Materializing Religion: Expression, Performance and Ritual

The material symbol has become central to understanding religion in late modernity. Overtly theological approaches use words to express the values and faith of a religion, but leave out the 'incarnation' of religion in the behavioural, performative, or audio-visual form. This book explores the lived experience of religion through its material expressions, demonstrating how religion and spirituality are given form and are thus far from being detached or ethereal. Cutting across cultures, senses, disciplines and faiths, the contributors register the variety in which religions and religious groups express the sacred and numinous. Including chapters on music, architecture, festivals, ritual, artifacts, dance, dress and magic, this book offers an invaluable resource to students of sociology and anthropology of religion, art, culture, history, liturgy, theories of late modern culture, and religious studies.

Elisabeth Arweck is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Education, University of Warwick, UK. She is Editor (with Peter Clarke) of the Journal of Contemporary Religion and has published Researching New Religious Movements: Responses and Redefinitions (2006), Theorizing Faith: The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Ritual (2002) with Martin Stringer, and New Religious Movements in Western Europe: An Annotated Bibliography (1997) with Peter Clarke. William Keenan is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the Division of Politics and Sociology at Nottingham Trent University, UK. He has published extensively on sacred dress and related aspects of symbolic culture, most recently in Theory, Culture & Society, Body & Society, British Journal of Sociology, Fashion Theory, Mortality, Religion, European Journal of Social Theory, and New International Encyclopaedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He edited and contributed two articles on dress studies and dress freedoms to Dressed to Impress: Looking the Part (2001), and has articles on dress, body and belief in a number of edited collections, including Undressing Religion: Commitment and Conversion from a Cross-Cultural Perspective (2000), and As Others See Us: Selected Essays in Human Communication (2004).