Religion That Matters: Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala

This presentation will introduce and discuss the recently published book Religion That Matters: Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala. Published by Brill in 2024 (pp. 425), this book examines the material media — images objects clothes foodstuffs incense holy waters spaces and sounds — that instantiate somatic, corporeal and visceral experiences of Shiʿi Muslim religiosity. Drawing on rich empirical case studies from diverse demographic and geographic contexts, the book includes twelve chapters that engage with conceptual debates in Religious Studies, Material Religion, Anthropology of Religion, Media Studies, and Cultural and Heritage Studies as well as Islamic Studies and Shiʿi Studies. By examining 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-than-human beings, and how they act as gateways and links to the Elsewhere and Otherworldly, Religion That Matters makes several propositions that push the frontiers of the social and anthropological study of religion. The volume also examines how materialities are integral to the politics of heritagization through processes that are shaped by competing social and political actors involved in the creation, recreation and canonization of religious — in this case Shiʿi — heritage.

Leading scholars in Religious Studies and Material Religion have described Religion That Matters as a “programmatic intervention” and a “significant contribution ... towards analyzing complex aesthetic formations, ... the creation and transformation of religious spaces and atmospheres and the material and rather mundane techniques and technologies that might involve”.

The eBook can be downloaded (open access, free of charge) and print copies can be ordered from the publisher’s website: https://brill.com/display/title/69727.