Religion is, at its very root, a sensual and often tactile affair. From genuflections, prayer, dance, and eating, to tattooing, wearing certain garments or objects, lighting candles and performing other rituals, religions of all descriptions involve regular bodily commitments which are mediated by acts of touch. Contributors to this volume have isolated the ‘sense of touch’ from the general sensorium as a particular ‘sense tool’ from which to creatively innovate and operationalize fresh concepts, theories, and methods in relation to a diverse range of case studies in Africa, South America, Polynesia, Europe, and South and Southeast Asia. Organised over three main parts: Reciprocity and Knowing: Being in Touch with Things; Crafting, ritual, and creativity: working devotion; and ‘Touch, Ritual Efficacy and Communication, common and overlapping themes among the contributions include how touch mediates direct physical (often deliberate) contact between physical bodies (human and other than human) and the things that are crafted, blessed, related with, engaged with, or worn. Understanding touch as the vehicle to alternative forms of knowledge-making in specific religious contexts is the driving force behind the contributions to this collection. The volume argues that touch is not only an intrinsic part of religion but the principal facilitating medium through which religion, religious encounters and performances take place. The diverse contexts presented here signal how investigations that centralise the body and the senses can produce nuanced, culturally specific knowledges and allow for the development of new definitions for lived religion. By placing both ‘body’ and the sense of touch at the centre of investigations, the volume asserts that material practice and bodily sensation are lived religion.

Religions are just as much action plans than systems of faiths. They involve, to equal part, the spirit and the body, the interiority and the physicality. The acting out of faith or in other words its material anchorage is moreover a component of all religious life as well as of the emergence of any believers’ community. Moreover, Numerous recent researches in the field of religious materiality have shed light on the importance of the physical relationship to certain artefact in votive practices. In contrast, the process of acquisition of knowledge which establish the particular status of the religious specialists have been subject to less scrutiny. For the religious specialists and ritual experts, touch, material actions, techniques of the body and the embodied knowledge belong to a category of skills that are integral part of the permanent and canonical aspects of any liturgy. At the same time, access to religious authority critically depends on access to these knowledges. If understood as a set of physical, sensory and kinaesthetic abilities, ritual or religious knowledge is not very different from the professional skills of craftsmen. By approaching religion from the point of view of the specialists’ skills, this paper endeavours to debate on the classic distinction between ritual action and technical action. Using ethnographic literature and first hand fieldwork data, this contribution will explore the role of touch and physical sensations in certain religious practices, in particular within tattooing ritual practices of South-East Asia and in the Pacific.

Bodies and clothing are in exchange and influence each other. Guyanese Hindus describe this interrelationship of clothing and bodies by highlighting that during acts of consuming clothing—when it is worn or gifted—substances and energies are transferred between bodies and dress, creating mutual touch. This touch is facilitated through for example body fluids, which transform used or ‘touched’ clothing into a person’s material likeness. Clothes and other material objects can thus be considered as dwelling structures for substances and energies, which have a special capacity to ‘take on’ former consumers. ‘Touched’ clothes may be polluting or polluted as a consequence of their consumption however, particularly through the former consumers’ substances and energies. This potential pollution influences ritual gift exchange practices, as clothes are frequently offered to deities during Hindu pujas (ritual veneration). Besides conceptualizing the notion of touch and emphasizing the necessity of an inter-sensory approach, this chapter also discusses the role of touch in the context of transnational migration: In transnational networks, gifts of used clothing become a means of recreating and manifesting for example religious communities. Material gift giving hence reconstructs group identity and facilitates a means to literally stay in touch.

Based on a small ethnographic study at the shrine of the Virgin of Alcala in Andalusia, Spain, this chapter begins with the assertion that ‘touch’ is not only an intrinsic part of religious devotion, but the principal facilitating medium through which the performances, expressions, and relationships with the Virgin, take place. Part I of the chapter uses the relational discourses of animism to critically explore the dynamics of and significance of touch, focussing primarily on day to day statue engagements, caretaking rituals including the gendered ways in which her statue-body is ritually touched, and the potentiality of her religious personhood. Here, categories of subject and object mix, merge, and ‘co-mingle’, giving way to the relational emergence of ontological possibilities aimed helping us reimagine the nature of religion, religious artefacts, creativity, and the significant roles of the senses in devotion. The second part of the chapter is carried out in light of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. It moves emphasis away from more highly ritualised and daily shrine activities and into the village of Alcala, and employs the use of an additional ethnographic (distance) study that sought the views and attitudes of villagers regarding the role of the Virgin in the personal management of the crisis. Findings suggest varying degrees of devotion to the Virgin as well as the view that the Virgin is a ‘everywhere’, and a protector of the people; but principally, they emphasise the significance of tactile and other engagements with home altars, plaques, rosaries, and other forms of Virgin-specific devotionals. On balance with the touch-encouraging performances that take place at the shrine, the addition of how the villagers are maintaining relationships with the Virgin in their homes allows for a deeper understanding of the significance of religious material cultures, the dynamics of temporal and physical relating, and how presence and touch are accommodated in a time of social, pandemic crisis.

In this chapter I investigate the intersection of religion, music and touch by focussing on musical instruments, the things we touch to create ‘humanly organised sound’. I consider both the denotative and connotative meanings of instruments and how certain instruments, and not others, become meaningful in the context of religion. I use the lyre, and my learning to play a replica Dark Age lyre, as the main examples throughout. Though associated with Christianity and with ancient Greece and Rome, the lyre was also played in pre-Christian Europe. Consequently the lyre is undergoing a revival of interest by practitioners of contemporary heathenism, such that its connotative meaning is shifting from its more traditional, ‘heavenly’ associations. I end by suggesting that in many instances (and even within the supposedly secular West) an animist reading of musical instruments may both be warranted and open new areas of research within the underexplored field of music and religion.

This chapter examines an aspect of the growing phenomenon, typically termed ‘Roots Tourism’, focussing on Anglo-Indians returning to India to explore their family roots. This type of ‘tourism’ involves selecting destinations to which one has ancestral links and pursuing information about them in that place. It is becoming increasingly popular as family history information is more accessible than ever, due to the availability of genealogical tracing through DNA analysis and technology-enhanced searches of recently digitized archives. TV programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? reach vast audiences and possibly add to the popularity of this type of tourism. In 2018 I commenced an ethnographic study exploring Anglo-Indian expectations, experiences, and reflections of roots tourism ventures. In addition to participant-observation in India, I interviewed others before and after their travels. Here I discuss some key findings drawn from the interviews, observations, photographs and FaceBook posts. A significant theme identified was the intense emotional reactions of those involved, when encountering and in touching significant objects and places linked to their ancestors. What began from necessity with technologically mediated virtual searches from afar, culminated with encounters with the material reality of their ancestors: a highlight for many. Many aspects of their experiences resembled pilgrimage journeys – there were visits to churches (as sites of significant moments, and keepers of heritage objects) and the descriptions of journeys included ideas about its ‘sacredness’. My research builds upon both Paul Basu’s (2001, 2004b, 2004a, 2005, 2017) work in the area of roots tourism, and Walter Benjamin’s (1968) on objects and their aura, thus contributing to a growing body of work in the area of ‘touch’, ‘things’, spaces and places, from an anthropological and South Asian perspective.

Hindu ritual is always and everywhere deeply sensory and sensual. In Bali this is spectacularly and famously obvious in temple ritual, which is a feast for all the senses, but least of all touch – apparently. But it is there between the lines – not highlighted, but in the background. In Tamil Nadu, a very different corner of the Hindu world, touch is more central, both ordinary touch and the subtle, extrasensory “touch” that occurs in darshan – the central moment in the ritual process. This chapter explores these spectrums of presence and absence of touch. It also “touches” upon the political-economic realities often obscured behind the sensory and symbolic feasts of ritual.

Touch is a powerful sensory way through which to communicate presence, emotion, comfort and support, particularly at end of life, yet many of us have forgotten this most fundamental form of human communication. In Western societies especially, the decline in cultural tradition and religious ritual at end of life, augmented by social and medical narratives that focus on death avoidance and the institutionalisation of the sick and elderly, have led to a loss of meaningful connection with death. Talking about it has become taboo, being around, let alone touching, the dying, has become frightening, avoidance and denial of death, dying and grief have become the norm. As a result, both the dying and their caregivers often feel isolated and invisible when faced with their own mortality, experiencing fear, impotence and hopelessness rather than understanding, acceptance or support. This paper examines, through the personal accounts of practitioners, two ways in which these issues are beginning to be addressed, particularly in terms of touch and its place at end of life. Firstly, it explores the work of a Death Doula in England who offers spiritual, emotional and practical support to the dying and their families, by providing and teaching therapeutic touch. Secondly, it examines the growing phenomenon of the Coffin Club movement and asserts that touch, through the group crafting of personalised coffins, encourages a deeper exploration and acceptance of death and loss. Both authors draw on their experiences within each approach, emphasising the significance of touch at end of life using ethnographic accounts or clinical case studies, and referencing scholarly, religious and ethical perspectives where relevant.

In an effort to access spiritual knowledge, the human senses work in collaboration. In the case of basket divination, a renowned technique found in the southern fringes of Central Africa, the distant senses of sight and hearing work together with the near and affective senses of touch, kinesthesia, and pain. Basket divination shows the value of synergy, cosensing, intersensoriality, and synesthesia in religious practice. It also shows that spiritual truths are not only seen in the form of material symbols and heard as words, but also felt with the hands, the moving body, and the aching heart. Basket divination challenges any definition of religiosity that denies the senses, the body, and material religion a key role in its performance.

Touching and being touched is the foundation of most BDSM practice (play) as sensations are deliberately created by one person for another. Many of the sensations involved could be categorised as pain, and many of the techniques used to create the sensations themselves and the scenes built upon them could be said to carry significant physical and/or emotional risks. Factors like these, as well as other sensory and situational elements and the emotional weight attached to the activities contribute to the synaesthetic whole that is BDSM play, resulting in a multivalent experience of an ‘other’ world. These worlds are co-constructed through an iterative and relational process of sensation and response. A chosen form of touch is applied and experienced by both the person touching and the person who is touched; each responds, and each reaction is responded to in its turn; the same sensation may be repeated, adjusted or contrasted with a new one, which garners a new set of responses, interwoven with the first. These continual loops of sensation and response shape an ambiguous space within which practitioners can walk the edge between fidelity and betrayal, form and formlessness, order and chaos, integrity and violation in order to discover and rediscover new ways of being, knowing and relating. I will use my research conversations with BDSM practitioners to consider how they deliberately engage with touch sensations, including pain, and the synaesthetic and relational experiences that result from these engagements. I will suggest that through the powerful potential of these sensations and their foundation engagement with the edges of integrity/violation and fidelity/betrayal BDSM play can be considered a form of ‘spiritual edgework’: a deliberate process of creating and approaching the edge, through which practitioners seek transcend the everyday world and its perceived limits and controls and to utilise those experiences in personal processes of world-, meaning- and/or story-making.

Eve Sedgwick in Touching Feeling (2003) states that touch provides understanding, and this chapter premises the notion that in regard to death, touch helps the living understand that someone has become a lifeless corpse. Death is perhaps the biggest challenge the living have to face and whilst touching the dead can be highly problematic in some cultures, it is not so in others, and how different religions deal with the dead is the subject of this chapter. The dead are religiously ambiguous; physically gone yet often spiritually still sentient, and as such a huge variety of rituals have developed to help the living cope with this ambiguity. To explore the ambiguity of the dead, and socio-religious norms of death, this chapter explores some theories around death before moving to examine a range of religious traditions and spiritual lifeways from a variety of time periods, to provide an overview of death and touch. The chapter is arranged into three sections. The first section explores touch and the wet corpse (the still enfleshed dead) in the context of a socially-good death (i.e.: end of natural life); the second section explores touch and the wet corpse in the context of a socially-bad death (i.e.: death from disease, suicide, murder); and thirdly section explores contact with the dry skeletal remains of the human body.

This paper explores the interactive workings of the prolonged, fervent hugging found in many practices associated with what have been called contemporary spiritualities: New Age-inspired movements, Contemporary Paganisms, Personal Development initiatives, etc. One of the characteristic features of such immersive hugging is the striking hiatus between the intense personal intimacy it displays and the lack of interpersonal commitment this display might ordinarily be expected to imply. In looking closely at some of its concrete features – how it is initiated and terminated, the different phases it passes through, the qualities of positioning and touch it entails, etc. – I argue that the immersive hug be understood as a ritual performance centered less on the acing out of a special connection than on the enactment of special selves capable of making such a connection. It lets participants experience themselves, and be experienced by others, as endowed with certain exemplary if difficult-to-define qualities of thought and feeling deemed essential to the fulfilment of contemporary (middle class) Western personhood: “spontaneity”, “authenticity”, “creative expressiveness”, “openness to others”, etc. Immersive hugging can thus be seen as a ritualized process of self-construction in which participants willingly and reflexively act as resources for each other’s personal development. On a more theoretical level, immersive hugging is also shown to provide insight into the built-in, embodied reflexivity that is essential to the ritual process many contemporary spiritual practices put into play.

The tactile aspects of the Christian faith serve to demonstrate friendship, to maintain tradition, and to make the invisible visible. The Eucharistic bread and wine is a tactile anticipation the future heavenly banquet which has not yet been made available to Christ’s followers. Roman Catholic popular piety employs sacramentals – objects such as holy water, crucifixes, medallions, rosaries, and scapulars – which can be used for devotional or protective purposes. Some objects are not available for touching, either because they are too sacred, damageable, or because they have been lost through time. The Protestant tradition, which has viewed tactile aids to devotion less favourably than other traditions, is more amenable to biblical-themed attractions such as Kentucky’s Ark Encounter. The liturgical calendar provides occasion for the use of tactile phenomena: the imposition of ash on Ash Wednesday, distribution of chrism oil, and foot washing on Maundy Thursday, veneration of the cross on Good Friday and the lighting of the Paschal Candle at Easter. The use of candles is less favoured by Protestants, although their use during Advent has become popular. Tactile objects, particularly oil, can be used for healing purposes, and the biblical practice of taking handkerchiefs to the sick is maintained in some Protestant churches. Touch features in initiation rites, notably baptism, confirmation, and ordination, and the presentation of tactile objects to the candidates is an accompanying practice. The advent of the Internet has given rise to some experimentation with substitutes for direct physical contact, for example Jonathan Blake’s Open Episcopal Church, which offers online versions of the Anglican Eucharist, and “Bishop” D. J. Soto’s VR Church. When Covid-19 prevented many Christians from physically assembling, some Anglican churches have revived the practice of “spiritual communion” in lieu of the more usual physical tactile form of the sacrament.