ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will examine the material effects of the early Christian ascetic tradition as regards the production of the immaterial. It will focus on the way these effects help to make and unmake people and the material world: in short what does the paradoxical mortification and rejection of the material world enable – what does it ‘do’? The Western ascetic tradition is emphasized because of its privileged position in Weber for the development of Western capitalism and the modernist traditions of the West and our understandings of material culture, in particular from whence it is derived, as well as for the development of Western notions of subjectivity based on Christian concepts of the universal individual (Cannell 2006; Keane 2007). The literature on asceticism is extensive and wide-ranging. Asceticism has been written about extensively by classicists, theologians, historians and to a certain degree by sociologists and anthropologists. It has hardly been addressed within the sphere of anthropological material culture studies (with a few notable exceptions: see Engelke 2005, 2007; Keane 2005, 2007; Pietz 2002). Consequently, despite its profound engagement with the material world, the material practice of asceticism is poorly understood (though see Miller 2009). It is almost as though material culture studies, by virtue of its active embrace of the materiality of human practices, has taken the ascetic rejection of the material world at face value and rejected it as well.
