Material Culture and Religion
Authors: Morgan David 
Published: December 2022

The study of the material culture of religion represents a long-established interest in material artifacts as sources of information about religious cultures. But it also has featured a turn since the 1990s toward recognizing that the dominant dependence on texts tends to dematerialize religion by turning it into a system of ideas, a body of creeds or teachings, a worldview, or a discourse. Religions are more than ideas or dogmas, because they are about things, bodies, animals, places, and natural events and forces. These are not mere signifiers of value but the very medium in which religions take shape. The emphasis on texts and ideas reflects the strong influence of classical humanism and Christianity, both of which privilege human agency as sovereign and unparalleled in nature.

Since the late 20th century, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have been rethinking received conceptions of matter, causality, and sociality. As a result, what has come to be called the “new materialism” amounts to a broad effort to reconceive the place of human beings in the natural world by recognizing ecologies as the basic unit of relation in nature: nothing exists in isolation but participates in networks of interdependent interactions. This realization urges that things are not dead matter waiting for the thinking substance of mind to endow them with purpose but rather are indeterminate and emergent actors exhibiting agency in their effect upon other things. Such an approach offers a stimulating framework for the study of religions, because it stresses the importance of materiality.

By training attention on things and their environments, scholars of religion can scrutinize how the material conditions and artifacts of religious practice and belief exert agency, how they change over time, and how they interact with discourse and thought. Things are not stable or unitary. They exist within ecologies of time as well as space. So, the material study of religion is always also the historical study of religion. Artifacts are produced with histories behind them and used within specifiable contexts. But artifacts are never only what their producers intended them for. They are passed down, modified, repurposed, or destroyed. This means that objects exhibit a cultural biography, or even a series of lives. It also means that waste is a category of materiality that is important to recognize.

The idea of “material culture” will seem at odds with the new materialism’s scope to scrutinize materiality far beyond human culture. But the deeper recognition at stake is realizing that human beings are incomplete without things, without their ecological connections to objects, places, animals, and people. Culture is all manner of ways in which human beings produce and are produced by these connections. The materiality of culture consists of the embodied, emplaced, and interactive nature of the connections. The emphasis on things has allowed the recognition of their repressed or overlooked agencies. That is because thingness resists lasting objectification. Human beings and other animals craft objects and places, but they do not last. They change over time, are appropriated by others or repurposed, and they decay and are destroyed. In its capacity to be different kinds of objects, a thing is always more than an object.