INTRODUCTION

All religion is material religion. All religion has to be understood in relation to the media of its materiality. This necessarily includes a consideration of religious things, and also of actions and words, which are material no matter how quickly they pass from sight or sound or dissipate into the air. But the difficult part comes in understanding what precisely constitutes the materiality of material religion, what makes religious materiality either significant or religious, and according to whom.

Within religious studies and the human sciences more broadly, there has been a growing interest in what the study of materiality offers for our understanding of the lived experience and practices of religion. The move to materiality allows us to reconsider (and resuscitate) the very concept of religion itself, for one thing, which has long been recognized as Protestant idealism masquerading as a neutral analytic. “Religion” is not always about belief or the problem of meaning, nor can religion always be recognized as something discrete in culture and society. (This is the paradox of the modern understanding of religion: religion is immaterial but treated always as a distinctive entity apart from everything else.) Approaching “religion” as “material religion“ allows us to consider the material as part and parcel of our interests and of the religious worlds of the people we study. The materiality of religious life is not incidental. As Talal Asad writes, “the materialities of religion are integral to its constitution.”