Dressing Rooms: Spaces of Magical Reality

Alyssa Velazquez writes about dressing rooms as transitional spaces, questioning how, and to whom, these secret and privileged spaces generate imagined realities. MLA citation format: Velazquez, Alyssa, "Dressing Rooms: Spaces of Magical Reality" Web blog post. Material Religions. 4 December 2017. Web. [date of access]  You are now going “behind the scenes.” As you cross over the threshold you may expect to experience the intimate...

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Tracing the Many Lives of Religious Structures

Uthara Suvrathan emphasizes the importance of alternative traces in exploring the complex life-histories of Buddhist and Hindu religious structures in Banavasi, South India. By paying attention to ephemeral as well as more long-lasting religious material culture she offers a way of studying changing patterns of religious practice and cultural memory formation. MLA citation format: Suvrathan, Uthara "Tracing the Many Lives of Religious Structures" Web...

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Material Culture and the Construction of Subjects

Marie-Pierre Julien and Céline Rosselin explore the issues at stake in the close physical relationship that people have with objects, proposing that this seemingly quotidian and frequently non-verbal process is a means of constructing human beings as subjects. What is at stake in material culture is not only the production of physical environments by actors but the effects of these environments in shaping people as specific kinds of social entities. Marie-Pierre...

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