UCL Conference on “The Bodily AND Material Cultures of Religious Subjectivation” 17-­18 June 2014 Exhibition Curatorial Note by Elizabeth Fox, Priya Joshi and Delphine Mercier “Making Religious Subjects: Charting bodily distance and proximity through materials of religious subjectivation” This exhibition employs a selection of material artefacts from the Ethnographic Collection of the Department of Anthropology, UCL to draw out relationships between religious bodily practice and material culture, in association with “The Bodily and Material Culture of Religious Subjectivation” conference on 17th and 18th June, 2014. For the exhibition, which seeks to illuminate the various ways in which subjects are made religious through engagements with material objects and the cultivation of certain bodily techniques, we as curators assert as the editors of Material Religion also do, an understanding of religion that is as “wildly inclusive” as possible (2005). The term ‘religious’ is recognised to firstly carry particular connotations: “as Derrida insists, as soon as we adopt the word ‘religion’ to designate our interest ‘we are already speaking Latin’ (1998:28)” (Csordas 2004:163) and secondly to have been subjected to strong critiques (e.g. Asad 1993). However, following Csordas, we agree that the proper response to 1 such critique is not to excise a contentious word from our vocabulary, but to use it with care (ibid.). In our survey of the materials and artefacts in the fantastic Ethnographic Collection and in conjunction with our thematic exploration of bodily distance and proximity, we invoked a broad and inclusive concept of ‘religious’ materials. Likewise, we selected objects that could speak to an analytical approach to the religious as enacted through practice, as opposed to an abstract, liturgical, belief-­‐based perspective. Where text is presented, as in the ‘Arabic book’ artifact, it is there to draw attention to the practice of writing, the gestures and techniques that enact a mutual transformation of materials and body, especially in this manifestation of writing-­‐as-­‐religious-­‐action, where the ‘meaning’ (if there is any) of the ink figures is subordinate to the repetitious activity. The particular material content of the Ethnographic Collection naturally constrained and informed our selection of objects. One question we often had to contend with was the place of ‘ancestors’ and material practices directed at these ancestors within our approach to ‘religion’. In grappling with this question we developed a notion of the religious that we do not offer in any universalising sense but outline first, as it became central to our thematic engagement and second, in hopes that it may spark further discussion of what constitutes the religious, as illuminated through bodies and other material presences. The understanding of religion we are exploring through this exhibition is that of exchange, particularly material-­‐bodily exchanges with the immaterial, or invisible. This follows Gell’s description of the art nexus and the way in which objects may stand in for agents, abducting through secondary agency forms of exchange or interaction between those present/visible and absent/invisible others (1998). This approach is likewise Gellian in the sense that it attempts, in curatorial form, to approach the study of relations between people and objects in the same way as anthropologists study other forms of social relationships. Hence, the role of exchange and the importance of material mediators between those present and absent, the material and immaterial, the visible and invisible, the immanent and the transcendent (see also Kendall’s 2014 conference paper on ‘Divine Prosthesis’). In this light, objects in the exhibition such as the Zande throwing knife, the Abelam mask, and the Aboriginal Australian burial post among others that do not at first appear religious in the narrow ‘Latin’ sense of the term, may be (in at least a self-­‐consciously etic sense) approached as ‘objects that make religious subjects’, given that they play a part in the mediation of particular exchanges with gods, ancestors and others, and in doing so effect a range of transformations on bodies and subjects. Focusing thus on the materiality of religious objects and the materiality of bodies, we present an exhibition that explores how the body engages with material objects at different proximities, evoking the variety of ways in which religious subjects are created through the negotiation of proximity and distance with particular materials. The arrangement of the objects in the cabinet charts spatially a range of proximities and distances from the body, from the intimacy of ingestion (Wooden board, Nigeria) or audition (Conch Shell, Oceania Polynesia/Eastern Polynesia), to the creation or maintenance of distance via burning (Chinese Spirit Objects) or aversion of the gaze (Burial post, 2 Aboriginal Australia). In this way we hope to explore configurations of materials and bodies and the ways in which they are made to intersect through particular spatial and temporal schemas made manifest in the practices by which religious subjects are made. References Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Csordas, T. J. 2004. “Asymptote of the Ineffable: Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion”. In Current Anthropology. 45 (2). pp. 163-­‐185. Derrida, J. 1998. “Faith and knowledge: The two sources of ‘religion’ at the limits of reason alone”. In J. Derrida & G. Vattimo, ed. 1998. Religion. Stanford: Stanford University Press. pp. 1-­‐78. “Editorial Statement”. 2005. In Journal of Material Religion. 1 (1). pp. 4-­‐9. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kendall, L. 2014. The God’s prosthesis: Divine presence in painted images and in the costumed bodies of shamans. Paper presented at the conference. 3