Religion and Touch - Christina Welch
Series Foreword
Religion and Touch - Christina Welch
Graham Harvey [+]
Open University
Graham Harvey is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the Open University, UK. His research is concerned with the performance and rhetoric of identities among Jews, Pagans and indigenous peoples. He is particularly interested in the 'new animism', embracing relational and material approaches to interactions between humans and the larger than human world. His recent publications include The Handbook of Contemporary Animism(2013) and Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life (2013).
Description
There are many good reasons for studying religion and the senses, including the assertion made by this foreword (and contested both by some religionists and by perhaps within some of the following chapters) that religion is fully and definitively sensual, corporeal and worldly. This series takes up the project of the ‘turns’ to lived religion, everyday religion, materiality, gender, embodiment and performance. By sustained focus on the senses—perhaps mediating mechanisms between our bodies and our world—we will gain a greatly improved sense of what religion is and what religious people do.