Matters of Faith: Icons, Identification, and the Role of Material Things in Religious Subject Formation

• In Event: 176 - Section on Sociology of Religion Paper Session. Innovations in the Sociology of Religion

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic study of contemporary conversions to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the United States, this paper analyses converts’ shifting experiences of Orthodox religious icons. Expanding on David Morgan’s (2012) argument that icons act as interfaces through which the self can become capable of a broader range of activity and feeling, my analysis demonstrates that the phenomenology of the iconic interface is not inherent in the artifact by itself but is instead produced through the ways icons circulate within the practices and social-material environments of new (as well as already established) Orthodox Christians. Through ethnographically reconstructing the social, cultural, and material processes by which converting actors moved from experiencing icons as strange, even off-putting, art objects to mediums for interacting with divine persons, I demonstrate how these material artifacts came to develop experientially persuasive, subject-forming capacities.

Author

• Daniel A. Winchester, Purdue University