Materiality and the Study of Religion

The Stuff of the Sacred

Tim Hutchings, Joanne McKenzie, Tim Hutchings, Joanne McKenzie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472477835
• eBook ISBN: 9781317067986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Material culture has emerged in recent decades as a significant theoretical concern for the study of religion. This book contributes to and evaluates this material turn, presenting thirteen chapters of new empirical research and theoretical reflection from some of the leading international scholars of material religion. Following a model for material analysis proposed in the first chapter by David Morgan, the contributors trace the life cycle of religious materiality through three phases: the production of religious objects, their classification as religious (or non-religious), and their circulation and use in material culture.

The chapters in this volume consider how objects become and cease to be sacred, how materiality can be used to contest access to public space and resources, and how religion is embodied and performed by individuals in their everyday lives. Contributors discuss the significance of the materiality of religion across different religious traditions and diverse geographical regions, paying close attention to gender, age, ethnicity, memory and politics. The volume closes with an afterword by Manuel Vásquez.

1 Material analysis and the study of religion

David Morgan

Discussion of the materiality of religion has become more common in recent years, resulting in a host of instructive studies ranging from the production and reception of objects, images, spaces, clothing and food to the study of practices, the senses and the history of thought about them.¹ Less attention, however, has been devoted to consideration of the kinds of questions one poses in conducting the material analysis and interpretation that compose the empirical study of materiality. The paucity of procedural reflection among scholars of religion compromises the materialisation of the study of religion because it fails to provide scholars not trained in material analysis with the tools they need to undertake empirical studies. Scholars of religion tend to be well-prepared in the investigation of languages, texts and the history of ideas, but less so in the study of objects, spaces, bodies and the practices of using them that make up religions in one way or another.

I propose here a sustained reflection on the means of material analysis and critical definitions of material culture that enable the study of religions as embodied, physical and felt forms of social and historical phenomena. Making materiality evidential is the task. By this I mean foregrounding such material evidence as images, emotions, sensations, spaces, food, dress or the material practices of putting the body to work. The challenge is to resist using these phenomena as illustrations of what remains the truly immaterial basis for studying religions. It is, after all, far more traditional to approach the study of reli-gion with a set of themes or problems that are set wholly within the medium of theories and texts, answerable by applying abstract reasoning to non-material evidences, such as literary sources or philosophical debates. Certainly this counts as the study of religion no less than does material analysis. The problem is that it has tended to dominate academic investigation to the point of excluding other kinds of evidence. The rise of material culture studies in religious studies over the past two decades has moved towards correcting this tendency, but a significant challenge persists in making material analysis a readily usable method. This book will contribute importantly to addressing that challenge.

We can frame the study of an object’s materiality in a series of steps that follow it from production to use. Doing so should not be allowed to privilege intent or the genius of a maker if we balance production with reception and if we understand the origins of an object to precede the object in the history of its medium and the craft and manufacture that produce it no less than the tools and ability of the person making it. The object is an instance of a material culture that precedes it and is renewed and extended by it. By material culture I mean not only the object’s physical characteristics but also the registers of sensation that apprehend the object, the techniques of the body that object activates, and the value or salience that is generated by the use of the object in religious practice. Material culture, in other words, is more than an object. It is the way in which an object participates in making and sustaining a life-world. To study religious material culture is to study how people build and maintain the cultural domains that are the shape of their social lives. This approach presumes that objects, spaces, food, clothing and the practices of using them are not secondary to a religion but primary aspects of it.

In practice, material analysis consists of a series of inquiries that move from consideration of the concrete features of an individual object to comparison with other objects like it to its circulation and use and finally to what the object does and how it may be understood to perform different kinds of cultural work. This procedure can be parsed in many ways, but I will map it out as a process that consists of at least nine aspects or moments, each of which captures a key aspect of an object’s materiality and its relevance for those who put the object to religious use. These are the principal foci of analysis, the handles by which scholars take hold of objects in order to treat them as primary evidence. The nine aspects are: medium, design, manufacture, function, comparison, remediation, deployment, reception and ideology or cultural work. I will organise these nine into three successive groupings: production, classification and circulation. These nine form what amount procedurally to nine consecutive steps in analysis. Running throughout these steps are a number of key analytical themes that occupy scholars, which I will take up in tandem with discussion of each of the nine steps of analysis. In order to keep the reflection concrete, I will focus my remarks on a number of related objects (Figures 1.1–1.5), which will be helpfully compared with one another to put the analytical terms and categories I adduce to work.

A final note is important to make as a preface to what follows. My intention is not to transform the study of religion into the specialised study of objects, but rather to offer a way to make materiality an available datum for scholars of religion who discern a useful connection of objects to what they study. Objects are a mode of evidence whose characteristics yield value only when interrogated constructively. There is much that is important and relevant to learn from them. But if we are unable to hear their testimony, they remain mute in our accounts and religions tend to remain textual and intellectual – that is conformed to the evidence that most scholars are trained to analyse.

Production

Material analysis commences with scrutiny of an object’s medium. What an object is made from enables and shapes our perception of it. A medium carries form or content, bearing it across space or time, between people. In many of the most important instances, a medium becomes indistinguishable from what it bears. In works of art, for example, the value of the object is in part its maker’s performance in a particular medium. In the performance of a liturgy or listening to a speaker, the medium is also a connection in which a relationship takes place. More than the information that is otherwise conveyed, the medium of music, chant or elocution is how a community is experienced. Disparate parties come together or are mediated in a medium.

In the case of Figure 1.1, a woodcarving of Jesus, the Christian deity is represented. A feeling, idea, ideal or message is presented in the delicate shape of wood. When a devotee fondles the figure, prays to it, proudly displays it and gazes tenderly upon it each day, the object is clearly a medium that has merged with its content. To touch and behold the object is to convey to Jesus what the devotee feels about him.

The feel of Jesus in the case of Figure 1.1 is something we can apprehend ourselves, at least to a certain degree. The smoothed wood surface, the light weight of the object, the delicate details are all features of this particular species of wood. The close grain of the wood allows for the detailing as well as the smooth, uninterrupted surface. No knots or discolouration mars the even planes and contours. The eye and the hand move over the surface in uninhibited gradation. Light falls softly on the figure, casting diffuse shadows that serve to reveal the gradually undulating surface and a columnar volume. The treatment of the wood moves effortlessly from long folds of drapery to the tiny articulation of fingers, heart emblem, hair and facial details. Another medium would not allow this delivery of form. Imagine a knotty length of scrub pine or a figure modelled in cement.

Consider the different effects of other media commonly used to portray figures of Jesus bearing the Sacred Heart. Figure 1.2 is a solid cast of plaster, made from a two-piece rubber mould and painted with a spray gun and details by hand. This means that the hands must cling to the surface of the body since they are the result of a mould, not free-form carving, as in Figure 1.1. The same is clear in Figure 1.3, a hollow metal cast that has been covered with a coating of gold paint. In order to keep the process inexpensive, hands and robes avoid deep undercuts, which require more complex forms of casting, and therefore greater expense. The same can be said of the dashboard figure (Figure 1.4), a two-piece plastic moulding.²

A more elaborately treated version of the subject is Figure 1.5, a hollow cast with deep undercuts and a free-hanging hand. This figure was probably created using a multiple-piece agar mould, a gelatinous substance derived from algae and used in creating dental moulds as well as for figure casting before the development of latex moulds in the early twentieth century.³ It was entirely hand-painted and bears considerable detailing work as well as subtle variations of tone. This strongly suggests that the piece was created in the early twentieth century when spray guns were not used to paint the figures, but assembly lines of artisans decorated the surfaces by hand. The delicacy of the figure and the degree and fine nature of ornamentation of Figure 1.5 suggest that its cost was higher and its clientele more demanding. A stamp on the backside of the figure indicates it was created in Olot, a town in eastern Catalonia that was home to several firms specialising in the production of saints’ images beginning in 1880.⁴

Figure 1.1 Albrecht Buchmiller, Sacred Heart of Jesus, ca. 1950, wood, 8 3/4 inches high.

Figure 1.2 Sacred Heart of Jesus, Columbia Statuary, no. 110, solid cast plaster, ca. 1930s, 12 1/2 inches high. Collection of the author.

Figure 1.3 Sacred Heart of Jesus, early twentieth century, pot metal, 6 inches high. Collection of the author.

Figure 1.4 Sacred Heart of Jesus, dashboard figure with suction cup, Hartland Plastics, mid-twentieth century, 5 1/2 inches high. Collection of the author.

Figure 1.5 Sacred Heart of Jesus, produced by in Olot, Catalonia, by Moderna Sagrada Familia P. Lluís, early twentieth century, hand-painted hollow cast plaster, 17 1/2 inches. Collection of the author.

The liability of a hollow cast is clear, however, in the broken fingers of the left hand. The figure’s delicacy makes it a risk for easy damage. The same is true of the woodcarving, where several fingers are missing (see Figure 1.1). Yet the very delicacy means a more distinctive object, one that cuts a more engaging figure, displays finer workmanship, costs more and participates with a more lavish setting to create a special place for devotion. It is evident that each medium affords a different range of treatments, from detail work to finish. The medium allows different kinds of working, resulting in effects that suit certain circumstances more than others.

Size, setting and finish are features of each medium that hinge directly on the design of objects, like the figures discussed here. By design I mean the organisation or structure of an object, which is the arrangement of forms in the body of a medium. Formal organisation bears intention, which is why the word “design” means both the configuration of an object and the intention carried within it. We need to consider how the medium accommodates or affords the object’s design by asking why the object was made this way and not another.

Clearly, medium and design work closely with one another. Design is the form a medium takes. Recognising an object’s design means discerning the intention it bears. Design aligns medium to the process of manufacture as well as to the object’s intended function. In all of the five figures reproduced here, it is evident that the design seeks to protect the integrity of the figure from breakage by securing the hands to the torso, by distributing the falling folds of the robes in such a way that the figure takes the shape of a column. A bowed head is linked with quietly displayed hands and an overall repose of the figure achieved in narrow shoulders to convey a feeling of serenity and silence. The figures are designed, in other words, to produce an effect that suits their purpose.

The overall shape of each figure tends to be something like a canoe: narrow at top and bottom, widest at the centre. Often, the slightest sway is introduced in the right hip and left knee (only Figure 1.1 reverses this). This suggests the presence of the body, but stops far short of accenting it, subordinating its sensual effect and power to a mass of drapery whose folds and patterns safely conceal flesh. But it may be more than that. Beneath the thick robes, the anatomy subtly registers a distribution of weight that puts the figure at standing rest. No movement vibrates through the folds of drapery. The objects focus our attention on and by means of their very motionlessness. The figures bring the eye to rest, collecting attention in the endeavour to calm the mind with a grace that emphasises sweetness and delicacy as the correspondence between body and soul.

The third aspect of production to be discussed is manufacture. In fact, we have already mentioned it in the discussion of medium by pointing out the techniques of casting used to create several of the figures of Jesus. Manufacture, the physical production of an object, has everything to do with medium and design since the means of production must suit the nature of a medium and the design or formation in which a medium is invested. Pushing a medium beyond its limits will result in a figure’s easy demise. Manufacture involves expense and skill that are directly relevant to the marketing of the objects and more. Skill pertains to the culture of practice, status, knowledge and availability of resources that imbue objects with value. An object’s expense affects its sale and display as well as its function, circulation and reception, not to mention the cultural work it performs. Moreover, manufacture pertains to the supporting technologies of production, which reveal much about the division of labour, scientific knowledge, the investment of wealth and the social location of producers. Therefore a careful description of an object’s methods of manufacture reveals a great deal, serving as a kind of window on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: The body of St Cuthbert
• 1 Material analysis and the study of religion
• Part 1 Production
• Part 2 Classification
• Part 3 Circulation
• Afterword: Materiality, lived religion, and the challenges of “going back to the things themselves”
• Index