Important Terms
Bodies: In the West, Christians believed that God used bodies of saints to perform miracles. Through their bodies, saints continued to live among men even after their death. Close contact with or possession of them meant you could partake in that power. See Patrick Geary, “Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things (Cambridge, 1986), 169-191. See also Relics and Reliquary Crosses in Medieval Christianity.
Colonialism: A power (whether a country, region, or otherwise powerful entity) controlling a region or community. This is usually an attempt to gain economic dominance and territorial dominion through exploitation and imposing the power’s culture and values onto another region or community. See Constance Classen and David Howes, eds., “The Museum as Sensescape,” in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums, and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006,) 199–222.
Commodification: When a religious object or symbol changes according to mainstream trends and becomes used for non-religious purposes, often resulting in a loss of power to the religious movement. See Colleen McDannell, “The Bible in the Victorian House,” in McDannell, Material Christianity (Yale, 1995), 67-102. See also Relics and Reliquary Crosses in Medieval Christianity.
Devotional baggage: The set of emotional or cultural assumptions that viewers bring to museums and other sites of religious objects, which influences the way that they understand art and artifacts. See Steph Berns, “Devotional Baggage,” in Gretchen Bulgeln et al., eds., Religion in Museums (Bloomsbury 2017), 83-91. Devotional image: An image that communicates information through something other than language or text, but also works beyond just conveying information. A devotional image brings something out of the viewer by activating networks by its very presence. It is often a device that works in networks to engage human and nonhuman actors in creating the “sacred.” See David Morgan, “How Images Work,” and “The Ecology of Images,” in Images at Work:The Material Culture of Enchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 44-68. See also Mosan Reliquary Cross.
Domestic object: Object found in a home, for example a bible. See Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), ch 3.
Focal object: An object that works by engaging the audience. See “How Images Work,” and “The Ecology of Images,” in David Morgan, Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.)
Gaze: The perceptions and assumptions of someone or something by an individual or group. See David Morgan, “How Images Work,” in Images at Work: the Material Culture of Enchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.)
Magic: Matteo Benussi, "Magic," Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2019; Ceri Houlbrook and Natalie Armitage, eds., The Materiality of Magic: An Artefactual Investigation into Ritual Practices and Popular Beliefs (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2015.)
Modernity: A period of time marked by technological innovation, capitalist markets, and industrial civilization. The development of the socio-cultural norms and attitudes during modernity arose during the Renaissance and emphasized rationalization and scientific explanations. Privileging scientific models cast religion as “irrational” and led to a push for secularization and emancipation from Christian hegemony. See Matteo Benussi, “Magic,” edited by Felix Stein, Matei Candea, Hildegard Diemberger, Sian Lazar, Joel Roberts, and Rupert Stasch, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (October, 2019.)
Museum: an institution that displays objects or artifacts of historical significance. In Western museums, artifacts are displayed for the appreciation of visitors, usually through single sense of sight. See Constance Classen and David Howes, “The Museum as Sensescape,” in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums, and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006,) 199-222.
Pilgrimage: A journey to a holy place one goes on to discover or deepen spiritual connection. It often includes re-enacting spiritual actions of important religious figures in the places where they originally did them. Pilgrimages offer people a liberation from social structures that attach them to society or customary norms, allowing them to make deeper spiritual strides. See Victor & Edith Turner, “Pilgrimage as a Liminoid Phenomenon,” in Turners, ed. Image and Pilgrimage (New York: Columbia Univ Press, repr. 2011), 1-39. See also Relics and Reliquary Crosses in Medieval Christianity.
Relics: The bodies of or objects touched by Christ, the saints, and martyrs. Relics were believed to have protective and healing qualities that allowed people to reconnect with holy Christian figures. They acted as a mediating point between material and spiritual realms. See Patrick Geary, “Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things (Cambridge, 1986), 169-191. See also Relics and Reliquary Crosses in Medieval Christianity.
Representation: The use of an object such as an image to portray divinity or religious ideas and express collective realities. Representations can include a fetish (a concealing object standing in for something else), an icon (an image), or a symbol (a sign). See Harvey Markowitz, "From Presentation to Representation in Sioux Sun Dance Painting,” In The Visual Culture of American Religions, edited by David Morgan and Sally M. Promey. Berkeley: University of California Press: 2001), 160–7; also Birgit Meyer and Dick Houtman, “Introduction: Material Religion—How Things Matter,” Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality, ed. Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer (Fordham University Press: New York, 2012), 1–24.
Ritual (performance): An act that has spiritual/religious meaning behind it, for example a dance. See David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, eds., The Visual Culture of American Religions , (Berkeley: University Presses of California, Columbia and Princeton, 2001), chap. 8. See also Mesoamerican masks.
Sympathetic magic: A type of magic that consists of healing. Matteo Benussi, "Magic," Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2019;
Sacred Space: Areas that allows one to transcend or that connects one to the divine. Places can be constructed to participate in rituals to connect with the divine or places can be interpreted to be divine. See: Christiane Barth, “‘In Illo Tempore, at the Center of the World’: Mircea Eliade and Religious Studies’ Concepts of Sacred Time and Space,” Historical Social Research 38: 3 (2016): 59–75; David Damrel,“Baraka Besieged,” in Muslims and Others in Sacred Space (Oxford University Press, 2012); Roberto Lint Sagarena, “Making a There There: Marian Muralism and Devotional Streetscapes,” Visual Resources 25: 1–2 (2009), 93–107.
Scripture: Texts with sacred meanings. It is commonly written on paper or other flat object, but it can also be written on other objects, such as stones. See Colleen McDannell, “The Bible in the Victorian House,” in Material Christianity (Yale, 1995.) 67–102.
Sensecape: The idea that the experience of the environment and all people and things within the environment is produced by a particular mode of distinguishing, valuing and combining the senses in the culture. See Classen, Constance, and David Howes, “The Museum as Sensescape” in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Philips (Routledge, 2006), 199–220.
Sight: One of the senses that humans use to interact with the world around them. It is the dominant sense that Westerners use to interact with museum objects. See Constance Classen and David Howes, “The Museum as Sensescape,” in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums, and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006,) 199-222.
Symbol: An object or sign which signifies theological meaning or stands for the abstract norms and values enshrined in a group. See Birgit Meyer and Dick Houtman, “Introduction: Material Religion—How Things Matter,” in Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality, 1–24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c5chw4.5.
Thing Theory: A critical theory of human-object relations which posits that objects become things (in human perspective) when they acquire new, atypical functions. See Bill Brown, "Thing Theory," Critical Inquiry 28: 1 (2001): 1-22.
