ATS2371 Chap.9 Materiality: the Stuff of Religion and Magic
Materiality: the Stuff of Religion and Magic
Week 9 asks why the physical properties of things should matter in a unit about belief. Modern thought has tended to downplay material life, and Descartes supplies the emblem: thinking is held to lift a person above their material conditions.
The week proposes the inversion, that having a body might be the better starting point, and argues that anthropologists were early to it because they study fields where the qualities of objects and even of words are decisive. Miller's encounters look at private space and at how people order objects to give shape to memory and relationship.
Engelke's Masowe Apostolics worship without the bible, using marked speech to make the divine present, which turns language itself into a material medium.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Materiality defined as the physical attributes of objects, and why an inquiry into belief needs them
- 02
The Cartesian inheritance, and the proposed inversion from thinking to having a body
- 03
Why anthropology arrived early: magic, religion and spirituality are organised around the qualities of things
- 04
Miller in private space: individual aesthetics and cosmologies read from how objects are arranged
- 05
Objects as a way of ordering memory and relationship, with the body as one of the objects being decided about
- 06
Engelke's Masowe Apostolics: worship without the bible, the preacher as a vessel, and marked speech as material medium
Read an object arrangement as a cosmology
- 1Treat the shelf as private space in which objects have been controlled rather than accumulated, since the exclusion rule is as informative as the contents.
- 1Read the ordering: the objects gather relationships and one event into a single visible set, which is memory given a physical arrangement.
- 1Name the aesthetic as individual rather than communal, which is Miller's point about how people of our times reveal a personal cosmology through the arrangement of things.
- 1Add the Engelke move: attend to immaterial media as well, so the weekly dusting and anything said while doing it are candidates for the same analysis.
Key terms
- Materiality
- The physical attributes of objects and their consequences for social life, treated in this unit as central to religious and spiritual practice rather than incidental to it.
- Private space
- The domestic setting, including the body, in which Miller reads the decisions people make about material things as a form of ordering memory and relationship.
- Masowe Apostolics
- The African church studied by Engelke, which worships without the bible and uses other techniques to make the divine present in its services.
- Marked speech
- Language deliberately set apart from everyday talk, which the Masowe case treats as a medium through which religious experience is made to stand out.
- Vessel
- The role the Masowe Apostolics assign their preachers, understood as a carrier through which prophecy arrives rather than as its author.
- Cosmology
- An ordered account of the world and a person's place in it, which this week reads out of arrangements of objects rather than out of doctrine.
Materiality: the Stuff of Religion and Magic FAQ
What are the readings for Week 9?
Two encounters from Miller's The Comfort of Things, together with Engelke's 2004 article on the Masowe Apostolics, both reached through the unit's reading list. Read Miller first, since the argument is easier to see where objects are plentiful, and keep the second reading for the harder case where the central object has been refused.
Why start a week on objects with Descartes?
Because the dictum that thinking establishes existence is the clearest statement of the position the week is arguing against, namely that humans transcend their material conditions through thought. Setting the inversion beside it makes the alternative visible.
How can speech be material?
On the Masowe account, because what makes something a medium is that it carries and marks religious experience, and a special language such as an ancient tongue does that as effectively as an object would. The case is used deliberately, since the church rejects the most obvious material object of all.
Which essay question uses this week?
Two of them. One asks about bodily adornments and bodily practices and their significance for a religious group, and another asks about what physical objects do inside divination and shamanic practice.
Assessment move
Photograph one arrangement in your own home and write two hundred words on it using Miller's approach before the tutorial. The exercise is short, and it is the closest practice available to what the observation exercise asks you to do with a religious object.
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