Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds

Abstract

93 Pinn’s alchemical fusion of these two seemingly disjunct bodies of scholarship proffers a major contribution to material culture studies and contemporary theoretical conversations more broadly. Pinn also offers an important correction to material culture approaches that overemphasize the category of “meaning”—an issue with a number of schools of thought taking cues from late-20-century cultural anthropology. Although he doesn’t spend significant time breaking down the definition of this notoriously watery concept, Pinn offers a decisive criticism in the way he insists on moving on from inert “meaning” to a sensitivity to the dynamics of encounter—presence together rather than “meaning” as a product of detached observation. One aspect of Pinn’s project that I hope to see explicated further in his future writings is how presence together connects with aesthetics, the full-spectrum palette of how we sense, feel, and respond to the world around us. He offers a vivid theory of art as such—and gripping readings of specific artworks as drivers of philosophical and political conversations. Is the only role of art the surfacing of philosophical and political processes? How does some art succeed and other art fail? Must art be good to stoke our awareness of presence together? Is art always part of an opening? Or can art operate as a form of enclosure? I suspect Pinn could write another book on this topic, which would be a welcome companion piece to Interplay of Things. This is, of course, not a criticism; it is, rather, one of many lines of dialogue that will be inspired by Pinn’s exceptionally generative contribution to the rapidly evolving conversation around materiality, art, religion, and culture.