matter of mentioning and describing the usage of objects and body practices in religions, neither means to analyze its symbolisms, but rather, it is a matter of reviewing categories like body, things, fetishism, idolatry, animism, concepts used along history to diminish religiosities in the colonial contexts. This paper aims to clarify what Material Religion is and to show how to give voice to nonwestern epistemologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quaker spirituality encompassed a range of activities, from prayer, meditation and worship to reading, writing and conversation. It also included interaction with what scholars call 'material religion'. Analysis of an allegorical map entitled 'A Map of the Various Paths of Life', created by American minister George Dillwyn in 1794, provides a window into the relationship between Friends' religious practice and material culture. It enables us to examine the use of objects to inculcate Quaker values and provide a 'guarded education' to Quaker youth. A multidisciplinary approach will be utilised to analyse the map and its importance to practical piety among American Friends in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centres on the emblem book Jesus en de Ziel, Een Geestelycke Spiegel voor 't Gemoed , first published in Amsterdam in 1678, with texts and images composed by Jan Luyken. From the time of its first publication, the book was part of the literary devotional life of the Dutch Republic, undergoing numerous editions and reprints, at least until the final decades of the eighteenth century. Using the information provided by Book Sales Catalogues, the article explores different modes in which Jesus en de Ziel was consumed, paying attention to the material conditions under which the object was provided and acquired by the consumer. The emblem book, as a religious object, was constantly reconfigured and mobilized by their manufacturers, their providers, and by the consumers themselves. I argue that these patterns of consumption, elucidated by the catalogues, can make a fundamental contribution for historical and cultural research on religious practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking cognisance of the recent theoretical concern with relational ontologies, this contribution explores the dynamic interplay between conceptions of religion, animism, and pilgrimage by focusing on the agency of pilgrim passports and stamps as an affective force to enhance our understanding of the idea of pilgrimage as materially grounded within wider relations of human and non-human agents. Drawing on an emergent body of literature that subscribes to the new material turn, I analyse pilgrimage walks, pilgrimage events, and pilgrimage entrepreneurship in Kent, England, as complex assemblages of people, things, places, and immaterial thought. The contribution thus foregrounds the interweaving of materials, potentials, and processes in which human and non-human agency, including pilgrim passports and stamps, may all be implicated in generating 'enchantments' that act as an affective or animating force in the revitalisation of pilgrimage routes, and the narratives, experiential, ethical, and conceptual formations they elicit in Kent and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of Japanese religion have recently drawn attention to the global repositioning, "greening", and international popularization of Shinto. However, research on Shinto ritual practice and material religion continues to focus predominantly on cases located within the borders of the Japanese state. This article explores the globalization of Shinto through transnational practitioners' strategic glocalization of everyday ritual practices outside of Japan. Drawing upon digital ethnographic fieldwork conducted in online Shinto communities, I examine three case studies centering on traditional ritual offerings made at the domestic altar (kamidana): rice, sake, and sakaki branches. I investigate how transnational Shinto communities hold in tension a multiplicity of particularistic understandings of Shinto locality and authenticity when it comes to domestic ritual practice. While relativistic approaches to glocalization locate the sacred and authentic in an archetypical or idealized form of Japanese tradition rooted in its environment, creolization and transformation valorize the particularities of one's personal surroundings and circumstances. Examining these strategies alongside recent and historical cases in Shinto ritual at shrines within Japan, I propose that attending to processes of "parallel glocalization" helps to illuminate the quasi-fictive notion of the religious "homeland" and close the perceived gap in authenticity between ritual practices at home and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a case study of a lay Buddhist community that employs a business model called "living hall" (Shenghuo guan 生活馆) to facilitate the practice of Tibetan Buddhism among its members. The living hall model is explored in the context of the politics of religion in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the dynamics of Tibetan Buddhism among Han Chinese in the past decades. The author investigates the model's origin, its implementation in a contemporary Buddhist community, and its interaction with the discourse on Buddhism in the PRC. The article joins a recent academic endeavor to illuminate the different modalities in which lay practitioners carry out Buddhist practice outside the sphere of institutionalized Buddhism. The article sheds light on the delicate dynamics between religion and state control in the PRC and the role of entrepreneurs and materiality within lay Tibetan Buddhism. 文摘: 本文是关于佛教居士群体的案例研究。该群体通过采用生活馆的商业模式促进了藏传佛教汉族信徒的修行。对生活馆模式的探索基于过于几十年内中华人民共和国的宗教政治环境，以及藏传佛教在汉族中的动态演变。作者考察了该模式的起源、它在当代佛教居士群体的实施，以及该模式与中国佛教主流话语的互动。本文顺应近期的学术努力，旨在阐述佛教居士在制度化宗教领域之外的不同佛教实践。本文揭示了宗教和国家控制之间的微妙动态，以及在藏传佛教居士中企业家和物质性的作用。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statues of the gods, or spirit images (shenxiang 神像), remain among the most ubiquitous material objects in the religious culture of modern-day Taiwan. Notwithstanding, research to date has yet to examine adequately the people and processes that produce, consecrate, and enshrine these statues, work that effects a transformation of these cult statues into sacred presences. How should we understand the relationship between these artistic and ritual processes and the resulting spirit image that is born out of them? The article argues that the spirit image at the heart of this study, a statue of the Daoist god Guangcheng Zi 廣成子 , emerges in the context of its religious lifeworld not as a discrete entity, but rather as an "assemblage," a coming together of the people who contribute to it, the materials those people use, and the specific spirits and divine powers those people invoke. 神像仍普遍存在於現今台灣宗教文化中，此乃屬於物質性的文物之一。然而迄今為止針對相關人員，以及製造、開光、安座等使塑像轉化為聖物的過程，這類的研究仍不足。該如何理解這些藝術和科儀的過程之間的互動關係，進而了解這兩者與其生成之神像間的關係？這篇文章主要探討的主題為道教神明廣成子的神像，在宗教世界觀之下，其並不是以分離的實體存在，而是以一個「集合體」出現於此世界觀之中，此集合體包括了貢獻的人員、人員所使用之材料、以及他們所祈求的對象，例如神明、靈氣等。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the histories of Catholic material culture in revolutionary Cuba. It illustrates and discusses how the Cuban Church and individual Catholics have navigated the revolutionary everyday with practices of material religion. Moving from the first years of the Cuban Revolution (1959 onwards) to the late 1970s, the article presents and analyses examples of the ways in which material religion has intersected with the state ideology, politics, and the performance of the Revolution in Cuba. Additionally, the article discusses the meanings given to material representations of religion in the revolutionary reality by Cuban Catholics themselves: how religious material culture has constituted a means for Catholics to navigate the juxtaposition of religious worldviews and the socialist state power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centers on the devotional volume Corona de la divinissima María, published in Lima in 1644. This volume primarily takes the form of an extended exegesis of the words spoken by the Virgin Mary as recorded in the Bible, while also exploring the power of the Virgin's name and narrating the author's search for her true lived physical appearance. The book includes 37 engraved illustrations. One of these engravings reproduces a painting the author commissioned of the Virgin's true appearance; the rest diagram or emblematically illustrate powerful words. Indeed, the entire book, called a Corona, or crown, itself shapes an extended metaphor in which the words of prayers directed at the Virgin materialize as spiritual crowns, represented three times in the engraved illustrations. This article argues that, within the 1644 Corona, words have material presence and bear power in multiple ways: as diagrams, as typographic objects, and as spiritual forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Green's works, she challenges binary gender and its use in the regulation of subjects, demonstrating how Jewish ritual objects can be used in diverse ways by diverse people to meet a variety of needs that need not be pre-determined according to the norms of binary gender. As political scientist Paisley Currah and scholar of law Tara Mulqueen explain, "The notion that one's classification as male or female will not change is such a widely held belief that gender classification has been part of state practices of recognition since the earliest days of modern state formations." We might conclude then that if a person's gender cannot be securitized - if their sex or gender does not fit into the model put forward by the state - then they cannot be understood by the state as proper subjects and their existence may even be cast as a threat to the state itself. 6 In the DSM-5, the core component of a gender dysphoria diagnosis is that the person has "a marked incongruence between the gender they have been assigned to (usually at birth, referred to as natal gender) and their experienced/expressed gender.". [Extracted from the article]

19 rachel B. groSS FeelIng JeWISh Nostalgia and American Jewish Religion Keywords: nostalgia; memory; Judaism; American religion; material culture; material religion; genealogy; synagogues; children's books; delis; foodways The visitors to the Museum at Eldridge Street sat in the pews of the restored 1887 Eldridge Street Synagogue. I argue that the premise of American Jewish religious decline and the studies supporting a continuity crisis incorrectly identify the ways that rachel b. groSS: FeelIng JeWISh 23 Jews think about and practice Judaism in the United States. You can do it." 18 The prayer shawl, and Oberman's story, comfortably incorporate Jews and non-Jews into the emotions and network of relationships of North American Jewish nostalgia. By focusing on what they see as the waning religious practices of American Jews in institutions like synagogues, proponents of the continuity crisis are looking for Judaism, especially public forms of American Judaism, in all the wrong places. [Extracted from the article]

Although recent scholarship on the biblical studies survey course has sought to bring in a wide array of new methods and ways to incorporate the Bible into the broader liberal arts curriculum, a dearth of tactics for employing biblical manuscripts in the classroom remains. This article details one experience crafting two class sessions for an introductory Hebrew Bible course, employing manuscripts and rare books to spark students' insights into the questions of textual transmission, scribal practices, the materiality of sacred texts, and the significance of manuscripts as windows into the people and cultures which create, use, and own them. This lesson plan successfully facilitated firsthand learning about the importance of embodied texts as witnesses to the complex, messy transmission of the Hebrew Bible and its role in diverse cultures and times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: "Jero Amerika," a mask/tutelary god, protects the people of Ubud, a former kingdom of Bali, Indonesia, and today a tourist mecca. Jero Amerika operates within the logic of empowered Balinese temple masks, but Jero Amerika is also eccentric. Returned to Bali from abroad after uncanny events, the mask makes remarkable appearances during temple festivals and in stories that circulate by word of mouth and via media old and new. Jero Amerika's activities encourage us to regard ontologies, as with all social and material phenomena, as fluid and malleable in their unfolding encounters with changing circumstance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revisiting Charles H. Long's 1991 proclamation of a modern crisis of materiality, this essay examines Long's theorization of the fetish‐commodity legacies, that recreated African persons into objects and commodities, as a means of understanding our present tripartite pandemic of systemic racism, environmental destruction, and COVID‐19. Examining the period of, what Long elsewhere terms, the "second creation," I interrogate what this crisis means for the study of religion and for our society today. Building on Long's conception of "soul stuff" and yet moving beyond notions of human exceptionalism, I argue that to move beyond fetish and colonial legacies and realize a "third creation" (or, in other words, a (re‐)re‐creation), both scholars and the public must craft a new materialism that honors the ontological reality and value of all existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

England's Church Missionary Society sent missionary William Duncan to Victoria, BC in 1856. His task was to convert the native Tsimshian who lived in the Fort Simpson area to Christianity. Grouped together with other historical accounts of the conversion of indigenous peoples, the story of Metlakatla is often characterized as a story of loss. However, this article posits a different reading of this history, one based on the idea that the material practices and beliefs of the peoples of Metlakatla suggest an ongoing engagement with this past, making for a living, transcendent historical trajectory. In examining the ways that the Metlakatlans engaged with and repurposed material religion in the Tsimshian and Anglican contexts, I demonstrate the significance of this alternate form of history. A material religion reading of a Chilkat dancing blanket, or gwishalaayt, helps illuminate the sometimes uncomfortable overlap between indigenous and colonizing perspectives, raising further questions about the boundary-lines and completeness of acts of conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The persistent notion of the holy mountain, both as a special place infused with divinity and as a pilgrimage or tourist destination, is to be included among the physicalistic foci of material religion as an emerging study. The mountain is not only a feature of the natural world but also a material object that intersects with worship throughout the world's diverse religious and spiritual traditions. It also is increasingly becoming a concern of the environmental movement in terms of both ethical arguments and considerations of embodied enchantment. Among the selected axes mundi surveyed in the present article are those found in the Himalayas, North America, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, Greece, and Japan. What constitutes a mountain's alleged sacredness, where are such mountains to be found, what awe and wonder associations might they have with earlier religious understandings as well as present-day spiritual beliefs, and what are some of the social consequences of mountain veneration in terms of today's ecological awareness? These questions belong to the remit of material religion as it examines the interface of corporality and divinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the stability of religious objects by asking how Joseph Smith's seer stones, from which he dug for buried treasure and produced the Book of Mormon, were materialized into religious objects. This analysis challenges the assumed stability of material objects by demonstrating that the seer stones could potentially lose their religious qualities and values once they were examined, displayed, or explained. This is framed by using Martin Heidegger's practical descriptions "ready-to-hand" and "present-to-hand" to explain the unstable nature of religious objects and why public examination and explanation of religious objects can potentially strip them of their perceived sacredness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé radically changed in the twentieth century. From being persecuted as crime and sorcery, it has become identified as culture. Its objects and images have become works of art. This article presents this process of 'culturalization' through objects and images. This transformation, however, resulted in some contradictions, that left some of these objects in ambiguous positions. This case study aims to contribute to current debates on the agency of objects and images in material religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Material expressions of religion are some of the most visible ways in which the lived realities of religions can be examined and understood. Religious materiality not only mediates between a continuum of still productive dualisms that exist between 'official' and 'lived' religion, but is also capable of inspiring relational methodological approaches. Based on a small-scale study of Marian statue devotion in Spain, the article asserts that 'personhood' as an approach is an appropriate conceptual and methodological tool with which to frame theoretically, address, and approach practically the religious objects that researchers encounter in the field. Such approaches are considered here as 'relational', as lived religion is best understood through the intimate relationships and negotiations that take place not only between religious group or community members, but also between human persons and other than human persons such as religious statues. Acknowledging that researchers and the objects being researched can bring each other into varying forms of personhood carries the possibility of expanding the 'participant observer' paradigm, thus expressing lines of possibilities for understanding the volatile relational phenomena that take place in the religious 'worlds' of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Material manifestations of the Chinese popular deities, Guanyin and Guan Gong, are ubiquitous in Cantonese-Chinese restaurants globally. Yet studies of Chinese popular religion among overseas Chinese have seldom focused on the diverse significance of these deities to Chinese migrants, nor the use of restaurant-spaces to house these deities. This article examines the presence and powers of such deities in Chinese restaurants of Santiago de Chile. We seek to understand how the presence or absence of Guanyin and Guan Gong figures specifically shapes migrant Chinese restauranteurs and workers' experience of the restaurants as particular kinds of protected, sacred/secular spaces, and how these deities might also affectively shape the restauranteurs' ways of being and inhabiting the restaurants. Based on semi-structured interviews with Chinese shopkeepers and workers, observation and photography of the spatial organization of 26 restaurants and the aesthetics of their deities, we argue that these restaurants are more than just their primary sources of livelihood. We argue that they approximate Soja's "thirdspaces" (1996), which on the one hand mediate their interactions with the city and its other residents, and on the other hand mediate relationships between humans in the earthly world and deities in the "other" parallel world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The artworks produced at the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre at Rorke's Drift, KwaZulu-Natal, have been highly appraised and appreciated in South African art-historical circles, not in the least so as African expressions of postcolonial and anti-apartheid resistance. The work of Namibian artist John Muafangejo (1943–1987) is prominent amongst these. In this article, while borrowing generously from the methods of art historical research, our interest is primarily in works of art as objects of material religion. Erwin Panofsky introduced iconology as a way of determining the meaning of art. Iconology wants to enable the seeing of the unseen; seeing the transcendence—making it most applicable to the study of religion as a cultural practice. This article investigates in a critical way how iconology can assist in the study of material religion, especially as applied to the study of religious art. Because meaning is contextual, the conditions under which religious objects are made and interpreted are as important as the work itself. A discussion of a specific work by John Muafangejo originating from the Rorke's Drift Centre will be conducted by testing the potential of iconology as an analytical tool in this African Christian environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2019, the United States Government tried Scott Warren on felony charges for "harboring illegal aliens" and "conspiracy to transport and harbor illegal aliens." No More Deaths, an abolitionist direct aid organization, insisted that the trial was a result of the government's criminalization of care. "Humanitarian Aid is Never a Crime," they insisted. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tucson during the summer of 2019 to argue that the gallon-sized water bottles used by aid groups and the heavyduty black water bottles carried by migrants can help scholars interrogate the boundaries of "America" and "religion." Despite militarized walls and barriers, people touch and commune across the Americas. Water bottles are sacred objects--criminalized, policed, destroyed--precisely because of their potential to facilitate such transborder intimacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I consider the methodological and theological significance of David Hopps's creative intervention in The Extravagance of Music to 'rehabilitate lightness' in theological reflection on music in a way that includes taking seriously even the theological potential of musical 'kitsch' and 'banal' popular music lyrics. Yet though Hopps makes a persuasive case for widening the musical content that he deems worthy of theological engagement, I show that his own 'light' limits around the revelatory potential of music surface in a series of caveats and qualifications. I argue for a still more capacious approach to theological reflection that resists even these limits. I suggest that such reflection has the capacity to open our ears to the activity of God at work in and in spite of the quality of human musical creations and testifies to the extravagance of God more than to the extravagance of music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious traditions – although socially constructed – are distinguishable as distinct, practiced entities having pragmatic effects. Religion is not a purely scholarly invention. Correspondencies between empirical data and scientific concepts, or, between object language and metalanguage, have to be found beyond essentialism and reification. Consequently, there is a shift in parts of the study of religion towards approaches that counteract essentialism and reification by explaining subject-matters through relationality. A relational paradigm is beyond the alternative of a naïve realism and positivism on the one hand or a radical constructivism or deconstructivism on the other hand. Against this background, the article draws attention to relations in the study of religion, especially between cognition, experience, action, and materiality, between semantics and social structure, and between structure and process. The article argues for a synthesis of different approaches in the study of religion, namely cognitive and material approaches, and experience- and action-orientated theories and methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kasuga Wakamiya Onmatsuri is an important local festival celebrated every winter in Nara. While the festival has been analyzed from the point of view of its relations with religious institutions such as Kasuga Taisha and Kōfukuji, to date less attention has been paid to its historical transformations. Countering linear narratives that tend to portray it as largely unchanged since its inception, this article combines ethnography, historiography, and religious studies to provide a more multivocal analysis of the Onmatsuri. After an overview of its main celebrations, the article revisits the origins of the festival, describes the ontological multiplicity of its deities, and analyzes material elements that concur to its "fractal" features. Showing how these heterogeneous elements generate a diffuse "atmosphere of the past," this study discusses practitioners' accounts of ritual participation, as well as the relationship between ideological reconstructions of the past and material embodiments of religious symbols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I investigate the significance of contemporary Tamil temple signs that have been laid, hung, and sometimes painted over earlier stone inscriptions. I am particularly interested in the following questions: What is the purpose of these old and new signs? And how does their existence contribute to the devotional program of a temple? While signs appear everywhere within a temple complex and come in a wide variety of materials, I argue that their impact is not found at the level of an individual signboard. Instead, the significance of southeast Indian temple signs is found in the fullness of the walls and their non-linear refrains to events, values, communities, and scenes for the worship of the deity. To make this argument, I draw from affect theory, material studies, and especially concepts of accumulation and saturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how white, Western followers of Japanese Buddhist schools (primarily Sōka Gakkai) practice Buddhism through acts of purchasing, decorating, and positioning altars (butsudan) in the space of their homes. Drawing on a pilot ethnographic study of altar practice, I detail the oft-overlooked dimension of becoming and being Buddhist that is material consumption. Western consumption of Buddhist popular culture is often critiqued as aesthetically driven and Orientalist. However, aesthetics, "Japanese-ness," and ease of use are often not the only or primary concerns when crafting an altar. Rather, altar-making can be a continuous process involving significant deliberation, DIY, and compromise. By directing attention to the domestic religious sphere and the concrete artifacts via which Buddhism has crossed oceans, I show how making a place in the home for butsudan is tied up in the process of making Buddhism "at home." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Idols, icons and religious images have had an enormous influence on the spiritual and religious lives of individuals and communities for millennia. This paper explores aspects of this attraction from a psychological perspective using the model of transitional objects developed by D. W. Winnicott, a 20th century British psychoanalyst. I argue that the worship or veneration of material forms may at times represent or symbolize the unseen divinity or god for the believer, but at times these forms may also "be" the divine or be considered an aspect of the divine in material form, thus facilitating religious devotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the myriad connections between geometric visuals, magic, and altered states of consciousness, more specifically looking at the colocation of geometric visuals and experiences of intermediary beings. The main focus here is on how geometric visuals relate to the consciousness experiments and magical practices of American author William Burroughs (1914–1997) and his Swiss-English collaborator Brion Gysin (1916–1986). Such an analysis will also dive into the broader intellectual currents that influenced Burroughs and Gysin's uses of geometry, yielding more abstract conceptions of how geometry relates to altered states of consciousness and intermediary beings. Furthermore, understanding how geometric manipulation of the mind works has important consequences for multiple fields outside of the history of esotericism, including market-oriented disciplines like architecture and industrial design. As such, this essay proposes that the historical study of esotericism can promote and conduct itself as an interdisciplinary space that communicates the value of its data to market-oriented fields through "material approaches" to religion à la Birgit Meyer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using and adapting the ideas of material religion, this paper considers Wesleyan Methodist circuits: the organisation of chapels within specific geographical areas into co-dependent communities. Interested in circuits as an example of the extension of religious space beyond institutional contexts – the extended geographies of religion – it highlights the importance of thinking about such spaces as material things. Using two circuits in London (Bow and Highgate) as case studies, this paper focuses on representations of circuits and their visual and material qualities. It then explores how material approaches facilitate insights into the differences between how religious leaders designed these spaces and how individuals experienced them. Taking a material approach to congregational bodies, objects and (sub)urban landscapes, it simultaneously considers how material things gain meaning through their participation in humans' social networks and as a result of their inherent material properties. In particular, it argues that taking this material approach to the extended geographies of religious practice is an effective method of gaining insights into individuals' everyday experiences of religious spaces. Most specifically, it emphasises how the insights that material approaches provide into everyday religious practices are especially useful when studying individuals in the past, as their voices are generally unrepresented in the official archival documents of religious institutions that historical research into religious communities is often dependent on. • Promotes material approaches to extended geographies of historical religious practice. • Uses and adapts material religion approaches. • Investigates the everyday experiences of nonconformist congregations. • Compares the official design and lived experience of religious spaces. • Identifies differences between the design and lived experience of Wesleyan circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]