The move to studying material and performative culture as a corrective to an overemphasis on texts and textualism is now several decades old. For more than a century anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, and folklorists have been interested in the symbolic dimensions of clothing, buildings, dances, festivals, and pilgrimage. A database survey of Church History, using the keywords “dancing” and “clothing,” for example, retrieves over 130 published articles, in this one journal, since 1980. The topic of “material religion” is definitely on the academic radar, and it has been for quite some time.

Materializing Religion advertises itself as “open[ing] up the emerging interdisciplinary field of material expressions of religion through … case studies … which explore the negotiable and permanently porous borders of social science, theology and the arts” (4). Many of the essays, however, do not broach theological issues, and in claiming that the volume is “path breaking” (6) the editors promise much more than is delivered. In fact, several of the chapters show a lack of methodological and theoretical sophistication. If, as the introduction suggests, materializing religion is all about making the spirit flesh, this reader had hopes of encountering living, breathing bodies in the case studies. Unfortunately, only a few of the fifteen chapters bring religion to life, either by presenting the thoughts and actions of actual individuals embodying their religion, or through writing rich, evocative descriptions of places and material things. The chapter on modern pagan witchcraft, for example, is ethereal and generic; the reader is presented with a thoroughly disembodied and dematerialized sense of contemporary pagan practices, and several other chapters suffer from a similar absence of bodies or rich description. The opening chapter describes the decline of religion in South West Wales, and the resulting “redundant chapels” that inhabit the landscape. What, the author rightly and interestingly asks, does such a religious landscape do to collective identities and cultural memory? To get at such questions, however, we need to hear the voices of those who live in these locales, including, presumably, the voice of the author. Methodologically, for the field of material religion to move forward, scholars will need to develop a writing style that is sensuous, on-the-ground, and attentive to detail.

Theoretically and analytically, many of the chapters leave much to be desired, offering little more than surveys and summaries. A chapter on religious dance in contemporary Germany surveys the surprising variety of dance, presents a typology to organize this variety, and concludes that what is needed is participant observation of specific case studies; the chapter reveals the very preliminary state of the research, which is a problem for the volume as a whole. Materializing Religion, as the editors readily admit, is exploratory and eclectic, lacking a central question, thesis, or theoretical perspective. Growing out of a session of the Sociology of Religion Group at the annual conference of the British Sociological Association (2001), the chapters comprising the volume demonstrate a desire to think about religion through its material, expressive, and ritual forms, but too many of the chapters are at a preliminary a state. The volume draws on and contributes little to the field of ritual studies. In the last decades, scholars of ritual have theorized rites and performances through the notions of complexity, virtuality, embodiment, and efficacy, but very little of such work finds its way into the reflections on ritual found in this volume. From a theoretical perspective, two chapters (one on the music of Handel and the other on pentecostal aesthetics) are perhaps the most successful, using occasions of material, performed religion to critique secularization theory and the assumptions of modernist aesthetics.

The volume is diverse enough that scholars will undoubtedly find something of interest and relevance to their own research. A few chapters, on Nonconformist architecture, Marist dress and garments, agency in witches' rituals, and pilgrimage in Fátima, Portugal, give a glimpse of what the volume could have been. The cost of the volume is prohibitive, and the various chapters will likely see the outside world by being selected for course readings in upper level undergraduate and graduate classes.