Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Materializing the Bible : Scripture, Sensation, Place, PDF eBook

Materializing the Bible : Scripture, Sensation, Place PDF

Part of the Bloomsbury Studies in Material Religion series

PDF

Please note: eBooks can only be purchased with a UK issued credit card and all our eBooks (ePub and PDF) are DRM protected.

Description

What happens when the written words of biblical scripture are transformed into experiential, choreographed environments? To answer this question, anthropologist James Bielo explores a diverse range of practices and places that materialize the Bible, including gardens, theme parks, shrines, museums, memorials, exhibitions, theatrical productions, and other forms of replication. Integrating ethnographic, archival, and mass media data, case studies focus primarily on U.S. Christianity from the late 19th-century to the present.

Composed as 20 short chapters that may be read in any order, the book is divided into three sections. Section I, Variations on Replication, analyzes examples that recontextualize elements from the (actual or imagined) biblical past. Section II, The Power of Nature, turns to the natural world associated with Christian scripture and how it is mobilized as a privileged media. Section III, Choreographing Experience, examines lived interactions with the affordances of materializing the Bible.

Bielo argues that materializing the Bible works as an authorizing practice to intensify intimacies with scripture and circulate potent ideologies. Performed through the sensory experience of bodies, physical technologies, and infrastructures of place, Bielo illustrates how this phenomenon is always, ultimately, about expressions of power.

Information

Other Formats

Information

Also in the Bloomsbury Studies in Material Religion series  |  View all