Material Objects in Cosmological Worlds: An Introduction

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Notes

1. Of course, in Orthodoxy theology, for example, mediation between this world and the otherworld is much more solidly based on mimesis (iconism, hence the theological importance of actual icons) as well as metaphors involving light and illumination, all heavily indebted to a generally Platonic theological system (Kenna 1985). Orthodoxy thus might be said to foreground the Peircean relation of iconism, when compared to Catholicism (which seems to prefer indexical motifs of incarnation instantiated proto‐typically in the dominant figure of the Eucharist ('Incarnationalism', see O'Connell 1995, 2000; Parmentier 1997; Bedos‐Rezak 2000) or Protestantism (where the prototypical form of mediation is the symbolic [textual] sign (O'Connell 1995)).

2. The two most influential of the critiques of Geertz are those offered by Asad 1993, discussed here, and Roseberry 1994 who draws attention to the fact that Geertz neglects how meanings may not be equally shared by all in society, that some people may have meanings imposed upon them, or may contest public meanings. Roseberry's critique also suggests that Geertz neglects the material contexts in which meanings are generated.

3. For some reason the discourse of the idol does not have the same fashionable currency as the discourse of the fetish in various circles, presumably partly because neither Freud nor Marx found it ‘good to think', yet as a fantastic anti‐model of semiosis, the idol is more complicated than is usually assumed (see for example Mitter 1977; Camille 1989; Pinney 2001; Salih 2003).

4. For example, studies of classical images have shown an internal division between a secularizing aestheticism characteristic of art historical approaches (the dominant approach), while appreciation of those same images in relation to their ritual contexts of manipulation or theology of images is relegated to experts on religion or ignored entirely (Elsner 1996). For similar points with respect to European responses to Indian images see for example Mitter 1977; Pinney 2001; Jain 2006.

5. See Komaromi's (2004) discussion of the Soviet genre of Samizdat (self‐publication), for an interestingly similar case where accidental qualisigns (wear and tear from circulation, bad quality of materials and assembly, etc.) become necessary to valuation of an object as authentic, in some ways as important as those qualisigns that establish a given document as a legible ‘text’.