This essay asks whether the buried remains of a deceased Hindu ascetic, following the practice known as sam & amacr;dhi burial, might be considered a kind of material relic. Sam & amacr;dhi burial is most frequently framed in terms of the physiology and practice of yoga, whereby the embodied spirit of the ascetic is thought to be released from its physical container after death. In the context of & Sacute;iva worship, since the burial site is often adorned with & Sacute;iva's emblem, it is common to speak of the linga as a kind of memorial pointing to the transcendent reality of & Sacute;iva. This paper argues that the rite of sam & amacr;dhi burial is more than commemorative; rather, the ascetic's buried remains may be seen as a kind of Hindu relic. Research for the essay involved study of monastic sties in present-day West Bengal created under the auspices of the Da & sacute;an & amacr;m & imacr; Samprad & amacr;ya. One conundrum posed by field research is that today many sam & amacr;dhis are not recognized as ascetic burials; often they are simply thought to be & Sacute;iva temples. The solution to this conundrum lies in rethinking both Hindu understandings of immanence and the limits of modern spiritualized understandings of religion.
This paper explores migrants' ways to emplace religion at home, through portable beliefs, artifacts and practices, as forms of adaptation to new social, economic and cultural contexts. The paper focuses on the case study of "domestic religious practices" among Sikh immigrant families in Northern Italy. It specifically analyzes the religious practices whereby some Sikh migrants, building on certain objects and ways to use the domestic space, sacralize their houses, turning ordinary dwellings into meaningful homes. Through the emplacement, the daily care and the ritual interaction with religious objects, the domestic space-with its corridors, rooms, stairs and affordances like beds and closets-becomes an infrastructure to reproduce and adapt Sikhs' collective identities. At the same time, the home may foster the creative redefinition of religious practices, as they are tuned with daily routines, adapted to the spatial characteristics of the house and enmeshed with practices of family reproduction.
How different were the rituals that took place in and around the Roman home from those carried out at temples and in sanctuaries? This paper will address various aspects of Roman domestic religion: the material objects in use, the actions performed, the human participants and the otherworldly recipients of worship. Through the theoretical framework of miniaturization, I will consider the extent to which the distinction between so-called "private" and "public" cult practices was primarily one of scale. Everyday ritual practices within the Roman home centered around the worship of the household gods (the lares and the penates) represented as terracotta, bronze or silver figurines housed in small shrines that could take the form of miniature temples. Altars - often located in kitchens or gardens - were used for pouring libations, burning offerings and even the sacrifice of small animals. Combining archaeological, epigraphic and literary evidence, this paper will explore the continuum between civic and domestic religion in the Roman world.
An array of material objects and liminal spaces in which they were used in magic rituals concretely anchored subversive spiritual practices within the topography of early modern Venice. Witchcraft cases pursued by the Venetian Inquisition offer compelling evidence that urban homes were common sites of magic and could also become embroiled in rituals. Practitioners of magic invoked spiritual entities at their hearth, tucked bundles of ritual objects into bedframes, and smeared magical concoctions onto architectural fixtures like windows, doorways, and balconies. Contested use of domestic space and objects reveals the individualization of religious practices for personal motives, as Venetians adapted liturgy and sacred and mundane objects into informal spiritual practices in the home, and the archaization of subversive spiritual acts in attempts to link magic rituals to broader religious traditions. This article argues that to be understood fully, our study of domestication cannot only examine licit household devotions but must also consider how subversive spiritual practices, collectively termed magic, were brought home.
Religious objects at home are an important source for a material perspective on everyday religiosity in past and present. Teaching with these objects is, therefore, of paramount importance, as our students should acquire research skills at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary collaboration. This article will introduce a teaching project centered on domestic religious objects in contemporary Swiss households. It will outline the teaching content, didactic strategies, and reflect on the exhibition that the students curated.
The essays in this special issue offer a revealing comparative analysis of how religion and home are dialectically formed. "Domestication" is the organizing concept, which attunes us to a series of interlaced processes: the ways in which sacred objects enter the home; how homes and objects mutually transform each other; the integration of objects into domestic ritual life; and the capacity of objects to link home life with broader socio-spiritual worlds. Ethnographically and historically, this special issue presents the vitality of domestic contexts that are lived in, portraits of home sites where religious objects help the flow of everyday life happen. A fieldwork analysis of estate sales in the United States offers a complementary perspective. If this set of essays takes up the materiality of lived religion at home, the estate sale takes up the vestiges of lived religious practice.
Small, mass-produced pipe-clay devotional objects were immensely popular among the urban laity in the late medieval Low Countries. Although written sources concerning their use are scarce, their ubiquity makes them an interesting entry point into the domestic, lived religion of the time. This article takes pipe-clay images as starting point to explore the domestication of religion in late medieval Christianity. Ingold's notion of the meshwork, which foregrounds the movements of things and persons with the environment as domain of their entanglement, is used to analyze the movements of objects and people into, around, and out of the household. Their encounters in the fluid domestic domain, entangled with other spheres, enabled the performance of religion and the cultivation of a relationship with the divine inside the home.
The work of American painter Vicci Sperry (1899 - 1995) demonstrates how religion happens in abstract art. In her paintings, abstraction allows more than one religion to happen at the same time. For Sperry, adoption of a new religion increased rather than diminished an existing identity, with the visual arts serving as a creative arena for navigating religious plurality. I chart Sperry's movement through Judaism, the Society for Ethical Culture, Christian Science, and, finally, her embrace of abstract expressionism as a religious practice. Modern art is thus restored to its religious contexts by utilizing recent scholarship regarding plural identities of religious subjects in the United States. Visual, musical, medical and manuscript sources reveal Sperry's embodied life as an acculturated American Jew, while simultaneously challenging easy categorization of Sperry as Jewish or Christian. Jewish networks served as pathways into Ethical Culture and, more surprisingly, into Christian Science. Ultimately, Sperry's abstract painting and her book The Art Experience strove to express a universalism unconfined by human institutions. Sperry's conflation of art and faith urges scholars to look beyond Protestant concepts of religious adherence toward seeing the confluence of multiple religiosities, including visual art.
