Browsing by Subject "Material culture"

The following dissertation addresses the origins, development, and contemporary living religious world of the Hindu deity Bhairava. An ambivalent deity associated both with antinomian and orthoprax Hinduism, his example is unusual, even unique. Particularly important in the sacred Hindu city of Vārāṇasī, Uttar Pradesh, India, he fulfills a range of roles and appears in a spectrum of forms that is difficult to reconcile or analyze. This dissertation looks at who Bhairava is and where he comes from; how he functions both centrally and at peripheries; and how his ongoing, polythetic body of living religious practice can be understood as constructively potent and relevant.

By addressing Purāṇic textual materials, contemporary iconography, and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Vārāṇasī, this dissertation presents a vibrant image of Bhairava, his identity, his interpretation, and his roles. The result of this investigation is a view of Bhairava as a specialized figure, connected to and maintaining tension between disparate Hindu constructs. It is this ability to eke out a position in a middle, while remaining present at and relevant to conceptual and physical peripheries, that makes Bhairava so compelling, and so important.

This dissertation turns attention to the neglected history of relic practices among Protestants from late colonial America to the 1860s. It explores why Protestants deemed the material remains of their dead saints, friends, and relatives to be special kinds of objects in their mourning practices. American Protestants of all stripes put relics—the corporeal and non-corporeal remains of their dead—to work as lively material objects. Chapters examine George Whitefield’s relics, George Washington’s relics, mourning pieces made by schoolgirls, mourning lithographs, locks of hair, paintings, daguerreotypes, and bibles.

By charting the production, display, and collection of Protestant relics, this dissertation argues that a new attitude towards mourning objects proliferated among Protestants. Late eighteenth-century Protestants combined Enlightenment notions about the role of memory objects in everyday sensory experiences with notions about the role of sentiment to feel the character, virtue, and piety of their dead. Protestant relics carried the presence of the dead as powerful memory objects that enlivened belief. They were powerful in their ability to induce conversion experiences and increase piety in the living. Sometimes, they condensed space and time in order for the living to feel the dead in heaven.

Protestant men first acknowledged relics as emotional memory objects with a lively presence that acted on living bodies and minds. After the American Revolution, a relic culture developed among Protestant men that valued the remains of evangelists and politicians. Young women also participated in this relic culture as they mourned for Washington and produced mourning pieces for the General and their families in women’s academies. This relic culture authorized a distinctly republican Protestantism that united evangelicals, Anglicans, and some “old light” Calvinists as American Protestants around the relics of George Whitefield, George Washington, and individual Americans.

By the 1830s, mourning was deemed women’s work as nearly every young Anglo-American woman who attended school produced a relic as a mourning piece for a family member. Mourning pieces as relics were later consigned to the attics of grandmothers as signs of women’s handiwork in mourning practices. The marketplace reinvigorated relic practices through the 1860s as Protestant women and men transformed commodities into relics to be distributed on their deathbeds as gifts to loved ones. Protestant men who learned to die distributing relics on their deathbeds took their practices with them to war. Civil War soldiers continued to engage in relic practices as they sent letters with locks of hair to family members, as well as bibles, rings, and clothes. Some families even searched battlefields for the relics of their dead. Protestant relic practices started to decline after the war as some families were not able to access the relics of dead loved ones and others defined relics as the remains of the dead Confederate States. By the 1930s, relic practices died out among Protestants who defined them as historical but not religious objects and as dirty objects that circulated diseases.

The Senses of Fundamentalism: A Material History of Sensing Bodies in Early Twentieth-Century American Fundamentalism offers a new historical narrative about the rise of fundamentalism. I argue that sensing bodies laid the foundation of fundamentalism. New kinds of Christian sensory practices around the turn of the twentieth century established the shared frames of reference that allowed a broad fundamentalist coalition to emerge. Fundamentalists felt their faith in their guts.

Each chapter of this work explores the role of one of the senses in fundamentalist life: sight, hearing, touch, and the spiritual senses. Using visual and material evidence, I explore how fundamentalists trained their eyes to see truth from dispensationalist charts, how they taught their ears to hear the voice of God on radios and phonograph records, how they regulated and controlled contact between gendered bodies through clothing, and how they honed their bodies to sense spiritual presences.

Using the methods of visual and material culture studies of religion, I examine the how specific sensory practices structured the everyday realities of fundamentalist life. I examine the specifics of how sensation operated in fundamentalist religious practice. Current studies of fundamentalism tend to treat the movement as primarily concerned with intellectual matters. My material and visual history of fundamentalism intervenes in the historiography to show that efforts to describe fundamentalism as an intellectual movement have excluded important bodies of data. By studying ideas and doctrines, scholars have too long presumed that fundamentalists forbade material forms of religious devotion or disregarded bodies altogether. My work materializes the study of early fundamentalism, exploring how material objects and sensory practices undergird traditional concepts like “belief,” “theology,” or “literalism.” This project recovers sensing bodies as the cornerstone of fundamentalism.

“The Touch of the Word: Evangelical Cultures of Print in Antebellum America” analyzes the reception of evangelical print media among everyday Americans in the antebellum period. I focus on the practices of readers who received publications produced by the American Tract Society, the publishing giant that circulated over five billion pages of books, tracts, and newspapers between 1825 and 1860 in hopes of converting the nation to Christianity. While scholars typically approach printed media as containers for words, I argue that the antebellum reading public encountered proliferating religious print as a visual, tactile, and affective experience in ways not usually associated with Protestantism, let alone evangelicalism. The product of intensive archival research in over a dozen repositories, “The Touch of the Word” tells a new story about popular religion by recovering three predominant ways in which Americans sensorially encountered the material power of religious print media: as burdens, as objects of desire and consumption, and as sites for appropriation and play.