Proximity and form: the correlation between what humans believe and the nature of their relationships to the material world.

Abstract

How do humans relate to material culture with respect to what they “believe in” (such as gods or spirits)? Objects used in religious practice have generally been understood within Material Culture Studies as corresponding to mind-dependent concepts. This is largely derived from Neo-Kantian thought which reified ideas of an internal mind in which “representations” are sustained.
Attempts to shift thought since the 1990s, including recent “post-anthropocentric” approaches, have arguably only indurated representationalism, albeit with a subjectivist ‘twist’: they have generally neither demanded nor affected any substantive change to belief or behaviour. Indeed, the concept of “belief” itself has largely been banished from the humanities and social sciences to obviate the “unpalatable” implication that “believers” form attachments to objects associated with “illusory” ideas. But there is an absurd irony in this, of course: belief in a god or a spirit is a “problem” only if one believes they are representational constructs. So, despite recent attempts to overcome representational Euro-American ‘metaphysics’, belief-claims unwittingly continue to be advanced which, by their own account, cannot and do not involve belief. It is suggested here instead that there can be no change without change in belief: we can neither shift our understanding of human relations to the material realm in the past, nor affect change in the future, without a root and branch purge of the spectre of neo-Kantianism.

This thesis draws from Life Philosophy, Philosophical Anthropology and Gestalt Psychology as well as more recent research in Enactive Cognition and Affectivity. It posits that belief is derived directly from sensuous affectivity of the experience of life (and death). It further suggests that this leads to perceived tensions between “mind”-body/self-world which elicit conflicting responses concerned with (physical)self-preservation and (conscious)self-annihilation: a kind of yearning for “re-enchantment”. Whether understood as localised and imminent (such as the spirit of a tree) or distant and transcendent (such as a god or big-bang theory), the location of the source of life in belief is co-determinate with the form of objects humans enter into direct exchanges with for seeking fulfilment of the yearning. Importantly, exchanges stemming from true belief, do not take place through “mind”-dependent intermediary objects or concepts, but in response to the demands of affective sensory phenomena.

While maintaining that we cannot “interpret” the specific “meanings” individuals or communities attribute to objects, actions or beliefs; this approach offers a way for understanding - through observation of material forms and exchange mechanisms - the nature of a given community’s relationship to the material world and drivers of change. This has far-reaching potential implications for understanding past and present material exchanges and social dynamics including religious practice, consumerism, the production and reception of art/literature, social/digital media, and political populism. The kinds of insights such an approach can offer are explored in this thesis through the inherent tensions between figurative, aniconic and iconoclastic traditions in ancient Israel and Punic Carthage; and in recent militant Salafist Islamism.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Fares Khereddine Moussa: orcid.org/0009-0001-3587-3210

ORCID for Josh Pollard: orcid.org/0000-0002-8429-2009

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