This panel critically interrogates the “material turn” in religious studies by examining its major interventions in intellectual and cultural context. Over the last three decades, the “material turn” has effected significant transformations in how scholars theorize and discuss religious phenomena, countering the field’s historic emphasis on meaning with a focus on objects, practices, spaces, and embodiment. How has this revision been articulated and achieved? Why have religionists come to think about materiality in the terms that they do? And what alternatives may have been elided in the process? The panel’s contributors pursue these questions from three distinct, though related perspectives. We engage the material turn in sequence as a feminist project, a decolonial intervention, and a reaction to the “linguistic turn” before reflecting on the overarching context of neoliberalism. By doing so, we seek to provoke new understandings of the field’s recent history and alternative conceptions of materiality.
The Material Turn, within and outside of the discipline of Religious Studies, is marked by a significant high interest by female and feminist scholars as well as analyses of gender, the body and aesthetics that are centred in this approach. In this paper, I will reflect upon this gendered (or sexed?) distinction with the Religious Studies’ Material Turn. This will bring new and different insights to the question in how far the Material Turn is connected to a neo-phenomenology guised in feminist (essentialising) approaches to religion and in how far this feminist approach was part of its early and ongoing appeal to the discipline. To do so, I will give an overview of the development of the Material Turn/Material Religion and how it relates to gender and sex and specifically look at the works of David Morgan and Birgit Meyer.
This paper interrogates the material turn and its relationship to forms of post- or decolonial thinking through a close examination of the resurgence of interest in the “fetish” in religious studies. In recent years, the twin concepts of fetish and fetishism have become major terms for scholars of religion. In a striking departure from its historical use as a term of racist denigration, the fetish has been revalorized as a focal point of critical reflexivity along explicitly decolonial and materialist lines, distilling in its multiple functions the material turn’s broader intellectual and political ambitions. In this paper I capitalize on that exemplarity. Focusing on one early iteration of fetish-talk in religious studies, namely, the work of Charles Long and his “imagination of matter,” I use the fetish as a privileged lens through which to historicize the material turn and examine its enduring theoretical tensions.
This paper asserts that recent and popular trends in the academic study of religion, together loosely designated by the tag “the material turn,” proceed from a mistaken rejection of deconstruction, and its associated semiotic conceptualization of textuality. After showing how deconstruction, especially its stakes for perception and cognition, is misunderstood and misrepresented in representative writings of the material turn, the paper shifts focus to the work of Paul de Man in order to counter the material turn’s mistaken opposition of deconstruction to materialism. De Man argues that it is precisely in language that materiality, denoting that which refuses “transform[ation]…into the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgment,” registers for the subject, albeit only ever in the mode of error. Against this more rigorous account of materiality, the so-called material turn scans as an uncritical flight into the refuge of aesthetic mystification.
| Rebekah Rosenfeld | rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu | View |