中研院民族所

Why The Spirit of Matter? On secularism and materiality as topics for anthropologists of religion

Dr. Peter Pels

Professor of Anthropology and Sociology of Africa, Leiden University

2023年12月18日（一）上午10點至12點

中央研究院民族學研究所第三會議室

This presentation introduces the main arguments of my recently published The Spirit of Matter: Modernity, Religion, and the Power of Objects (Berghahn, 2023) through the examples of a secularist “relic” and the magic of museum realism. Early in my career, I was puzzled by two main problems: firstly, why, when so many manifestations of European secularism were emotional and affective, could lead people to sacrifice themselves for king and country, or lead to the “worship” of “Mammon” (or “materialism”), did so many Europeans try to persuade themselves that they were not religious?  Why did the anthropology of religion not engage more insistently with the sacred aspects of North Atlantic secularism? And secondly, why did so many North Atlantic thinkers insist that the “real” objects of science were abstractions - while Europeans scientists were obsessively collecting concrete things at the same time, and incessantly produced one material spectacle after another, whether as Wunderkammer, as museums of art, science and the exotic, as “World” expositions, or in the form of consumer society’s commodity fetishes, advertising and brands?

The Spirit of Matter argues that we should start to understand this as a fear, introduced above all by Protestant Christians, of excessive objects and of losing one’s human agency to them - fear expressed, among other things, in the adoption of terms (like “relic”, “fetish”, or “idol”) that tried to keep secular science pure by banishing such excessive objects to other times and modes of thought (such as “religion”) and places (“Africa”). Nevertheless, excessive matters are universal and cannot be eradicated. As a result, they haunt North Atlantic secularist circles in the form of ghosts, or in the cultivation of various forms of magic (including the ‘realism of many museums). The presentation starts with the extraordinary career of a secularist, yet excessive object – Jeremy Bentham’s Auto-Icon, which was supposed to remember and celebrate his anti-religious philosophy after his death – which shows that the quasi-religious fear of excessive matter cropped up regardless of the intentions of modern secularists, to give modern people “the shivers”, and could make even the secularist Bentham afraid of ghosts. A second example takes this way of reasoning to the modern history of European museums, where it can show that secularism results in what one can call a “magic of realism”, once exhibition makers use(d) excessive objects to attract visitors to the ‘real’ knowledge they want these visitors to consume.

許仟慈，02-2652-3324，chientsu@gate.sinica.edu.tw