Replicating the Holy Land in the U.S. (a ‘Materializing the Bible’ Road Trip)

James S. Bielo analyzes a practice of religious replication: re-creations of Holy Land sites in the United States. Such replications invite visitors into an experience of sensorial and imaginative immersion, marshaling indexical techniques for materializing the Bible. Replicating the Holy Land is a strategy for actualizing the virtual problem of authenticity, a problem that animates any and every lived expression of Christianity. To explore this phenomenon, we indulge another national tradition: the great American road trip. This essay emerges from a larger project, Materializing the Bible, curated by Bielo.

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The Religious Book as Object: An Interview with Dorina Miller Parmenter

Dorina Miller Parmenter approaches the book as object, inspired by her material explorations as a former book artist as well as a desire to understand why and how the book has come to be so important in religion, especially the Judeo-Christian tradition. 

MLA citation format:

Mohan, Urmila and Dorina Miller Parmenter

"The Religious Book as Object:
An Interview with Dorina Miller Parmenter "

Web blog post. Material Religions. 16 December 2015. [date of access]

UM: How did you get interested in materials and objects in religion? 

DMP: I was an art major in college, focusing on crafts rather than the so-called fine arts, and then went to graduate school where I studied ceramics and metalsmithing. I finished my degree in art by studying the history and designs of Medieval treasure bindings and creating my own jeweled and enameled covers for books that I bound. When exhibiting the finished products, the queries that I received most from viewers concerned the contents of the books, implying that the texts must be special to warrant such attention on the covers. Upon discovering that the books had blank pages, the disappointed viewers often shared their take-away lesson with me: “Well, I guess you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.” 

Relic of the Inquisition (Diary 85) 1995; paper, leather, sterling sliver, enamel, and stones; 
5.5 x 5.5 x 1.25 in. Photo courtesy of Dorina Miller Parmenter.

After I got over my irritation that people seemed more concerned with the implied but absent text than they were appreciative of the art that I had created, I realized my own take-away lesson: people do judge books by their covers, among other things. The material elements of a book—including its cover, its size, the materials used to make it, where it is kept, how it is used, and so on—send signals about its purpose and value. When I then went to graduate school to study religion, my attention was drawn to the significations of the material elements of religious scripture, which seemed to be overlooked in textual hermeneutics as well as in ritual studies. 

I no longer practice book arts, although every now and then I conduct basic bookbinding workshops to invite people to think about the materiality of books or the impact of different ways of presenting writing.

Linda's Clan (Diary 90) 1996; paper, leather, brass, fine silver, enamel, and stones; 
7 x 7.5 x 1.5 in. Photo courtesy of Dorina Miller Parmenter.

UM: Do you approach ‘religious books’ and ‘texts’ as sacred objects or sacred knowledge? 

DMP: My view is that the attribution of ‘sacred’ to books and texts comes from the material practices that surround them as objects more than from the meaning of the words conveyed by the text. My mentor and colleague, James Watts, articulated this well in “The Three Dimensions of Scriptures,” stating that scripture involves the ritualization of three related dimensions of texts: semantic, performative, and iconic. The iconic dimension—the representative and recognizable material form of the text that acts as a signifier separately from the signification of any particular words—is crucial to this formula. 

I conduct most of my research in relation to the iconicity of biblical texts, such as an adorned Torah scroll in a synagogue ark, two arched tablets on a granite monument, or the display of a family Bible within the home. As visual objects they might act as symbols of God’s revelation and/or religious history and tradition, as tangible objects engaged in ritual they might be perceived to act as mediators of divine presence, as images and objects manipulated within particular social contexts they might communicate power and legitimacy.

"Bishop High Prayer Book", CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, Image Credit

While my initial interest in the iconic dimension of the Christian Bible related to lavishly adorned books, recently I have been studying rituals that demonstrate an opposing sentiment. In some sectors of contemporary American evangelicalism it is common to display heavily used or worn-out Bibles, often held together with duct tape. In this case the iconic dimension signifies the piety of the individual user who is intimately bound up with the book, and reveals how the book acts as a mediator of God’s saving grace that “holds together” not only the book but its owner. 

"Southern T-shirt", CC BY-NC 2.0, Image Credit 

UM: Would you agree that the materiality of religious objects tends to be marginalised in religious studies in favor of scriptural exegesis? 

DMP: Fifteen years ago I would have agreed that materiality was marginalized in favor of textual interpretation in religious studies, but I think that a focus on everyday objects has moved more toward the center. This has been furthered by the important and prolific works of David Morgan, S. Brent Plate, Colleen McDannell, and Sally Promley, among others, and the publication of "Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief."

UM: Is there more work to be done in highlighting the importance of religious materiality?

DMP: I don’t think there can be too much emphasis on materiality in the study of religion. In relation to materiality and scripture, I’ll take this chance to promote the organization SCRIPT – The Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts. We have sessions at the AAR/SBL annual meeting as well as at some regional and international conferences, and published the anthology Iconic Books and Texts in 2013. The conversations around SCRIPT are great because they are cross-cultural, and one can think about new ideas by hearing about issues of materiality and scripture in different traditions. 

 

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Paper Offerings: Judaic Themes in the Artwork of Donna Ruff

Artist Donna Ruff takes a well-known iconoclastic act—the destruction of the book—and invites us to consider this act for its destructive potential as well as its creative possibilities.

Figure 1: Es-tu comme moi? (Are you like me?), 2008. Lithograph, altered books. 
9 x 21 in. Photo courtesy of artist.

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Enacting “Electronic Qur’ans”: Tradition Without a Precedent

Natalia Suit describes instances in Egypt in which the Qur'ān is enacted through the daily routines of worship and piety known as the etiquette of the muṣḥaf. These practices, she argues, are inseparably entangled with technology. A book made of paper is not the same as the Qur'ānic text on the screen of a phone. A text visible on the page does not necessarily appear in the same way as its digitized version under a plastic cover. When the medium of the message changes, the etiquette of the muṣḥaf changes as well, and practices are redefined to accommodate this new and unprecedented materiality of the text.

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On the Agency of Religious Objects: A Conversation

David Morgan, Brent Plate, Jeremy Stolow and Amy Whitehead discuss the subject of agency in religious material culture. 

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Exploring Aniconism: IAHR 2015 Panel Review

Mikael Aktor reviews the panel he co-organised on Aniconism at the 2015 IAHR World Conference in Erfurt, Germany.

Anicionic objects from different religious traditions together form a broad category of religious material sources. In fact, it seems both too broad and incoherent. It includes clearly recognizable depictions of wheels, fish, phalli, unmanufactured objects and elements in the natural environment such as unwrought stones, trees, rivers and mountains, fashioned objects, such as stelai and logs, as well as empty spaces, such as vacant seats, and empty rooms. While all of these objects are described as ‘aniconic’ at least in some religious traditions, they differ dramatically in their religious agency and manner of mediating divine presence. A South Asian river can be a Hindu goddess, while it is hardly an image of her. Similarly, a black meteorite could be described as Cybele the mother goddess, yet it does not seem to articulate a vision of the divinity’s imagined appearance. At the same time, a river and a stone have markedly different physical and visual relations to their viewers and worshippers as well as the deities to which they are linked. In order to explore the range of aniconism, Mikael Aktor and Milette Gaifman organised a panel at the 21^st World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) to discuss these questions. 

In particular panelists were invited to address three themes: How to build up a more precise terminology? There is much confusion as to the meaning of several central words such as ‘representation’, ‘symbol’, ‘icon’, ‘iconicity’, ‘aniconic’ and subcategories of the aniconic such as ‘physiomorphic’, ‘petromorphic’ and more. It is also open to debate as to how many and what categories must or can be included in the aniconic. Is a body relic an aniconic representation of a sacred being? Is fire? It is also common that a god or goddess appears in both anthropomorphic and physiomorphic forms. The river Narmada in Madhya Pradesh, India, is worshipped as a goddess and so is her anthropomorphic image in front of which we find the aniconic banalinga, the direct manifestation of Shiva. What kinds of mediation are going on here? Is the river an ‘aniconic representation of Mother Narmada’ or simply her true form? 

Figure 1: Narmada Temple at the Western point of Mandhata Island in the middle of Narmada River at Omkareshwar, Madhya Pradesh, India. Photo by Mikael Aktor.

Another theme is about historiography. Scholars working in different religious traditions, for instance Greek, Hindu and Buddhist, have often assumed that aniconic symbols predate later pictorial, typically anthropomorphic modes of expression. Recent scholarship has revealed that such periodizations sometimes go together with the hypothesis that early aniconic symbolism was the expression of an original unwillingness to imagine divine beings in iconic forms, an unwillingness that only gradually gave way to iconicity and an anthropomorphic visual imagery. But do such hypotheses stand for a fresh historical scrutiny within single traditions, and if they do, can such developments be explained within general macro-historical frameworks? Lastly, it is interesting to ask questions about how aniconic objects embody and mediate their prototypes. Even if aniconic modes of expression predate iconic imagery, aniconism was never lost. Rather aniconic forms continued to exist as a deliberate choice side by side with anthropomorphic or other iconic representations. What, then, do aniconic forms accomplish in terms of mediating the divine prototypes to which they are related? Also the lack of direct visual links between aniconic objects and the holy or ritually potent presences they mediate raises questions as to how the sensory properties of such objects generate notions of ritual agency and trigger religious thought and practice. Is the missing visual link a way of expressing a more esoteric understanding of the prototype? 

Nine papers were presented at the panel. 

Milette Gaifman critically addressed the genealogy of the notion of ‘aniconism’ from its birth into archeological scholarship in the middle of the 19th century. The word was coined by the German archaeologist Johannes Adolph Overbeck, in the context of an account of the development of ancient Greek art. But it was overlaid with a Protestant ideological bias in favor of transcendence that is inadequate today. The paper also stressed the idea of aniconism as a deliberate choice and showed how Greek gods were given both anthropomorphic and aniconic forms. 

Figure 2: Seat of Zeus and Hekate. Halki Island, Greece. Photo by Milette Gaifman.

Robert G. Bednarik argued that contrary to the widely held belief that iconic palaeoart preceded the aniconic during the early history of humans, palaeoart commenced as non-iconic forms, and in most parts of the world then settled by hominins continued as such during the Pleistocene era. He paid attention to the question of the continuation of aniconism after the introduction of iconicity and the apparent connection between the former and adult initiated groups. He pointed out that the neuroscientific explanation of aniconism shows that it is cognitively more complex than iconic depiction. 

Figure 3: Petroglyph in Kienbachklamm, Austria. Photo by Szojak via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Jay Johnston considered the materiality and mediality of sacred and ‘magical’ stones in Northern European vernacular belief practices (especially Gaelic traditions). Her paper focused on the materiality and ontology of the objects, their associated visions and the relations such stones are understood to have produced. As sites of divine agency and efficacy the stones were imbued not only with spiritual agency, but also placed within an invisible network of relations that linked individuals, non-human animals, the landscape and the metaphysical realms. 

Jørgen Podemann Sørensen presented material from ancient Egyptian religion, where images of the gods served to secure their presence in the world. Statues used in ritual were the vital presence of the god, and when kings were called ‘the living image’ (as in the name Tutankhamun) of a god, this was really based on the role of statues in ritual. At the same time there was an idea that gods had a ‘true form’, independent of all kinds of iconic or aniconic representation. This was demonstrated by the many iconic and aniconic representations of Osiris. 

Hans Jørgen Lundager Jensen discussed the promotion of aniconism as a general rule for the Yahweh-religion: Images of the god Yahweh were strictly prohibited. The reason for the prohibition was not Yahweh’s inherent indescribability but can be understood in the broader context of the religious revolutions (the so-called ‘axial age‘) in the middle of 1. Mill. BCE. As such it can be regarded as an element in a general transformation from a ‘pre-axial’ type of religion, based on cult, ritual and material culture, to an ascetic, and cognitively sophisticated, form of religion. 

Mikael Aktor presented his field work in Nepal and India on the Hindu pancayatanapuja, a ritual where five deities, Shiva, Vishnu, Surya, Ganesha and Devi, are worshipped in the form of five stones from different locations of South Asia. In particular, he examined the anthropomorphization that seems to take place when aniconic objects are appropriated in devotional rituals of worship. Inspired by Milette Gaifman’s idea of seeing aniconism not as an absolute mode of representation but as part of a spectrum he presented a chart showing the continuity between various aniconic forms. 

Figure 4: Shalagramas (Ammonite fossils), the manifestations of Vishnu, with tilaka marks and facial characteristics. Muktinath, Nepal. Photo by Mikael Aktor.

David L. Haberman presented his research on the worship of landscape elements in Hinduism. He focused on the worshipful interaction with three such natural phenomena: the Yamuna River, sacred trees of Varanasi, and Mount Govardhan. He stressed that although all three would be considered aniconic religious objects, they all have iconic forms as well, typically personified as various gods or goddesses. Like the previous paper, a major aim of the presentation was to examine the devotional tendency to anthropomorphize aniconic objects as a way of manifesting their full being and bringing out their personality—in other words, to draw the iconic out of the aniconic. 

Richard H. Davis discussed the many manifestations of Shiva that we see in South Indian temples as understood from the perspective of Shaivasiddhanta theology. A Shiva temple contains both iconic and aniconic forms, for Shiva to inhabit and for human devotees to worship. Davis presented the varied forms that are transformed ritually into manifestations of Shiva during a Shaiva temple festival, as spelled out in medieval priestly guidebooks. Apart from the aniconic Shivalinga and the anthropomorphic processional icons, these also include a flagpole, a sacrificial fire, a trident, a pot of water, a drum, and a temporary linga made of rice and yogurt. The festival provides a demonstration of Shiva’s divine ubiquity. 

Klemens Karlsson stressed that meanings attributed to objects are not inherent to the objects themselves. Instead, meanings are the result of cultural and historical processes and are constantly changing. The same applies to ‘aniconic’ objects. Early Buddhist cultic sites in South Asia were covered with signs that have been interpreted as ‘aniconic’ representations of the Buddha. This paper focused on the shifting meanings of these signs from the early ‘aniconic’ phase to the time when these signs exist side by side with anthropomorphic presentations of the Buddha and became symbolic signs that serves as vehicles for Buddhist doctrines. 


The panel was convened by Mikael Aktor, co-editor of Objects of Worship in South Asian Religions (Routledge 2015) and Milette Gaifman, author of Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (Oxford University Press 2012). 

MLA citation format: Aktor, Mikael "Exploring Aniconism: IAHR 2015 Panel Review" Web blog post. Material Religions. 14 October 2015. [date of access] 

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The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Miracle-working Images in Italy

Jane Garnett considers objects of domestic devotion from Italy that frame personal engagement in cults of miraculous images. Their presence within a complex network is powerful in connecting the everyday with the transcendental, the individual with the community.

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In Search of Gods: A Short Walk in Nowa Huta

Chris Pinney describes his recent visit to the town of Nowa Huta, Krakow, Poland. Through photos of the landscape and architecture he traces the tumultuous history of this formerly Social Realist town that has been the site of Stalinism, the Polish Solidarity Movement and now the regeneration of Catholicism through new churches. This painful history seems embodied in the image of Our Lady of Czestochowa, whose scars elongate with the suffering of her nation.

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Maya Spirituality: A photographic exploration of contemporary Maya ritual in Guatemala

Through a series of photos, John J. McGraw presents some of the basic forms of ritual practice among contemporary Mayas in the western highlands of Guatemala.

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New Images for New Publics: Oral-Visual Narratives of the Telangana

Chandan Bose analyses an oral-visual tradition of South India to argue that the efficacy of such storytelling is located not just in linguistic practice but in a performative 'doing'. That it is through acts of performance and participation that storytellers, audience and practice forge relationships with each other, invent new traditions, and confront the tensions of contemporary conditions of production and reception.

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Clothed with Strength: Meaningful Material Practices in the Sport of CrossFit

Alexander D. Ornella explores the sport of CrossFit as meaningful material practice via the use and display of t-shirts. He provides us with a unique case study and encourages us to look at the domain of sport with new eyes, one where materials, artefacts and practices are simultaneously part of the mundane world but also transcend the ordinary and manifest transformative values.

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Let's Be Noah: Toys as Material Religion

Stefanie Knauss considers the importance of toys in shaping childrens' embodied conceptions of cultural practices, particularly the significance of religious toys in conveying some of the important characters, ideas, and values of a tradition. She argues that the materiality of toys fosters particular enactments of religious stories but that such exercises are underdetermined; the toys must be a focus of pedagogy for them to take on the particular meanings of a tradition, otherwise, they may simply exist as secular playthings. In short, religious toys present opportunities for teaching about a particular tradition, but are not clearly indicative of such approaches in and of themselves. Knauss sees religious toys as a promising unit of analysis for investigating meaning-making and the interplay of self-determination and group influence in early identity formation.

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Thinking With The Tabot: The Material Dimensions of Waiting in Addis Ababa

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The Material Culture of the Evil Eye: Merging Orthodoxy and New Age Spirituality in Greece

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The Role of Stones in Maya Spirituality

Thomas Hart presents an excerpt from The Ancient Spirituality of the Modern Maya regarding the role of stones in Maya spirituality. Below he introduces the excerpt, contextualizing these practices within traditional forms of spirituality in the western highlands of Guatemala. In his book, Hart draws from interviews with ritual specialists and other practitioners he has conducted since 1993.

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"Agents of a Fuller Revelation" Photographs and Religion in Nineteenth-Century America

Rachel McBride Lindsey discusses the significance of photography in the study of religion and, particularly, how photographs were "made sense of" as an emerging technology in the nineteenth century. In reviewing the meaning of photos in American religion, she suggests that these images are not mere "things" but enable an entirely new way of engaging religious practices and doctrines.

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Objects and Substances of Funeral Mediation in Mongolia: Coffin, Miniature Yurt and Food Offerings

Sandrine Ruhlmann describes contemporary Mongolian funerary practices in this week's post. Mongolian funerary practices, based in shamanism but mixed with other traditions as well, provide material intermediaries for the care of the disembodied soul.

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Afflictions in the Field: Evil Eye and the Anthropologist

Rose Wellman and Dionisios Kavadias offer a comparative ethnographic study of the evil eye in Iran and Greece. With rich ethnographic detail, the authors convey the ongoing importance of the evil eye as well as the diagnostic approaches and remedies used for removal of this curse. Of particular interest is the way that this complex of notions exists aside from, or sometimes within, orthodox religious practices. Either way, the evil eye conveys a set of concerns related to admiration, envy, and inequality that has played an important role historically, partly because of its ability to continuously update itself to the latest metaphysical constructs.

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The Power of Communitas

Edith Turner offers an excerpt from the preface of her book, Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy. In the excerpt, she recounts an incident while doing fieldwork among whale hunters in Alaska when a moment of “collective effervescence” was generated by the community in an effort to influence environmental conditions to better support their whale hunting activities.

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The Church-Museum: Context and (Dis)connection in Public Religion

Alexandra Antohin explores the museum-ification of churches in Ethiopia, Russia and the U.S. and how exhibitions and tours of religious significance establish active reference points for new forms of public engagement. Antohin draws upon her experience of these sites as well as contextualization theory to explore how religious media are included in the interpretative space of ‘church-museums’. She suggests that in Ethiopia, where tourism is still a new industry, multiple subjectivities and modes of interpretation may emerge through the display and reception of religious media in a public context.

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Between Temples and Toilets: Sanitation Worship in India

Jacqueline Cieslak artfully describes the complicated relationships between sanitation, reverence, and political contrivance in contemporary India. Cieslak focuses on the phenomenon of ‘The Toilet’ and its objectification as artefact and cultural institution. She argues that officials have not simply recruited religious imagery but that sanitation itself has become an object of worship.

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The Category of Person

Rane Willerslev reviews Yukaghir notions of personhood in this excerpt from his book, Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Yukaghir hunters have sophisticated knowledge of the behaviors of the many species of animals they interact with in northeastern Siberia which helps them characterize these beings along a continuum of personhood; humans being just one among many varieties of persons. These rich and varied conceptualizations ramify more basic ideas about animism, demonstrating how indigenous traditions can be labeled "animistic" as a useful generalization, though this rarely means the same thing across different societies.

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Transformative Rituals

Dimitris Xygalatas suggests here, in the final section of his book, The Burning Saints, that rituals can be deeply transformative. In this case, a person suffering from a mood disorder is cured by virtue of her participation in a traditional fire-walking ritual in the town of Agia Eleni in Northern Greece. Agia Eleni is one of five villages that celebrate the tradition of the Anastenaria, a group of Orthodox Christians who practice a fire-walking ritual. These rituals are performed at a konaki, a place where icons and other religious objects are stored and venerated. This passage is evocative of an important excerpt from Durkheim's classic, The Elementary Forms of Religious Ideas, where he wrote: “the real function of religion is not to make us think, to enrich our knowledge…but rather, it is to make us act, to aid us to live. The believer who has communicated with his god is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger. He feels within him more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them.”

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Thoughts on Death and Immortality

Ludwig Feuerbach, the 19^th century philosopher and theologian, discusses the modern idea of the soul and immortality in this excerpt from his 1830 book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality. Feuerbach was the original “materialist” in that he felt human existence to be subsumed in the larger existence of nature and society. Philosophical anthropology, the philosophy of the existence and experience of personhood, remained a key theme across all of his work. Feuerbach thought that modern Christianity’s notion of the soul and its immortality was errant. His attempt to ground human existence in the natural world could be seen as one of the earliest attempts to overcome the mind-body dualism that had become entrenched in European religion, through Christianity, and European philosophy, through Descartes. Given Feuerbach’s perspective, a focus on materiality and environment cannot be separate from a philosophical anthropology that supports or denies their significance.

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On Freedom, Pencils and Material Religion

Jean-Pierre Warnier, reporting from Paris, offers some reflections on Charlie Hebdo and the burgeoning Je Suis Charlie movement. David Morgan builds on Warnier’s comments by considering the humble pencil as means and motive of the events in Paris. What both bring to the forefront is the role that materiality, and, particularly, material religion, play in this confrontation with and affirmation of the democratic process. At issue are many serious issues: the rights and privileges of divergent groups, and their divergent commitments, in pluralistic societies, the proper balance of respect and transparency between those of different communities, and the proper response to attenuate the necessary frictions that will always exist whenever people of different backgrounds choose to live side-by-side in democratic states. Hopefully, in celebrating Charlie we can celebrate the freedom of speech, a bedrock institution for flourishing democracies, without celebrating the sparks that fly when critics choose to depict the prophet Muhammad, an indecorous act, at the very least, but not something to be responded to with violence and terror, not in this day and age, and certainly not in Paris.

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Immaterial Religion – Yves Klein’s Ex-voto to St Rita of Cascia

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