Pub Date : 2022-08-08DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2022.2111102
J. fosu-ankrah
This essay deals with the La (Ga) indigenous religious ritual of planting a traditional deity in a newly established marketplace in Madina, a peri-urban and a multireligious area in Accra, Ghana. The relation of this deity to the market is to ensure peaceful coexistence between traders as well as protection of the marketplace. The La people are inhabitants of one of the six indepen-dent towns that constitute the Ga ethnic group. The principal town of the La people is Labadi (La), and Madina is built on La traditional land. Madina is a multireligious and multiethnic neighbourhood, with Muslims, Christians and Traditionalists. While African traditional religious practices are pushed to the margins, they still play a central, albeit often overlooked, role regarding land issues.
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Pub Date : 2022-08-08DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2022.2111095
B. Meyer, S. Ntewusu
Madina is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious neighborhood in the North of Ghana’s capital Accra. It is situated on the territory of the Ga-people, whose open attitude towards hosting strangers on their land has been central for generating wealth. The name Madina (Arabic for city) emerged in the 1950s, when a substantial number of Muslims from Northern Ghana started to settle in the area (Ntewusu 2020). Before then the community was known as Nkwantanang, meaning cross-roads or junction in Akan. While Muslims form the majority of the more than 135.00 inhabitants that populate Madina today, there are also many Christians, as well as practitioners of African indigenous religion. With many inhabitants coming from other African countries and goods on offer from many parts of the world, Madina has a cosmopolitan vibe. Religion is virtually omnipresent, through buildings, images and sounds. Madina offers a fascinating case to study modalities of co-existence across religious, ethnic and other differences. How do people of different religious backgrounds manage to live more or less peacefully in the same place? Our Madina research project investigates such modalities at the level of everyday life. Our research shows that it would be mistaken to think about religious and ethnic groups as separate, bounded entities that subsequently coexist with each other. Instead we conceptualize Madina as a place in which its inhabitants are entangled in multiple ways, negotiating their own goals, practices and identities in the light of the presence of others. This approach has yielded four dissertation research projects that focus on the in-between spaces in which such negotiations take place. Here the materiality of religion is of crucial importance, both conceptually and methodologically. Matters such as the shrine of a deity in the midst of the market, the presence of pork, the wearing of hijab or the display of a white naked dummy in front of a beauty salon trigger debate, moving people out of their comfort zone. The four essays presented in this section unpack modalities of co-existence through their respective research sites. Joseph Fifii Fosu-Ankrah shows that, notwithstanding Muslims’ and Christians’ dismissal of indigenous African religion, they cannot help but accept the ‘planting’ of the Kla deity which is the spiritual guardian of a newly built market; both traders and customers must obey the regulations that organize human relations in the market. Focusing on the sale of pig feet— haram for Muslims—that are imported from Europe into the Madina market, Rashida Alhassan Adum-Atta unpacks how Muslims develop strategies of keeping distance and avoidance with regard to the, for them, disgusting presence of trotter. Studying how a Pentecostal hospital situates itself in a majority Muslim neighborhood, Martin Luther Darko focuses on the hijab. It forms a major bone of contention, as a new hospital policy denies Muslim nurses the right to wear it, thereby raising
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Pub Date : 2022-08-08DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2022.2111113
Martin Luther Darko
{"title":"To Wear or Not to Wear: Contesting Hijab at the Pentecost Hospital in Madina","authors":"Martin Luther Darko","doi":"10.1080/17432200.2022.2111113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2022.2111113","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18273,"journal":{"name":"Material Religion","volume":"18 1","pages":"494 - 495"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47944229","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 : 2022-08-05DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2022.2090307
Leah Elizabeth Comeau
Abstract In this article, I present a material-centered analysis of a Tamil Christian song titled Tiruchabai Tarattu, which was composed in 1813 by Vedanayaka Sastriar. Through this focused case study, I address the question of what is—or what ought to be—the relationship between material and textual analysis in the discipline of religious studies. Rather than positioning material religion as a discrete approach to the study of religion, one that is often contrasted with textual studies, I propose that textual studies finds in material religion an invitation for significant growth since texts are mediated through the material. I am especially interested in sensory experiences and objects, the mainstays of material analysis, as they are found embedded in texts. By focusing on the sensuous and material elements highlighted by the poet, a study otherwise focused within the bounds of textual sources can pivot and expand to include non-textual sources. My assembly, description, and analysis of sources and experiences that span across media in and outside of texts allows me to build what I call a sensory corpus by which we understand the meaning—better, meanings—of South Asian Christianity.
{"title":"Material in text, text in material: a tamil christian lullaby","authors":"Leah Elizabeth Comeau","doi":"10.1080/17432200.2022.2090307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2022.2090307","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article, I present a material-centered analysis of a Tamil Christian song titled Tiruchabai Tarattu, which was composed in 1813 by Vedanayaka Sastriar. Through this focused case study, I address the question of what is—or what ought to be—the relationship between material and textual analysis in the discipline of religious studies. Rather than positioning material religion as a discrete approach to the study of religion, one that is often contrasted with textual studies, I propose that textual studies finds in material religion an invitation for significant growth since texts are mediated through the material. I am especially interested in sensory experiences and objects, the mainstays of material analysis, as they are found embedded in texts. By focusing on the sensuous and material elements highlighted by the poet, a study otherwise focused within the bounds of textual sources can pivot and expand to include non-textual sources. My assembly, description, and analysis of sources and experiences that span across media in and outside of texts allows me to build what I call a sensory corpus by which we understand the meaning—better, meanings—of South Asian Christianity.","PeriodicalId":18273,"journal":{"name":"Material Religion","volume":"18 1","pages":"433 - 458"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44256059","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 : 2022-08-03DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2022.2083412
V. Shotten-Hallel
Abstract ‘Atlit Castle chapel was the only polygonal church built in the Holy Land in the thirteenth century. Through a study of the archaeological remains, this article examines for the first time the possibility that the chapel was built following the model of the Holy Sepulchre Frankish choir, as part of a deliberate program to present ‘Atlit Castle as a substitute for a visit to Jerusalem. The unified and complex design of the chapel at ‘Atlit, unlike some of the western copies of the Holy Sepulchre, was founded on a deep personal knowledge of Jerusalem, its landscape and its most important shrines. It is argued that the Templars and their architect employed numerous tools to create a particular image of Jerusalem—at that time in Muslim hands and with only limited access to the Franks—in their newly built castle at ‘Atlit. Meticulously designed to serve a religious community, the architecture conveyed a multi-layered message transparent both to passers-by and to the Templars themselves.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-28DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2022.2083413
Y. Tchekhanovets, Roi Porat, Temo Jojua, U. Davidovich
Abstract The monastic practice of Lenten retreats in the desert is attested in ancient Palestine by the early fifth century. However, within the large archaeological corpus of desert monasticism, sites that can be positively identified as Lenten hermitages were previously unattested. The hermitage discovered during the recent survey of the Dead Sea Escarpment is situated in a rock shelter in a narrow natural ledge, part of the high cliff towering the western shore of the Dead Sea. The harsh, arid environment and lack of perennial water sources nearby make the site a suitable abode mainly during the spring season. The walls of the shelter are covered by two layers of plaster bearing the remains of two different decorative programs, adorning the cell with red paintings and repetitive round medallions and blind arcades. Both phases of decoration exhibit initial lining, probably in preparation for relatively long texts. The sophisticated decoration of this isolated hermitage, which was not meant to impress visitors but rather to stimulate spiritual work in solitude far from the distractions of the outside world, provides an exceptional opportunity to discuss the interaction between the landscape, the image, and the written word in the ascetic practices of Palestinian monasticism.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-19DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2022.2085995
Gertrud Hüwelmeier
Abstract The “Cowshed Tree” (Cây đa nhà Bò), located next to a maternity hospital in urban Hanoi, has long been a destination for women and men who offer prayers to ensure a successful birth and to give thanks for a healthy baby. As the nearby hospital also performs abortions, the crown of the huge banyan tree with its aerial roots has come to be regarded by many city residents as a home for unredeemed souls. But the history of the tree and narratives about its existence predate the construction of the hospital in the early 1960s and refer to the arrival of migrants from India in the French colonial period. In this article, I explore how the Cowshed Tree became a location where affective relations between the living and the dead are created and fostered through prayers and offerings, and hence as a site where sensations and material objects mediate between this world and other worlds. Taking the performance of popular religious practices at the Cowshed Tree as an ethnographic example, this essay aims to contribute to ongoing debates on the urban sacred in late socialist Vietnam and on unfortunate deaths and commemoration in times of rapid transformation; it also contributes to recent research on the relationship between humans, trees, and spirits in the urban environment.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-15DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2022.2083371
C. Ceruti
{"title":"Conversations Elevated: On High Altitude Archaeology and the Anthropology of Sacred Mountains. In Conversation with Constanza Ceruti","authors":"C. Ceruti","doi":"10.1080/17432200.2022.2083371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2022.2083371","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18273,"journal":{"name":"Material Religion","volume":"18 1","pages":"366 - 375"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47510020","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 : 2022-07-15DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2022.2084858
A. Possamai, G. Presterudstuen, K. Openshaw
Abstract This article uses the case study of Fiji’s border restrictions on Holy Water to think about how even the supernational (like spiritual things) remains subject to international border regimes. In this case, we consider how Fiji’s borders have actually been sacralized in order to securitize Holy Water—inhibiting its importation into the country. Holy Water as a spiritual thing plays an important role in spiritual practices across the globe, and certainly within the vibrant religious and political landscape of Fiji. In this article, we explore the border restrictions on Holy Water in Fiji. Exportation of the Miracle/Healing Water from Fiji over the last few years to New Zealand shows that while Fiji is sacralizing its borders to securitize Holy Water, New Zealand remains highly secularized. In this piece, we propose that research focused on the relationship between the circulation of spiritual things and their crossing of international borders is required so we can better understand how secular borders are negotiated by spiritual things and their people.
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Pub Date : 2022-06-21DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2022.2082778
Nicole C. Kirk
During the global pandemic, the publication of new books proved challenging for authors and readers alike. Many texts missed the wider audience they deserved, and readers lost the opportunity to delve into groundbreaking texts. Jenna SuppMontgomerie’s When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture was one of these books that, if you missed it in 2021, it is time to circle back. A part of the New York University Press’ excellent North American Religion series, When the Medium was the Mission makes significant contributions to the study of religion and material culture by combining media theory, network and infrastructure studies with religious studies, Supp-Montgomerie offers a game-changing study in four chapters that include a preface, introduction, and epilogue. She reorients the story of the telegraph, US Protestant missions, religion, and the media. The introduction opens with a familiar moment in the history of the United States and the telegraph, Samuel Morse’s successful electric telegram between Washington DC and Baltimore, Maryland, in 1844 and the famous message, “What hath God wrought.” Supp-Montgomerie argues that historians looking for religion often focus on content and practice as “sites of meaning” and by doing so, they overlook the ways technological infrastructure relocates “meaning from content to technology” (167). When the Medium Was the Mission provides a corrective to this approach by “taking infrastructural religion seriously” and, in the process, remakes the history of science and religion (12). Materiality plays a principal role in Supp-Montgomerie’s book. She demonstrates how religion and media are deeply intertwined materially, culturally, and politically. Supp-Montgomerie reminds us that a telegraph cable without an operator is just a line with electricity running in bursts through it (26). Religion, particularly US Protestantism, played a central role in developing network culture through the expansion of the telegraph. Media and religion were co-constitutive. She provides a genealogy of network culture and the hopes and dreams that permeated it. She excavates to the absences and silences of those excluded from these dreams of unity. These network culture imaginaries remain active in the twenty-first-century networks. Four chapters flow from a “global to local” perspective centering on the United States in a larger global context that considers the emerging national context (30). The first chapter introduces many of the storylines that unfold throughout the book. Supp-Montgomerie employs new materialist theory to show the ways US Protestant missions directed the expansion of telegraphy (37). She clearly shows the ways US Protestants utilized the telegraph as a symbol of civilization and technological savvy that missionaries employed to promote white superiority in colonial settings. In the American West, the telegraph was used as a tool of domination over the Nati
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