Material Religion

The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief

ISSN: 1743-2200 (Print) 1751-8342 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfmr20

On the materiality of religion

Webb Keane

To cite this article: Webb Keane (2008) On the materiality of religion, Material Religion, 4:2,
230-231, DOI: 10.2752/175183408X328343

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175183408X328343

Published online: 01 May 2015.

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on the materiality of
religion
webb keane
Some basic points regarding the materiality of
religion and what we might hope to gain from
taking it seriously.
In one conventional view, found in
anthropology from E. B. Tylor to current
evolutionary psychology, and supported by
mainstream common sense in the Euro-
American world, religion consists of certain
beliefs. To be sure, this belief-centered view
has been attacked on numerous fronts, yet it
is remarkably resilient. And it is certainly the
case that some important religious traditions
do tend to privilege belief in their own self-
understandings. But even where belief is
crucial, it must still take material form. What
do I mean by that? Ideas are not transmitted
telepathically. They must be exteriorized in some
way, for example, in words, gestures, objects,
or practices, in order to be transmitted from one
mind to another.
Evolutionary psychologists sometimes say
that religious ideas are not entirely the result of
cultural transition, but are replicated by virtue
of inferential processes inherent to human
cognitive capacities. In other words, just as
children seem to spontaneously invent invisible
friends, so too, when children are presented with
incomplete religious information, they will build
on it by drawing on their innate potential. To this,
however, we must reply that for those inferences
to circulate socially and have any sustained
existence beyond the moment, they must still
enter into material forms in some way. Otherwise
they remain idiosyncratic and unsupported by
the rest of that persons social existence.
Several things follow from the point that
ideas must take material form at some stage in
their existence.
First, even the most idiosyncratic experience
must ultimately become recognizable if it is
230
Webb Keane is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
in the Department of Anthropology at the University of
Michigan. His most recent book is Christian Moderns:
Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. He also co-
edited the Handbook of Material Culture and is the author
of numerous articles on religion, materiality, language, and
cultural theory.
Material Religion volume 4, issue 2, pp. 230231
DOI: 10.2752/175183408X328343
to have any endurance in time or circulation
in space, that is, to become an element of a
religion rather than an isolated and ephemeral
incident. This means it must take some
recognizable form. The condition holds even
for the kind of experience that William James
took to be at the heart of religion or a one-of-
a-kind event like the star over Bethlehem or
Sauls conversion on the road to Damascus.
Such experiences would, in effect, go nowhere
if others (and, one might argue, even the
persons having the experience themselves)
were unable to recognize them as instances
of, say, a glimpse of divinity, a miracle, or a
conversion. Materiality is a precondition for the
social circulation and temporal persistence of
On the Materiality of Religion
experiences and ideas. This is true, of course,
not just of ideas but of any materialization,
including rituals, institutions, altars, icons,
offerings, bodily habits, and so forth.
Second, by virtue of their very materiality,
Webb Keane
forms can never be reduced in any stable way
to particular intentions or meanings. One reason
is an a effect of what I have called bundling,
the contingent coexistence of an indenite
number of qualities in any object, which always
exceeds the purposes of the designer. (Flags
are often made of cotton because it is pliable
and easily produces a at surface. But cotton
is also ammable. No one would say that ags
are made of cotton in order that they may be
burned, but their wholly contingent ammability
makes available a potent political symbol.
Flammability is bundled together with all the
other material characteristics of ags.) Bundling
gives to material things (including linguistic
forms) an inherently and irreducibly open-ended
character.
Third, from this second point it follows
that material things, however much one might
want to treat them in terms of meanings and
ideas, are enmeshed in a world of causes and
effects. (This is one reason why contemporary
semiotics stresses indexicality, which is a
means of analyzing the ways in which causality
Volume 4
Issue 2
and actuality enter into social logics. This is
one opening to a materialist semiotics.) In
particular, since material things commonly
endure beyond the moment of their production,
and circulate beyond the site of production,
they are available to other people and enter
into their peoples projects. By virtue of their
material autonomy from their original producers,
externalizations of one set of ideas can enter into
new combinations with material externalizations
arising in quite different times and places, and
Material Religion
In Conversation
 from quite different purposes. Again, simply
to conne myself to those traditions in which
belief is important, consider scriptures. Words
can become written texts. Written texts can be
decorated, they can be physically reverenced by
kissing and embracing, they can be physically
concealed or revealed, excerpts from them
can be placed in protective amulets or burned
in order to make potions, the volumes can be
opened at random for in divinatory purposes.
As words, the same scriptures can leave the
religious domain altogether and be read for their
literary value, narrative interest, ethno-nationalist
incitement, or as sources of practical advice.
Conned to particular linguistic forms, they can
demand or resist translation. The volumes may
demand libraries and librarians, scribes and
scriptoria. There is in principle no end to the
231
possibilities. And faced with all these treatments,
such material forms may then summon forth
the purifying urges of new religious reform
movements, aiming to purify them of all these
accretions and superstitions. Perhaps the
very idea of the immaterial is ultimately an effect
of reactions to materiality.
Such are the consequences of the very
historicity that the materiality of religions makes
possible, indeed, unavoidable. Even the most
anti-materialistic, the most inward, or mystical, or
spiritualizing religious reform movements should
be understood as responding to, and moralizing,
certain material experiences of the material
surround. From the materiality of religion, the
irreducibly social and historical characteristics of
religion follow.
That religions are material is non-trivial.