The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality provides a thoughtfully organized, inclusive, and vibrant project of the multiple ways in which religion and materiality intersect. The contributions explore the way that religion is shaped by, and has shaped, the material world, embedding beliefs, doctrines, and texts into social and cultural contexts of production, circulation, and consumption.

The Companion not only contains scholarly essays but has an accompanying website to demonstrate the work of performers, architects, and expressive artists, ranging from musicians and dancers to religious practitioners. These examples offer specific illustrations of the interplay of religion and materiality in everyday life. The project is organized from a comparative perspective, highlighting examples and case studies from traditions originating in both East and West. To summarize, the volume:

• Brings together the leading figures, theories and ideas in the field in a systematic and comprehensive way
• Offers an interdisciplinary approach drawing together religious studies, anthropology, archaeology, history, sociology, geography, the cognitive sciences, ecology, and media studies
• Takes a comparative perspective, covering all the major faith traditions

Vasudha Narayanan is Distinguished Professor of Religion at the University of Florida and a past President of the American Academy of Religion. She is an associate editor of the six-volume Brill's Encyclopedia of Hinduism. Her publications include The Vernacular Veda: Revelation, Recitation, and Ritual (1994), The Life of Hinduism (co-edited with John Stratton Hawley, 2007), and Hinduism (2009). Her research has been supported by the Centre for Khmer Studies; the American Council of Learned Societies; National Endowment for the Humanities; the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation; the American Institute of Indian Studies/Smithsonian; and the Social Science Research Council.

Notes on Contributors

Chapter 1: The Persistence, Ubiquity, and Dynamicity of Materiality: Studying Religion and Materiality Comparatively  4
Manuel A. Vásquez

Section I: Religious Bodies 81

Chapter 2: The Incarnate Body and Blood in Christianity 82
Jessica A. Boon

Chapter 3: Perspectives on Rabbinic Constructions of Gendered Bodies 112
Gwynn Kessler

Chapter 4: The One and the Many: Ancestors and Sorcerers in Hohodene Worldview 169
Robin M. Wright

Chapter 5: Cognitive Science, Embodiment, and Materiality 202
Nathaniel F. Barrett

Section II:  Practices and Performances 240

Chapter 6: From Bells to Bottus: Analyzing the Body and Materiality of Indian Dance in an American University Context 241
Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger

Chapter 7: Spirit Incorporation in Candomblé 269
Paul Christopher Johnson

Chapter 8: Spiritual Warfare in Pentecostalism: Metaphors and Materialities 310
Simon Coleman

Chapter 9: Consider the Tourist 341
Thomas S. Bremer

Section III: Spatiality, Mobility, and Relationality 380

Chapter 10: Moving, Crossing, and Dwelling: Christianity and Place Pilgrimage 381
John Eade

Chapter 11: Hindu and Sikh Processions in Europe: Material Objects and Ritual Bodies on the Move 415
Knut A. Jacobsen

Chapter 12: Geopolitics, Space Sacralization, and Devotional Labor on the U.S.-Mexico Border 441
Elaine A. Peña

Chapter 13: The Imagination of Matter: Mesoamerican Trees, Cities, and Human Sacrifice 470
Davíd Carrasco

Chapter 14: Material Religion, Materialism, and Non-Human Animals 500
Anna L. Peterson

Section IV: Sacred Objects and Beings 530

Chapter 15: Assembling Inferences in Material Analysis 531
David Morgan

Chapter 16: Woven Beliefs: Textiles and Religious Practice in Africa 569
Victoria L. Rovine

Chapter 17: Beyond the Symbolism of the Headscarf: The Assemblage of Veiling and the Headscarf as a Thing 591
Banu Gökarıksel and Anna J. Secor

Chapter 18: Indigenous Sacred Objects after NAGPRA: In and Out of Circulation 617
Greg Johnson

Chapter 19: Objects of Memory and Authority: Thinking through and beyond the "relic" in Sikh contexts 644
Anne Murphy

Section V:  Religion, Food, and Comensality 671

Chapter 20: Religion, Agriculture, and Food: Three Case Studies 672
A. Whitney Sanford

Chapter 21: Vaishnava Vegetarianism: Scriptural and Theological Perspectives on the Diet of Devotion 711
Steven J. Rosen

Chapter 22: Prasada, Edible Grace 742
Andrea Pinkney

Chapter 23: To Eat and Be Eaten: Mesoamerican Human Sacrifice and Ecological Webs 780
Kay A. Read

Section VI:  Media and Material Religion 813

Chapter 24: Cinema 814
S. Brent Plate

Chapter 25: Religion and Digital Media: Studying Materiality in Digital Religion 843
Heidi A Campbell and Louise Connelly

Chapter 26: Aural Media 873
Rosalind I. J. Hackett

Section VII:  Economies and Governmentalities of Religion 910

Chapter 27: Colonialism, Orientalism and the Body 911
Sylvester A. Johnson

Chapter 28: Dharmaśāstra: Materiality in and of the Hindu Legal Code 949
Patrick Olivelle

Chapter 29: Religion and Ethnicity as Located and Localized 978
Terje Østebø

Chapter 30: Never Again: Religion, Commodities, and the State 1020
Kevin Lewis O’Neill

Index 

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