Religion that Matters: Shi'i Materiality Beyond Karbala

About the event

This presentation aims to introduce the recently published edited volume Religion That Matters: Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala. Published by Brill in May 2024, this book comprises twelve chapters which examine the material media – images, objects, clothes, food, incense, holy waters, spaces, and sounds – that instantiate somatic, corporeal and visceral expressions and experiences of Shiʿi Muslim devotion and religiosity in diverse demographic and geographic contexts. Drawing on this rich empirical material, the book engages with conceptual debates in Religious Studies, Material Religion, Anthropology of Religion, Media Studies, and Cultural and Heritage Studies. It examines how material things and less thing-like materialities make the praesentia and potentia of the Sacred tangible, how they cultivate intimate relations between human and more-thanhuman beings, and how they act as gateways and links to the Elsewhere and Otherworldly. The book makes several propositions that push the frontiers of the social and anthropological study of religion while also examining how materiality is integral to the politics of heritagization processes that are shaped by competing social and political actors involved in the construction and canonization ofreligious – in this case Shiʿi – heritage.

This event from the Monday Lectures series is organised by the Department of Religious Studies.

Participation is also possible online via Webex:https://uni-erfurt.webex.com/uni-erfurt/j.php?MTID=mb2fc48efa36e2dbf16b882982093a07b

All interested parties are cordially invited. Registration is not required.