RT Article
T1 Objects, object-ness, and shadows of meanings: carving prayer beads and exploring their materiality alongside a Khaksari Sufi Murshid
JF Material religion
VO 14
IS 3
SP 368
OP 388
A1 Saramifar, Younes
LA English
PB Taylor & Francis
YR 2018
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1663476195
AB 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.
K1 Islam
K1 OOO
K1 Sufism
K1 anthropology of materiality
K1 object-oriented ontology
K1 objectness
K1 Rosary
K1 speculative realism
K1 Surplus
DO 10.1080/17432200.2018.1487765