Someone recently asked me how I choose podcast guests. Recently, that’s been answered by way of the latest Sowing the Seed gathering, Off-Script: Conversations on Scriptures, Scholarship, and Teaching. The larger answer is that I like to find people who I want to teach me and who I think you all would enjoy learning from too. From time to time, someone reaches out in the interest of self-promotion and asks to be put on Broadcast Seeding. And by and large, I’m happy to spread the word about neat people doing neat things, so self-promote away.
Today, however, I get to brag about a neat person who has been out here doing some of the neatest things in the my subfields. Dr. James Bielo is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. An anthropologist of religion, Bielo brings together methods from ethnography and the study of material culture to trace networks of formation, power, and exchange, especially amidst American Christian practices.
I first came across his work in relation to the Institute for Signifying Scriptures, and his edited volume, The Social Life of Scriptures: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Bibicism (Rutgers University Press, 2009). I’ve also enjoyed picking his brain about museums as spaces for cultural projection and formation. If you haven’t seen Materializing the Bible: Scripture, Sensation, Place (Bloomsbury, 2021) or Ark: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU Press, 2018), make it a point to check them out. I’m sure they’ll have copies at the conference season book exhibits. He has other great publications that you can check out over at his website.
Most recently I have been a big fan of how he’s been exhibiting his work, specifically this project called Secondhand Sacred. Bielo describes it this way:
Churches close. Producers stop producing. People die. Things survive. My current ethnographic fieldwork explores the circulation of Christian material culture through the networked assemblage of estate sales, thrift stores, flea markets, antique malls, auction houses, eBay, Instagram, and gift exchange. At the project’s core are part-time and full-time resellers: folks who scavenge second-hand venues in search of donated, discarded, and passed over items. The range of material culture is immense, from Bibles and books to prayer guides, rosaries, holy cards, figurines, clothing, art, icons, and other decor. Two early research questions focus on value and ethics in the social life of Christian material culture. How are objects attributed diverse forms of value, from affective attachments to financial profit, devotional use, and aesthetic display? And, how is circulation informed by ethical commitments, ambivalences, and negotiations regarding what is appropriate to source, sell, and buy?
From Prof. Bielo’s Website
Secondhand Sacred is currently being exhibted at the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago.
And I’m delighted to share that Prof. Bielo will be sharing with us a bit about his work at Off-Script! Join us on November 15, 2024 at Noon (Central) for our one-hour Zoom gathering. His interactive presentation is called “Secondhand Scriptures: Collecting Sacred Waste.” You won’t want to miss it! To register, visit sowingtheseed.org/off-script.
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