6 Culture Purchased

In the study of religion, material culture refers to the stuff of religion, the bodies, objects, and places of religious life that are animated through practices of sensory engagement, economic exchange, and technological mediation. Material culture is the cultural activity of things. Human beings engage things in many ways, not only by finding, making, using, exchanging, consuming, and destroying them, but also by thinking about them, interacting with them, and ritually attending to them in religious ways. In recent research on religion and material culture, an earlier division between spirit and matter, soul and body, has been rejected. Research has been redirected by interests in embodied religion, with attention to the senses, gender, sexuality, life, and death, as embodied religion intersects with material religion, the solidity, opacity, animation, biographies, and social lives of material objects.

The study of religion and material culture might be defined against the background of a religious materialism, going back to the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued that human consciousness is not an independent spiritual essence, aloof from the material world of objects. Against any idealist rendering of humanity, Feuerbach argued that human beings were constituted by their reciprocal engagements with material objects. “Man is nothing without an object,” Feuerbach asserted, “but the object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject’s own, but objective, nature.”¹Close This formulation of humanity raised two risks, reification and alienation. By reifying objects, as if they were more real than human beings, humans sacrificed their humanity to their own projections, including the supreme projection of a God, reified in the image of a human being. By mistaking projections for reality, human beings suffered alienation from their own material ground of being.

Without reducing religion to reification and alienation, historians of religions have found materiality a productive source of religious creativity. While Mircea Eliade found matter at the origin of religion, as human beings engaged with the solidity of stone, the fluidity of water, and the expanse of sky, Charles H. Long has directed attention to the materiality of signification, focusing on the materiality of signs, their material transmission, and the modes of human imagination, orientation, and formation that have directly engaged materiality.²Close The imagination of matter, as Long has argued, is not confined to an original primordial ontology or defined by an enduring poetic phenomenology. Rather, the imagination of matter can be historically situated in the contacts, relations, and exchanges of the colonial era, at work and at stake within colonial situations that provided the material terms for significations of meaning and power. In the intercultural encounters of colonial situations, arguments arose about the value of objects, the spirit of matter, the social life of things, the cultural promiscuity of things, the intractable materiality of the fetish, and the secret of the cargo, all shadowed by the circulation of the commodity, eventually operating in what has been called the global religion of the market.

Mediation has emerged as a central concept in the study of religion and material culture. Religion has been recognized as a human activity that does not merely use media but is a process of mediation in which relations among the human, the less than human, and the more than human are materially transacted. In the science of mediology established by the French Marxist Régis Debray, which is dedicated to the disciplined investigation of culture, communication, and media, religion registers in gestures of symbolic efficacy that are required by the material organization of any collectivity. Identifying symbolic efficacy as “religious materialism,” Debray argued that mediology investigated not the meaning but the power of signs, the “becoming-material” forces of symbolic forms. Taking mediation as his subject, Debray focused on the materiality of signs and technologies of signification. Basically, Debray argued that material organization is necessary for the organization of matter in any transmission of culture. Attention to the materiality of material culture raises these questions: How do signs produce effects? How does saying or showing become doing? In the science of mediology, these are questions of both material and religious importance. Observing that Marx’s problem was that he had not studied the history of religions, Debray developed a materialist analysis of symbolic efficacy that holds implications for the study of religion as material culture.³Close From a variety of disciplinary perspectives, many other researchers have attended to material mediations of religion. Since 2005, the journal Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief has been at the forefront of charting new theoretical developments in the study of religion, media, and material culture.⁴Close

Relics, the physical remains of holy persons, act as powerful objects in many religious traditions. Whether defined as the remnant (from the Latin, relinquere) or the essential ingredient (from the Sanskrit, dhatu), relics have not been regarded as dead matter, parts of corpses, but as animate objects, living presences, endowed with life. In Buddhist practice, the allure of relics has resided in the perceived presence of sacred power within them instead of their capacity to symbolically represent holy persons.⁵Close For Roman Catholicism during the European Middle Ages, constructing a church as the meeting place between the living and the dead required the physical remains of saints. Since they acted as patrons, protectors, and intercessors between the material and spiritual worlds, the saints had to be present in a church. In fact, their bones had to be located within the most sacred center of the church, the altar, in order for the building itself to be sanctified. Not only necessary for sanctifying an altar, relics were also used for swearing oaths, for rituals of healing, and for religious devotions that brought pilgrims from great distances to be in the presence of a holy patron.

As this practice was followed throughout Europe, churches and monasteries embarked on a quest for relics, developing new methods for acquiring the physical remains of saints. Certainly, relics might be simply discovered, as the empress Helena had found relics in fourth-century Jerusalem, but this method became extremely rare in medieval Europe. As the European demand for relics increased, a class of professional relic merchants emerged to serve the expanding international trade in the bodies of saints. Relic salesmen acted as middlemen in sacred exchanges between Rome and the rest of Europe. Although relic merchants assured their customers that the bones they were purchasing were genuine, the question of authenticity was ultimately settled in practical terms. If the bones worked miracles, inspired the faithful, attracted pilgrims, secured funds from donors, and added prestige to the community, then they had to be regarded as authentic relics. Better than buying relics, however, was stealing them. By stealing the body of a saint, a community could be assured not only of the authenticity of the relic but also of the blessing of the saint, since saints would certainly not allow their bodies to be moved without their spiritual approval. The bones of Saint Benedict, for example, were stolen from his monastery, Monte Cassino, in Italy and taken to the Fleury monastery on the Loire River in France. To certify their claim on the spiritual power of Saint Benedict, the monks of Fleury told elaborate stories about stealing the bones, with the implicit permission of the saint, and transferring them to France, where they subsequently conveyed their miraculous power. Throughout medieval Europe, similar accounts of stealing relics, known as translationes, certified local claims on the bodies of saints and martyrs.⁶Close As living material objects, relics played significant roles in mythic narratives of the origin of a community; in regular rituals of display, procession, and celebration; and in attracting pilgrims to be in the presence of the physical remains of a holy person.

Like the relic, in many religious traditions, visual images, or icons, have often been perceived as imbued with sacred power that is presentational rather than representational, a power engaged not only by the gaze but also by kissing, touching, and carrying them in rituals of procession. By the sixth century, icons had assumed an important role in the religious practices of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. In general terms, holy images were used for education, veneration, and protection. Although icons were often characterized as if they were a visual scripture, the Bible of the illiterate, their pedagogical role was superseded by their status as sacred objects effectively conveying the spiritual power of holy persons. Although great value was placed on the accuracy of a representation, an icon was more than a mere likeness; it was a presence. Through ritual acts of veneration—bowing, kneeling, and kissing the image—devotees could gain access to the spiritual power present in the image. By such acts of veneration, Christians entered into ritual exchanges with Jesus, Mary, and the saints, the heavenly “prototypes” of the material images. As they came to be widely used in personal devotion, church liturgy, public processions, and even in defending a city against invaders, icons emerged as crucial intercessors between heaven and earth.

During the eighth century, however, the Orthodox Church entered a period of crisis regarding the image. Known as the iconoclastic controversy, this crisis called into question the legitimacy of venerating icons. To a certain extent, this controversy was waged in the broader context of an interreligious argument about images among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Generally, Jews and Muslims rejected the use of visual images in their own religious worship. Although their criticisms of Christian practice were taken seriously, the iconoclastic controversy was primarily an internal argument among Christians who agreed on regarding Jesus Christ as divine. According to the defenders of icons—the “icon lovers,” known as iconophiles—the merger of spiritual and material in these holy images corresponded directly to the merger of divinity and humanity in the incarnation of Christ. However, the opponents of images, who became known as iconoclasts, were convinced that icons had drawn Christians into violating the biblical commandment prohibiting the worship of any “graven image” (Exodus 20:4). Not only idolatrous, the veneration of icons was useless, because these images were inanimate objects. In place of the holy images, iconoclasts directed Christian attention to the text of the Bible, the bread and wine of the Eucharist, and the triumphalist sign of the True Cross. Only these objects, they argued, could be regarded as bearing the spiritual power of Christ.⁷Close The iconoclastic controversy, therefore, was an argument about the material location of the sacred.

As the mediation of sacred presence in material forms, religious material culture also engages objects in motion, since objects circulate in a variety of transactions with religious significance. Such transactions bear multiple meanings. A sacrificial off ering, for example, might be understood as a gift, a communal meal, an act of sanctification, or a rule-governed manipulation of objects. In all these respects, material objects in motion are central actors in the meaning of the ritual.

During the modern era of colonization, imperialism, and globalization, two religious objects have been particularly important for the study of religion and material culture: the fetish in the Atlantic world and the cargo in the Pacific world. As research on the history of the fetish has shown, the term emerged in West Africa during the fifteenth century within intercultural trading zones.⁸Close In these mercantile trading networks, Portuguese, Dutch, and English traders in West Africa dealt with African Christians, Muslims, and “fetishists,” who, according to the European observers, had no religion at all. From this European Christian perspective, fetishists, allegedly lacking any trace of religion, had no stable system of value to assess material objects. Without religion, African fetishists were supposedly unable to evaluate objects. They overvalued trifling objects—a bird’s feather, a pebble, a piece of cloth, a dog’s leg—by treating them as fetishes for ritual attention, but they undervalued trade goods, showing a lack of interest in acquiring what European traders were interested in selling. Fetishism, therefore, emerged in the fifteenth century as a European mercantile theory not of the origin but of the absence of religion. In the context of incommensurable values in these intercultural trading relations, Europeans developed the stereotype of “fetishism” to characterize Africans who had no religion to organize the necessary relations of meaning, power, and value between human beings and material objects and thereby to organize relations among human beings in the exchange of objects. The discourse of fetishism, which cast Africans as incapable of properly valuing objects, could also be deployed to turn Africans themselves into objects, rendering them as suitable commodities for the slave trade. As the discourse of fetishism has been turned back on the West through Marxist critiques of commodity fetishism or Freudian analysis of sexual fetishism, the fetish has endured as an argument over the meaning, power, and value of objects.

In the Pacific world, the cargo has played a similar role in arguments over the material culture of religion. As Melanesian islanders developed complex beliefs and practices in relation to the material goods brought by white merchants, missionaries, and colonial administrators, the cargo emerged as a new location for negotiating meaning, power, and value. The history of cargo movements illustrates different religious strategies in relation to the material goods brought by European explorers, colonizers, and missionaries. Engaging Christian myth, ritual, and institutions, cargo movements emerged that reconfigured indigenous religious resources to make sense out of the new world of material goods. In some cases, people embraced the Christian church as the road to the cargo. The Christian gospel of the cargo, however, turned out to be a great disappointment. Many Christian converts in Melanesia were convinced that white men hid the secret of the cargo. They say, “Work for it,” but you do not get it. They say, “Pray for it,” but you do not get it.” With the failure of wage labor and religious ritual to deliver the cargo, the only remaining way to get it was to steal it. According to many cargo myths, the secret of the cargo was the truth of theft: long ago, whites had secured the cargo by mistake—in effect, by stealing it—from its original producers and rightful owners, the deities and ancestors of the island people. In the colonial situation, therefore, the secret of the cargo revealed that private property was theft. The cargo millennium promised to redress that act of original theft by restoring material goods to their rightful owners.⁹Close Like the fetish, the cargo has been turned back on the West. Critiques of the spiritual materialism of the global market have rendered the market as a religion, as a millenarian capitalism expecting material wealth to mysteriously appear from extraordinary sources. This mystery of the market resembles the religious material culture of cargo movements.

As the primary media in the material culture of religion, the senses have received considerable attention in recent research that focuses on what Marx called “sensuous human activity” in religious practice. In practices of seeing and being seen, sight has been studied in religious visual culture, the sensory embrace of images, and the variety of religious ways of looking. The sense of hearing, which has also been studied in terms of practice, focusing on religious practices of listening, which in many religious traditions cultivate a disciplined ethics of listening, has inspired research on religious soundscapes as an important feature of the material culture of religion. While the fragrance of sanctity, the stench of sin, and the taste of salvation employ sensory metaphors, smell and taste are important aspects of religious practices, especially if we regard religion as more like cooking than like philosophy. Finally, focusing on the sense of touch, some researchers have argued that tactility is the most important religious sense, the most integrative sense, incorporating the entire corporeal field of the body in pleasure and pain, in handling and manipulating objects, and in the kinesthetic motion of all religious activity. Often, religious media are synesthetic, engaging many senses simultaneously, creating an intense, unified, and perhaps even transcendent sensorium, while some religious media narrow the perceptual field to one dominant sense, such as the sense of hearing in practices of listening to sermons or maintaining silence. In any case, attention to the senses shifts emphasis from the design and function of material objects to embodied experience in the material culture of religion.

Mediating physical environments feature prominently in the material culture of religion, whether the natural environments of deserts, rivers, or mountains or the built environments of religious architecture. In places of religious gathering, such as churches, mosques, temples, or synagogues, religion is materialized in wood and stone, iron and glass, but also in the directing of religious attention, the staging of religious performance, and the alignment of individuals with a collectivity.¹⁰Close In its design, religious architecture can contain in material microcosm an entire religious world. For indigenous religion in South Africa, the cattle enclosure was a sacred place, the site for sacrificial off erings to ancestral spirits, but it was also the material embodiment of a religious worldview that depended upon ongoing material transactions between humans, domesticated animals, and ancestors. These transactions built up the homestead as a human place but also protected the homestead against antihuman forces associated with the wild space of the forest or the desert that harbored dangerous wild animals and wild spirits. Entering the cattle enclosure, therefore, was to enter this world of spiritual and material relations. Likewise, a temple can materially embody the meeting point between heaven and earth, a cathedral can provide entry into the cross of Christ, and a mosque can direct religious devotion toward Mecca. These ideal patterns, however, are not simply revealed in religious architecture; they are intensively interpreted, regularly ritualized, and inevitably contested by competing claims on their ownership. Interpretation and ritualization are obviously required for sacralizing a place; contestations among competing interests are often overlooked. Material culture, therefore, also entails the mediation of conflicts over ownership and access, inclusion and exclusion, within the built environments of religion.

Crucial to the transmission of religion, communication media have been thoroughly material in the history of religions. Against the background of face-to-face oral communication, Régis Debray has charted the shifts from writing to printed texts to audiovisual media as comprehensive reorientations in the materiality of religious communication.¹¹Close First, in the logosphere of writing, techniques were developed—pictographic, ideographic, and phonetic—to create material traces of words. Writing on stone, whether a pyramid, a stela, or a stupa, necessarily fixed those traces in a specific location. The sheer weight of their material grounding signaled a locative orientation to the religious significance of that place or an assertion of religiopolitical authority over that place. By contrast, collecting the material traces of words on papyrus and, later, vellum or parchment signaled a greater degree of religious mobility, supporting a utopian orientation in which sacred words were portable, capable of being carried to places far beyond their material point of origin. However, despite this increased mobility, the materiality of written texts still placed limits on their circulation. Parchment, for example, was extremely expensive, made from the hides of sheep, goats, or calves. Writers on parchment had to calculate the number of animals required for each text. As a result, writing and reading was the preserve of people in specified religious roles who drew their textual authority from the material and organizational base that was created to sustain this costly technology.

Second, initiating the graphosphere of the printed text, the sixteenth- century Guttenberg revolution in movable metallic type radically altered the material conditions for the circulation of words. As this technology increased the accessibility of the written word, religious reformers embraced the printing press as a divine intervention. Celebrating the printing press as God’s latest and greatest gift, the Protestant reformer Martin Luther sacralized a communication technology as a divine instrument for transmitting “true religion” to all nations of the earth. Certainly, his printed words circulated widely, but the material technology of printing also led to unanticipated consequences of skeptical scholarship and secular publics organized around printed publications. Nevertheless, the technology of printing provided a new material base for individual engagements with religion.

Finally, the videosphere, animated by audiovisual media, has dramatically increased the pace and scope of the circulation of religious signs. While some critics, following Walter Benjamin, have argued that mechanical reproduction deprives these signs of their “aura,” their sacred significance that was previously grounded in a specific religious architecture or ritual practice, others have recognized the proliferation of sacred significance in photographs, radio, films, television, and the Internet. Nevertheless, these media also place material constraints on religion. Religious broadcasts on television can engage the eyes and ears, displaying spectacle, proclaiming words, and performing music, but they cannot convey the fragrance of incense, the taste of holy food, or the embrace of congregants. Furthermore, like the expense of parchment, the cost of broadcasting exerts material constraints on audiovisual media, which has coincided with the emergence of a new spirituality of money that not only promises prosperity to viewers but also advances a new religious devotion to fund-raising for religious broadcasting. In all of these spheres of communication, therefore, spirituality has been thoroughly infused with materiality.