Thinking Religion Through Things

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 365-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Bräunlein
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

In recent years, the “material turn” has gained prominence in the humanities and social sciences, and it has also stimulated a shift toward a rediscovery of materiality in the scientific study of religion\s. The material turn aims to dissolve conventional dichotomies and, by emphasizing the concept of assemblage, insists that humans and things are fundamentally co-constitutive. This “New Materialism” addresses ontological alterity, and it radically decenters static anthropocentric arrangements and the position of the human subject as such. The insider–outsider distinction, however, as well as the emic–etic categorization, are based on fundamental dichotomies between the researcher and the researched, and between descriptive and analytical understandings of human beings. This article discusses the possibility and significance of a non-anthropocentric approach to religion, and examines to what extent it is analytically helpful to apply the insider–outsider and emic–etic distinctions while pursuing the goal of dissolving hierarchical and binary thinking. It furthermore argues that these issues can be properly answered only with reference to their methodological implications.

Responsibility before the World: Cinema, Perspectivism and a Nonhuman Ethics of Individuation

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-410
Author(s):  
Andrew Lapworth
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
World Cinema ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

The recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical ‘responsibility’ of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this essay, I explore how Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers potential opening for a more ontogenetic thinking of a ‘nonhuman ethics’. Specifically, I focus on how his theory of ‘individuation’ – conceived as a creative event of emergence in response to immanent ontological problems – informs his rethinking of ethics beyond the subject, opening thought to nonhuman forces and relations. I argue that if cinema becomes a focus of Deleuze's ethical discussions in his later work it is because the images and signs it produces are expressive of these nonhuman forces and processes of individuation, generating modes of perception and duration without ontological mooring in the human subject. Through a discussion of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's experimental film –  Leviathan (2012)  – I explore how the cinematic encounter dramatises different ethical worlds in which a multiplicity of nonhuman ‘points of view’ coexist without being reduced to a hierarchical or orienting centre that would unify and identify them. To conclude, I suggest that it is through the lens of an ethics of individuation that we can grasp the different sense of ‘responsibility’ alive in Deleuze's philosophy, one oriented not to the terms of the already-existing but rather to the nonhuman potential of what might yet come into being.

The Head, the Hand, and Matter: New Materialism and the Politics of Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 49-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Rekret
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Do So

This article seeks to examine the political connotations of a recent ‘material turn’ in social and political theory and its implications for theorizations of political agency. ‘New materialist’ theories are premised upon transcending the limits which social constructivism places upon thought, viewed as a reification of the division of subject and object and so a hubristic anthropocentrism which places human beings at the centre of social existence. Yet new materialist theories have tended to locate the conditions of the separation of mind and world they seek to overcome upon the terrain of epistemic or ethical error. By taking the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett and Karen Barad as exemplary, this article contends that new materialist theories not only fall short of their own materialist pretensions insofar as they do not interrogate the material conditions of the separation of the mental and material, but that the failure to do so has profound repercussions for the success of their accounts of political agency. This essay seeks to offer a counter-narrative to new materialist theories by situating the hierarchy between thought and world as a structural feature of capitalist social relations.

scholarly journals Prospects for a Postsecular Heritage Practice: Convergences between Posthumanism and Popular Religious Practice in Asia

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 436
Author(s):  
Denis Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Conservation Management ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Popular Belief ◽  
Management Plans ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

By failing to document popular belief in the supernatural attributes of religious sites and by drawing up conservation management plans that fail to attend to such beliefs, current heritage regimes effectively perform a secular translation of them. I argue that the posthuman turn in the humanities and social sciences, and in particular its openness to forms of agency, vibrancy and vitality in the object world, offers prospects for a kind of heritage practice newly comfortable with the vibrancy that belief in the supernatural lends to the things of popular religion. Focusing on the material heritage of popular religion in Asia—in particular in China and Southeast Asia—attitudes of devotees to the rebuilding of temples and shrines are examined. Practices of rebuilding and restoration come to be seen as a form of worship. While ontological differences between worshipers and heritage practitioners remain, it is possible to be positive about the prospects for a postsecular heritage practice precisely because the rationalist authority of established practice is so under challenge by the counter discourses of posthumanism, the new materialism, and related streams of thought.

Legal History and The Material Turn

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
The Past ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Ontological Categories ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences ◽  
Material Things

This chapter considers the implications of the ‘material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences for the study and writing of legal history. It suggests three paths forward for how legal historians might incorporate these insights into their research. These approaches are labelled as ‘categorizing’, ‘materializing’, and ‘filing’. ‘Categorizing’ refers to the possibility of redrawing ontological categories which could open up new ways of understanding law in the past. ‘Materializing’ looks at an analytical approach in which law is understood as a phenomenon composed of the material things it draws into itself. ‘Filing’ looks at the materiality of legal systems, both through their processes of record creation and their performative praxis, focusing attention on the co-constitutive nature of law and its material-bureaucratic apparatus.

scholarly journals Promises of Non/Living Monsters and Uncontainable Life

Somatechnics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marietta Radomska
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Organic Matter ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Biological Materials ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Theoretical Ground ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences ◽  
A Current

In the Western cultural imaginaries the monstrous is defined – following Aristotelian categorisations – by its excess, deficiency or displacement of organic matter. These characteristics come to the fore in the field of bioart: a current in contemporary art that involves the use of biological materials (various kinds of soma: cells, tissues, organisms), and scientific procedures, technologies, protocols, and tools. Bioartistic projects and objects not only challenge the conventional ideas of embodiment and bodily boundaries, but also explore the relation between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, as well as various thresholds of the living.By looking at select bioartworks, this paper argues that the analysed projects offer a different ontology of life. More specifically, they expose life as uncontainable, that is, as a power of differentiation that traverses the divide between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, and, ultimately, life and death. In this way, they draw attention to excess, processuality and multiplicity at the very core of life itself. Thus understood, life always already surpasses preconceived material and conceptual limits.Finally, while taking Deleuzian feminisms and new materialism as its theoretical ground, the paper suggests that such a revision of the ontology of life may mobilise future conceptualisations of ethics that evade the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences.

Fictionality in New Materialism: (Re)Inventing Matter

2020 ◽  
pp. 026327642096740
Author(s):  
Tobias Skiveren
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

Throughout the last decade, calls for a return to materiality have reverberated within the humanities and social sciences. Few, however, have noticed that this return has also entailed a return to fiction, as the new theoretical writings on matter regularly include elements of storytelling, fabulation or other genres of invention. This article asks why this alliance between new materialism and fiction has come about: Why do scholars united by a common interest in ‘getting real’ consistently utilize a type of discourse defined precisely by not committing itself to reality? Examining works by Jane Bennett, Dominic Pettman, Stacy Alaimo, Astrida Neimanis, Donna Haraway, and Rebekah Sheldon, the article explores this question by tracing three modes of fictionality in new materialism distinguished by inventing non/human entanglements, scientific knowledge, and future societies respectively. Ultimately, the article argues that fictionality is a particularly attractive tool for attempts to transcend anthropocentric regimes of truth.

Contesting the Material Turn; or, The Persistence of Agency

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred J. López
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Material Turn

This essay begins by asking whether the new materialism, as currently constituted, can say anything useful about race, given that the most widely read texts recognized as belonging to this emerging field pointedly do not. Put another way, this essay examines possibilities for the reading of the raced enfleshed human subject in and beyond the parameters of the new materialism. The essay’s first section locates the raced enfleshed subject as latent (if not actively suppressed) entity in existing new materialist work. The latter half turns to questions of possibility, especially the question of whether a much older, precluded, or occluded voice is already “speaking through” the so-called materialist turn, challenging it as a way of contesting its own (attempted, failed) erasure from the metaphysical founding scene of the liberal humanist subject that informs the material turn.

Visions of the material body: Twitch.tv and post-phenomenology

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-257
Author(s):  
Ben Egliston
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
The Body ◽  
Game Play ◽  
Material Body ◽  
Video Game Play ◽  
The Status ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

This article considers what broadcasts of video game play, transmitted through livestreaming platform Twitch.tv, can contribute to discussions around technology, materiality, embodiment and affect in videogaming – an interdisciplinary set of concerns for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. Specifically, I outline the methodological value of Twitch as a tool for addressing video game play as a post-phenomenological concern – providing a perspective of play as not emerging from an autonomous human subject, but from exchanges between humans and non-humans. To demonstrate this, this article discusses observations of livestreamed play of the popular PC-based rhythm game Osu. These observations spotlight how video game play operates as a messy and ongoing relation between bodies and technology, as well as demonstrates how Twitch streams can attend to the often taken-for-granted relations between non-human objects in play, which in turn shape the status of the body as it meets the game.

Focus: Mobility – A Bridge between the Past and the Present

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Nikita Harwich
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
Constructive Dialogue ◽  
Two Component ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

What follows is the result of a workshop on ‘mobility’ organized by the History & Archaeology Section of the Academia Europea at the AE Wrocław Knowledge Hub on 3 and 4 September 2018. The topic of ‘mobility’ is understood here in its paradigmatic sense. It takes into account the mobility of human beings, goods, animals and plants, diseases or knowledge, including infrastructure, effects on environment, societies and politics, gender issues, transport, etc. At the same time, a historical dimension may serve to bestow upon such a paradigm the perspective given by time when applied to different patterns of mobility. However, the bridge is not only between past and present, but also between disciplines, both within and beyond the realm of humanities and social sciences. The purpose of this workshop, therefore, was to consider strengthening the links between the two component disciplines of the Section concerned, namely History and Archaeology, while at the same time consolidating our disciplinary voice within the Academia Europaea and establishing a constructive dialogue with other sections of the Academia.

scholarly journals Human, Transhuman, Posthuman Digital Archaeologies: An Introduction

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Díaz-Guardamino ◽  
Colleen Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Ongoing Development ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences ◽  
Ontological Turn

Current archaeological thought evokes a sparking Catherine wheel: spinning fireworks that detonate light, colour, and sound with every movement. These theoretical turns swirl alongside the ongoing development and adoption of scientific and digital techniques that have wide-ranging implications for archaeological practices and interpretations. Two particularly combustible developments are posthumanism and the ontological turn, which emerged within the broader humanities and social sciences. Posthumanism rejects human exceptionalism and seeks to de-centre humans in archaeological discourse and practice. Linked to this is the so-called ‘ontological turn’ (aka the ‘material turn’), a shift away from framing archaeological research within a Western ontology and a movement beyond representationalism (i.e. focusing on things themselves rather than assuming that objects represent something else).

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