The Sacred Senses

Over the past fifteen years, there has been a growing literature on the role of material and visual culture in everyday religious practices leading, more recently, to the publication of the specialist journal, Material Religion. Whilst art historians traditionally studied religious images and artefacts as artistic products, offering historical accounts of their production or visual analysis of their content, this new study of religious visual and material culture involved a shift from a primary focus on the object itself to an interest in the uses of objects within religious life-worlds. Associated with this shift came greater attention to the aesthetic processes and practices through which religious adherents engaged with sacred objects, which brought these objects alive as media of sacred presence. Religious visual culture, then, is this sense is not simply about religious images, but concerned with the habits, feelings and ways of seeing that make objects part of a religious life.

The aim of this seminar was to bring together leading researchers who had contributed to this turn to the study of visual and material culture within religion, as well as including areas for discussion that are still relatively under-developed: the religious significance of audio culture and the meanings of new technologies for embodied religious practice.

The presentations at the seminar explored a range of issues: the significance of the architecture of post-War Catholic churches in suburban America in shaping forms of congregational life that anticipated changes formally encouraged by Vatican II; the question of how we understand the capacity of religious images to exert charismatic influence in some viewers; the significance of bass as sacred symbol and experience in dub reggae; the enchantment of technology as spiritual medium in the post-1960’s counter-culture; and the cross-disciplinary origins and developments of the study of religion and visual/material culture.

Some of the key ideas emerging from the presentation and discussion were:

• the study of religion and material culture can help to challenge the assumption that religious change is initiated primarily through theological innovation, disseminated by theological elites, or indeed by changing patterns of ‘belief’. Religious change can be grounded in changing material contexts of religious practice which may present certain constraints as well as making new kinds of interaction, group structure and experience possible. These changing material contexts also need to be understood in terms of wider historical, social and cultural shifts. For example, the demographic, policy and cultural conditions that led to the growth in the number of Catholic public schools in post-War America, led to the construction of new buildings that combined schools with modern church sanctuaries. The trend towards temporary or multi-use sanctuaries (with, for example, the same space being used alternatively as a sanctuary for Sunday worship or a school gymnasium during the week) changed the physical environment in which worship took place, often leading to less decorative spaces which encouraged new, more informal modes of interaction. More theoretically, in terms of actor-network theory, this might be understood in terms of the ways in which material objects and spaces (constructed through particular historical and social processes) play an active role in the constitution of religious life-worlds.
  
• people form person-like relations with religious objects, experiencing them as media of sacred presence and encountering them as sources of transcendent experience. Understanding the ways in which sacred presence is mediated through particular objects remains a complex task, however. The attribution of sacred presence to an object is clearly not an inherent property of the object itself – a religious painting that may become a source of profound experience for one person may be of little interest to another. Rather the religious charisma of objects arises through a complex inter-play of the nature of the object itself, its physical context of display and encounter, the religious aura associated with the context of its production or its creator, the capability of someone to experience its religious significance through the cognitive and aesthetic frames which they bring to the object, and the wider social context in which the object may be attributed particular religious significance or put to particular religious use.
  
• a similar framework of attention to object, production, display/performance, and context and conditions of individual and collective reception can also be used to make sense of the religious significance attributed to particular kinds of aural experience. In the context of dub reggae, for example, the significance of bass within the music derives partly from its physical/auditory properties. The common use of bass in dub below 30Hz – at which point it becomes inaudible – emphasises both its physical qualities (as bass vibrations from large bass speaker stacks in sound-systems move through the body, sometimes in ways that can be experienced as frightening or disorienting) and the potential for it to signify something beyond the mundane. The physical sensation and physical media (large speakers) associated with the transmission of the bass sound also therefore becomes associated with an embodied and symbolic notion of weight, and the ability of producers to utilise bass/weight effectively is an important ground on which the legitimacy of their work is evaluated and celebrated. The context and conditions of the performance and reception of bass also render it open to various symbolic meanings – of both masculinity/strength and the maternal, erotic energy, political resistance, and the primal and the mystical. These meanings are not arbitrary but are formed through under historical conditions (e.g. the emergence of dub from spaces associated with black consciousness and struggles for black liberation). The auditory and embodied qualities of the bass sound, rendered through particular spaces, histories, technologies of performance and codes and practices of reception, are therefore integral to the lived meanings of dub reggae as a religious, cultural and political practice.
  
• whilst some objects may become the focus of intense religious devotion or experience, other objects may have a more mundane significance (e.g. folding chairs in the context of temporary church sanctuaries) which do not attract explicit religious meanings, but nevertheless play a role in the recursive reproduction of particular forms of religious life and practice. This raises important questions about whether the objects to which scholars are normally drawn are focal, charismatic objects attributed explicit sacred significance, and whether this can lead to researchers neglecting objects that have a more mundane role but which may, in reality, have an equal or greater formative significance in shaping religious lives.
  
• whilst the physical and sensory properties of objects, images and sounds establish particular grounds of possibility for their religious meanings and uses, the cultural meanings applied to them also play a critical role in shaping the possibilities of their use. There is, therefore, nothing inherently deterministic about the ways in which objects, images and sounds come to have particular meanings and uses, but rather this is subject to an inter-play between the object itself and the cultural meanings attributed to them. Often to make a clear distinction between object and cultural meaning will be an arbitrary distinction – we understand specific objects to have significance only through the cultural meanings already attributed to them, and the cultural meanings attributed to them are always formed through the properties of the object. But the significance of cultural meaning in framing the experience and use of objects becomes clearer when particular objects evoke very different interpretative responses. One example of this is the meanings given to new technologies in the (post)1960’s counter-culture. Within this cultural scene there was a strong strand of criticism of new technologies as inherently alienating – from Roszak’s critique of the technocratic system to Mary Daly’s notion of necro-technologies. Such critique often emerged out of the binary opposition of technology (as profane) in relation to nature (as sacred). But at the same time, others within the counter-culture embraced the use of new technologies: from Ken Kesey’s use of stroboscopes and tape recorders to produce disorienting experiences to Timothy Leary’s advocacy of new synthetic drugs such as LSD and MDMA as means to spiritual experience. Producers working within the symbolic context of the counter-culture also played a key role in the creation of new technologies – from the rise of Apple and the development of the personal computer, to Bob Moog’s creation of electronic synthesizers. More recently, this has found expression the application millennial and religious discourses to the emergence of the internet, and the use of new technologies (like video games such as Journey to the Wild Divine) which are designed as media for spiritual experience. Rather than seeing technology as the profane other of the sacrality of nature, this counter-cultural use of new technologies is legitimated on the basis of the counter-cultural appeal to the epistemological authority of personal experience: whatever medium produces authentic and constructive experience is, by definition, legitimate. The ambiguities of cultural frames through which objects, images and sounds are produced, displayed and received is demonstrated in alternative cultural scenes in which both ways of coding technology are simultaneously present. A crowd at an alternative psy-trance club night may dance along to images projected by VJ’s of the evils of industrial society as alienation from the natural origins of human life, whilst at the same time new technologies are used both to design and project the images and members of the crowd dance to the electronic music and images whilst using new synthetic recreational drugs.

The following seminar presentations made at this event are available for download as podcasts:

David Morgan, 'Sources for the study of religion in relation to material and visual culture'

Stef Aupers, 'Techno-spirituality: embracing technology in alternative spiritual movements'

Christopher Partridge, 'The role of bass in aesthetic and religious dimensions of dub reggae'