Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality

Title Page, Copyright Page

Things This volume has emerged from a collaboration among: The NWO Research Council for the Humanities (GW), The NWO Research Council for Social Sciences (MaGW), and The Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO). International Advisory Board Veena Das, Chair Christoph Auffarth Peter Clarke Galit Hasan-Rokem Michael Lambek Regina M. Schwartz THE FUTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PAST Hent de Vries, General Editor In what sense are the legacies of religion—its powers, words, things, and gestures—disarticulating and reconstellating themselves as the elementary forms of life in the twenty-first century? This sequence of five volumes publishes work drawn from an international research project that seeks to answer this question. Editorial Board Meerten ter Borg Jan Bremmer Martin van Bruinessen Jan Willem van Henten Dick Houtman Anne-Marie Korte Birgit Meyer Things RELIGION AND THE QUESTION OF MATERIALITY Edited by DICK HOUTMAN and BIRGIT MEYER F O R D H A M U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S N E W Y O R K 2 0 1 2 Copyright 䉷 2012 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1 First edition ...