The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality

Vasudha Narayanan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781118660102
• eBook ISBN: 9781118660089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Asiatische Religionen

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality provides a thoughtfully organized, inclusive, and vibrant project of the multiple ways in which religion and materiality intersect. The contributions explore the way that religion is shaped by, and has shaped, the material world, embedding beliefs, doctrines, and texts into social and cultural contexts of production, circulation, and consumption.

The Companion not only contains scholarly essays but has an accompanying website to demonstrate the work of performers, architects, and expressive artists, ranging from musicians and dancers to religious practitioners. These examples offer specific illustrations of the interplay of religion and materiality in everyday life. The project is organized from a comparative perspective, highlighting examples and case studies from traditions originating in both East and West. To summarize, the volume:

• Brings together the leading figures, theories and ideas in the field in a systematic and comprehensive way
• Offers an interdisciplinary approach drawing together religious studies, anthropology, archaeology, history, sociology, geography, the cognitive sciences, ecology, and media studies
• Takes a comparative perspective, covering all the major faith traditions

 

CHAPTER 1
The Persistence, Ubiquity, and Dynamicity of Materiality: Studying Religion and Materiality Comparatively

Manuel A. Vásquez

1.1 The Persistence of Materiality

On 26 February 2001, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under the leadership of the Taliban issued an edict regarding the destruction of religious images. It noted the presence of multiple ‘statues and non‐Islamic shrines located in different parts’ of the emirate. ‘These statues have been and remain shrines of unbelievers and these unbelievers continue to worship and respect them. God Almighty is the only real shrine [taghit] and all fake idols should be destroyed.’ Thus, the edict concluded: ‘as ordered by the ulema [the council of religious and legal scholars] and the Supreme Court of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan all the statues must be destroyed so that no one can worship or respect them in the future’. Arguably, the most high‐profile and controversial enactment of the edict was the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Standing at over 150 ft tall at the foot of the Hindu Kush in the central highlands of Afghanistan, the statues were not only amongst the world's largest figures of the Buddha, but also material evidence of the widespread circulation of Buddhism along the Silk Road, a transcontinental network that connected the Mediterranean with India and China. Built in the fifth century CE in the Greco‐Indian Gandhara style developed by the descendants of Greek artists who came to the region with Alexander the Great, the statues also underscored the key role of materiality in the encounter and cross‐fertilization of cultures and religions along the Silk Road. A Taliban spokesperson characterized the efforts to demolish the Bamiyan figures in military terms, almost suggesting that the statues actively resisted the attempts: ‘Our soldiers are working hard; they are using all available arms against the Buddhas.’ After 20 days of trying through various means to weaken the structures, including the use dynamite, anti‐aircraft guns, and tank shells, the figures were finally destroyed, along with many smaller statues of Buddha housed at the National Museum in Kabul.

The demolition of the Buddhas brought widespread condemnation, not only from the West but from neighbouring Muslim countries, as well as those with large Buddhist and Hindu populations. The United Nations' General Assembly was ‘appalled’ by the Taliban's edict and actions and adopted a resolution stating that ‘the artifacts being destroyed in Afghanistan, including the Buddhist statues in Bamiyan, belonged to the common heritage of humankind. Their destruction was an act of intolerance that struck at the very basis of civilized coexistence and was contrary to the real spirit of Islam’. The resolution also ‘strongly called upon the Taliban to protect Afghanistan's cultural heritage from all acts of vandalism, damage and theft. It also called upon Member States to help safeguard the unique Buddhist sculptures in Bamiyan, using appropriate technical measures, including, if necessary, their temporary relocation or removal from public view’.¹

We start the volume with this case not to stress the radical iconoclasm of the Taliban, a strategy that, notwithstanding the UN's General Assembly's assertion that the destruction of the Buddhas ‘was contrary to the real spirit of Islam’, can easily be co‐opted by a ‘clash of civilization’ geopolitical gaze to portray Islam as not coeval with us, as a barbarian, uncivilized, and intolerant religion driven by a pre‐modern traditionalism contrary to modern notions of human rights and universal cultural values. To begin with, the Bamiyan Buddhas and surrounding Buddhist monasteries were attacked before the arrival of Islam by Hephthalites (also known as White Huns), for example, who worshipped Hindu gods, such as Vishnu and Shiva, and Zun, a merging of a local mountain deity and classical Shaivism (Wink 1990, pp. 117–119). Moreover, the giant Buddhas had co‐existed with Islam for centuries, surviving the Mongol, Mughal, and British empires and the Soviet intervention. While there is indeed a proscription in the Qur'an against shirk (the elevation of anyone and anything to Allah's singular preeminent place), Jamal Elias (nd, 14) notes ‘that there is no clear islamic [sic] condemnation paralleling the Biblical ban in the second commandment. Qur'anic condemnations are nowhere as explicit, perhaps the clearest being “And Abraham said to his father Azar: Do you take idols (aṣnāman) as gods? Indeed I see you and your people in manifest error”’ (6:74).² Finbarr Flood (2002, p. 652), furthermore, shows that historically Islam is not characterized by ‘a timeless theology of images’. He points to the waxing and waning of iconoclastic ‘moments’ within Islam in response to socio‐political and cultural complexities, a similar dynamic that one can find in other religions, like Christianity during the Byzantine era, the conquest of the Americas, and the Protestant Reformation (see Kolrud and Prusac 2014).

Flood's and Elias's points dovetail with Webb Keane's observation that with its mistrust of institutional and ritual mediation and its emphasis on sola fides and sola scriptura, the Protestant Reformation reinforced an iconoclastic ‘entextualization of world’ (2007, p. 68), as part of a ‘creed paradigm’ that made the voluntary declaration of faith by the autonomous religious subject the core of authentic religion. ‘In the pre‐Reformation era, collective recitation of a creed was often linked to the penitential system that reformers rejected. The reformers instead stressed the sincerity and privacy of the creed. Religious materializations such as rituals, offerings, priesthoods, sacred sites, relics, communities, holy books, and bodily disciplines persisted but usually in a position subordinate to that of statements of belief’ (p. 75). James Simpson (2010) goes further, arguing that in its professed aim of breaking radically with tradition, of shattering the prejudices and idols that kept humanity from exercising autonomy on the basis of rationality, Western modernity was driven from the outset by a strong iconoclastic impetus. More specifically, the Kantian separation of pure reason (science), practical reason (ethics), and aesthetics (art) into autonomous spheres, each operating with its own ‘transcendental’ principles, a separation at the heart of the Enlightenment and Western secular modernity, had profoundly de‐materializing effects. For ‘transcendental’ here meant not just principles not derived from revelation (religion), but also that these principles are a priori conditions of human experience, conditions not affected by the contingencies and particularities of embodied existence.

…substantial aspects of the Enlightenment project aimed to protect art from the sensory excesses of material religion, to protect especially fine arts from the day‐to‐day sensory and material muckiness of religious art and artifact, to abstract and elevate this protected and purified category of object in such a way to disavow human kinships with the substance of that messiness and neutralize its threat.

(Promey 2014, p. 2, emphasis in the original)

We shall have more to say about the sources of what is, at the very least, a profound ambivalence towards materiality in Western modernity and in the discipline of religious studies, which is, after all, a modern regime of knowledge. But notice here that iconoclasm cannot be unproblematically attributed to the barbarism of the pre‐modern religious Other. ‘[I]conoclasm is not “somewhere else.” Instead, it lies buried deep within Western modernity, and especially deep with the Anglo‐American tradition. This tradition insistently and violently repudiates idols and images as dangerous carriers of the old regime’ (Simpson 2010, pp. 11–12). Thus, we see how French revolutionaries spurred by the universal ideals of fraternity, equality, and solidarity set out not only decapitate the leaders of the ancien régime, but also its icons (Gamboni 1977). Comparisons of this sort demonstrate that when it comes to materiality, it is much too simplistic to oppose irrational, iconoclastic tribal religion to a rational, tolerant, and cosmopolitan modernity. While answers may differ widely, from various forms of iconoclasm to the celebration of the ‘threatening, yet glorious’ ‘power of the material as material’ (Bynum 2011, pp. 121–122), the question of materiality is an enduring and vital one across religions and cultures.

Flood argues that at the local level, there has been a far more nuanced management of religious materiality in Islam. The physical obliteration of religious images has been rare. Far more common has been ‘re‐purposing’ of images in prescribed ways through defacement, decapitation, mutilation, and substitution with ‘safe’ depictions such as those of gardens and trees. Thus, to the extent that local and historical resources allow any generalization, ‘iconoclastic practice in the medieval Islamic world… was less an attempt to negate the image than to neutralize it’ (Flood 2002, p. 647). Furthermore, the ‘“deanimating” [of] existing images by depriving them of a soul (ruh)’ (p. 648) involved an implicit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editor
• Notes on Contributors
• CHAPTER 1: The Persistence, Ubiquity, and Dynamicity of Materiality
• Section I: Religious Bodies
• Section II: Practices and Performances
• Section III: Spatiality, Mobility, and Relationality
• Section IV: Sacred Objects and Beings
• Section V: Religion, Food, and Comensality
• Section VI: Media and Material Religion
• Section VII: Economies and Governmentalities of Religion
• Index
• End User License Agreement