The aim of Religion and Material Culture, according to its editor David Morgan, is to “materialize Religious Studies as a field of inquiry” (xiv). Despite important work in recent years, the discipline remains dominated by approaches that presume abstract “belief” to be religion’s central category, often reducing religion to “a body of assertions demanding assent” (2). Practices, sensations, emotions, spaces, and things, when they are examined, are seen as mere outward or secondary manifestations of prior, internal, and more fundamental beliefs. This belief- or language-centered approach stems from a number of factors, including the continued influence of the linguistic turn in the humanities and the social sciences, the pervasiveness of Saussearean semiotic models of culture, and the numerical supremacy of Protestants—churchgoing or cultural—in the field.
Materializing Belief
As the book’s subtitle indicates, however, Morgan does not want to dispense with belief altogether. Morgan proposes that we attend to “the matter of belief,” and understand belief in “somatic or material terms” (3). That is, he argues that we need look to the material structures of feeling and practice that enable utterances of belief. Morgan fortifies his argument with discussion of ideas of the philosopher Charles Saunders Pierce, who in his essay “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), grounded belief in habit, physiology, and feeling, as well as philosopher David Hume, who argued in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) that all ideas derive from bodily sensation.
So what does it mean, Morgan asks, when someone says ‘I believe in God’? At first blush, it appears to be a straightforward expression of choice, personally arrived at by means of reflection and reason. However, this belief did not emerge spontaneously; it is embedded in and mediated by material realities, including the believer’s body, mind, and environment. Such a statement, according to Morgan, means that the believer prayed at dinner with her family, ate certain foods at Christmas, wore special clothes at Easter, and sang particular hymns over and over. These practices were not only cognitive exercises, but “they were the iteration of familiar feelings packaged and evoked and regularly rehearsed in the techniques of the body that he acquired from the earliest moments of his family and communal life” (4). This hypothetical believer, argues Morgan, must be understood in a material context:
He was taught how to fold his hands when praying, to close his eyes, to sit still and erect, to kneel at bedside, what voice to use as he prayed, as well as the archaic verbiage of prayers and snippets of pious diction; he learned when and how to stand and knell and genuflect (if Catholic) during worship, how loud to sing, how to blend his voice with those around him (4).
All of this is the slowly sedimentary practice of belief, built up over the course of his life and inflected with the feelings toward his family and friends and community, endlessly repeated, tirelessly education the ear, the eye, the palette, the body’s schemes of posture and gesture. So when out interlocutor says that he believes in God, we must listen for the silent speech beneath his words, the habits and felt-life of old practice…. He says he believes, but what he really does is feel, smell, hear, and see (4-5).
In sum, belief happens not only or primarily as intellective assent, but as “touching and seeing, hearing and tasting, feeling and emotion, as will and action, as imagination and intuition” (8). Such structures of practice and feeling, moreover, are always constructed and maintained by communities; holding a belief is a public practice, dependent on shared sensory culture. Belief is always sensory and constructed socially.
Consciousness, Phenomenology, and the Body
Morgan is obviously very influenced by the phenomenological tradition, especially the phenomenology of perception associated with the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty was similarly attentive to the centrality of bodily sensation and physiology in the experience of being in the world. All ideas and all external material things, he argued, were embedded in bodily experience, registered through the body’s interface. Put simply, the body the central category through which everything passes. Morgan quotes his Phenomenology of Perception (1945; translation 1962):
The identity of the thing through perceptual experience is only another aspect of the identity of one’s own body throughout exploratory movements… I am involved in things with my body, they co-exist with me as an incarnate subject, and this life among things has nothing in common with the elaboration of scientifically conceived things (10) [215].
My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my “comprehension” (10) [273].
Morgan also engages the cognitive neuroscientists—latter-day phenomenologists, really, who are sometimes dubbed “neurophenomenologists”—who have become a major force shaping the academy today, despite remaining controversial amongst many humanists. Cognitive neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have similarly grounded consciousness in the body. Consciousness arises, according to Damasio, “when the physical structure of the object interacts with the body.” It is the “unified mental pattern that brings together the object and the self” (11). All thoughts—beliefs, reflections, logic—arise out of bodily consciousness.
In his later theoretical chapter called “Materiality, Social Analysis, and the Study of Religions,” Morgan makes his interests in the phenomenology of the body and of consciousness even more clear. He discusses what he considers to be the five leading themes in the study of the material culture of religion: emotion, feeling, and sensation; embodiment; space and ritual; performance and practice; and lastly, aesthetics. It is evident in his analysis that all of these themes are grounded in bodily felt experience of the human subject.
Things and Thinglessness
Religion and Material Culture is a wonderful contribution to the study of the material culture of religions. Morgan has done much to reveal the richly embodied and felt modes in which religions are practiced and believed. But I felt like something remains conspicuously missing from a book with “material culture” so prominent in its title. There are very few things in these pages, and indeed, things are especially absent in Morgan’s introduction and theoretical chapter. They appear in his analysis only in so far as human bodies and brains perceive them phenomenologically. He approaches things themselves as more like flashes in the body’s own self-consciousness; they are not exterior items with real physical hefts. Objects exist as they are assimilated into the human body, as Morgan’s quote of Merleau-Ponty makes clear: “The identity of the thing through perceptual experience is only another aspect of the identity of one’s own body” (10). In the closing pages of his theoretical chapter, Morgan offers a definition of material culture that acknowledges and defends his own theory’s thinglessness:
Material culture is not just objects, not just architectural foundations or jewelry or paintings, because, as we saw above, things are more than things. Their edges fade into the systems of value we rely on to recognize and deploy them. Their boundaries fade as they are deployed in practices, merging into bodies and spaces in the medium of feeling. Things are present or absent according to the purposes and needs that drive our activities (73).
Things, in sum, are not really things according to Morgan. They are not only or primarily chunks of matter with heft, texture, color, and shape. On the contrary, they are significant insofar as they “merge into bodies and spaces in the medium of feeling” (73). They are, in Morgan’s words, “the stage on which a social actor, a person, a human being takes her place.” The subject reigns supreme in this book.
But what about things? What are we left to do with these chunks of matter that exist everywhere in the world? Is Morgan right that they are significant only insofar as they inscribe themselves on our consciousness and our bodies? Without a consideration of real things, does Morgan’s material culture remain a study of abstract consciousness, unmoored from the physicality of the world?
Alternatives to Subject-Centered Approaches
Alternatives exist. Other material culture scholars, notably Alfred Gell and Bill Brown, have taken the opposite tack than Morgan, and tried to theorize things themselves, apart from human projects for them. They have treated things more like subjects in their own rights—complete with “agency” and “social lives”—that have the power, within themselves, to shape human bodies and subjectivities. While I appreciate the inventiveness and risk of this kind of “methodological fetishism,” as the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai dubs this approach, treating things as agents has never quite satisfied me. Unless we are prepared to attribute some kind of magical or fetishistic power to inert matter, this approach to things remains methodological fetishism and not much more than that.
So what are we to do? Follow Morgan and investigate objects only as they are assimilated into subjects—the only materiality that we, as humans bound in brains and bodies, can assume to know? Or ought we explore the fun and experimental but, perhaps, ultimately flimsy method of Gell, who speaks of the agency of objects in quasi-mystical terms, as outside of and prior to subjects?
I believe that the recent philosophical work that seeks to break down distinctions between subject and object offers us a third way out of this morass. Theorists such as Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, and the late Gilles Deleuze have argued that everything exists in a network (Latour’s term) or an assemblage (Deleuze’s term). In assemblages, the human and the nonhuman, so-called subjects and alleged objects, cannot be separated cleanly, however much our habits of thought incline towards their segregation. Humans and nonhumans are always folded into each other in what Bennett, in her book Vibrant Matter (2009), has called a “swarm of vitalities” (32). Agency is not located in the subject or the human body alone, nor is it located in the object. Instead, agency is always confederate, distributed across the assemblage.
The clearest examples of the agency of assemblages that I have encountered belong to Latour, in his book Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (1999). His description of the human-gun assemblage is one of the most basic to conceptualize. The NRA’s braying insistence that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is premised on more traditional understandings of agency that treat material things, guns in this case, as pliable and diligent instruments of human intentionality. Latour contends that, on the contrary, once a person picks up a gun, she or he is not quite the same person they were before. Guns, among other things, when connected with humans, make up new assemblages that encourage different kinds of actions. Our shared human recognition of the gun’s violent potential (from, say, the news and movies) induces a somatic or affective reaction on the part of its the holder, who might feel powerful and dangerous. The weight of the gun in the hand may cue a latent violent tendency. Its finger-shaped trigger directs human activation of a bullet. According to Latour, when a person kills with a gun, it’s not only the person who kills. It’s the human-finger-trigger-news-movies assemblage that kills. Such a perspective has political implications: though it would not absolve the shooter from culpability, it would also shift attention onto the whole assemblage that powered the shot, which would mean looking critically at the role of nonhuman actants such as the availability of guns and violence in the media.
The challenges that such understandings of materiality present to Morgan’s material culture are considerable. It would mean that he would have to take more seriously the physical properties of objects themselves—not only as they are registered on and in the human body. And that’s all for now. More to come.
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