Ritual and Material Religion: Bodies, Objects, and Places

This course examines how religious life is enacted through embodied practice, material culture, and the production of sacred space. Integrating foundational approaches in religious studies, anthropology of religion, and material culture studies, the course introduces classic and contemporary theories of ritual and materiality and applies them comparatively across diverse traditions and modern contexts. We analyze ritual as social and performative action for how they shape identities, communities, authority, and power, while attending to the sensory and material worlds through which religious meaning is made: gesture and posture, sound and silence, food and clothing, images and icons, architecture, media, and everyday objects. Experiential learning is integral and methodologically guided. Students complete structured observation and field note exercises (where feasible), a material culture object biography tracing how an item circulates and acquires significance, and a place-based project that maps how spaces become sacred, contested, or transformed through movement, memory, and practice. Emphasis is placed on ethical, reflexive methods for studying lived religion and on developing analytic writing that links thick description to disciplined interpretation.