ABSTRACT
In the critique of social sciences, MaP underlines only the lack of consideration the role that objects play in the making of subjects and societies, but also the absence of praxis in a world made of subjects and objects. Agnes Jeanjean examines residual practices and waste objects from which health and hospital workers in France elaborate meaning, and transmit and express values and knowledge based on a tangible, socialised relationship. Devotion is produced through the ‘efficacious intimacy’ of home worship, a bodily-and-material relationship between householders, gurus, the community and a sentient deity. Roustan analyses these actions in terms of a power chain that articulates the struggle of minorities for their political rights, but also reproduces the symbolic domination of a cultural elite on a society. Urmila Mohan offers a ‘material religion’ approach to Hindu devotional practice in the context of the universalising ‘International Society for Krishna Consciousness' at the Chandrodaya temple in Mayapur in West Bengal, India.
