The Theologically Situated Lives of Everyday Things: Essays on Śrīvaiṣṇava Material Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In her seminal essay on ‘the material turn in the study of religion’ Hazard (2013) speaks of its objective as being, broadly speaking, to encourage us to understand materiality, not as an auxiliary or tertiary aspect of religions but, instead, to reorient our gaze from religion as predominantly doctrinal, transcendent and interior, to religion as that which is centred in the human body, its sensorium and objects. Yet, as she also suggests, even in such an agreed upon ‘material turn’ the question still remains as to it means to take materiality seriously within the study of religion? It appears that the answer is self-evident when it comes to materiality in the context of lived religious contemporary practices which one can observe and document. As Webb Keane (2008) has pointed out this might involve a deliberate decentring of religious belief in favour of religion’s material forms. It might move on even more, as in the ‘new materialism’, to a radical decentring of the anthropocentric nature of academic enquiry. But, for those who work on religions and religious communities from a textual and/or a pre-modern perspective, where as we shall see in the range of articles presented in these two thematic volumes, there has been a long doctrinal and theological tradition of how to use, interpret and understand objects, clothing, food and the paraphernalia of a religious life, it is clear that other methodological tools have to be employed. In this context Caroline Bynum’s work becomes particularly useful to turn to for us to think about how such religious communities might have engaged with objects or imbued them with sacrality and divinity against the backdrop of a theologically informed, implicit or explicit understanding of the nature of the relationship between the material and the immaterial. Ivanič et al. (2019) have most fruitfully drawn upon Bynum’s consistent attempts over many monographs to foreground the complex relationship between the Christian medieval and the material to think through, along with their contributors, the lives of objects as disparate as Tibetan relics, Arabic amulets and Christian votive offerings. Bynum, as they show, offers us an intertwined three-pronged approach to materiality which is also a theoretical framework that we have fruitfully drawn upon in these thematic issues.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".