Studying religious life and practice will inevitably require thinking about the objects and spaces through which ‘religion’ gets acted out. Rather than focusing on religious ideas or ‘inner’ beliefs, this challenges us to think about the significance of everyday aesthetics, the nature of space and the material basis of social life.
Discussion paper
Researching objects and spacesKey reading
B. Meyer, D. Morgan, C. Paine & S.B. Plate, (2010) ‘The origin and mission of Material Religion’, Religion, 40(3),207-11.
The co-founders of the journal Material Religion discuss the intellectual developments that led to the development of this as a distinctive field of study, as well as key debates and concepts that have emerged since the journal has been established.
B. Meyer (2006) ‘Why media, aesthetics and power matter in the study of religion’
This inaugural lecture by Birgit Meyer (available free online) provides a theoretical framework for thinking about the relationships between religious experience, its physical mediation and structures of power in the performance of religious subjectivities.
Bibliography
A PDF version of this bibliography is available online.
Material Culture (Journal)
Material Religion: the journal of objects, art and belief (Journal)
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Discussion questions and exercise
- What can the study of spaces, objects and materiality add to an understanding of religious subjectivity, practice, institutions or change? Conversely, what might be missed by failing to attend to the material and spatial basis of religion?
- What new insights might emerge if you ask ‘where’ the particular focus of your research takes place?
- What theoretical frameworks do we need to make sense of the relationship between social meaning-making and action and the spatial and material contexts in which it takes place? What role should emotion or aesthetics play in such frameworks? Does it even make sense to make a distinction between social action and meaning-making and material and spatial contexts?
- Exercise: analysing religious spaces (PDF)