Material Religion

The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief

ISSN: 1743-2200 (Print) 1751-8342 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfmr20

Editorial statement

To cite this article: (2005) Editorial statement, Material Religion, 1:1, 4-8, DOI:
10.2752/174322005778054474

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/174322005778054474

Published online: 29 Apr 2015.

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editorial statement
The Editors are pleased to put forward Material Religion
as a new project in the study of religious images, objects,
spaces, and material practices. The study of religion may be
conducted through any number of lenses. One may regard
religion through the lens of narratives, or documents such
as sermons and doctrinal statements. Other scholars will
stress the importance of understanding religion in terms of
its institutions, or its leading gures, or in the way in which
it takes shape in such social forces as revival, revolution,
urbanization, or migration. Material Religion sets out to
consider religion through the lens of its material forms and
their use in religious practice.
Of course, the investigation of things as different as
talismanic devices, burial mounds, cult statuary, or icons
is not new. But there is today a keen interest among new
and established scholars, among curators, and among the
general public in recognizing just how deeply dependent
religious identity and experience are on the material stuff
and ordinary practices of belief. Religion is not considered a
merely abstract engagement in doctrine or dogma, nor a rote
recitation of creeds and mantras. In other words, religion is
not regarded as something one does with speech or reason
alone, but with the body and the spaces it inhabits. Religion
is about the sensual effects of walking, eating, meditating,
making pilgrimage, and performing even the most mundane
of ritual acts. Religion is what people do with material things
and places, and how these structure and color experience
and ones sense of oneself and others. New to the study of
religion today, therefore, is the enthusiastic interest among
scholars in every humanistic and social-scientic discipline,
among curators and museum directors in private and public
institutions, and among large numbers of the general public
to learn what material culture can tell them about the lived
experience of religion.
This journal represents a widespread discernment that
religion is fundamentally material in practice and that a fruitful
approach to studying this aspect of religion will be robustly
interdisciplinary. Bracing as this challenge is to scholars and
curators, it comes with some nettlesome difculties attached
to it. The Editors are mindful of these. Like many of our
colleagues, we have each experienced how difcult it is to
study something as complex and varied as religious belief and
ritual. Trained in one discipline of study, such scholars and
museum professionals emerge into their eld of professional
work only to nd that what really interests them does not sit
neatly within the connes of a single discipline, but blithely
overlaps a host of such boundaries. The consequence of this
is a fast and ongoing re-training for those who wish to do
justice to a phenomenon as complex as the material culture

Material Religion volume 1, issue 1, pp. 49

 of religion. Indeed, the Editors have found that the freshest,
most engaging scholarship is produced by those who
relish this discipline of interdisciplinarity and who proceed,
respectfully, but without intimidation, to trespass on the turf of
disciplines as freely as the object of study requires.
The task, then, as we understand this journal, is to
provide a key service to colleagues across a wide range
of academic disciplines and professional elds; colleagues
who agree that the nature of the material culture of religion
stretches beyond the limits of a single discipline and that an
international forum, conducted with strict observation of the
professional standards of scholarship, will provide something
of a crossroads, as close to an intellectual home, or at least a
way-station, as seems probable for the study of anything as
wildly inclusive as religion.

Editorial Statement
Material Religion will seek out and publish the best work
from around the world on the material culture of any religion
in any period of time and any location. The study of religion
has largely been pursued as the study of textsliturgical,
6 theological, poetic, or narrative words and concepts. There is
no regretting this practice, since it is clear that many religions
in the last three millennia have invested enormous cultural
resources in hand and mechanically printed texts, which have
acted as authoritative transmissions of received knowledge.
But the limits of a textual study of religion have gradually been
recognized by many in academe, museum, and elsewhere
over the last two or three generations. In the spirit of their
interdisciplinary effort, the Editors of this journal believe that
the study of texts should be joined to the study of objects,
spaces, images, and all the practices that put these items
to use in order to arrive at a more robust account of how
religion works in the lives of its adherents and in the societies
that shape and are shaped by a religion. Often, however,
texts are lacking. Prehistoric religions have generally left only
objects, images, markings, and spaces for us to puzzle over
what religious practices and beliefs occupied such long-
lost peoples. Ancient religions frequently offer only scraps
of textual remains. In other instances closer to the present,
texts were destroyed or lost to the ravages of time, leaving us
once again with the deductive work that the study of material
forms offers historical understanding. Still again, material
things, places, and practices evoke modes of experience
Volume 1

that are not equal to the reading of texts. Meaning may be

Issue 1

reduced simply to the parsing of words or their conceptual

interpretation. Things and practices mean in ways that texts
do not. Moreover, words combine with things to create even
richer, more embodied forms of experience that must be
scrutinized in order to capture the complex sense of religious
Material Religion

meaning-making.
The study of the material aspects of religion that this
journal intends to promote does not rest within the traditional
coordinates of the study of religious images and objects.
Iconography is a highly useful way of reading images by
setting them beside texts of various kinds, but it is limited
to ascertaining the intentions of the image-maker or the
patron. As important as that is, it is far too narrow for the
scope this journal as well as much scholarship and exhibition
practice over the last several decades. Stylistic analysis, long
the mainstay of art history and museum curators, while an
essential tool in the study of objects, is unable to conduct the
kind of cultural interpretation that many wish to undertake.
The undertaking to collect, evaluate, and exhibit masterpieces
and works of artistic genius remains a major role of museums
and galleries around the world, particularly as art and artists
are nationalized and regarded as the patrimony of ethnic
peoples or nation-states. But this lter completely misses
indeed, deliberately ignorespopular and mass-produced
imagery and objects and the host of religious practices that
rely on such items. It has also often reduced religious images
to historical or aesthetic artifacts, failing to account for their
role in the living tradition of a communitys life.
We understand by material religion not only great works
of art and temples, but all the things believers do with them.
We understand material religion to include pilgrimages,
image-guided meditation, the spaces that house shamanistic
transport, spirit possessions, divination, or liturgical worship,
the objects to which memory and genealogy are keyed,
the costumes in which ancestors are invoked, the images
that make aesthetic experience a spiritual encounter, the
devotional paraphernalia that grandparents and priests
give as gifts to the young, the bumper stickers that invoke
deities, and the objects that serve as amulets to ward off
evil or summon benevolence. All of these objects and their
uses constitute examples of lived religion. Their meaning
is not contained merely in the object or its imagery, but in
how they are used, and reused, forgotten, broken, salvaged,
or ensconced in museums. Meaning, as we understand it,
is dynamic and forever unnished. The proper approach to
its study, therefore, will be practice centered, focusing on
reception no less than production, and perpetually asking
socially minded questions about objects and practices. By
material religion we intend not simply what people think
about their images, but what the images or objects or spaces
themselves do, how they engage believers, what powers they
possess, and in what manner a community comes to rely on
them for the vitality and stability of belief.
The meteoric rise in recent years of visual culture studies
has added a new dimension to the understanding of images
as different as lm, ne art, and advertising. Yet the study of
visual culture is only beginning to realize what a huge place
that religion occupies within visual experience, and has
scarcely developed the methodology or questions to study
it. We want to help do so. Archaeology and anthropology
are engaging strongly with religion, and we wish to help build
 bridges between these efforts and those of theology and
religious studies, whose work with the material often seems
hidden beneath a vast immaterial canopy. Religion is a
phenomenon that affects almost every aspect of human life,
and its material expression is found everywhere.
The contributions that we will welcome to the pages of
the journal will examine objects, images, spaces, and visual
practices as primary forms of evidence for the understanding
of religion as lived experience. Submissions that fail to
scrutinize material evidence are not likely to be accepted.
This is a journal about the material things and practices
of beliefhow belief happens in material form and what
believers do with things. We seek original contributions of the
highest scholarly accomplishment, thoroughly documented,
clearly written, deeply informed by critical scholarship, and

Editorial Statement
dedicated to advancing the understanding of religion by the
careful investigation of material evidence.
Academics are by no means the only people around the
world trying to understand the materiality of religion and its
8 power within human life. They are joined by heritage workers,
people caring for or visiting historic churches, temples, and
sacred places, and increasingly by believers seeking a richer
understanding of their own faith by understanding its context.
We will celebrate the success of the journals venture when
we have been able to gather together the nest research of
curators and scholars from around the world who are looking
for a broader community of colleagues to help them evaluate
their subject of study, to share the compelling problems facing
students of religion and material culture, and in coming to
share collegial recognition of our common cause.
Since our efforts include the work of museum and
heritage professionals, supporters and volunteers, the public
understanding of religious material culture belongs to the
purview of this project. In addition to several interdisciplinary
articles, each issue of the journal will feature sections entitled
In Conversation and Outlook. These will provide a forum
for reection on questions that inform the public exhibition
of religious artifacts, the funding of research and exhibitions,
the ethics of collecting and exhibiting artifacts, and the thorny
problems of religious objects in the public square. Finally, each
issue of Material Religion will offer a host of reviews of recent
publications and exhibitions concerning religious material
Volume 1

culture. We invite suggestions from readers for future features

Issue 1

and we encourage those who wish to submit scholarly

essays, In Conversation themes, or notes on and reviews of
developments in the eld, to the appropriate editors. We are
searching for the best practice in academic study, exhibition,
popular writing, collecting, interpretation, and every other
Material Religion

means of exploring the material culture of religion.

The Editors