From Goods to Gods: The Material Turn and Ritual Studies

The “material turn” has been part of the landscape of the humanities since the 1980s, yielding a rich array of frameworks for approaching objects as agents, as socially constituted and constituting, as subjectively perceived and affectively experienced (Hicks and Beaudry 2010; Gell 1998).

The roots of these interests run much deeper, however, than the late twentieth century (Taylor 2009; D. Miller 2005; Fogelin 2007). In the nineteenth century Locke and Tylor debated the boundaries between the material world and the human soul (Taylor 2009, 299). Hegel declared that engagement with the material world is a fundamental property of being human. Marx argued that the measure of a man is often the extent to which he transforms, commodifies, and accumulates the material world (Hegel 1807). In the mid-twentieth century, Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology outlined the role of the embodied and the experiential human interaction with the world, rather than the merely cognized (Merleau Ponty 1945). Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, affirming the role of society in concept formation and response to the material world, may be traced back to Herodotus’s declarations on the role of environment in the shaping of social character (Bourdieu 1977; Taylor 2009; Lloyd 1978). The depth of the topic is matched only by the breadth of its use across disciplines, from philosophy to economics, and that are focused on objects as diverse as fine art and inorganic waste (Meskell 2005; D. Miller 2005; Lange-Berndt 2015; Gregson and Crang 2010; Dant 2005). These disciplines and topics meet in a growing number of journals, scholarly handbooks, and collections of essays devoted to “materiality.”¹

Among the many outcomes of these conversations are several points of relevance for contemporary scholars of ancient religion: these include ^[1] ^{^[2] how religion is defined, the potential for its change over time, and religion’s association with icons (Droogan 2013, 149-73).}

At the simplest level, ritual practice can leave material traces—objects held in the hand, monuments viewed as a group, structures approached and entered into (Fogelin 2007). Attempts to distinguish ritual from nonritual objects have sought to establish a typology of ritual materials; essential characteristics include an intensity of focus, appeal to group memory, and density of symbolic elements.^{^[3]} The raw materials of these objects, their physical location and arrangement, and the way in which structures determine group size and line of sight can be approached through the question of somatic, emotionally intensifying impact at individual, group, and social levels. The focus on nonlinguistic properties complements the determination to study religion as a social reality rather than a doctrinal debate (Boivin 2009).

The social constitution of the material world replaces the apparent concreteness ofobjects with a model of fluid, interactive change over time (Gosden 1994, 37). The social life ofthings engages them in movement between individuals, social registers, and across the boundaries of group identity (Appadurai 1986; Morehard 2015). Barth’s work among the Baktaman demonstrated that even within a single society, different social registers experience objects differently; Keane has noted that the entrance of objects into new contexts gives rise to features unrelated to the intention of the previous owner (Insoll 2009; Keane 2008; Morehard and Butler 2010). Consistent with Bourdieu’s habitus, multiple social entanglements yield multiple meanings. These considerations yield a more flexible paradigm for determining an object’s relevance for religious practice. Objects may be ritualizing in one instance, but game pieces, artwork, or gifts to the dead in another. The life histories of objects, including the multiple cultural contexts in which they function, emerge as a critical component in the assessment of their ritual effectiveness. These contribute to creative, revolutionary models of ritual and religion as the meeting place for multiple voices (Keane 2008; Bradley 1998; Inomata 2006; Moore 1996; Fogelin 2007).

Among the objects most readily identified with ritual functions are icons and sacred images. Conceptualized as part of the cultural vocabulary of the sacred, they have often been interpreted with the aid of ancient narratives, particularly in the text-rich cultures of the Mediterranean. This has challenged scholars to develop more nuanced models for explicating the relationship between the textual and the material in ritual contexts. Semiotic and structural approaches boomed in the decades after the 1970s, emerging from the Paris School. These approaches pressed the boundaries of Saussure’s linguistics as an avenue into the thought world of ancient cultures. The models they yield—in their static quality, and their inattention to cultural context—lie far from the ideals that would be pursued by scholars working in the material turn. They reflect the tendency of semiotically focused analyses to deemphasize material remains in favor of cognitive models, and focus on belief system as abstract constructions of the human mind (Tilley 1999; Boivin 2009; Barrett 2016; Renfrew and Zubrow 1994; McCorkle 2014; Lehmann 2005; Geertz 2014). More recently, however, Fogelin, Boivin, and others have revisited the question, noting that scholars since Geertz, Turner, Douglas and even Levi-Strauss have acknowledged the nonarbitrariness ofsigns and symbols. These are not completely independent from the materialized reality of the signifiers, but shaped by the natural properties of the symbolic material as well as arbitrary factors (Tilley 1999; Fogelin 2015). The grounding of signs in material experience replaces the need to choose between mind and material, and opens a pathway into a recoverability of the thought world of the subject cultures. This recoverability exists even despite the force of social context in determining material interaction (Gosden 1994, 37; Taylor 2009).

Scholars of religion have not, on the whole, been as engaged in the discussions ofmateriality as may be expected (Insoll 2004; cf.

Balke and Tsouparopoulou 2015, Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik 2015; Boschung and Bremmer 2015; Houlbrook and Armitage 2015; Mylonopoulos forthcoming). At a practical level, the uneven representation of material practice across world religions limits its appeal to those scholars with access to its evidence (Meyer et al. 2014). Many religions in fact critique materiality as part of the encouragement for the transcendent (Fogelin 2015, 1-10; Taylor 2009, 300). Tendencies within the academy exacerbate the situation. Philosophical and academic voices have a long tradition of preferring mind over material, visible already in Cicero's disparagement of the work of the hands in comparison with the labor of the mind (Wood 1991, 9899). This extends to a specific disinclination to take up the question of the gods in a highly secular Western academy, particularly in the fields of anthropology and archaeology (Insoll 2004; Boivin 2009; Droogan 2013). In the mid-twentieth century, Hawkes's “ladder of inference” emerged as a model for responsible archaeological investigation: rituals, in her schema, lie beyond firm recovery. This was paired with what Tilley characterizes as the destructive pessimism of twentieth-century archaeology that was convinced fragmentary remains had little more to reveal. Technology and economy were the sole, notable exceptions, yielding models of the social past characterized by technological and ecological determinism. The postprocessual, cognitive, symbolic focus of the 1980s moved beyond the approach to objects as adaptive technologies (Taylor 2009). These new archaeologists regarded religion and ritual as key human activities—and the doorway was reopened to an archaeology of cult (Chippindale and Ta^on 1998; Tilley 1994; Scarre 2002; Whittle 1996). The constructivist perspective on those rituals has often dominated, informed by anthropological voices from EvansPritchard to Marshall Sahlins, who approached religion as one of the social codes projected onto the material world. The cognized social order, rather than the materiality of the world—shaped by the humans who were in turn shaped by it— remained dominant: these are the challenges against which a materials approach is offered. A growing number of publications attest to the productive potential for material approaches to religion; these bring together case studies from across the breadth of disciplines, cultural and chronological studies that characterize approaches to materiality.^{^[4]}

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Source: Blakely S. (ed.). Gods, Objects, and Ritual Practice. Lockwood Press,2017. — 371 p.. 2017

From Goods to Gods: The Material Turn and Ritual Studies

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