The Materiality of Divine Agency

Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Karen Sonik, Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Karen Sonik

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501502309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

Two topics of current critical interest, agency and materiality, are here explored in the context of their intersection with the divine. Specific case studies, emphasizing the ancient Near East but including treatments also of the European Middle Ages and ancient Greece, elucidate the nature and implications of this intersection: What is the relationship between the divine and the particular matter or physical form in which it is materially represented or mentally visualized? How do sacral or divine "things" act, and what is the source and nature of their agency? How might we productively define and think about anthropomorphism in relation to the divine? What is the relationship between the mental and the material image, and between the categories of object and image, image and likeness, and likeness and representation? Drawing on a broad range of written and pictorial sources, this volume is a novel contribution to the contemporary discourse on the functioning and communicative potential of the material and materialized divine as it is developing in the fields of anthropology, art history, and the history and cognitive science of religion.

Part I: The Material Divine: Anthropomorphism, Animation, and Agency in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik

Between Cognition and Culture: Theorizing the Materiality of Divine Agency in Cross- Cultural Perspective

Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, 15 East 84th Street New York, NY 10028, e-mail: [email protected]

Karen Sonik, Department of Art & Art History, Auburn University, 108 Biggin Hall, Auburn, AL 36849, e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: Specifically addressing the means and manner whereby the divine might be materialized or presenced in a particular matrix, divine images might act on and interact with individuals, and inanimate or even animate objects or entities might acquire a measure of divine agency so that they come to function, in effect, as (secondary) divine agents, this contribution (as well as the diverse essays contained in this volume) maintains a central emphasis on and exploration of the communicative potential and actuality of the material divine. It also explores, as a corollary, such issues as mimesis and portraiture in the context of divine representations, the definition and application of the terms animate and anthropomorphic to the material and materialized divine, and the nuanced distinctions between the concepts of image, likeness, and representation as these are negotiated in diverse cultural and spatiotemporal contexts.

Keywords: Agency, animacy, divine, image, likeness, materiality, mimesis, presence, representation

1 Matter Matters and Materiality

In recent decades, the development of materiality as a critical term and the burgeoning interest in pursuing its implications across diverse disciplines - anthropology, art history, sociology, and the history and cognitive science of religion among these - has seen the expansion and nuancing of its use and meaning beyond mere corporeity, the possession of physical substance.1 It is frequently if not always intentionally delineated as overlapping with material culture,2 itself a complex and somewhat protean concept diversely or even simultaneously signifying the material expression or reflection of human behavior or practice (Glassie 1999: 41),3 an active and dynamic“social practice constitutive of the social order" (Preucel 2006: 5),4 and a“scaffold for distributed cognition” (Dunbar et al. 2010: 4; DeMarrais et al. 2004; Renfrew and Scarre 1998).5 In addition to these inherited implications, materiality has been productively delineated as a multifaceted concept in its own right: a means of exploring both immateriality,“the merely apparent, behind which lies that which is real” (Miller 2005:1),6 and mutuality,“the myriad ways in which material culture mediates social being” (Preucel 2006: 5; Gosden 1994: 82ff.), as well as comprising“a relational perspective on materials, one that obliges us to think about their properties, qualities, or affordances” (Hodder 2012: 191; Ingold 2007; Graves-Brown 2000: 4).7

Concomitant with a renewed emphasis on the material, the eliding or obscuring of the traditional boundaries erected between art and nature (Pomian 1990: 69-79; Daston and Park 1998: 265-76;Daston 2004: 21, 24), subject and object (Gell 1998; Miller 2005; Marcoulatos 2003), person and non-person (Hallowell 1960; Kopytoff 1986;Dubois 2003;Knappett 2005), human and nonhuman (Latour 1993, 1999), the mental and the material (Renfrew and Scarre 1998; DeMarrais et al. 2004), the functional and the symbolic (Hodder 1982; Knappett 2005: 8), and spirit and matter (Keane 2003; Meskell 2005) - along side a developing interest in thoroughly elucidating specific object worlds and biographies (Kopytoff 1986; Gosden 1999; Meskell 2004b) - has given rise to a new and fruitful discourse on matters of matter in which the concept of materiality continues to play a central role.

The intention of the current volume is to scrutinize the notion of materiality in its contact with the divine and to reconsider its implications for human cognition. Prerequisite to such an undertaking is the understanding that the human mind operates using representations or mental contents - pictorial, compositional, and abstract - and that experience automatically organizes these in broader frameworks or schemas.8 Taking such cognitive mental states and processes into account transforms the approach to materiality taken here into something distinct from the consideration of matter as mere physical stuff, that which is visible or tangible to the senses. If matter matters, it is the mental framework assigning it meaning in particular institutional and cultural contexts that provides the explanatory pattern for why it matters. The contexts in which it might occur, moreover, are by no means static or singular, so that objects might come down to us with an entire complex trajectory. This approach to materiality, while it acknowledges alterations in the meaning of matter that might (and do) develop over time, should still be regarded as distinct from the life history approach to things that has taken (productive) root in the humanities and social science over the past three decades (i.e. Appadurai 1986b; Schiffer 1999;Meskell 2004b;Morgan 2010).

The cognitive approach espoused here, based on the“epistemological condition that no human being can have direct knowledge of any ‘thing'” (Carru- thers 1998: 14) but depends rather on memory and active recollection - working, essentially, by association - not only allows for but, indeed, demands the use of information gleaned from textual sources where it is available. It ties into Mark Johnson's rejection of the rigid objectivist separation of understanding from sensation and imagination and his call for a theory of meaning that“highlights the dynamic, interactive character of understanding” (Johnson 1990: 175; Lakoff and Johnson 2003). Understanding an object is a historically and culturally embedded, humanly embodied, imaginatively structured event, the meaning of which is always tied to a particular community.9 Meaning, in such a context, becomes a matter of relatedness that is irreducibly intentional: a mental event or symbol may possess meaning only provided there exists some one for whom it“is meaningful by virtue of its relation to something beyond itself” (Johnson 1990: 177) - in this case taking divinity as a referent. It is the specific performative actions of an individual, grounded in his or her understanding and imagination, that establish a relationship between an agent operating on behalf of a divinity and the divinity itself as referent - and that enables us to speak of objects or images as agents or even (detachable) parts of the composite divine.10 In this point in particular, then, the stance on materiality adopted here diverges from that often adopted in material culture studies, according to which (materially existing) things possess a significance, and a capacity to affect the world, that is independent of human action or manipulation of them (Tilley et al. 2006: 4).11 Whether meaning may actually be severed from language in this manner, indeed, remains unclear, and studies on cognition continue to debate this point. The approach adopted here regards cultural knowledge and cultural memory as central to and inextricable from any discussion of the materiality of things, particularly - as in this volume - things that have been assigned sacred status due to their consecration, their use in cultic contexts, or their functioning as (secondary) divine agents.

2 A Definition of Terms: Divine, Sacral, and Animate(d) Things

It is useful to include here a brief definition and elucidation of key terms and concepts considered in this chapter and in the volume at large:12 divine, sacral or sacred, and presence. (Agency or“doing,” the capacity to act as a person or at least social other, and anthropomorphism, the possession of human physical form and/or other human qualities, characteristics, or behaviors, are elucidated in the pertinent sections below.) The term divine, notably, is adopted - where appropriate and where possible - in preference to the term God or gods; it has the benefit of being both sufficiently neutral and sufficiently nonspecific to be broadly applicable in the type of cross-cultural discussion undertaken here. Divinity, moreover, need not necessarily be localized in a singular agent, anthropomorphic or otherwise, but may also comprise a relative rather than an absolute status, a cluster of qualities applicable and applied to varying degrees to a range of different types of things.13

Similarly broadly applied are the terms sacral or sacred, which describe things deriving from, offering a channel or a portal to, or otherwise being formally associated with religious practice or even identified with the divine. Sacred objects, in opposition to mundane or even profane ones, were famously defined by Durkheim (1964 [1915]: 47) as“things set apart and forbidden.” This definition may be retained here provided that sacred (as divine) is recognized as a relative rather than an absolute status, one existing on the latter end of the continuum stretching between the ordinary and the special, and that thing is understood as encompassing not merely material objects or matter but also persons, phenomena, or events.14

The term animate is applied here to describe the awakening of specific divine images or objects as well as the presenting (discussed below) of the divine within particular material matrices.15 In some cases, certainly, one might better discuss such sacral or divine things within the framework - quite literally, in some cases - of“things that talk,” composites of different species that“straddle boundaries between kinds” (Daston 2004: 21). The term animate, however, remains useful in that it foregrounds a practical grappling between made things, which are produced or crafted through human agency or mediation, and divine or sacred things, with respect to which human agency is often effaced or even explicitly denied - a grappling that frequently leaves traces in originating contexts even where it has been deliberately downplayed or effaced in theological theorizing. The Greek term acheiropoieta, for example, identifies miraculous portraits or representations that were“not made by any [human] hand,” encompassing in the Christian tradition such images as the Mandylion (Image of Edessa). The acheiropoieta are not limited to this context, however; ancient Greek sources include various accounts of divine images that had miraculously appeared, having fallen perhaps from the heavens or yielded by the seas, and that were understood as products of divine rather than human agen- cy.16 In Mesopotamia, for its part, written sources referred to the birth (Sumeri- an tu(d); Akkadian [w]aladu) rather than the making or crafting (epesu) of cult statues, which could also be recognized as divine or gods (ilu) even prior to the performance of the rituals (mis pi and pit pi) that enabled them to interact with humans and to both receive and give attention (Walker and Dick 1999: 116 ff.; Smith 2001: 184-87).17 The mis pi, moreover, also included an explicit and quite thorough disavowal of human intervention in the making of the divine image by the craftsmen involved (Berlejung 1997: 61-62), suggesting that this remained something of a sensitive point: the hands of the craftsmen involved in the making of the statue were - in a symbolic but quite viscerally effective gesture - severed using a tamarisk wood sword; the craftsmen swore that the craft deities rather than they (the human makers) were essentially responsible for the making of the statue; and the tools that had been used in the making were wrapped in the body of a sacrificed sheep and placed in the river, an act denoting their return to Nudimmud or Ea, the craft(y) god (Dick 1999: 40-41; Walker and Dick 1999, esp. pp. 70, 81, 99-10...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Part I:  The Material Divine: Anthropomorphism, Animation, and Agency in Cross-Cultural Perspective
• Part II: Divine Materials, Materiality, and Materialization in Mesopotamia
• Part III: A Feast for the Senses: Visual and Auditory Engagement with the Divine and Divine Agents in the Ancient Near East
• Index
• Fußnoten