Touching

This chapter undertakes a tactile exploration of the sense of touch in modern American culture and religion. After briefly recalling the denigration of tactility in Western thought, the discussion considers the usefulness of the work of two theorists, Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin, in recovering the sense of touch—the intimate caress, the violent shock—as deep background for tracking basic modes of religious tactility. By paying attention to sensory media and metaphors, the chapter proceeds from cutaneous binding and burning to kinaesthetic moving and to haptic handling in order to enter this field of tactile meaning and power. Specific cases of tactility are quickly considered, including binding covenants, firewalking, flag burning, alien abduction, global capitalism, and cellular microbiology. By exploring the religious dynamics of the sense of touch, this chapter points to the presence of a tactile politics of perception circulating through religion and popular culture.

Apartheid

Apartheid was established in South Africa between 1948 and 1994 as a force of exclusion and incorporation, excluding people from citizenship and exploiting people as labor. This chapter suggests that the term apartheid, meaning “separation,” was formative for certain ways of thinking about religion. One of the architects of apartheid, the anthropologist W. M. Eiselen, was a leading expert on indigenous religions in South Africa. Eiselen’s writings on African religion illustrate three overlapping types of comparative religion—a frontier comparative religion based on denial and containment; an imperial comparative religion assuming evolutionary progress from savagery to civilization; and an apartheid comparative religion creating and reinforcing boundaries to keep people apart. Although apartheid was formally established as a racist policy of separation in South Africa, the making and maintaining of boundaries has been a recurring feature of religious formations.

Sacred

This chapter examines a category, “that which is set apart,” which has been crucial for the Durkheimian tradition in the study of religion. Separated from the ordinary, the everyday, or the profane, the sacred is set apart in such a way that it is central to social formations. Exploring the dynamics of the sacred by viewing Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair, which takes us from Christian hair styling to Hindu temple rituals, this chapter shows how the sacred is produced through extraordinary attention, regular ritualization, sacrificial exchanges, and inevitable contestations over the ownership of the sacred.

Conclusion

In this book we have moved through religious materiality, exploring striking and illuminating cases, guided by attention to material categories, formations, and circulations. We have considered different meanings of materiality. People engage objects; objects engage people; and both people and objects are interwoven in material conditions and consequences that can rise to the level of materiality. Following the usage of the term in the practices of law and accounting, materiality is less a question of metaphysics than a matter of political economy. In this respect, materiality is a matter of force and effect, a configuration of discourse and power that makes a difference in the world. As a result, our exploration of the material dynamics of religion has been as much about dynamics—power, energy, force, and motion—as it has been about material objects....

Oceans

This chapter explores the circulations of religion across vast bodies of water. With special attention to the work of Charles H. Long, who has been a cartographer of oceans in the study of religion, this chapter highlights relations and mediations between land and sea. Returning to the fetish and the cargo and placing these contested material objects within the world produced by oceans, the materiality of religion is situated within changing relations between people of the land and people of the sea. Between the mercantile fetish and the virtual cargo, a third object, guano, which was sacred bird excrement in ancient Inca religion, signifying fertility and sovereignty, during the nineteenth century became the nexus of an industrial religion of fertilizer, explosives, and networked islands under European and United States imperial control. Like the fetish and the cargo, guano emerged from an ocean world as a material focus for conflicting religious orientations.

Economy

This chapter explores possibilities for locating religious formations at the intersections of culture and economy. Not solely the preserve of professional economists, economy is a term that has expanded in scope to include economies of signs and desires that generate values beyond the pricing mechanisms of the modern capitalist market. To illustrate how religion can be situated in a cultural economy, this chapter focuses on how one animated film, Destination Earth (1956), sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, serves to illustrate a political economy of the sacred in which the oppression of communist collectivism is opposed to the freedom promised by American free-market capitalism. Viewing this film provides an occasion for highlighting three features of the political economy of the sacred: mediations between economic and sacred values; mediations between economic scarcity and sacred surplus; and mediations among competing claims to legitimate ownership of the sacred.

Culture

This chapter engages material culture in the study of religion. Referring to bodies, objects, and places, material culture in religion is the sacred vitality of things. Rejecting the division between spirit and matter, soul and body, recent research on religion and material culture has attended to the senses, embodied practices, meaningful objects, built environments, and the material possibilities and constraints of technology, with special attention to the communication technology of media. As an entry into the study of religion and material culture, this chapter focuses on the relic and the icon as material objects in religious practice; the fetish in the Atlantic world and the cargo in the Pacific world as focal points for conflicts over about the meaning, power, and value of objects; and the material conditions of religious media, from the senses to audiovisual media, which in their materiality create different capacities and constraints for religion.

Time

Reviewing theoretical approaches to religious time, this chapter illustrates mythic and ritual productions of time with examples from India and Africa. Classic theories of religious time emphasize either subjective experience, social cohesion, or sacred renewal. Ritual produces regularities—simultaneous, sequential, and hierarchical—that are coordinated by clocks and calendars. Two basic ways of producing religious time, ancestral and mythic, represent different constructions of temporal continuity. Ancestral time, relying on memory, establishes continuity between human generations of ancestors and offspring. Mythic time, transmitted in narratives of origin and destiny, establishes continuity through underlying moral, legal, or forensic relations between actions and consequences. While establishing temporal continuity, mythic time can also signal temporal ruptures in a past crisis, a present conflict, or a future apocalypse. Ritual practices and mythic narratives generate religious time, but religious timing is also crucial in other spheres of human activity, such as politics, economics, and aesthetics.

Animism

This chapter examines the emergence of a category, “belief in spiritual beings,” which drove certain “intellectualist” assumptions about the essence, origin, and persistence of religion. Like many terms in the study of religion in Europe during the late nineteenth century, animism arose through a global mediation in which an imperial theorist, in this case the father of anthropology, E. B. Tylor, relied on colonial middlemen, such as missionaries, travelers, and administrators, for evidence about indigenous people all over the world. Among other colonial sources, E. B. Tylor relied on the Anglican missionary Henry Callaway for data about Zulu people in South Africa. Drawing on Callaway’s reports about Zulu dreaming and sneezing, Tylor distilled his basic definition of religion as belief in pervading and invading spirits. Against a broad imperial and colonial background, this chapter explores the historical emergence and ongoing consequences of the category animism in the study of religion.

Colonialism

This chapter situates religious formations in the contact zones and power relations of colonial situations. Referring to the settlement of a distant territory by foreigners, colonialism entails the use of military force and political power to create and maintain a situation in which colonizers gain economic benefits by exploiting trade, raw materials, and the labor of indigenous people. For the study of religion, colonialism calls attention to the role of religion in intercultural contact; the force of religion in the conquest and control of indigenous populations; and the changing character of religious subjectivity and agency, especially in relation to the inherent violence of colonialism. These issues are examined by referring to the analysis of anticolonial theorists, such as Mohandas K. Gandhi, Frantz Fanon, and Eduardo Mondlane. While colonialism has played an important role in the history of religions, it has also shaped the modern categories of religion and religions.