Abstract
Prayer beads, through processes of craftsmanship and trade, arrive at meanings, significations, and imaginative associations that are inscribed by religious-cultural codes or social networks. The shadows of meanings overwhelm their material existence as prayer beads despite their lives beginning before their enactment within the socio-cultural and religious networks. Therefore, alongside an Iranian Sufi murshid, I follow the object-ness and the life of rosaries and prayer beads in an "apprenticeship ethnographic" journey. I address the material life of rosaries to explain how their object-ness contributes to their materiality and meaning formation that they gain in a Sufi order. An approach informed by speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO) is chosen to examine what it means to study a religious object-in-itself. I follow the religiously loaded object and its spiritual traces by way of OOO to forgo the meanings and relationships that shadow the objects.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 368-388 |
Number of pages | 21 |
Journal | Material Religion |
Volume | 14 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 3 Jul 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Published online: 28 Sep 2018Keywords
- anthropology of materiality
- Islam
- object-oriented ontology
- objectness
- OOO
- rosary
- speculative realism
- Sufism
- surplus