Introduction: The Religious Life of Things

Abstract

The critique and historicization of “religion” as a universalizing category defined in terms of beliefs, ideas, and meanings has reoriented many scholars to materiality as a ground for the comparative study of religions within and across historical, social and cultural contexts.1 For students of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern religions, as in many other fields, the landscape of religion has always been well populated with material things: statues, altars, figurines, amulets, papyri, tablets, baskets, pots, knives, garments—the list could go on. Such religious objects have often been studied as the tools and furniture of ritual, or treated as instances of symbolic communication—evidence that points elsewhere to ideas and beliefs (and in earlier times, perhaps the deficiencies therein). The collection of papers presented here are the results of an invitation to focus attention on the things themselves. In organizing the annual conference of the Midwest Consortium on Ancient Religions for 2013, Celia Schultz and I encouraged participants to explore the “The Religious Life of Things.” The aim of this title was not only to shift the focus from the various human subjective orientations of “religious life” to its material dimensions, but also to exploit the ambiguity of “life” itself: life as biography, and life in a more ontological sense, as animate existence. That ambiguity was borrowed along with the template for our title from The Social Life of Things, the justly famous volume edited by Arjun Appadurai (Appadurai 1986a). In his introduction to that collection, Appadurai argued for the advantages of tracing the lives of things: “even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context. No social analysis of things ... can avoid a minimum level of what might be called methodological fetishism” (Appadurai 1986b: 5). This methodological fetishism seeks to turn commodity fetishism inside out. Rather than a mystifying reification of commodities as though they possess autonomous lives in the market, Appadurai’s methodological fetishism endows things with lives in order to follow their movements as they become or cease to be commodities, revealing how human subjects endow objects with value across a variety of cultural contexts. Igor Kopytoff, in his contribution to The Social Life of Things, proposed writing the cultural biographies of things in order to follow them not only through the homogenizing economic processes of commoditization, but also through the countervailing processes of singularization—of