The banquet of the gods is a mess

Como as imagens fazem você pensar sobre a religião? This question was send to me by Rodrigo Toniol, organizer of the Jornadas sobre Alternativas Religiosas na América Latina in Rio de Janeiro, and was to be at the heart of a public dialogue with my colleague Hugo José Suárez. The rather general formulation of the question could obviously lead us into a whole lot of different directions: how are one’s thoughts provoked by saintly statues, byzantine mosaics, buddhist mandalas, Islamic calligraphy? How to understand the materiality of religion? Or how to understand religious prohibitions of making images? Yet I immediately took up Rodrigo’s question as an invitation to reflect on my move from being an anthropologist who writes about religion to an anthropologist who films religion. Not in the least because camera-based research and image making was the immediate common ground with Hugo.