Beyond Karbala: New Approaches to Shii Materiality and Material Religion

This Session aims to introduce and discuss the edited volume _Beyond Karbala: New Approaches to Shii Materiality_ (forthcoming with Brill, 2023). Examining manifestations and transformations of material and multi-sensorial expressions and experiences in the life-worlds of Twelver Shi‘is, Alawī-Nuṣayrī, and Alevi-Bektashi communities in diverse, understudied demographic and geographic contexts, _Beyond Karbala_ engages with conceptual debates in religious studies, material religion, anthropology of religion, and sociology of religion, and makes several propositions that push the frontiers of religious studies and scholarship on material religion. The contributions presented in this volume demonstrate how religious materialities make the _praesentia_ and _potentia_ of the sacred tangible, lock human beings into intimate relations with the more-than-human, and acting as tangible links and gateways to the Elsewhere, therefore facilitating imaginal engagements with the otherworldly. The volume also posits that ‘things’ and less thing-like materialities of religion are integral to processes of heritagization, and that these processes constitute a site of contestation between competing religious actors involved in the construction and canonization of religious—in this case, Shi‘i—heritage.