The modern fear of matter: Reflections on the Protestantism of Victorian science

Material Religion

Volumn 4, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 264-283

  Pels, Peter ^a  

^a LEIDEN UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

Materialism; Materiality; Prophecy; Religion; Victorian science

Indexed keywords

EID: 85047700206     PISSN: 17432200     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2752/175183408X376656     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. In recent work on material culture, some stress discourses of the object's or "fetish's" agency (Gell 1998; Pels 1998; Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988, 1999); while others (Appadurai 1986; Myers 2001 a; and, to a lesser extent, Keane 1997) stress the human regimes of value to which objects are subordinated. The more remarkable thing about this literature, however, is its recent convergence of human and objective agency and intention (see especially Gell 1998; Keane 1996, 2001; Miller 1987; and Spyer 1998).
2. As Emile Durkheim (1965 [1912]: 144-5)
3. and, commenting on Durkheim's work, Michael Taussig (1993) bring out, the relationship is much more complex, especially when one considers its historical layering (see, e. g. Myers 2001b; Wolfe 1999).
4. See the remarks, below, on Durkheim's "hyperspiritual" conscience collective and Tylor's notion of "culture. "
5. See Taylor's analysis of the emergence of the interior, autonomous self in Western philosophy (1989).
6. This is, of course, ideology. As I have argued in juxtaposing Alfred Wallace's spiritualism and Edward Tylor's taxonomic schemes, all determinations of the material or the factual involve moral and political decisions (Pels 2003).
7. I use the gender of the "man-made" intentionally, as "male" mechanic manufacture and "female" natural procreation have long been opposed by the hegemonic discourses that I target. In contrast, see Donna Haraway's exploration of the liberating possibilities of the person that is both "made" and "grown"-the cyborg (Haraway 1991).
8. I borrow these terms from Johannes Fabian's analysis of anthropological rhetoric (Fabian 1983).
9. As far as I can tell, Tylor used "Materialism" only once in Primitive Culture, as a way to define "the deepest of all religious schisms, that which divides Animism from Materialism" (1873/1: 502). Placed at the end of Volume I, one wonders whether this-obviously radical- pronouncement was not too controversial to be repeated (especially for someone who could still be banned from an academic position by the Oxbridge religious establishment because of his Dissenting background).
10. Marginalized, that is, from mainstream Science. Despite the overwhelming philosophical literature on hermeneutics, phenomenology and like approaches, the social history of the survival of the more phenomenological and democratic attitudes towards research in scientific disciplines vis-à-vis the "hard sciences," in the humanities, in the field of anthropological method (cf. Asad 1994) and in popular science, occultism included (Pels 2000; 2003), is still in its infancy. Annan, Noel. 1955. The Intellectual Aristocracy, in J. H. Plumb (ed.), Studies in Social History. New York, Longmans Green, pp. 243-87.
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