Reformation of the Senses: The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany

Abstract

Along with the analysis of religious publicity, I want to highlight two other dimensions of Oliphant’s work that material religion scholars across disciplines will find fruitful. First, four Chapters 3–6 respectively take up the Collège’s initial four art exhibitions. While the voices of artists and Collège personnel are integrated, these chapters are primarily focused on visitors’ receptions of the exhibits. Oliphant’s fieldwork entailed her volunteering as a docent for the exhibitions, which meant she was uniquely positioned to constantly interact with visitors and observe their interactions with the art and the building’s architecture. Material religion studies of tourism, pilgrimage, and museums always confront the question of how best to account for visitors’ engagements with place and onsite materialities. Oliphant’s methodology provides a useful model. Her access to visitors as a docent and patterned documentation of visitor practices figure centrally in the book’s argument. She learned that despite the Collège’s intentions toward inclusivity, programming ultimately catered to an elite demographic of Parisians who often appear more interested in re-creating Catholicism’s privileged banality than taking up artists’ challenges to critically reflect on identity, inequality, and exclusion. A second dimension closely observed by Oliphant is the treatment of the Collège building as an actor. New materialist theories mark a significant development among material religion scholars, attuning us to the agentive capacities of non-human entities and assemblages of networked relationships. Throughout the book, we encounter multiple kinds of actors who invest the historic monastic space with notable force of being. Founders, docents, artists, and visitors each celebrate the building as a powerful entity, as something intrinsically enchanting and valuable. Oliphant moves beyond the fact of these commitments to ask how such claims of material agency buttress the broader exclusionary politics being reproduced by the Collège. In her analysis, when people highlight the building as an agentive force they reflect and re-create a problematic insistence on valorizing the medieval past over and against France’s multicultural present. Studies of religious publicity have deservingly become a primary area of inquiry within and beyond the field of material religion. As religious actors, traditions, and materialities enter and occupy public life, we are continually reminded of why religion is an immense cultural force and why the critical study of religion is necessary for understanding matters of belonging, sociality, power, and change. The Privilege of Being Banal makes a distinctive contribution to this comparative scholarship, posing pressing questions about how the social power of religion operates and how religious heritage is negotiated. The positive imprint of Oliphant’s book will reach far beyond anthropologies of western Europe, secularism, and Catholicism, benefiting anyone interested in the dynamics of religious publicity.