The Goddess and the Virgin: Materiality in Western Europe
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pome.v10i2.163Keywords:
Goddess Pagan, Spanish Catholic, Votive Practices, MaterialityAbstract
Materiality has had the tendency to cause disruptions in Western discourses and for the most part has been relegated to being representational instead of sensual, embodied or tangible. Relationally situated around two forms of the Divine Feminine, this article forms part of a greater work in progress and discusses two ethnographic accounts that highlight the role materiality plays in contemporary Western Europe. An object based discourse is used to examine the economy, performances, aesthetics and possible subjectivity of religious objects and offerings, and provides a basis upon which to explore ideas and possibilities that occur when objects and their agents are taken seriously. Through examining the relational status of objects among us in the West, this article examines the possibility of allowing not only for ontologies, but for clearing up the relegating binary opposites that are symptomatic of modernist thought.References
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Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Bowman, Marion. “Procession and Possession in Glastonbury: Continuity, Change and the Manipulation of Tradition.” Folklore 115, no. 3 (December 2004): 273- 285.
Eller, Cynthia. Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Gell, Alfred. The Anthropology of Time. Oxford: Berg, 1992.
Henare, Amiria; Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, eds. Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge, 2007.
Ignold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2000.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995.
Miller, Daniel, ed. Materiality. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005.
Schrift, Alan, ed. Introduction to The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. London: Routledge, 1997.
Peter Stallybrass. “The Value of Culture and the Disavowal of Things.” Early Modern Culture 1 (2000), http://eserver.org/emc/1-1/stallybrass.html.
Primiano, Leonard N. “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife.” Western Folklore 54 (1995): 37-56. doi:10.2307/1499910
Strathern, Marilyn. “Partners and Consumers.” In The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, edited by Alan Schrift, 292-311. London: Routledge, 1997.
Turner, Kay. Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies.” Common Knowledge 10 (2004): 463-484. doi:10.1215/0961754X-10-3-463
Published
2009-04-20
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Whitehead, A. (2009). The Goddess and the Virgin: Materiality in Western Europe. Pomegranate, 10(2), 163-183. https://doi.org/10.1558/pome.v10i2.163
