725097

editorial2017
MCU0010.1177/1359183517725097Journal of Material CultureMohan and Warnier

Journal of

MATERIAL
Editorial CULTURE
Journal of Material Culture
2017, Vol. 22(4) 369­–384
Marching the devotional © The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1359183517725097
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Urmila Mohan
University College London, UK

Jean-Pierre Warnier
Institut des Mondes Africains, Paris, France

Abstract
Drawing on the Maussian notion of the technologies of the body, on the Schilderian theory of
the Körperschema, on the neurocognitive sciences and the Foucauldian concept of subjectivation,
this article shifts the study of religion away from the verbalized creeds, doctrines and texts
towards the consideration of the bodily-and-material cultures that are prominent in most, if not
all, religious traditions. This shift helps us to understand how the bodily-and-material cultures of
religious practice contribute to producing the devotee and obtaining compliance. The potential
synergies, tensions and cognitive gaps between the verbalized creeds, on the one hand, and
the bodily techniques and material culture, on the other hand, are emphasized for a better
understanding of the complexities of the devotional subject.

Keywords
compliance, embodiment, materiality, religion, subjectivation

Take any religion, anywhere across time and space, that is, anything that is deemed reli-
gious according to commonsensical or scholarly knowledge. For the sake of analysis,
remove from the religious phenomenon anything that pertains to beliefs, creeds, dogmas,
doctrines, speech, texts, preaching and verbalized knowledge. Put it provisionally
between brackets. Practise the epoche advocated by Husserl. This will help us to

Corresponding author:
Urmila Mohan, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0B, UK.
Email: u.mohan.11@ucl.ac.uk
370 Journal of Material Culture 22(4)

dislodge the creeds from their natural evidence. Later on, but only much later, shall we
bring this package back into the picture.
Similarly, remove from religion anything that belongs with signs, codes, meaning and
symbols. Obviously, religion makes sense. Semiotics provides efficient tools for the analysis
of religious coded components. Religion is pervaded with signs that have a sign value in a
system of connotation and communication and that can be decoded. Religious icons, sym-
bols and signs can translate into speech and words. They belong with the verbalized knowl-
edge mentioned above. They too should be put between brackets for analytical purposes.
Once you have practised the epoche that denies the natural evidence of religion as
creeds and a system of signs, what is left is what we shall refer to henceforth as bodily-
and-material cultures of religious practice and their practical or praxic value in a system
of agency, that is, for what they achieve or do, to and for the religious subject, through
bodily practice and material culture.
Since the publication of its first issue in 2005, the journal Material Religion has gone
a long way in promoting a non-discursive approach, together with establishing a high
degree of expertise and legitimacy, and situating bodies, things, places and practices
squarely within the scientific agenda of religious studies (Meyer et al., 2010). However,
as Vasquez (2011: 11) argues in his book on religious materiality, a textual emphasis still
prevails in religious studies. Before going further to respond to this, we wish to acknowl-
edge a complementarity of goals between a study of religion that attempts to materialize
the field of religious studies and the study of material culture. Indeed, a scholar of reli-
gious materiality will find robust theoretical and methodological resources, together with
a wealth of empirical data in the Journal of Material Culture since its first issue was
published in 1995, and in the publications by the ‘Material Culture’ research team and
teaching programme at University College London (see Tilley et al., 2006). We also note
that historians, anthropologists and archaeologists have traditionally been interested in
the study of materiality with earlier works by Turner (1979) and Bell (1997) pointing out
the importance of studying the emotive and performative aspects of religion.
We acknowledge all these contributions but also distinguish our ‘bodily-and-material’
approach as one with a heightened level of theoretical and methodological clarity
(Mohan, 2015a, 2015b, 2016; Warnier, 2001, 2007, 2009). A focus on the bodily-and-
material inspires this special issue, in which we intend to give an account of the confer-
ence titled ‘The Bodily and Material Cultures of Religious Subjectivation’ held at UCL
on 17–18 June 2014 by publishing 5 of its 16 presentations and simultaneously attempt-
ing to clarify a number of more analytical and/or theoretical debates. We hope that this
discussion will have much to offer scholars interested in what people do and why they do
it in the service of religion. In other words, that a study of religion through a bodily-and-
material perspective and its attendant tools (see Galliot, 2015; Naji and Douny, 2009)
helps us access data and generate analysis that is difficult to pinpoint by other means.

Two kinds of religious knowledge: Verbalized and

procedural
We shall begin by calling on the cognitive neurosciences to establish a distinction
between two kinds of human knowledge: verbalized and procedural – knowing that, and
Mohan and Warnier 371

knowing how (Kosslyn and Koenig, 1995). The first one concerns verbal expressions,
discourse and ideas that can only be expressed in so many words. The second one con-
cerns our bodily techniques that may or may not be immediately identifiable as ‘reli-
gious’: knowing how to reach a state of trance (Romberg, this issue), how to drink the
Qur’an (Nieber, this issue), and, more broadly, how an aggregation of bodily techniques
might feed into domains not associated with religion, for instance, the value of Jain aus-
terity in the informal economy of Indian emeralds (Brazeal, this issue). Procedural
knowledge is always the result of an apprenticeship, whether to a person or process,
often a protracted one, as in the use of a musical instrument.
This distinction is by no means a theoretical innovation. Head and Holmes (1911–
1912), Schilder (1950[1935]) and many others had established this point in the early 20th
century. More recent and spectacular developments in the cognitive neurosciences have
validated this conceptual distinction (Berthoz, 2000; Berthoz and Petit, 2006) by demon-
strating that verbalized and procedural knowledge do not rest on the same neuro-physio-
logical processes although there is a fair amount of connection between the two. Yet,
procedural knowledge is far more involved with the sensorium and with bodily-and-
material culture. David Morgan (2010: 4) writes:

When (the devotee) says he believes in God, we must listen for the silent speech beneath his
words, the habits and felt-life of old practices. We must learn to hear his sighs, his gritted teeth,
the murmur of nostalgia, the distant gaze of eyes searching the memory of folded hands … He
says he believes, but what he really does is feel, smell, hear, and see.

This dimension of religious practice clearly belongs with procedural knowledge.

The two kinds of human capabilities – verbalized and procedural – do not simply
duplicate the Cartesian divide between body and mind. Verbalized knowledge depends
on the brain no less than the action of driving a car or singing religious songs in a
church. Both are equally human. Often, they are implemented simultaneously. Yet, all
too often, scholars rely on verbalized descriptions to have access to the bodily-and-
material cultures of the devotee, whereas direct participant observation and media such
as photography and video are required to document actions and emotions (Romberg,
this issue). Neither should it be assumed that the practice observed obeys the verbal-
ized norms and codes of behaviour. The bodily-and-material culture of religion is not
the same as its representation through verbal description, guidelines and norms. The
actual practice and its representation should not be collapsed together, as we are
reminded by the famous series of paintings by René Magritte representing a smoking
pipe with the caption: ‘this is not a pipe’ (Foucault, 1973). The pipe and its representa-
tion are not the same by any means. Their affordance is not the same. One cannot stuff
tobacco into the painting of the pipe, light it and smoke it. Neither can it be claimed
that pipe-smoking, viewing the paintings (or, in some cases, setting fire to them) do the
same thing to and for the subject, since they do not implement the same kinds of pro-
cedural knowledge. When it comes to bodily conducts, the body of the smoking sub-
ject, his or her handling of the pipe, tobacco and matches, the way he or she inhales the
smoke and the pleasure he or she takes from it are of a different order from the contem-
plation of the picture of the pipe. The confusion between the smoking pipe and its
372 Journal of Material Culture 22(4)

representation, between the territory and the map, between the icon and its text is what
Warnier (2007: 5–13) calls ‘the Magritte effect’.
In contrast with creeds and doctrine, procedural knowledge is ‘propped’ on material
culture. By propping, we refer to the fact that practically all our sensori-motor conducts
are geared to particular objects – statues, icons, temples, shrines, holy water, beads, offer-
ings, musical instruments, reliquaries, etc. In the human species, there is hardly any tech-
nique of the body that takes place in a material vacuum (Warnier, 2007: 11–12). Moreover,
as Paul Schilder (1950[1935]) underscored in his seminal work on the image of the body,
the bodily schema does not stop at the limits of the human coetaneous envelope. It extends
beyond it and includes the objects at hand. Through perception, motion and emotions they
become an integral part of bodily synthesis and therefore of the subject.
We need a specific tool kit for the analysis of bodily-and-material culture so as to
grasp motions, the senses and the emotions that are attached to them, and what they do
to/for the subject. The cognitive neurosciences have gone a long way in achieving this
when addressing the procedural, non-verbalized knowledge that we acquire through bod-
ily apprenticeship, applied to the use of material things and of bodily techniques.

On the topic of cognitive gaps

The issue of cognitive gaps is an important blind-spot that we wish to challenge in this
special issue. We claim that the bodily-and-material cultures of religion do not duplicate
or merely enact systems of beliefs and signs. They are something else, a different register
of knowing and being. More than that, they may be at odds with beliefs and doctrines. In
any given religion, there may be cognitive gaps and even outright contradictions between
these two forms of knowledge.
We are aware that these are strong claims. They challenge one of the basic, if often
hidden, tenets of most anthropological studies concerning the adequacy between practice
and representation. Making these claims introduces a suspicion concerning the compe-
tence of the devotee and even the religious specialist when they tell us what their religion
is all about. However, we would go one step further and claim the following. That to
locate the study of religion exclusively in the consistency of belief and sign systems or
the accordance between scripture and performance is to misunderstand the compelling
potency of religious compliance. We argue that this compliance exists not in the enact-
ment of an ideological adherence but in the tensions, deviations and potential contradic-
tions between verbalized knowledge, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, embodied,
procedural knowledge embedded in the material world. This approach encourages us to
appreciate practice not just as orthopraxy but as something slippery, uncertain and incon-
sistent that requires constant social and cultural work on bodies-and-materials.
These are statements with important consequences. But, although they are seldom
expressed with such boldness in anthropological literature, there is nothing new about
them. Gregory Bateson (1972: 179–181) had put them at the heart of his theory of cogni-
tive gaps, double binds and schismogenesis, following his analysis of the Naven ritual
(1936, revisited in the ‘Epilogue 1958’) and his study of mother–child interactions con-
ducted in Bali together with Margaret Mead (Bateson and Mead, 1942). In his view, the
very fact that the interaction between two or more subjects could be conducted through
Mohan and Warnier 373

two different media – speech, on the one hand, bodily conducts and material culture, on
the other hand – provided the potential for gaps and contradictions between the two and
the complex and compelling nature of such relationships. Since procedural knowledge
specifically concerns the techniques of the body, let us now turn to the body of the sub-
ject and come back to the possibility of cognitive gaps later.

The ‘real’ in religious practice

To begin with, there is no single religion in the world that does not involve the imple-
mentation of ‘techniques of the body’. Religion is the very point of departure of the
eponymous article published by Marcel Mauss in 1936. Religion is compelling, says
Mauss (2006[1936]), because it is a technique, that is, an efficacious and traditional
action on and by the body of the ‘total man’ as a bio-psycho-social entity. To translate:
religion is an efficacious and traditional action on and by the subject. The next tools in
our kit will be the notions of a body and a subject, and the double status of the body as a
subject/object. The subject is a body and has a body.
Second, we shall collapse together the techniques of the body and the material culture
of religion. All too often they are kept separate. Some academics deal with the body, oth-
ers with material culture. This division of labour has adverse effects on our understand-
ing of both. All the techniques of the devotee’s body are propped against specific material
cultures such as those of the temple, shrine, musical instruments, food, drink, clothing,
images, sacred objects and substances. We should never talk of material culture per se,
except as a kind of shorthand for ‘bodily-and-material culture’ hyphenated together. This
point has been stressed time and again by the team at the Material Religion journal. ‘The
material study of religion concentrates on what bodies and things do, on the practices
that put them to work, on the epistemological and aesthetic paradigms that organize the
bodily experience of things (Meyer et al., 2010: 209).
What is ‘the bodily experience of things’? That is the question that the Matière à
Penser network has also harped on since the mid-1990s (see Galliot, 2015; Gowlland,
2011; Naji and Douny, 2009) by drawing on the heritage of Schilder (1950[1935]) on the
Körperschema, Merleau-Ponty (1945) on the phenomenology of perception, the cogni-
tive neurosciences, and the post-Kantian philosophy of the subject.
As far as the efficacy of the bodily-and-material culture on the religious subject and
religion as a technique are concerned, we shall adopt the statement by Michel de Certeau
(1987: 57) that, ‘It is always in the name of something real that one can “march” the
believers and produce them.’1 This quote underscores the compelling efficacy of reli-
gious practice as a technique. It should be remembered that Michel de Certeau was not
one of those 20th-century radical, atheist, reductionist thinkers. He was a Catholic priest,
a Jesuit – himself a believer – but also a critical historian and a psychoanalyst, close to
Jacques Lacan. The expression ‘to march’ like a platoon of soldiers is somewhat deroga-
tory. It implies some sort of artifice.2 De Certeau suggests that the religious subject is
more or less compelled to comply. The devotee is produced, marched, directed and
shaped almost against his or her better judgement, and becomes that particular kind of
human being who walks with other devotees to the shrine, temple, church, ritual forest or
stream. Walking is anyway a basic devotional practice almost all over the world.
374 Journal of Material Culture 22(4)

De Certeau states that it is always in the name of something Real that people are trans-
formed into believers and are marched forward. We have to deconstruct this notion. The
Real, in his view, is not so from an ontological, universal, reified, point of view. It is
constructed as such by and for the devotee. For the Catholic, the bread and wine are the
real body and blood of Christ. For the Hindu, the deity image in the form of a statue is a
murti or sentient manifestation of god and not a representation. The Catholic devotee in
the church and the Hindu devotee in the temple bow in front of the bread and wine, and
the idol, respectively. But neither of them bows in front of the other’s Real. They con-
sider it spurious. For the unbeliever, they are real bread and wine, and real stone or metal
but that is still no reason to bow.
When talking about the Real, De Certeau has in mind the contribution of Jacques
Lacan (1974–1975) and of the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (1987[1975]). Nothing
is considered real by the subject unless it is shaped as such by the ‘Imaginary’, that is, by
institutionalized images. The Imaginary of the Catholic devotee turns bread and wine
into the real body and blood of Christ. The unbeliever, who has a different Imaginary,
will not see or feel anything divine in the Eucharist. He or she will perceive no more than
real bread and wine. It cannot be said that the Catholic has an Imaginary and that the
unbeliever has none. Both construct images to give shape to their experience and are
equally shaped by them. But they are different ones.
The Imaginary is a state of indeterminacy between the Real and what is not real. The
issue of religious reality as devotional or spiritual ‘truth’ is important precisely because
its absence implies the threat of falsity and heresy. One could argue that the religious
Imaginary is created as much by a fear of ambiguity, uncertainty and anxiety as by a clar-
ity or attraction to the faith. To go further, the latter depends on the former. For the devo-
tee, determining what is true or false, spurious or counterfeit is a critical issue. In order
to produce anything real, one has not only to attract but also to repel, to stigmatize one’s
opposite to the point of disgust, hatred and sometimes physical elimination. In contrast
to an earlier concept of religion as a cosmotheistic ‘technique of translation’ (Assmann,
1997), today we find the boundaries between religions being hardened and consolidated
with alacrity. The ‘faithful’ are clearly demarcated from the ‘faithless’ and often one
must declare allegiance to one Imaginary or the other. The priests, devotees and doctrines
of one religion are counterpoised against false gods, false prophets, counterfeit scriptures
and even scientific ‘fallacies’. It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a descrip-
tion of what such dynamics have done during our lifetime but we do suggest that the
credentials that are harnessed in these battles are of one’s own unmitigated Real attached
to bodily-and-material culture.
So how is this reality to be produced? How are these images institutionalized and
made all-encompassing? What are the best ingredients to produce something ‘Real’? To
some extent, ideas, concepts, words and symbols are useful but only to the extent that
they can be attached to the devotee’s body, emotions, practices and material culture.
Things, objects and substances must be felt, touched, smelled and grasped by the senso-
rium, and then transformed into something Real through an imaginary. Then they must
be legitimized by discourse, preferably one that disqualifies the false doctrines, prac-
tices, bodies and materials against the true ones. This is not a straightforward process.
Sometimes, seemingly different imaginaries work together. Romberg’s study of spiritism
Mohan and Warnier 375

in Puerto Rico (this issue) shows Catholicism existing side-by-side with animism.
Guitard (this issue) mentions the conflicts of interpretation of the waste heaps by Muslims
and non-Muslims. In Thorpe’s article (this issue), the multiple Imaginaries of the
Catholic, the nostalgic of Soviet Russia, or the families of the partisans, turn the same
vèlinès event into different kinds of Real for the different categories of believers.

‘Individual’, ‘actor’ or ‘subject’?

We have hopefully shown how a religious Imaginary is turned into a Real and how this
would be impossible without the body, senses, emotions and materials. But having
argued this, we must now raise the problem of reification in developing a theory of the
body and material culture. We often read that one should not reify the body or material
culture. However, if we choose to write or talk about the body and material culture with-
out connecting them to the human element (the actor or the subject) we cannot avoid
reifying them. We have to take into consideration something else to which the body and
religious objects are related and that will prevent them from being reified. Three candi-
dates apply for that difficult position: the individual, the actor and the subject.
The Western notion of the ‘individual’ has been constructed since the Reformation
and the Enlightenment as that of a human being personally responsible for his or her
salvation and actions. Utilitarian and Kantian philosophies as well as political economy
have focused the notion of an individual on rational thought, the capacity for judgement
and the pursuit of self-interest. The individual has become a decision-maker. This notion
was carried all the way to contemporary neoclassic economic science and mainstream
sociological theory. In that literature too enormous to be referenced, it would be difficult
to find the body as an essential property of the individual.
Our next candidate is the ‘actor’. In the context of material culture studies, one of the
most influential and frequently quoted authors is Bruno Latour (2005) who introduced
technical objects and material culture as part of the collective of human and non-human
actors found in R&D laboratories. These collectives operate as networks. In his earlier
books (Latour, 1991, 1992), the network paradigm proved extremely efficient in advo-
cating a symmetry between technical objects and human beings, both considered as
‘actors’ on an equal footing. At the same time, Latour (1999: 8–10) criticized phenome-
nology for intensifying German idealism’s focus on the subject/object distinction, a
statement rejected by Morgan (2014: 87), and that would certainly not apply to the phe-
nomenology of Merleau-Ponty (1945), nor to more recent developments by Gallagher
(2005) or Berthoz and Petit (2006) at the interface between phenomenology and the
cognitive neurosciences.
Bruno Latour was initially recognized as highly successful in introducing a sym-
metrical approach when applied to human actors (e.g. in taking into consideration the
religious affiliation of the Roman Catholic Louis Pasteur as against his creationist oppo-
nent Félix Pouchet (Latour, 1985). Similarly, the way he emphasized the crucial impor-
tance of technical objects in the process of scientific innovation as against the fantasy
of the disincarnated genius was widely approved in his work with Steve Woolgar enti-
tled ‘Laboratory Life’ (Latour and Woolgar, 1979). In contrast, qualifying objects as
‘actors’ in his work on ANT (see Pandora’s Hope, 1999) soon met with strong
376 Journal of Material Culture 22(4)

opposition by many, among whom his friend, the anthropologist Pierre Lemonnier (in
Latour and Lemonnier, 1994) has been the most vocal. In response to the latter’s argu-
ments, however, Latour would not budge, and never considered the candidacy of the
‘subject’ to carry the load of a theory of action. As a matter of fact, embodiment and the
body are not essential elements in ANT. The ‘actor’, whether human or non-human,
does not have a body. Indeed, if the body of the human actor (with his or her sensorium,
motricity, agency, emotions and the like) was an essential requirement of the theory of
action, then, for the sake of symmetry, Latour would have had to construct the notion of
the organic body of technical objects – something that is clearly impossible. Since
objects do not have the equivalent of a human body, then, it follows, the human actor
should not have one either. In contrast, our approach is clearly grounded in the epony-
mous article by Marcel Mauss (2006[1936]) on bodily techniques, with their organic
and social components. The body is an essential element in our paradigm of the bodily-
and-material cultures of religious practice. The Latourian ‘actor’ cannot be a proper
candidate for this role.
This is why we advocate the merits of our third candidate, that is, the ‘subject’, to
encapsulate everything we need in a theory of religious compliance through verbalized
and procedural knowledge, through the texts and creeds as well as bodily-and-material
culture.
Let us take heed of a valid point that Latour makes in his critique of German idealism:
the subject and the body cannot be conceptualized the way they were in the first half of
the 20th century when being a subject was predicated on the cogito, on thinking, and on
being conscious of oneself and the world. Once this was accepted, the philosophical dif-
ficulty was to catch up with all the complexities, contingencies and intricacies of human
existence and its embodied condition. This is where Foucault (2001), De Certeau (1986),
Žižek (2000) and many others come into the picture. They have rejected the Cartesian
cogito as the ontological substance of the subject and put the body and action in its stead.
We are ‘subjects’ for taking ourselves as the object of our actions and for being subjected
to the network of other subjects acting on ourselves. The body is the first of our tools, the
means of our action (Mauss 2006[1936]) and the focus of other people’s actions on our-
selves. We are our bodies, with their emotions, perceptions, drives, affects, intelligence
and unconscious as repressed. This is a philosophical question grounded in the history of
the human and social sciences. De Certeau (1986, 1987), just as Foucault (1988), Žižek
(2000) and several others belong to a philosophical tradition for which the notion of a
subject is too useful and important to be dispensed with.
For these philosophers, if there is anything like a body, it can only be the body of a
subject, not the body of an individual in the sense of the sociological tradition nor of an
actor in the Latourian symmetrical approach. A subject is a body and has a body. It has
the double status of a subject/object. Religious practice and techniques of the body
belong with the technologies of the subject that produce and shape the subject through a
process of subjectivation. Its study must focus on the subject as generated by his or her
engagement in a compelling religious practice. This is where we depart from the views
expressed by David Morgan (see his article in this special issue) who relies on Bruno
Latour as regards networks, and on Peirce and analytical philosophy to connect religion
on the one hand and bodily-and-material cultures on the other hand.3 Simultaneously, we
Mohan and Warnier 377

both share a common purpose and goal. Morgan introduces the embodied subject into the
Latourian ANT by emphasizing the role of the phenomenological that has been turned
down by Latour. By doing so, Morgan also addresses one of the chief criticisms of ANT,
that its push for symmetry over-reaches and eliminates important distinctions between
‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’. In Morgan’s article, we see indications of his prior interest
in the affective, sensory and non-discursive value of images and materials in religion
(Morgan, 1998, 2008, 2010). However, our perspectives are inspired by different philo-
sophical traditions. The next section will explain this further.

Ambiguities of the subject

We suggest that taking the ‘subject’ into consideration is one of the most effective means
to avoid reifying bodily-and-material cultures, and help articulate them to affects, senses,
relationships, fluidity and the processual and eventful nature of the body and of the mate-
rial world. After having considered the praxeological and the phenomenological in the
study of the subject, let us develop this point by turning to psychoanalysis and a point
clearly made by Foucault (1981). The subject is the product of what Lacan, after Freud,
called a division that gives access to the symbolic order, while articulating it to the ‘Real’
and the ‘Imaginary’ that give shape to its action. The subject is divided up between its
Freudian unconscious as repressed and its consciousness of self and the world. However,
in the life of any human being, the division may happen or fail to do so. The subject may
come into being or not. It cannot be taken for granted. It is an event. It cannot be ontolo-
gized. Foucault, De Certeau, Žižek and several others have accepted the Freudian and
Lacanian critique. They have discarded the Cartesian Cogito as the single substance of
subjectivity. Accordingly, the subject is not transparent to himself or herself. The subject
is fluid so to speak and never knows exactly where he or she stands. This process has two
dimensions: one of subjection to a religious tradition and to something that exercises
power on the one hand and, on the other hand, a dimension of autonomy where he or she
is the object of his or her own actions to govern, shape one’s identity, experience with the
technologies of the subject proposed or imposed by the society and engage in a quest for
the ‘truth’ about oneself. In that context, ‘subjectivity’ does not pertain to the interiority
of a given person, nor to individual idiosyncrasies, but to the simple fact of acting, and
being or rather becoming a subject as defined above. Subjectivity is what results from
other people’s actions and of one’s actions on oneself. It is the product of a process.
As a subject, the devotee needs the input of the religious community to be provisioned
with all the bodily, material, emotional and cognitive resources of the religious tradi-
tions. Any religious subjectivation implies this double movement of self-government and
of subjection – of techniques of the self, techniques of the body and technologies of
power. The process of subjectivation takes place at the junction between the individual
subject and the networks of actions that he or she belongs to, between the ‘micro’ and the
‘macro’, the devotee and the group. We previously stated that the religious subject is
produced and marched in the name of something ‘real’. Let us go back to the Real.
As De Certeau (1987: 57) states, the religious subject is produced and marched in the
name of a Real that is produced as such by an Imaginary giving shape to given discourses,
bodies and material things. ‘Marching’ entails two things: some kind of devotional duty,
378 Journal of Material Culture 22(4)

and the fact that this duty is focused on the bodily-and-material culture of the subject. In
order to be the ‘true’ subject of his or her religious commitment (if there is any such thing
given the plasticity of the subject), the devotee has an obligation to make certain gestures,
to relate to given substances and objects, to experience given perceptions and emotions:
kneel, bathe in the stream, grow his or her hair or shave it, walk towards the sacred moun-
tain or around the temple, dance to the point of reaching a state of trance, etc. If we take
those practices as items on a list of obligations that suffice to define any religion, we reify
them. If we take into account the subjectivity of the devotee as an event and the status of
the subject as being a body (that incorporates material culture) and having a body, we can-
not reify religious practice. It belongs with all the ambiguities and uncertainties of the
subject.
In a nutshell, we include the notions of a subject and of subjectivation in our theoreti-
cal tool kit because we think they encapsulate all the ingredients we need to analyse
religious practice, compliance and/or deviation. Let us shortlist those ingredients: the
body of the devotee as a subject/object; the material things and substances geared to the
bodily schema, to its motions, emotions and the sensorium; the Real that is needed to
produce the devotee and march him or her; the Imaginary that is needed to transform
bodies, objects and substances into something Real for the faithful while avoiding any
kind of reification from a theoretical point of view; the society to which the believer
belongs; and, finally, religion as a social practice that proceeds to and from the institu-
tionalization of the Real. The subject is a social subject. Last, but not least, we also need
the psychic drive that gives the impulse to the subject.

Religious subjectivation and its discontents

Freud’s book ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ (1961[1930]) was published in Vienna at
a time when the concept of civilization was generally uncritically accepted as something
uniquely Western and the best example of its kind. Freud pointed out that instead
‘Civilization’ had its own internal drawbacks, contradictions and failures, and that it had
a cost, indeed, a very heavy cost as was proven with World War I.
Now to return to the issue of gaps and contradictions that we consider to be essential
to the process of religious subjectivation. We have already alluded to them when quoting
Gregory Bateson. They can be underscored following three lines of thought. First, is the
Bateson argument that inter-subjective relations are achieved through two different chan-
nels or media. One channel is verbalized, propositional knowledge consisting of words,
speech, discourse, text and anything that can be expressed in so many words, including
systems of signs that can be decoded and translated into words. For example, rules con-
cerning polluting substances as matter out of place according to Mary Douglas (1966).
The other channel is procedural knowledge that is incorporated in bodily conducts and
material culture such as singing sacred songs, reciting mantras, or non-verbal bodily
communication between devotees. This vocabulary is recent and Bateson did not use it.
However, he clearly makes this distinction when he defines the double bind (Bateson,
1972: 178–183) as a deadlock experienced by an individual or a group subjected to two
conflicting injunctions. The cases quoted by him show that the double bind is most effi-
cient when the injunctions are conveyed through two different channels – verbal and
bodily/non-verbal – producing a cognitive gap between them. Most of the examples that
Mohan and Warnier 379

he quotes illustrate this point, such as that of Zen Buddhism that immediately follows his
definition of the cognitive gap between the two media that may (or may not in certain
cases) result in a double bind:

The Zen master attempts to bring about enlightenment in his pupil in various ways. One of the
things he does is to hold a stick over the pupil’s head and say fiercely, ‘If you say this stick is
real, I will strike you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will strike you with it. If you don’t
say anything, I will strike you with it.’ (p. 179)

The Zen master produces a cognitive gap by simultaneously using speech and a gesture-
and-stick that are at odds with each other. But he does it to achieve enlightenment, writes
Bateson, whereas, in other circumstances, this process is implemented – intentionally as
in the practice of torture, or not – to produce a disturbance within the subject, reaching a
climax with a painful double bind.
Let us underscore that Bateson’s example is taken from religious practice. The cogni-
tive gaps between verbal statements and the sensory-motor experience may be far more
widespread in religious practice than we think. The Catholic priest says that the Eucharist
is the body and blood of Christ whilst the sensory experience clearly denies his state-
ment. The cognitive gap must be bridged in order to avoid a painful double bind. This is
achieved by resorting to the Imaginary that transforms the perception of the sensori-
motor experience. In religion, this process achieves awe, consent, compliance and
enlightenment. In ordinary life, says Bateson (1936), when it goes as far as the double
bind, the cognitive gap may trigger a process of schismogenesis in the person (pp. 195–
196), family (pp. 207–208), groups (pp. 183–185), and politics (p. 186). This is not the
place to discuss how Bateson overhauled his theoretical approach under the influence of
Freud and cybernetic theory, as expressed in the 1958 Epilogue of Naven (1936). Nor is
it appropriate to attempt a translation of his theory in view of the considerable develop-
ment of the cognitive neurosciences. Suffice it to say that the two media may (or may
not) be at odds, and that gaps, double binds and schismogenesis rest on the dynamic
contradictions between what is conveyed and achieved by their simultaneous implemen-
tation in inter-subjective relations, and that they were integrated in Bateson’s theory of
religious practice as early as 1936.
Second, is the Foucauldian argument where subjectivation is a double process of: (1)
production of given subjectivities, lifestyles, repertoires of bodily practice, and (2) at the
same time a process of subjection to a sovereignty. Or, in other words, governmentalities
are systems of action on oneself and on other people’s action. Yet governmentalities act
on the subject precisely at the point where the subject governs itself, and takes himself or
herself as the object of his or her own actions. One cannot assume that acting on other
people is devoid of tensions and contradictions. Subjection/subjectivation is geared to an
ambiguous exercise of power: power as a means of producing subjects and shaping them,
and power as a means to control, exercise domination, and even punish. Subjectivation
is not a smooth, peaceful and entirely positive process.
Third, the cognitive neurosciences have argued that, whereas any subject has a fairly
good reflexive awareness of his or her speech and what it means, this is not the case with
bodily conducts. We are not aware of the billions of nervous impulses needed to sing
successfully while keeping in tune with the music and the other devotees. We are not
380 Journal of Material Culture 22(4)

conscious of all the stimuli that we receive through our highly complex sensorium. If we
were conscious of them, we would be overwhelmed by a flood of (conscious) percep-
tions. We would be incapable of keeping control over such a flood. In order to avoid
being stuck or overwhelmed, our nervous/cognitive system selects and brings to our
awareness only those stimuli that are relevant to our present situation, that is, a minute
fraction of what our sensory channels actually catch. It inhibits the awareness of irrele-
vant stimuli. Bodily conducts and the sensorium are buried in the cognitive unconscious
(Buser, 2005; Parlebas, 1999: 170–176). Consequently, there is a fundamental imbalance
between verbal self-awareness (and intentionality) in speech on the one hand and the
bodily/sensory unconscious on the other hand. This peculiarity of our cognitive system
provides the conditions for gaps, contradictions, conflicts between conscious verbalized
knowledge and mostly unconscious, embodied, procedural knowledge, sensorium and
emotions of which we have little awareness or control.
Several scholars such as Keane (2003, 2005: 185), Morgan (1998, 2010) and
Knappett (2005) have tried to address similar issues within the tradition of analytical
philosophy. We find it difficult to follow them on the issues raised above insofar as
analytical philosophy takes language as its basic paradigm. Much has been done within
this tradition to reach all the way to the body, emotions and the matter of things by
resorting to phenomenology. David Morgan (2010: 4), for example, is quite explicit
regarding the power of emotions and the reframing of belief as ‘felt-belief’. We are very
close to such theoretical and descriptive propositions. What we attempt to do in this
editorial is to shift the theoretical approach and, right from the start, bring it closer to
the question of the production/marching of the devotee by framing the latter within the
question of the subject and subjectivity. We propose both approaches in this special
issue in the hope that it may trigger a debate. In the future, we shall discover whether
this is a valuable proposition or not.
The three arguments presented so far disqualify any functionalist approach to reli-
gious subjectivation. The latter is fraught with tensions, contradictions and the ambigui-
ties and complexities of power relationships. The arguments disqualify the confusion
between practice and its verbal translation, between the thing and its representations,
between the pipe and the picture of the pipe, and between religious practice and doctrine.
If we are right in saying that religion necessarily involves the body of the subject and its
material culture, then such contradictions may be essential to the religious experience,
and they may contribute to explaining how religion may march the devotee and obtain
his or her consent and compliance.

‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘orthopraxy’

The arguments mentioned above may also explain why art, science, warfare, medicine,
politics, sports and sex merge easily with religion and with one another, producing a
compelling, strange and sometimes explosive mix. We may ask, why and how? If we
emphasize the doctrinal contents of religion, we would achieve a kind of ‘domaining’
and bring to the fore the differences between different religions. We would also under-
score the differences between religion on the one hand and politics, sports, arts, warfare,
sex, etc. on the other hand because their discourses and their explicit purposes are quite
Mohan and Warnier 381

different. Nieber’s discussion (this issue) of how a practice might be both ‘religious’ and
‘medicinal’ indicates both how practices must increasingly conform to one or the other
domain, and how people might choose to respond to more doctrinally oriented faiths
such as Wahhabism.
By contrast, if we stress the bodily-and-material cultures of religious subjectivation
and the tensions that inhere in them, we will bring to the fore what they have in common
with sports, warfare and politics, i.e. bodies, subjectivities, motions, emotions, drives,
material culture, etc. In that respect, fascism has been convincingly equated to a religion
by Emilio Gentile (1996). In the context of this special issue, the trash heaps collected by
Chadic kingdoms and taken over by Muslim Fulani rulers in Africa combine religious
compliance with political subjection (Guitard, this issue), as do the Vèlinès visits to
Lithuanian cemeteries in memory of the politically tormented history of that ‘Bloodland’
(Thorpe, this issue). These are not isolated cases.
The bodily-and-material cultures smuggle elements of subjectivation into a subject
who is often unaware of the process and, hence, uncritical about it. They obfuscate the
cognitive gaps and contradictions. They combine to produce a religious subject who will
comply not only because of the attractiveness of the beliefs and creeds, but also because
he or she feels, experiences and engages in bodily-and-material cultures together with its
Imaginary that may help cover up the cognitive gaps, contradictions and discontents of
religious subjectivation. A Kalashnikov rifle may acquire the same sacred aura as a reli-
quary or a sacred icon provided a group of subjects validates the doctrine–praxis com-
plex and overcomes the cognitive gaps and contradictions by resorting to a common
Imaginary. This very process may explain to a large extent the production of compliance
and, conversely, of rejection. It may well explain by what means you can or cannot cre-
ate believers and march them.
The five papers published in this special issue enter in dialectical interaction with the
points developed in the Editorial, with cases from quite different religious and cultural
backgrounds. From Puerto Rico, Raquel Romberg studies how spiritists provide divina-
tion, healing and possession rituals as a means of summoning transformative processes
in the devotees’ subjectivities. In northern Cameroon, Emilie Guitard explores the trash
heaps piled up next to the royal palaces of the Chadic kingdoms as a means of totalizing
the waste disembodied by subjects in all the hamlets. In a study that differs from the
contemporary nature of the other four papers by using a historical lens, Guitard describes
how these trash heaps, as sacred embodiments of the kingdoms, were taken over by the
Fulani (Muslim) conquerors and endowed with a new layer of religious significance and
practice. From Lithuania, Denise Thorpe writes of how people of different religious
backgrounds get together in cemeteries on All Souls’ Day to light candles and share in
the painful remembrance of their tormented past. In India, the Jain emerald traders stud-
ied by Brian Brazeal practise exacting ascetic bodily mortifications in a religious context
as proof of their personal trustworthiness in a totally informal market. And from Zanzibar,
Hanna Nieber discusses how the kombe healing practice for devotees of different reli-
gious backgrounds (Muslims and Christians alike) consists of drinking water that has
been used to wash Qur’anic writing.
This special issue includes quite different religious traditions: spiritism in Puerto Rico
(Romberg), African sacred kingship (Guitard), European Christianity (Thorpe), Jainism
382 Journal of Material Culture 22(4)

(Brazeal), and Islam (Nieber). This is admittedly a restricted sample, and we regret the
absence of a number of important religious traditions. However, we expect it is diversi-
fied enough to substantiate the workings of the bodily-and-material cultures in producing
the religious subject and in marching the devotee.

Acknowledgements
This special issue is a joint venture by its co-editors and the result of a conference proposal formulated
by Urmila Mohan in early 2013. The co-editors shared the task of vetting the paper submissions,
organizing the conference and preparing this publication. We acknowledge with much gratitude the
support of Susanne Küchler, Christopher Pinney and the staff of the Anthropology Department at
UCL in helping to organize the conference, and David Morgan who attended and represented the
Material Religion journal team. We are grateful to the Journal of Material Culture, the Anthropology
Department at UCL and the Institut des Mondes Africains (IMAF, Paris) for their support in funding
this event. We also wish to thank Claire Schneider at Musée du Quai Branly and Chris Hagisavva at
UCL for their help in selecting films and preparing them for screening during the conference, and
Haidy Geismar, Delphine Mercier, Elizabeth Fox and Priya Joshi for preparing the concurrent exhibit
‘Making Religious Subjects: Charting Bodily Distance and Proximity through Materials of Religious
Subjectivation’ in the Anthropology Galleries. Last, but not least, we thank the panellists for their
stimulating papers and Christopher Pinney for his closing remarks at the conference.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors and there is no conflict of interest.

Notes
1. In the original French: ‘C’est toujours au nom d’un réel qu’on “fait marcher” des croyants et
qu’on les produit.’
2. Indeed, there is a material and sensory variability to this most fundamental of human activi-
ties. Our comfort, gait and motion depend on the type of surface that we walk on and whether
we choose to rely on devices of various kinds. For instance, with constant developments in
prosthetic materials for the wounded, on what type of legs could we march in the future?
3. We are grateful to David Morgan for his contribution to the conference held on 17–18 June
2014 and for his article published in the present special issue. The differences between our
two points of view as outlined here underscore the need for further development of a philo-
sophically educated approach to the importance of bodily and material cultures in the produc-
tion of religious compliance. In such matters, academic research still has a long way to go.
We wish to present the two points of view and let the readers choose what is most pertinent to
their interest.

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Author biographies
Urmila Mohan is an Honorary Research Associate at the Department of Anthropology, University
College London, and a 2016-18 Bard Graduate Center-American Museum of Natural History
Postdoctoral Fellow in museum anthropology. Her doctoral research was on clothing as material-
ity in a contemporary Hindu group in India while her current project expands her research to
include textiles and Hinduism in Southeast Asia. She is the co-founding editor of the ‘Material
Religions’ blog.
Jean-Pierre Warnier is Honorary Professor of Anthropology at University Paris-Descartes and
Research Fellow at the Institut des Mondes Africains, Paris. His research interests are material
culture, praxeology, Foucault, Cameroon Grassfields and Africa. Significant publications are:
Echanges, développement et hiérarchies dans le Bamenda pré-colonial – Cameroun (Franz Steiner
Verlag, 1985), Construire la culture matérielle. L’Homme qui pensait avec ses doigts, (PUF,
1999) and The Pot-King: The Body and Technologies of Power (Brill, 2007).