Introduction: The im/materiality of Pacific religious movements

Abstract

Instead of reproducing an assumed opposition between immaterial and material religious elements to lived religious worlds, this special section approaches the issue of im/materiality through ethnographic and historical material collected on Pacific religious movements. We argue that religious movements exemplify the emergent character of religion, revealing how it is fluidly and continuously constructed. Religious movements are creative becomings, in which the im/materiality of religion is negotiated anew when members work toward the realization of their religious projects. Studying religious movements, we therefore suggest, allows us to see the conceptualization of, and the relationship between, materiality and immateriality in the making and offers a privileged perspective on the forces running through and composing emergent religious worlds. In our introduction, we summarize and contextualize our contributors’ innovative theoretical and analytical approaches in relation to questions of materiality and immateriality in the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of religion more generally.