Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2023.2221582
Eline Huygens
207 resurgence of Islamophobia, wherein reason was supplanted by unchecked emotion. Schaefer engages with Imani Perry’s book, More Beautiful and More Terrible, in which Perry wrote that racialization “that leads to the practice of racial inequality is influenced by visceral responses to [feelings about] assumptions that operate within the process of reason and analysis and that insidiously lead to inequitable and illegitimate discrimination” (42). Perry demonstrated that racialization can and will infest and contaminate the rational process itself. Schaefer then engages with the scholarship of the late Saba Mahmood, in her famous discussion of religion and secularism as defined by emotions. Schaefer points out that secular critique aspires to an unrealized ideal of the absence of feelings, whereas portraying religion embraces a “thrall to emotion” (96). But science is “engineered by living bodies, saturated by culture, power, and history, and enfolded within feeling” (231). This is evident in considerable debate amongst practitioners of various religious traditions regarding the beginning of fetal life, while American legislation and policy are victims to the “thrall of emotion” of the contemporary Religious Right. Hence Schaefer makes clear that science and scholarship are not objective while recognizing that there is a difference between social sciences and hard sciences. Schaefer argues that scholars in the social sciences tend to acknowledge the blind spots and limitations that inevitably shape how they conduct research, but those working in the hard sciences may cling to an unrealized chimera of objectivity. This artificial division between the social sciences and hard sciences does not obviate the fact that both disciplines are influenced by emotions. But the division suggests that social science is not readily adaptable to direct observation that withstands the rigorous measures of the hard sciences, thereby creating a different context for scholarship and knowledge-making. Even Einstein, arguably one of the most preeminent scientists, “believed religion and science spring from the same emotional root” (237). Hence it is surprising that certain secular scholars insist on demarcating the two, placing science and religion as adversarial, thereby excluding scholarship on subjects such as “the God hypothesis” from scientific discussions. Schaefer argues that the “conflict thesis” between science and religion has long been rejected in learned contexts, positing that it is perpetuated among a certain group of scientists, especially those who are least knowledgeable about either the history of science or the history of religion. He highlights how the conflict thesis continues unabated outside the academy, especially in popular culture, because specialists have failed to communicate the message effectively to the public. Wild Experiment discusses embodiment, interweaving the study of secularism with materiality by identifying a role of embodied af
207年,伊斯兰恐惧症死灰复燃,理智被不受控制的情绪所取代。谢弗引用了伊玛尼·佩里(Imani Perry)的书《更美丽更可怕》(More Beautiful and More Terrible),佩里在书中写道,种族化“导致种族不平等的做法受到对理性和分析过程中运作的假设(感觉)的本能反应的影响,这些假设不知不觉地导致了不公平和非法的歧视”(42)。佩里证明了种族化能够并且将会侵扰和污染理性过程本身。随后,谢弗在已故的萨巴·马哈茂德(Saba Mahmood)著名的关于宗教与世俗主义的讨论中,探讨了情感的定义。Schaefer指出,世俗批判追求的是一种没有感情的未实现的理想,而描绘宗教则包含了一种“情感的束缚”(96)。但科学是“由活生生的身体设计的,被文化、权力和历史所浸透,并被情感所包围”(231)。这在各种宗教传统实践者之间关于胎儿生命开始的大量辩论中是显而易见的,而美国的立法和政策则是当代宗教权利“情感束缚”的受害者。因此,Schaefer在承认社会科学和硬科学之间存在差异的同时,明确指出科学和学术是不客观的。谢弗认为,社会科学领域的学者倾向于承认盲点和局限性,这些盲点和局限性不可避免地影响了他们进行研究的方式,但那些在硬科学领域工作的人可能会坚持一种未实现的客观幻想。社会科学和硬科学之间的这种人为划分并不能排除这两个学科都受到情感影响的事实。但这种分歧表明,社会科学不容易适应直接观察,而直接观察经受住了硬科学的严格衡量,从而为学术研究和知识创造创造了不同的环境。即使是爱因斯坦,可以说是最杰出的科学家之一,“也相信宗教和科学源于同样的情感根源”(237)。因此,令人惊讶的是,某些世俗学者坚持将科学与宗教区分开来,将科学与宗教对立起来,从而将“上帝假说”等主题的学术研究排除在科学讨论之外。Schaefer认为,科学与宗教之间的“冲突论题”在学术语境中长期以来一直被拒绝,他认为它在某些科学家群体中一直存在,尤其是那些对科学史或宗教史都最不了解的科学家。他强调,在学术界之外,尤其是在流行文化领域,冲突理论是如何有增无减的,因为专家们未能有效地向公众传达这一信息。野性实验讨论具体化,通过确定具体化情感在思想中的作用,将世俗主义与物质性的研究交织在一起。它讨论了案例研究,如范围审判的视觉文化和牛津谢尔登剧院的世俗建筑。它解决了阴谋论,以前是通过物质文化的棱镜来研究的,具体化的影响。《狂野实验》是任何关于种族、宗教、情感理论和任何关于情感与思维交叉的跨学科主题的课程大纲中不可或缺的补充。
{"title":"Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation","authors":"Eline Huygens","doi":"10.1080/17432200.2023.2221582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2023.2221582","url":null,"abstract":"207 resurgence of Islamophobia, wherein reason was supplanted by unchecked emotion. Schaefer engages with Imani Perry’s book, More Beautiful and More Terrible, in which Perry wrote that racialization “that leads to the practice of racial inequality is influenced by visceral responses to [feelings about] assumptions that operate within the process of reason and analysis and that insidiously lead to inequitable and illegitimate discrimination” (42). Perry demonstrated that racialization can and will infest and contaminate the rational process itself. Schaefer then engages with the scholarship of the late Saba Mahmood, in her famous discussion of religion and secularism as defined by emotions. Schaefer points out that secular critique aspires to an unrealized ideal of the absence of feelings, whereas portraying religion embraces a “thrall to emotion” (96). But science is “engineered by living bodies, saturated by culture, power, and history, and enfolded within feeling” (231). This is evident in considerable debate amongst practitioners of various religious traditions regarding the beginning of fetal life, while American legislation and policy are victims to the “thrall of emotion” of the contemporary Religious Right. Hence Schaefer makes clear that science and scholarship are not objective while recognizing that there is a difference between social sciences and hard sciences. Schaefer argues that scholars in the social sciences tend to acknowledge the blind spots and limitations that inevitably shape how they conduct research, but those working in the hard sciences may cling to an unrealized chimera of objectivity. This artificial division between the social sciences and hard sciences does not obviate the fact that both disciplines are influenced by emotions. But the division suggests that social science is not readily adaptable to direct observation that withstands the rigorous measures of the hard sciences, thereby creating a different context for scholarship and knowledge-making. Even Einstein, arguably one of the most preeminent scientists, “believed religion and science spring from the same emotional root” (237). Hence it is surprising that certain secular scholars insist on demarcating the two, placing science and religion as adversarial, thereby excluding scholarship on subjects such as “the God hypothesis” from scientific discussions. Schaefer argues that the “conflict thesis” between science and religion has long been rejected in learned contexts, positing that it is perpetuated among a certain group of scientists, especially those who are least knowledgeable about either the history of science or the history of religion. He highlights how the conflict thesis continues unabated outside the academy, especially in popular culture, because specialists have failed to communicate the message effectively to the public. Wild Experiment discusses embodiment, interweaving the study of secularism with materiality by identifying a role of embodied af","PeriodicalId":18273,"journal":{"name":"Material Religion","volume":"19 1","pages":"207 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44459115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2023.2218246
C. Hoang, Tyce Shideler, Duong Hong Nguyen
Abstract Since the onset of the Renovation Era in the late-1980s in Vietnam, a significant amount of resources and communal energy—both at the state and grassroots level—have been mobilized for the reconfiguration of communal spaces dedicated to worshiping ancestors, gods, and spirits. But by what precise means and in pursuit of what objectives has such sociocultural action taken place? Further, what are the long-term implications for state and society of these dynamic transformational processes that appear to be the norm in the contemporary era? This article seeks to address these and related questions by analyzing recently observed patterns of sociocultural action at communal "sacred spaces" dedicated to various forms of folk religion in the Red River Delta region of northern Vietnam. The authors argue that a process of “reconfiguration” is underway, which is characterized by a common pattern of practices and interventions that are physically and spiritually reshaping the region’s sacred space, including a set of prominent actors with highly particular motivations that guide their role in religious revival.
{"title":"Reawakening Ancestors, Gods and Spirits: An Investigation into Reconfigurations of “Sacred Space” in the Red River Delta of Northern Vietnam","authors":"C. Hoang, Tyce Shideler, Duong Hong Nguyen","doi":"10.1080/17432200.2023.2218246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2023.2218246","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Since the onset of the Renovation Era in the late-1980s in Vietnam, a significant amount of resources and communal energy—both at the state and grassroots level—have been mobilized for the reconfiguration of communal spaces dedicated to worshiping ancestors, gods, and spirits. But by what precise means and in pursuit of what objectives has such sociocultural action taken place? Further, what are the long-term implications for state and society of these dynamic transformational processes that appear to be the norm in the contemporary era? This article seeks to address these and related questions by analyzing recently observed patterns of sociocultural action at communal \"sacred spaces\" dedicated to various forms of folk religion in the Red River Delta region of northern Vietnam. The authors argue that a process of “reconfiguration” is underway, which is characterized by a common pattern of practices and interventions that are physically and spiritually reshaping the region’s sacred space, including a set of prominent actors with highly particular motivations that guide their role in religious revival.","PeriodicalId":18273,"journal":{"name":"Material Religion","volume":"19 1","pages":"126 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47997945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2022.2154971
Sonja Hukantaival
Abstract The meaning of objects is often observed through how they are useful to humans or what kind of symbolism people attach to them. Thus, human subjects dominate material objects. However, the matter can be approached differently. This article has two aims: First, it discusses evidence of the interaction between humans and objects in Finnish folk magic rituals. Second, it tests if Ian Hodder’s human-thing entanglement theory can be applied when discussing these interactions. The discussion focuses on the ethnological folk magic collections of the National Museum of Finland and the Hämeen museo collection at Museum Centre Vapriikki in Tampere. These collections have formed as a result of the late 19th–early 20th-century effort to preserve Finland’s cultural heritage. This article focuses on descriptions of how the objects were used or handled and visible use-wear. In his discussion of human-thing entanglement theory, Ian Hodder shows how humans depend on things, things depend on other things, and things depend on humans. It therefore attempts to avoid the extremes of materialism/idealism and objectivism/subjectivism, incorporating agency while at the same time it de-centers the human. Thus, this article shows how humans depend on magical objects, magical objects depend on other objects, and magical objects depend on humans.
{"title":"Tools of Magic – Ritual Handling and Human-Thing Entanglement in 19th-Century Finland","authors":"Sonja Hukantaival","doi":"10.1080/17432200.2022.2154971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2022.2154971","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The meaning of objects is often observed through how they are useful to humans or what kind of symbolism people attach to them. Thus, human subjects dominate material objects. However, the matter can be approached differently. This article has two aims: First, it discusses evidence of the interaction between humans and objects in Finnish folk magic rituals. Second, it tests if Ian Hodder’s human-thing entanglement theory can be applied when discussing these interactions. The discussion focuses on the ethnological folk magic collections of the National Museum of Finland and the Hämeen museo collection at Museum Centre Vapriikki in Tampere. These collections have formed as a result of the late 19th–early 20th-century effort to preserve Finland’s cultural heritage. This article focuses on descriptions of how the objects were used or handled and visible use-wear. In his discussion of human-thing entanglement theory, Ian Hodder shows how humans depend on things, things depend on other things, and things depend on humans. It therefore attempts to avoid the extremes of materialism/idealism and objectivism/subjectivism, incorporating agency while at the same time it de-centers the human. Thus, this article shows how humans depend on magical objects, magical objects depend on other objects, and magical objects depend on humans.","PeriodicalId":18273,"journal":{"name":"Material Religion","volume":"19 1","pages":"148 - 170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47393655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2023.2221581
Abdulrahman Bindamnan
The final chapter focuses on drug cartel violence and the militarization of the southern border, as well as the birthday festivities as an opportunity to stage interventions – from a silent protest coordinated by parents of missing children at the 2006 performance to a mother sewing monarch butterflies—patron saints of unauthorized migrants—onto the dress her daughter wore to an abrazo ceremony. Border patrol agents have also intervened in the performance, embracing play to counteract negative press about their use of force. Though the festivities are restored behavior—a recovery of a previous doing—what Peña calls the “expectation of ritual” also facilitates creative interventions or repurposings. When writing about the 2006 silent protest, Peña observes “their choice of location spoke for them” (116). To return to the book’s opening, border infrastructure does not set the stage. It is the stage. It speaks. Elaine Peña brings together performance, border studies, and material religion to think about Washington birthday festivities on the US-Mexico border. Viva George takes ritual and play seriously, affirming that not all knowledge is written down and embracing the embodied archive. Rather than disparaging “controversial racial performance,” such as “playing Indian,” “playing Mexican,” or “playing colonial,” Elaine Peña writes a masterful study of the material economy of religion in the borderlands. She considers how practices of repurposing ports and bridges simultaneously deterritorialize and reterritorialize the southern border. She suggests that border actors engage with place and space in all sorts of ways—refusing to accept lines between nation-states as static or permanent. Play is key here, and it is at once world-building and world-shattering.
{"title":"Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism After Darwin","authors":"Abdulrahman Bindamnan","doi":"10.1080/17432200.2023.2221581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2023.2221581","url":null,"abstract":"The final chapter focuses on drug cartel violence and the militarization of the southern border, as well as the birthday festivities as an opportunity to stage interventions – from a silent protest coordinated by parents of missing children at the 2006 performance to a mother sewing monarch butterflies—patron saints of unauthorized migrants—onto the dress her daughter wore to an abrazo ceremony. Border patrol agents have also intervened in the performance, embracing play to counteract negative press about their use of force. Though the festivities are restored behavior—a recovery of a previous doing—what Peña calls the “expectation of ritual” also facilitates creative interventions or repurposings. When writing about the 2006 silent protest, Peña observes “their choice of location spoke for them” (116). To return to the book’s opening, border infrastructure does not set the stage. It is the stage. It speaks. Elaine Peña brings together performance, border studies, and material religion to think about Washington birthday festivities on the US-Mexico border. Viva George takes ritual and play seriously, affirming that not all knowledge is written down and embracing the embodied archive. Rather than disparaging “controversial racial performance,” such as “playing Indian,” “playing Mexican,” or “playing colonial,” Elaine Peña writes a masterful study of the material economy of religion in the borderlands. She considers how practices of repurposing ports and bridges simultaneously deterritorialize and reterritorialize the southern border. She suggests that border actors engage with place and space in all sorts of ways—refusing to accept lines between nation-states as static or permanent. Play is key here, and it is at once world-building and world-shattering.","PeriodicalId":18273,"journal":{"name":"Material Religion","volume":"19 1","pages":"206 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41848578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2023.2170099
Candace Mixon
{"title":"Review of Omar, la Opera–Outlooks Series, Material Religion","authors":"Candace Mixon","doi":"10.1080/17432200.2023.2170099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2023.2170099","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18273,"journal":{"name":"Material Religion","volume":"19 1","pages":"99 - 100"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49075672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2022.2161247
E. Kravchenko
Abstract American Protestants participate in Eastern Orthodox iconography workshops and use icons. What do these practices and objects mean to the practitioners and how do these meanings materialize? This article answers these questions by demonstrating how participants in the workshops consciously utilized their previous religious and secular knowledge to understand their experience of creating and engaging with icons, and how these practices, at the same time, influenced these practitioners to imagine new understandings of and adopt new uses for these sacred objects. Demonstrating how Protestants who made icons treated them primarily as objects that help to express personal religious agency, and how, on the other hand, icons opened up a space for these practitioners to embrace them as lively presences, this article insists that religion is as much about human intentions as material influences of objects.
{"title":"The making of faith: human intentions and material influences in the orthodox christian practice of iconography","authors":"E. Kravchenko","doi":"10.1080/17432200.2022.2161247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2022.2161247","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract American Protestants participate in Eastern Orthodox iconography workshops and use icons. What do these practices and objects mean to the practitioners and how do these meanings materialize? This article answers these questions by demonstrating how participants in the workshops consciously utilized their previous religious and secular knowledge to understand their experience of creating and engaging with icons, and how these practices, at the same time, influenced these practitioners to imagine new understandings of and adopt new uses for these sacred objects. Demonstrating how Protestants who made icons treated them primarily as objects that help to express personal religious agency, and how, on the other hand, icons opened up a space for these practitioners to embrace them as lively presences, this article insists that religion is as much about human intentions as material influences of objects.","PeriodicalId":18273,"journal":{"name":"Material Religion","volume":"19 1","pages":"55 - 78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45132475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2023.2170102
Sundari Johansen Hurwitt
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.
{"title":"Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds","authors":"Sundari Johansen Hurwitt","doi":"10.1080/17432200.2023.2170102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2023.2170102","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":18273,"journal":{"name":"Material Religion","volume":"19 1","pages":"93 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46574296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2022.2161244
Jennifer N. Sime
Abstract Every year thousands of pilgrims, most on foot, travel to Santiago de Compostela, a medieval pilgrimage destination in northwestern Spain. Recent scholarship has mapped a historical shift of the focus in contemporary pilgrimage from the relics of St. James, ostensibly held in the crypt in Santiago’s cathedral, to the journey itself as a primary site of meaning and transformation. However, this scholarship has not addressed the ways in which the meaning of pilgrimage is bound up with pilgrims’ practices relating to their own and others’ bodies. Pilgrims’ feet, in particular, have become a fraught focus of contemporary pilgrimage. Pilgrims’ practices of walking the pilgrimage, together with recorded images of their feet in social media videos, work to materialize two forms of nostalgia. The first involves the desire to return to a past time of imagined authentic pilgrimage. The second encompasses a melancholic recognition of the fragility of the present moment and longing for human connection. A detailed reading of two YouTube videos documenting the care of pilgrims’ own and others’ injured feet allows for an analysis of how recorded images of feet posted by pilgrims on social media reveal the complex relationship between bodies, social media, and nostalgia in pilgrimage.
{"title":"Materializing Nostalgia: Feet, Youtube, and the Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela","authors":"Jennifer N. Sime","doi":"10.1080/17432200.2022.2161244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2022.2161244","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Every year thousands of pilgrims, most on foot, travel to Santiago de Compostela, a medieval pilgrimage destination in northwestern Spain. Recent scholarship has mapped a historical shift of the focus in contemporary pilgrimage from the relics of St. James, ostensibly held in the crypt in Santiago’s cathedral, to the journey itself as a primary site of meaning and transformation. However, this scholarship has not addressed the ways in which the meaning of pilgrimage is bound up with pilgrims’ practices relating to their own and others’ bodies. Pilgrims’ feet, in particular, have become a fraught focus of contemporary pilgrimage. Pilgrims’ practices of walking the pilgrimage, together with recorded images of their feet in social media videos, work to materialize two forms of nostalgia. The first involves the desire to return to a past time of imagined authentic pilgrimage. The second encompasses a melancholic recognition of the fragility of the present moment and longing for human connection. A detailed reading of two YouTube videos documenting the care of pilgrims’ own and others’ injured feet allows for an analysis of how recorded images of feet posted by pilgrims on social media reveal the complex relationship between bodies, social media, and nostalgia in pilgrimage.","PeriodicalId":18273,"journal":{"name":"Material Religion","volume":"19 1","pages":"34 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41467508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}