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Library | Item Barcode | Call Number | Material Type | Item Category 1 | Status |
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Searching... | 30000010237802 | BL624 R425 2010 | Open Access Book | Book | Searching... |
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Summary
Summary
Religious belief is rooted in and sustained by material practice, and this book provides an extraordinary insight into how it works on the ground. David Morgan has brought together a lively group of writers from religious studies, anthropology, history of art, and other disciplines, to investigate belief in everyday practices; in the objects, images, and spaces of religious devotion and in the sensations and feelings that are the medium of experience. By avoiding mind/body dualism, the study of religion can break new ground by examining embodiment, sensation, space, and performance.
Materializing belief means taking a close look at what people do, how they feel, the objects they exchange and display, and the spaces in which they perform whether spontaneously or with scripted ceremony. Contributions to the volume examine religions around the world--from Korea and Brazil to North America, Europe, and Africa. Belief is explored in a wealth of contexts, including Tibetan Buddhism, the hajj, American suburbia and the world of dreams, visions and UFOs.
Author Notes
David Morgan is Professor of Religion at Duke University, where he also holds an appointment in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. He is the author of Visual Piety (1998), Protestants and Pictures (1999), The Sacred Gaze (2005), and The Lure of Images (2007) and is an editor of the journal Material Religion.
Table of Contents
List of illustrations | p. vii |
List of contributors | p. ix |
Preface | p. xiii |
Introduction: the matter of belief | p. 1 |
Part I Theory | p. 19 |
1 Body and mind: material for a never-ending intellectual odyssey | p. 21 |
2 Object theory: toward an intersubjective, mediated, and dynamic theory of religion | p. 40 |
3 Materiality, social analysis, and the study of religions | p. 55 |
Part II Sensation | p. 75 |
4 Tactility and transcendence: epistemologies of touch in African arts and spiritualities | p. 77 |
5 The feeling of Buddhahood, or guess who's coming to dinner? Body, belief, and the practice of chod | p. 97 |
Part III Things | p. 113 |
6 Tempering "the tyranny of already": re-signification and the migration of images | p. 115 |
7 Out of this world: the materiality of the beyond | p. 135 |
8 "Dolls are scary": the locus of the spiritual in contemporary Japanese homes | p. 153 |
Part IV Spaces | p. 171 |
9 Staging Baroque worship in Brazil | p. 173 |
10 Form, function, and failure in postwar Protestant Christian education buildings | p. 193 |
11 Materializing ancestor spirits: name tablets, portraits, and tombs in Korea | p. 214 |
Part V Performance | p. 229 |
12 Clothing as embodied experience of belief | p. 231 |
13 Dressing the Ka'ba from Cairo: the aesthetics of pilgrimage to Mecca | p. 247 |
14 Performing statues | p. 262 |
Works cited | p. 277 |
Index | p. 301 |