![]() Studies of African and missionary Christianity have developed along similar lines in recent years. 1 As Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer note, materiality and material culture have become ‘key terms in the study of religion, generating new empirical questions about how religions shape the world in a concrete manner’ (2012, 6). The study of ‘material religion’ or ‘religious things’ has advanced significantly over the past three decades. Thus when viewed in non-European contexts, miraculous medals were far more dynamic and multifaceted than has previously been understood. Object analysis of an extant version from Buganda also reveals the medal’s material diversity and offers important insight into local agency in the reception and reshaping of Catholic objects. For some Baganda, meanwhile, it played pivotal roles in a newly emerging form of local religious identity politics. For missionaries it served as a key item for proselytizing and propaganda. This article uses the medal to shed new light on the material, corporeal, and gendered aspects of the Catholic Christianization of present-day Buganda, where it fulfilled a variety of functions for missionaries and Baganda alike. However, few scholars have connected the medal’s emergence with the spread of the European mission in the wake of nineteenth-century colonial expansion. The religious and social history of the medal in Europe is relatively well known. Adorned with an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary and other Christian emblems and text, the miraculous medal has been an important object of Catholic intercessory prayer since the mid-nineteenth century. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |