Brief Overview of Religious Media/Materiality Readings

1. Appadurai, Arjun, New York University, The Social

Life of Things, 1986:
a. Commodities, objects with value attributed to
them, can only be highlighted by and
understood in their uses and trajectories: their
human and social context is illuminated by
being in motion.
b. One aspect of the social existence of any
object is the capacity to become a commodity, and some things
become commodities for longer than others, and some remain
out of the sphere of being a commodity for an indefinite time.
c. If a thing is not always a commodity, is a commodity not always
a thing? Probably not, Appadurai would say no, it is always an
object—though this may not make sense in an information
economy, or something like taste, from the perspective of
Bourdieu. Are they in this case, cultural or non-material things?
i. In this case, the solution may be that words are things,
they are the objects which have commodity value.
ii. Things have value outside of commodity state, do they
not? Things people have are still of value.
2. Bell, Catherine, d. 2008, Santa Clara University, Ritual
Theory, Ritual Practice, 1992:
a. The category of ritual functions for scholars of
religion, sociology, and anthropology to resolve
complex problems posed by the apparent
division into thought and action: this is a
consequence of the period of the hegemony of
‘reason’ and knowledge in western intellectual
life and the problems posed by that. But,
contrary to Goody, the term need not be thrown
out: we can work with the “common-sense” notion of ritual, while
moving beyond it being a key to culture or a concept with
universal applicability.
b. Ritualization is thus posited to be a strategic way of acting in the
world distinct from other practices—it emerges as a cultural
strategy of differentiation linked to social effects and rooted in
the interplay between a socialised body and the environment it
structures—lack of distinction between rite and non-rite is
significant, and is part of making the non-ritualised life coherent
with the ritualized part of life.
c. Ritual can be seen as a method of creating a power relationship,
not one that is based on a dominant-subservient power
relationship, but one that involves consent and resistance,
misunderstanding and appropriation. Ritual activity thus
reproduces and manipulates its own contextual ground.
3. Keane, Webb, University of Michigan, Signs of
Recognition, 1997:
a. People try to represent themselves
symbolically or politically through ritual action,
but this needs recognition in order to be
efficacious. Hazard is the failure of
representation and recognition. Symbolic and
political representation fail in Anakalang in the
cases of semiotic difficulty, economic weakness, political conflict,
and ancestral ire. Culturally constructed relationship between
affines can trigger hazard at any moment of a formal encounter.
b. Material goods have value in relation to semiotic and political
situations through formal ritual exchange and their use in
practical contexts like maintaining households. Ritual speech,
contrary to Bell, does not reproduce authority, but rather tells us
about the nature of authority. Authority is seen in the way ritual
speech is used in the semiotic context (i.e. that it is from
ancestors) or politically (in the effect of authority upon an
audience). Speech and objects function on the scene at the same
time. One can also see hazard through speech. Speech is thus
embodied in interactions between humans.
4. Gell, Alfred, d. 1998, London School of
Economics, Art and Agency, 1998:
a. Anthropology of art must understand the
social context of art production, circulation,
and reception. This must look at social
relationships in production systems of
various kinds across cultures, and not in
particular societies.
b. Art is not whatever is considered art by the art world, or any
attempt to provoke an aesthetic response, rather, art and art
objects are social agents: they have agency, intention, causation,
and are effective and transformative—in order to understand
them, one must understand their biographical elements.
c. A social agent is an index: an outcome or instrument of social
agency. Things or indexes are either primary or secondary
agents: primary agents are intentional beings, whereas
secondary beings are the artefacts through which primary agents
distribute their agency and thus render their agency effective.
Thus, they are distributed personhood. Secondary agents are still
agents, they just don’t initiate happenings through acts of will,
and are not themselves morally responsible.
d. An agent works in a network of social relations and must have a
patient: an object which is causally affected by the agent’s
action. Both primary and secondary agents can themselves act
as patients. Manufactured objects are indexes of agents (their
 makers), but sometimes those agents, the indexes’ origin, are
concealed. The those who are in social relationships with indexes
are either patients or agents, i.e. those who make the index
possible by causing it. Thus, an index has specific
receptions/recipients. Prototypes are things that the index
represents visually or non-visually, e.g. the original landscape
that a painting represents, and thus that prototype is also in a
relationship with the index.
5. Tilley, Christopher, University College London,
Metaphor and Material Culture, 1999:
a. The language people use is highly permeated by
metaphor, more than we acknowledge, and it is
an essential feature of material culture. Cognition
is seeing something as something, which is also
the core of metaphorical understanding both for
words and for objects: linguistic and solid
metaphors. There is also the metaphorical
significance of place: the landscape. This approach bridges
boundaries between archaeology and anthropology.
6. Engelke, Matthew, London School of Economics, “Sticky
Subjects, Sticky Objects” 2005:
a. In reformed Christianity, one of the main tensions
is between the spiritual and material, and
avoiding the encroachment of the latter on the
former. However, as Keane, Tambiah, and Meskell
have argued, religion cannot do without
materiality—so to what extent can religious
practice be given over to a sustained project of
immateriality? The Masowe want a similar religion with no
matter, but their commitment to materiality makes the objects
they do use in life more important, such as substances used in
healing practices.
b. An example is holy honey, thought to be blessed by the Holy
Spirit. It is not regarded as only matter, it is more important than
mere honey—but this view can make some Masowe followers
uncomfortable due to their stance on matter.
c. Even the bible is rejected so that they may have a live and direct
connection to god. The bible, historically, was considered to have
power and agency when used by colonial missionaries, which
ended up being “spiritual furniture.” The Masowe do take
seriously the claims of witchcraft and healing, which explains, in
a way, their strong reaction to matter as emphasised in
witchcraft and traditional healing.
d. Their robes, too, are examples of the agency of materiality—they
emphasise their spiritual purity and commitment to equality.
 e. The Masowe healing practice involves having an elder put hands
on those who request, and give some holy water or holy honey.
There is also a blessed pebble that can be used to make water
holy or the remove impurities. These practices differentiate
Masowe material ritual objects from traditional healing objects.
f. In order to soothe people when possessed, they may chant
“honey, honey, honey” to heal them. Alcohol is forbidden,
including in the form of honey wine. However, the issue is still a
difficult one. In daily life, it is a practical substance, religiously, it
is not clearly appropriate from the Masowe perspective.
However, the conclusion is that objects can both demonstrate
and cause one to lose the immaterial: it is a matter of degree
and kind.
7. Latour, Bruno, Sciences Po Paris, Reassembling the
Social, 2005:
a. Social is about connections and relationships,
but includes both humans and non-human
actors. The social is not a domain of reality, or a
context (e.g. “social context”) it is also not a
particular type of causality, but rather, is any
trail of associations between heterogeneous agents. This is
sociology of associations, and not just sociology of the human
social.
b. There are five uncertainties that interrupt, interfere, disrupt, and
dislocate social movements: the nature of groups (contradictory
ways for an actor to be given identity), the nature of actions (the
variety of agents who displace original goals of other agents on
an actor), the nature of objects (types of agencies in interaction
is vast), nature of facts (the contradiction between natural
sciences and the rest of society), studies done under the label of
science of the social, wherein it is unclear to what extent they’re
empirical.
c. How to deploy controversies: why humans aren’t the only agents.
d. How to render associations traceable again: the methodology for
establishing and analysing links between
agents.
8. Meskell, Lynn, Stanford University, Archaeologies of
Materiality (Introduction), 2005:
a. The study of materiality diverges from
conventional study of material culture. It
focuses on the social. Materiality moves
beyond seeing objects as merely symbols or
epiphenomenal, but rather, as phenomena with their own
particular properties which shape human world.
b. Our material lifeworld is conceived and constructed by us:
material habitus. Tylor argued that all artefacts are the product
 of combined actions of individuals and their choices. Processes,
customs, and opinions that are carried on by force of habit,
refashion society and are traced in the material world. This
acting is done in relation to immateriality: the need to objectify
and abstract: fabrication is making the world and ourselves at
the same time: subject making. All acts are copying &
objectifying the thought world.
c. Meaning is not all that matters in archaeology. The dialectic of
people and things is called by Keane bundling. Latour used
Heidegger’s notion of a distinct world of objects and things as
being a gathering, but Heidegger sees objects as lesser—Latour
suggests objects have rich and complicated qualities as well.
The separability of objects and society, the dichotomy of
“facts and social constructions” is useless. Society is
literally built of gods, machines, sciences, arts, and
styles. The things fabricated by humans, as Allan Turing
suggested, are possessed of souls and the power of gods. We
embody gods in statues, or identify them with nature, and are
still attributed with power. This is translation, the creation and
instantiation of hybrids blending nature, deities, and so forth
which act. Moderns believe they can separate domains of social
and material, which is conceived of by Latour as purification: this
privileges moderns themselves and rationality. We have to
understand matter and the specificities of sociality and
materiality at particular moments in time while eschewing
essentialism and naturalism. Thus, we intrude into the natural
world and mark that intrusion physically/materially.
d. In South Africa, the attempt to make traditional artisan
economies pay is seen as inherently positive move: freezing
culture in a pre-apartheid and pre-modern identity. This doesn’t
necessarily have an effect on poverty or development, but does
have an effect on the formalization of identity categories and
boundaries. Social and international reifications regarding
spiritual needs and material needs have their imprint upon the
material record. These are also the arts of resistance: e.g.
telephone wire baskets from wires stolen from the apartheid
government, and now used as a tool to attempt to emphasise
collectivities in relation to recent epidemics and issues.
e. The reason Boer or Afrikaner culture is not deemed exotic is
because of the Durkheimian intonation that ethnicity and
aesthetic style correlates, and that primitive objects stem from
the collective mind (a people) and not individual artist. People
continue to hold that technology equals progress and material
sophistication worth—thus, “under-development,” under the
American international interest-influenced social approach,
traditional industries are de-privileged by anthropologists and
 governments and organizations: which is why such industries
exist in the first place. This is complicated and the goal in this
study is not to encourage or discourage such industry. We just
need to observe and see the worlds that we have. Artisanship is
central in landscapes of group identity: and is a sphere of
material expression of solidarities and has potential for great
import in lives.
9. Miller, Daniel, University College London, Materiality
(Introduction), 2005:
a. Division between material and immaterial is
nowhere as strong as Hinduism and Buddhism
—but is also a cornerstone if the modern
world. We can resolve the dualism of subjects
and objects through a philosophy but
anthropology allows us to employ
understandings in forms of engagement with
analytical insight that can be realised in
different situations, as the world changes and
varies.
b. Materiality is not just artefacts, but also an understanding of
material culture within a larger conception of culture. Objects are
important because we often do not see them: they determine
what takes place while we are unconscious of their capacity to do
so. Objects ability to appear inconsequential is the reason why
many anthropologists look down upon material culture studies.
c. Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice emphasised the
implicit conditioning of objects for humans in their socialising.
Objects influence our habitual way of being in the world, our
second nature. Teaching in school used to be inculcated primarily
through material culture. Even in Hinduism, a belief in
immateriality can thus be expressed through temple architecture
and control over the body. Appadurai’s contribution is to suggest
that objects are in a dualism between gift and commodity,
showing how objects can move in and out of different conditions
of identification and alienation.
d. What is a thing and what is an object? When does something
become a thing? For Hegel, in Phenomenology of Spirit, there is
no separation between humanity and materiality, through which
the former create form from our mirror image. It is a material
mirror created by us and we understand ourselves through it.
This is the process of objectification: all we do becomes alien to
us. Hierarchy appears to happen by itself, as an object, and
human agency is obscured. There is no representation in this
theory, we just see the creation of form as creating
consciousness and capacity such as skill. In Philosophy of Right,
Hegel identifies that education is real inasmuch as it enhances
 capacities of the educated—education is a process an agent
undergoes and not something that happens to one. When
production functions for its own interests, e.g. school for its own
sake rather than for education, then it alienates.
e. As regards agency, the main two contributors were Latour and
Gell. Latour focuses on the division between science and
sociology, emphasising that it is not possible to separate the
natural and law-like and the apparently unpredictable and
human. What matters for him are the networks of agents that
become the prime movers of actions. Contrary to Durkheim, he
argues that objects cannot be projections of society—the non-
human world has agency too. The Hegelian dialectic furthers the
division between subjects and objects through dualism: what is
interesting in artefacts as we see prior historical creativity and
agency, but not that a subject depends upon an object for its
subjectivity or agency. As regards Gell, what is emphasised is the
agency of subjects upon other subjects through objects—natural
anthropromorphism. Creative products (art) becomes the
distributed mind of a person or people, and in that way, influence
the minds of others. Materiality theorists of agency thus dissolve
commonsense dualism. But anthropology does need to begin
from an emphatic engagement with humans of the world: we
must mediate their commonsense apprehensions and then draw
analytical and theoretical conclusions from the particular places
they hold in their particular worlds—whose interests are served
by what claims we make? We should return to ethnographic
empathy and ordinary language.
f. Meskell emphasises the monumentality of the Great Pyramid and
shows the relation between materiality and power. Similarly,
Rowlands, shows how the body of a person can have power in
ritual distinctions for the Fon. Forms and the ability to fill them in
became power in colonial projects. For Myers, the power register
determines how solid a thing is to another, e.g. aboriginal art as
compared to that subject to copyright, private property. Thus,
power is a property of materiality.
g. Immateriality is important but always finds itself at crisis when
out of touch enough with materialities.
h. The issue of signification: Keane points out that materiality has
agency in and of itself, not only through meanings and signs.
Signs are semiotic ideologies that guide practice in and of
themselves. The “clothes have no emperor.” If you remove the
signs, the signification does not disappear. The signs do not
really stand for the signified, but they are so ingrained as being
such that the enactment upon the significance of what is
signified go beyond any clear sense of intentionality: e.g. the way
one behaves when one wears a sari vs. western clothes. Being
 superficial is not always considered a bad thing: e.g. where
sincerity, having one’s “true self” close to the surface, reduces
deception.
i. Resort to philosophy is necessary, but emphasizing basics of
ethnography is more important. We need to consider materiality
directly, not through the quest for immateriality. But the
immaterial gives rise to our perception of ourselves and sense of
importance: both in religion and economics today. We need to
return to the subjects and understand them in ways that are
meaningful to them. We must also use colloquial and local
language: culture and social are only words that we use in our
field—but these are not the ways people we talk to always think
and talk. We must be willing to betray our philosophical
foundations. We need to understand things in terms of subjects
and objects—however, we still try to improve our heuristics,
invent a better wheel.
10. Boivin, Nicole, Oxford University, Material Cultures,
Material Minds, 2008:
a. The idealist-materialist, mind-body, and culture-
nature dualities are still very heavy in
contemporary social sciences where scholars fall
back on representationalism and social-
constructivism.
b. Western sociohumanist studies have a linguistic
and representationalist bias, but the sensual,
emotional, and aesthetic properties of the material world have
shaped human experience. Matter has active and agentive
qualities, and technology back–influences human society both in
the ancient and modern worlds. Moreover, through the
accumulated materiality of constructed ecological niches,
humanity is self-making itself in both their biological and
cognitive evolution.
c. As regards affordances, soil type in the middle east influenced
early land enclosures and living quarters.
11. Meyer, Birgit, Utrecht University, “There is a Spirit in
that Image,” 2010:
a. Pictures should not be understood simply as
depictions subject to a beholders’ gaze, but
instead should be taken seriously as things
that evade human control due to the way they
are embedded in particular social practices of
acting and looking.
b. Despite the aggressive dismissal by Protestant
missionaries among the Ewe in Ghana of
religious things such as pictures as fetishes and idols, they have
 not been entirely stripped of their power in the view of followers
and churches.
c. While Protestant, especially Pentecostal, Christians charged
African indigenous religious traditions with idolatry and evil
worship, the relationship between the two is best understood as
a symbiotic entanglement wherein the nature of pictures is
unstable: Jesus images feature as indices of Christian outreach
(Gell) to slip into icons that render present not the depiction
itself, but the devil’s force behind it.
d. People and things engage in mutual animation. The older
tradition continues to flourish behind the newer tradition—the
older tradition prevails over the newer, as the Christ image is
never one of a redemption from the devil but the prevalence of
the devil in the image. These are religiously induced modalities
of vision—both in looking upon an image and being looked back
at (this is also a form of flattening of the landscape of agents).
e. Religion cannot do without images: even the rejection of it
heightens the value of it (Engelke).
12. Meyer, Birgit, Utrecht University, “Material Mediations and Religious
Practices of World-Making,” 2010:
a. Focusing on mediation as a material process—material
mediations—is central to grasping the transformation of religion,
both empirically and conceptually.
b. Humans relate to each other and the world indirectly through
mediation—this requires media (or as Latour puts it, mediators)
which transmit content which carries particular meanings and
values. Krämer sees media as transmitting what needs to be
expressed, but also as shaping the message—media is thus a
third party which translates and broadcasts over distance: even
speech is a material medium (communication cannot occur
through immediate intuition as a romanticist notion would
suggest). In religion, media are devices for sending messages
along horizontal and vertical axes between senders and receivers
(very much like Gell)

The application to my own project should be fairly straight forward. My study

has more in common with Lewis’ approach than with that of Gellner, Owens,
or Locke. I am studying a series of different texts and their uses in Nepal,
tracing their life both textually and in practice. This shall be done with
respect for their agency as texts and objects and in relation to the ritual
specialists. The question of immateriality and value is also relevant in
regards to what texts are considered the most important. The extent to
which the agency of the text is what matters shall also be evaluated—to an
extent what I think we see and shall see is that, as Michaels notes, despite
what prescriptions texts give, people do go about doing ritual the way their
parents or their ritual instructors taught them. As regards what will be
focused on, the Navagrantha will be the primary focus, along with a
consideration of the “popular” texts that Lewis identifies.