ABSTRACT
This chapter connects the ‘material turn’ in religious and gender studies and uses the work of the archaeologist and Hellenist Jane E. Harrison (1850-1928) to show the synergies of both fields of innovative research on materiality. It analyzes how her work at the start of the twentieth century, which connects archaeological with ethnographic findings, opened up our understanding of religion in ways that stressed the role of images and rituals in lived religion and highlighted the role of gender and the importance of material objects and embodiment. More specifically, it draws on Harrison’s insights to reveal the strong ties between religion, ritual and art, and presents and analyses possible genealogies of new approaches in religious studies such as the ‘aesthetics of religion’ and ‘material religion’. Harrison was the first female Hellenist at Cambridge University, and the head of the so-called ‘Cambridge Ritualists’ and revolutionised the very concept of ancient Greek religion and culture, raising ritual and image to a status equal to that of literature and texts as means of religious expression. Like the twenty years younger art historian Aby Warburg, Harrison emphasised the active, emotional, performative and memory-evoking power of images and religious practices that included assumptions about human symbol formation based on ritual and dance performances. She reinforced the role of sensual and emotional media and ‘formed’ feelings as ‘sensational forms’. Some guiding questions will be: Did Harrison’s critical problematisation of the gendered coding of religious figures and practices act as a trigger for studying how religion happens in rituals and how it is felt and embodied? And what role did her feminist and ‘bottom-up-approach’ that emphasized the relational dynamics of natura naturans in connection to the archaeological discovery of a matrilineal culture in Crete, play for her material and aesthetic conceptualization of (religious) knowledge itself?
