Accumulation, authority, and the cultural lives of objects: materiality and ancient religion

Abstract

Material objects enable human relationships – with other humans, with objects themselves, and with the propositional world of the divine. Humanistic frameworks for the study of materiality have deep roots, from Locke and Tylor’s nineteenth century debates on the boundaries between the human soul and the material world through Bourdieu’s concept of habitus.1 More recently, a hubbub of monographs and scholarly articles on cultures from the American Southwest to India, Mesoamerica, and Europe attest the commitment to approach human religiosity as constituted in and through the material world.2 Agency, affect, textual reflections on material force, magic, spatiality, and ritual implements emerge as repeated themes across these different cultural traditions. The four articles collected here bring the focus to ancient Mediterranean votive, ritual, and magical practice: time, memory, authority, and the confirmation of social groups run as a thread among them, confirming the productivity of materiality as a framework for comparison across discrete material types as well as cultural settings.3 K.A. Rask focuses on accumulation, placement, and familiarity as intersecting factors in the phenomenology of votive practice. The low cost and mass production of the materials, combined with the habitus of well-worn pathways, forges connections between viewers and their predecessors, in whose actions they recognized their own. Clutter is a dynamic, affective spectacle that yields a community of visitors joined by common action, common image, and common space, but through the passage of time rather than a shared temporal frame. Dina Boero addresses distribution rather than accumulation, tracing the cultural biography of pilgrimage tokens from ancient commodity to modern objects with heritage status at risk of destruction and theft. The tokens were the materialized “eulogia” of a single saint and a remembered journey, capable of authorizing applications from cleansing, medicine, and magic to late antique churches. The latter relied on patterns of deposition that invert the highly visi-