A cross-cultural theory of relics: on understanding religion, bodies, artefacts, images and art

Abstract

This paper argues that relics and, especially, relic-related behaviour, are a fundamental part of religion as a global human cultural practice. Using examples of artefacts and artworks from a variety of religious traditions and periods, a cross-cultural definition and theory of relics is proposed that encompasses and aims to explain a wide range of behaviour, from structured worship to celebrity adulation. A crucial distinction between religious doctrine/theology and religious practice is drawn, and the analytical utility of the distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ is challenged. Throughout human history, special personages – gods, ancestors, kings, queens, saints, heroes, celebrities – have been regarded as sources of power. Their body parts, items their bodies have touched, and images made of them, have, by the operation of a mechanism of transfer and equivalence, also been attributed with power. A new tripartite theoretical framework is outlined that extends the definition of relics from body parts and contact artefacts to images, helping to explain the power of images in different cultural contexts. The attribution of power to special personages, artefacts and images is intrinsically connected to theories of causation; these aetiological concerns have given rise to much of what is called art, to the great value assigned to art and, more recently, to the value of memorabilia.

Keywords:

• relics
• religion
• bodies
• images
• art
• portraiture
• memorabilia
• celebrity
• value
• aetiology

Acknowledgements

This essay has its origins in an inaugural professorial lecture at the University of East Anglia in 2009. I am grateful for feedback from John Mitchell, Sandy Heslop, Margit Thøfner, George Lau, John Mack, Karen Jacobs, Aristoteles Barcelos Neto, Matthew Sillence and other colleagues at UEA. I am also grateful to two anonymous peer reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank James Robinson and Anna Harnden for the invitation to attend the stimulating Matter of Faith conference at the British Museum in October 2011, coinciding with the exhibition Treasures of Heaven.

Notes on contributor

Steven Hooper is Director of the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, and Professor of Visual Arts, at the University of East Anglia. Holding a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University, his research mainly focuses on Polynesian and Fijian art, most recently through AHRC-funded research projects which have led to exhibitions. A special interest in ritual, exchange, the power of objects and in religion as practice, stimulated by the cross-disciplinary environment in which he works at UEA, has led to these cross-cultural reflections on the nature and importance of relics.

Notes

1. These three images now belong to the British Museum in London, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

2. There is an enormous literature that is culture- or tradition-specific concerning images, but some notable contributions to broader understandings include Belting (1994), Freedberg (1989), Gell (1998), Latour and Weibel (2002), McClanan and Johnson (2005) and Boldrick and Clay (2007).

3. Although very frequently published as a great work of art, this sculpture had not previously been identified as a reliquary. The reliquary hypothesis was proposed at the William Fagg Memorial Lecture at the British Museum in March 2001 and in the book Pacific Encounters (Hooper 2006: 194–5). A full study of the image and its history was published in the Journal of the Polynesian Society (Hooper 2007). Having been acquired by the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1821 as a trophy in the war against heathenism (to use a prevailing idiom), it was displayed in the LMS museum before being transferred to the British Museum in 1890.

4. Recent research at Stonehenge and nearby Durrington Walls confirms that the site contained elite burials and was a place for periodic large-scale gatherings of people from as far away as Scotland (Parker Pearson 2012). The stones are also attributed with healing properties and Stonehenge remains a contemporary destination for Druidic neo-pagan pilgrimage.

5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/16/st-therese-relics-uk. Relics of St. Thérèse have toured the world; in Ireland in 2001 an estimated three million people, almost half the population, went to see them, or at least to see the reliquary and be close to its contents (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/jul/02/catholicism.religion).

6. The Tinos shrine was visited in August 2009. The icon is purported to be the work of St. Luke, so on that account can be regarded as both a contact relic of St. Luke and an image relic of the Virgin. See Dubisch (1995) for an extended discussion of the shrine.

7. Souvenirs in the form of plastic images of the Virgin from Lourdes or holy soil from Jerusalem derive their value from being materialisations of memory and experience, specifically being evidence of the proximity achieved to special places. They play a metonymic role as partial, miniature and microcosmic versions of the original (see Mack 2003: 121 and 2007: 77 ff. for perceptive discussion of these issues). Along with such things as memento fridge magnets their value is largely personal, rather than general, for it is linked to personal experience. However, if the person involved has significant status, then the commercial and cultural value of the items they accumulate may be high. A reproduction of an image of the Virgin owned by a Pope will have more commercial and cultural value than an identical image owned by an ordinary devotee.

8. Seneviratne (1978) provides a full ethnographic account and analysis of the rituals of the Temple of the Tooth and the annual Perahära festival. Strong (2010) perceptively analyses Buddhist and Catholic attitudes to relics and their destructibility/indestructibility, focusing on the alleged destruction of the Buddha's tooth by Portuguese Catholics in the sixteenth century. For a study of the role of Buddha relics in South Asian state formation, see Blackburn (2010).

9. Publications such as those by Duncan (1995), Paine (2000), Bouquet and Porto (2005) and others in museum studies have discussed this issue comprehensively. Geisbusch (2012: 116–18) reflects on how different modes of presentation have implications for ‘the museological and the religious gaze’. Stier (2010) has discussed secular/religious ambiguity in the displays at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

10. The significance of spears and holy blood will not be lost on Christian relic specialists interested in the Passion (see Klein 2010: 60–61). The 2003 Captain Cook ‘spear’ auction and the Christie's 1972 auction of ‘the club that killed Captain Cook’ are discussed in an article in Anthropology Today (Hooper 2003).

11. This must be the highest price ever paid for a golf glove. Even those worn by deceased golfing ‘icons’ such as Severiano Ballesteros (died 2011, aged 54) would be unlikely to reach such heights.

12. The last three have fetched high prices recently at auction. Jane Austen's 1804 manuscript draft of The Watsons was sold at Sotheby's in London on 14 July 2011 for £993,250. Gandhi relics, including his spectacles, sold at Antiquorum in New York on 4 March 2009 for $2,096,000. Marilyn Monroe's ‘subway’ dress sold at Profiles in History in Los Angeles on 18 June 2011 for $5,200,000.

13. On this subject and on the origins of ‘government’ in ritual/religion, see Hocart (1970).

14. This is not to devalue what individuals or groups believe or say they believe. Rather, it is that this is not the subject of analysis here. There is increasing scholarly interest in ‘the materiality of religion’ and in drawing an analytical distinction between belief and practice; see Keane (2008) and Morgan (2010).

15. No justice can be done here to the extensive literature on relics, but key publications that have stimulated recent scholarship are by Brown (1981), Geary (1986; 1990) and Howard-Johnston and Hayward (1999). Meri (2002, 2010), Schopen (1997), Trainor (1997) and Strong (2004) have made significant contributions to the study of Islamic and Buddhist relics, emphasising their major, if largely ignored, role in the history of those religions. See Flügel (2010) for a similar study of Jainism.

16. Examples are extensively covered in the literature on Christian practice, for example Brown (1981), Holsbeke (1996), Vincent (2001) and Bagnoli et al. (2010). These examples are overwhelmingly Catholic but, as noted earlier, Lutheran Protestantism was not without its saint/relic cultic aspects.

17. There is no space here to discuss the role charisma plays in relation to special personages – as part of what leads to the attribution of their specialness. See Weber (1968), Lewis (1986) and Glassman and Swatos (1986) for discussion of charisma.

18. These modern celebrities usually have some quality that marks them out as exceptional in their field, whether this is acting, sport or popular music. The recent phenomenon of C-list celebrities, people with no particular talent who happen to be physically attractive or prone to extreme behaviour, is largely short-lived and driven by the popular media. These celebrities have no enduring cultural impact once ‘dropped’, and their temporary fame is partly connected to envy of their apparently exalted lifestyle, misrecognised as evidence of having been blessed with talent.

19. Within anthropology, the concept of contagious magic was developed by James Frazer in The Golden Bough (1990; 12-volume 3rd edition originally published 1906–15) as an aspect of sympathetic magic which privileges contact. John Skorupski proposed the notion of ‘contagious transfer’, in which the quality of one object can be transferred to another, but not necessarily by contact (1976: 176). Both definitions contribute to the meaning suggested here, which is that contact, or close proximity, facilitates the transfer of qualities from one person or object to another person or object. The term magic is problematic, with its connotations of irrationality, although John Mack discusses the widespread attribution of the power of magic to small things (2007: 163–81). An informative review of theories concerning the relational power of saints and relics, in the context of a study of the Jain case, is provided by Flügel, who uses key anthropological sources, such as Tambiah (1984). Considering relics as objectifications of social relationships, Flügel's own view is that ‘the power of relics to act as catalysts derives from the individuals who are oriented towards them and from the emotive energy with which relics are invested, not from their intrinsic qualities’ (2010: 480).

20. After her death, Elizabeth Taylor's jewels were sold at Christie's, New York, on 13–16 December 2011, for $137.2 million. Many ‘ordinary’ items fetched over ten times their already inflated estimates. The celebrity frisson of Elizabeth Taylor's tempestuous love life, especially with Richard Burton, no doubt encouraged the pre-Christmas buying frenzy for items that had once been in intimate contact with Ms. Taylor's body.

21. Such intense devotion has recently been the subject of a documentary film made in Peru by my colleague Aristoteles Barcelos Neto (2012).

22. See Gell (1998: 116–21) and Schopen (1997: 116–17, 137–8). Also noteworthy is a life-size wax image of Luther, its face cast from a death mask and animated with glass eyes (Scribner 1986: 54) that survived until the twentieth century. Ostensibly playing a role in Lutheran ‘memory culture’ (Rublack 2010: 163), its impact on devout viewers is likely to have been more complex.