Rule-governed activity vs. rule-creating activity

Questioning the usual understanding of Native American religions as supernaturalistic, this study re-examines the ritual system of the Yaqui people of Arizona. First, it evaluates assumptions about the nature of religion—including God, grace, and prayer—which inform the ethnographical interpretation of Yaqui religion. Second, it reconstructs the Yaqui cosmological system and relates their complex cosmos to the traditional religious actors, the Deer Dancer and the Pascola clowns. Third it examines the master symbol, Sewa or Flower, to demonstrate that Yaqui religious logic does not correspond to the grace theory of Catholicism. Fourth, it demonstrates that flower embodies a causal system in which all religious actors, human and transcendent beings alike, achieve ritual efficacy in mutual, reciprocal acts of witnessing. Finally, the essay observes that ‘conversion’ fails to make sense of Yaqui syncretism for two related reasons. In the first place, the Yaqui neither rejected the world nor embraced a monotheism which assigns a privileged, vertical superiority to God. In the second, the Yaqui applied traditional insights deriving from the most basic realm of myth to reach an understanding that Jesus and Deer are alike powerful innocents who sacrifice themselves so that others might live. In all these ways, the essay demonstrates that the concept of the supernatural fails to explain either the traditional or the Christian sides of Yaqui religion and suggests that the same may be true for other Native American religions as well.     

Does matter really matter? Computer simulations,experiments, and materiality

A number of recent discussions comparing computer simulation and traditional experimentation have focused on the significance of “materiality.” I challenge several claims emerging from this work and suggest that computer simulation studies are material experiments in a straightforward sense. After discussing some of the implications of this material status for the epistemology of computer simulation, I consider the extent to which materiality (in a particular sense) is important when it comes to making justified inferences about target systems on the basis of experimental results.     

The origin and mission of Material Religion

Beginning its sixth year of publication, Material Religion is an interdisciplinary journal that seeks to gather the best work from around the world engaged in materializing the study of religions. The editors welcome original scholarship on any religion and from any period in human history that treats material objects and practices as primary evidence and engages in critical reflection on the cultural construction of materiality. In this article the editors reflect on the formation and format of the journal, the force and direction of its articles and other features, the question of what constitutes the material culture of religion, and finally the role of materiality in the current study of religions. Along the way, the editors consider new theories and concerns that have been taken up in the journal's pages and address the range of disciplines and interests that are represented in the different departments of the journal.     

What’s an early triadic interaction made of? A methodological proposal to study the musical dynamics of interaction

Classical theories of intersubjectivity hold that the first interactions in which children participate are dyadic (adult-baby). However, thanks to the material shift that is taking place in the cognitive sciences, an increasing number of authors began to recognise the constitutive role that materiality has for cognition, from the very beginning of life. Interactions do not occur in a vacuum, but within a meaning-loaded material world that adults actively seek to bring to children. While in the field of dyadic interactions studies on communicative musicality have shown how interactive exchanges are structured and how that structure unfolds over time, little is known yet about the internal structure of early triadic interactions. In this paper, we propose a longitudinal, mixed and multilevel methodological framework aimed at describing the dynamics of the musical organisation of early triadic interactions between adults, babies and things, and its development over different timescales. We conclude that if researchers want to fully understand early triadic interactions and their musical structuring, further studies that take into account the cognitive relevance of things and the dynamics of our interactions with and through materiality are needed.