Religion: Material Dynamics is a lively resource for thinking about religious materiality and the material study of religion. Deconstructing and reconstructing religion as material categories, social formations, and mobile circulations, the book explores the making, ordering, and circulating of religious things. Part 1 revitalizes basic categories—animism and sacred, space and time—by situating them in their material production and testing their analytical viability. Part 2 examines religious formations as configurations of power that operate in material cultures and cultural economies and are ... More

Religion: Material Dynamics is a lively resource for thinking about religious materiality and the material study of religion. Deconstructing and reconstructing religion as material categories, social formations, and mobile circulations, the book explores the making, ordering, and circulating of religious things. Part 1 revitalizes basic categories—animism and sacred, space and time—by situating them in their material production and testing their analytical viability. Part 2 examines religious formations as configurations of power that operate in material cultures and cultural economies and are most clearly shown in the power relations of colonialism and imperialism. Part 3 explores the material dynamics of circulation through case studies of religious mobility, change, and diffusion as intimate as the body and as vast as the oceans. Each chapter offers insightful orientations and surprising possibilities for studying material religion. Exploring the material dynamics of religion from poetics to politics, the book provides an entry into the study of material religion that speaks to the interests of both students and specialists in religious studies, anthropology, history, and other fields that have made the material turn.