ABSTRACT
As is the case with the just examined term “lived religion,” the related material religion approach represents a fairly recent attempt in the study of religion to switch the focus from texts produced by elite classes to other members of society. It may therefore be no coincidence that the etymology of “material” derives from the Latin materia and the suffix -alis, and used as early as the fourth century by Augustine to differentiate something claimed to be from the spiritual or ethereal world. The material religion approach now begins to sound remarkably like its cognates, such as lived religion or embodied religion, all of which emphasize an awareness of the human body as an overlooked but still secondary site of religious manifestation. To the critical scholar, there is no prior, non-empirical thing called culture that only later somehow manifests itself in teapots or clothing.
