MAVCOR Journal

This introductory essay presents the origins and aims of the special issue. It examines how objects marked by violence and loss acquire dimensions of sacrality and affect, and highlights the essential—often invisible—professional labors of care and conservation in sustaining historical memory.

Objects shape and legitimate human identity, especially in terms of interpersonal relations. In this article, Stone compares and contrasts how the Arolsen Archives and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum care for the objects in their possession. The varying approaches of the two institutions leads to different sorts of knowledge about the past, and has much to tell us about contemporary understandings of Holocaust museum curatorship and Holocaust memory.

Suitcases, and their smaller cousins, the briefcase, hold things. They are both object and container, possessing a range of physical properties and material connections. They are also inherently material in their demands for care and curation, creating challenges for institutions that hold them to make sense of violent and traumatic pasts.

An exploration of how Holocaust museums and archives confront and contextualize perpetrator materials, addressing the ethical challenges of exhibiting “disgraceful” objects, this essay examines curatorial and archival approaches to preservation, interpretation, and display, and reflects on how these materials shape public engagement, historical understanding, and moral responsibility.

This article presents four objects, all relating to the Treblinka death camp, that would have been worn on the bodies of Holocaust victims. Each one, however, illustrates differences in the journeys, uses, spatialities, and temporalities of proximity. These items give pause to reflect on how value and sacrality are affected when objects have been in extremely close physical contact with the (living or dead) human body, and how the context in which they are found may affect their perceived status.

What is evoked when one encounters a child’s nametag, exhumed from the soil of a former Nazi death camp? For Holocaust archaeologists, such moments collapse temporal distance, raising pressing affective and ethical questions about the persistence of the past within the material present. When such objects enter museum narratives, they bring the emotional labor and spiritual attachments of families with them, complicating the “afterlives” of things displaced by war.

Through war, ghettoization, deportations, and forced labor, Judy Lachman carried and protected from harm photographs of friends and family members, mementos of her life before and during World War II. One of these pictures depicts members of the youth Zionist organization Akiva. This article examines the photograph’s visual and material qualities, the transformations it underwent during the war, and its mediation and remediation after the war. 

Covertly constructed from scrap or excess metal in forced labor factories and workshops, pendants, pins, bracelets, and other metal objects made in Holocaust-era ghettos and camps by prisoners were largely given as gifts to friends and family or exchanged for food or other resources. A consideration of these rare surviving objects reveals how prisoners understood the conditions they were living in and represented them in material culture, and by doing so asserted a form of material agency amid confinement and forced labor. 

At the close of World War II, numerous Jewish brides in a Displaced Persons camp wore a remarkable parachute wedding dress now in the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) a parachute is "something which inflates to control the descent of a falling body." Not all who wore this dress or the others like it in the UHSMM collection experienced soft landings. Wedding dresses never come with guarantees.   

The importance of the Holocaust for Jewish and general memory has led to scholarly discussion of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in religious terms. The USHMM, like many other Holocaust memorial museums, is not, however, owned or run by a religious community and does not serve as a space of prayer. Yet visitors treat the museum space and its objects with a sense of reverence reserved for ritual spaces and relics. But what happens if such religious objects are not on display? In this article, the author turns to Armin Loeb’s tallit katan to show the value of analyzing inaccessible objects.

This article examines a rosary and missal given to Beatrice "Trixie" Muchman for her confirmation while she was hiding in a small French town during the Holocaust. Although she returned to her Jewish faith following the war, she still revered the objects, keeping them long after donating the rest of her Holocaust-related materials to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for safekeeping. The article explores the multiple layers of sacredness imbued in Muchman's rosary and missal, and considers how a federal, non-denominational institution such as the USHMM should curate and display such objects.

Susan Goldstein Snyder, formerly an acquisitions curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, interviews Beatrice "Trixie" Muchman, who survived the Holocaust in hiding in Belgium. 

Pal Szegö’s Holocaust diary is written in the only book he had available, a Hungarian language copy of the New Testament. While the diary entries are a rich text that merits attention, examining the diary as a unique bound object that preserves traces of the diarist’s interactions with it and some of the experiences detailed in the entries foregrounds Szegö’s individuality and agency amid changing circumstances, offers insight into his complex identity as a devoted Christian convert persecuted for being Jewish, and emphasizes the significance of the diary as a survivor object.

The mezuzah on a wall inside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, donated by Benjamin Meed, is the only object among the countless artifacts identified and displayed in the USHMM's Permanent Exhibition installed as if it is a useable object, i.e., without a display case and in the position of a ritually functional mezuzah. What is the place of such an object within the museum and what does it signify?

During the Holocaust, even within the extreme conditions of life in concentration camps, people chose to keep and—in some cases—create objects that do not appear to fulfill essential human needs. Leia Kreimer’s tiny book, made for her as a gift, is one example. Its production, exchange, and ultimate survival illuminate the enduring resilience of the book as a cultural form that is both text and object.

In September 1942, in the Warsaw ghetto in German-occupied Poland, Maria and Maximilian Wortman hastily wrote a letter to their daughter, Dziunia, from whom they had become separated. The couple had been selected for deportation to the death camp Treblinka, and they were gathered on the Umschlagplatz, the railway siding from where the deportation trains departed. Their final words to their daughter are written on the reverse of a scrap of paper no larger than 11 x 15 cm. 

This essay examines Hedda Sterne's 1941 Romanian passport and her little-known photomontages from Life magazine as parallel "documents of exile." The passport traces her perilous flight from Europe, serving as an unintended autobiography of survival. Her photomontages, composed from magazine clippings, became visual testimonies that confront the dissonance between American popular culture and her feelings of anxiety as a refugee. This study uses a conservation and art history lens to explore how paper, in both bureaucratic and artistic forms, mediated Sterne's identity and experience of displacement.

Yizkher bukher, collaboratively authored memorial books devoted to single cities, can offer descendants of Holocaust survivors access to the places their ancestors were forced to flee. Jennifer Rich reflects on her encounter with Sefer Kostopol, the book written about her grandmother's hometown of Kostopol, Ukraine, and specifically the way maps in this and other yizkher bikher can help envision spaces now lost and destroyed. 

Looking at Indigenous bannerstones from what is known as North America, their unique shapes and symmetrically drilled holes carved from an array of lithics, from sedimentary stone to quartz, I wonder what stories they are telling. Do their stories begin with the sculptors who made them east of the Mississippi Valley in 6,000 BCE or do they begin four billion years ago when volcanic heat from the earth’s core melted and congealed minerals to form the oldest terrestrial rocks?

Beijing's Tibetan Buddhist temples have always been places through which diverse groups of people moved. During the Qing, these were spaces where elites from different backgrounds met, collaborated, and enacted the multicultural character of the empire within the capital. The temples themselves announced the pluralistic nature of the Qing dynasty, as well as its grandeur, through their public display of signs and stelae aimed at the multi-ethnic audiences of the empire.

Fleming’s trilogy illustrates the complex dynamics of race, religion, and visual arts in the interwar United States. Though the extant scholarship highlights the increasing Anglo-Saxonization of Jesus’s body in American visual culture in this era, Fleming’s story reveals a virtually opposite impulse in liberal Protestantism: to search for multiple colors of Christ.

The authors set the nucleating body of the medieval Virgin in conversation with contemporary reimaginings of the Madonna to ask how hybridization, fracture, insertion, assemblage, color, multiplicity, and meaning around sacred and secular exchange can change the way we know and see in relation to these forms from the medieval to the postmodern.

This Constellation is intended to complement the author's book and give readers access to color versions of some of its illustrations, which could only be printed in black and white in the original publication. As in other parts of the Iberian world (i.e., the Iberian Peninsula and all the territories under Spanish and Portuguese control), these performances were usually staged by lay Catholic confraternities.

Votive practice in the Americas has Indigenous, Christian, and syncretic origins that contribute to the diversity of offerings, as do social class, gender, age, and region. Petitionary devotion is structured by an exchange that the votary proposes to a folk saint or miraculous image. The offerings that votaries promise are based on the presumption that folk saints and miraculous images, because they are like us, value what we value.

Kati Curts and Alex Kaloyanides introduce this special issue of MAVCOR Journal devoted to examining four key categories: “Material,” “Economies,” “Religion,” and “America(s).” The ambition of this issue is that the collective inquiries of its authors, which span various interpretive histories and genealogical fragments, can offer ways to better understand their assorted conveyances, as well as the powerful grip of their critical conjunction.

For many Indigenous people of Turtle Island, also known as North America, treaty medals are material reminders of sacred promises made between their nations and the British Crown or the U.S. Government. Settlers and colonial officials, by contrast, have often treated these medals as mere trinkets.

More than a portrait of a holy person, an icon structures a present encounter with a saint and the community that the saint represents. What kind of encounter does Greeley’s icon conjure with race and Catholicism in the Old West?

Through Af Klint’s journal entries and sketches, we can shift analyses of sacred space from the guise of transcendent force that simply “appears,” in the phenomenological nomenclature, and instead approach it as technique.

These redwood rings are both family trees and family circles, literally naturalizing a canonical “American” familial heritage insistently recited and instantiated in many media and locations: artistic and built environments, judicial practice, legislation and policy, textbooks, land use, and national land theory. Heritage is a family business.

I wondered—how does a person become a place? A street, city quarter, mosque, or town could take the name of the wali interred there, like the cities of Sidi Slimane and Mawlay Idris. The sacred enters physical space through the body.

In her memoir, The Red Parts, Maggie Nelson writes about the over-thirty-year-old unsolved murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer, a case brought back to life in a Michigan court room. Who gets to tell this story? How should it be told?

The musical in which this song appears includes archetypal depictions of the modern artist and his attendant gendered capacities and failures. Sondheim would point out: its lyric is a single sentence; it is a description of a process; it includes a word, “forever,” that he observes makes him cry.

From Fijian ceremonial objects to nineteenth-century American whaling souvenirs, to airline membership cards, this constellation explores material economies through one raw material: sperm whale teeth.

Was [the Magdalens'] decision to own in perpetuity the status of penitent a judgment on waywardness, or a benediction? An internalization of white surveillance, or its repudiation?

While a stationary bike is the main conduit for the SoulCycle experience, perhaps no object plays a greater role in facilitating SoulCycle’s choreography of emotion than the brand’s signature grapefruit-scented candle.

Biblical womanhood blogs often resemble the idealized Christian home they encourage women to build. Businesses have long recognized the potential for profit in networked domesticity, enticing bloggers to participate in commercial enterprise by promising percentages of purchase costs made through their sites.

This golden Buddha, which has a striking resemblance to a Burmese Buddha in the British Museum, came up for sale on eBay for the sum of $5,000.00. The material of teak, the economies of the British and Burmese empires, the religion then being named "Buddhism," now give us this American eBay Buddha.

The fragrance Wifey by KKW Fragrances was released in 2019. As wife to black artist Ye (formerly Kanye West), Kim KW claimed and sold the role of wifey. The “wifey” is not simply a wife. She is a model or caricature of a wife, a down-ass. The “wifey” signifies a new ideal in our contemporary popular culture.

Eshu-Elegguá is a divinity in the Regla de Ocha-Ifá pantheon characterized as a warrior and messenger. Enslaved Africans in Cuba taught their descendants that a good relationship with this divinity is helpful for making risky choices and providing protection when embarking on a treacherous new beginning.

The bible "God's Word for the Oil Patch: Fuel for the Soul" offers insight into how people theorise both the value of energy and the kind of lives people need to live to access this value. The publication implies that to have the kind of soul that lives a good life, you need to manage oil and its energy: souls are things that need fuel, be it "God's word" or oil itself. Oil work, in this context, becomes soul work.

A row of clocks. Each one with an identical, nondescript face—except for the hands, which are conspicuous in their different orientations. Clocks are the kind of “religion” that spills out beyond the sphere of the sacred. Rows of clocks that evoke utopian, aspirational feelings of global connectedness. These are “religious” feelings in the deepest sense of the term.

A simple woodcut on a late-seventeenth-century membership letter of the confraternity of Souls of the Cathedral of Lima depicts two souls bathed in flames, gazing up at Christ crucified. Stylized drops of blood pour from each of Christ’s wounded hands, visual embodiments of the doctrinal logic behind indulgences—the great sacrifice of Christ and of the martyrs of the church created a treasury of merit that ordinary sinners could draw upon.

This is a pair of highly engineered, durable waterproof socks that exemplifies the rebranding of sportswear for the American Muslim market. Marketed as “wudhu socks,” the socks protect the feet and ankles from ritual impurities, and are intended to allow one not to wash one’s feet between ablutions.

On April 5, 1832, Peter Jones presented King William IV with a bible he translated into Anishinaabemowin. This exchange reflects Anishinaabe gift-giving practices, in which bible gifts can be regarded as practices used to build and refuse particular religious, political, and material relations.

Don Leo Jonathan was born 1931 to a Mormon family in Utah. During his professional wrestling career, Don Leo capitalized on certain anti-Mormon prejudices during a period of Mormonism’s erstwhile mainstreaming and clean-cut imagination in American culture, often performing as the "heel," or villain.

In 1929, Henry Ford opened the Henry Ford Museum. That same year Ford Motor Company set ablaze vast swaths of rainforest in Brazil to clear land for Fordlandia, one of Ford’s rubber plantations. In Ford’s “progressive” trail across the Americas and in pictured masses arrayed outside Ford’s plants, we glimpse material economies of religion christened as political economy and mass produced in Ford’s name.

Tracy Fessenden, Hillary Kaell, and Alexia Williams discuss three iterations of religious, material economies: bus stop clocks, cloistered Magdalens, and a Catholic prayer card from Denver.

From the familiarity of scent to the spread of colonial/space time, and through Black vernacular culture and “linking” us to divine power through the digital, Ellen Amster, Dusty Gavin, and Suzanne van Geuns introduce us to the strange intimacies of the wifey.

In Fall 2020, Paul Johnson, Emily Floyd, and Kati Curts met on Zoom. In this edit of their extended conversation, the authors question “planned sacred space,” the role of design in creating religious experience, and the category of the “relic.”

Judith Ellen Brunton, Richard Callahan, and Alexandra Kaloyanides endeavor to find the resonances their images pose to characterizing material economies of religion in the Americas. In emails from the autumn of 2020, each offers moments of speculation on the contexts shaping their research objects, and the supernatural powers and economies they enchant.

In this collaboratively written exercise, the authors discuss the material significance of embodied sense perceptions and affects. Despite Protestant secularity’s claims to the contrary, sensation and affect are no more confined to interiorized subjective mental states than is religion merely belief.

Cody Musselman, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, and Roxanne Korpan each present an object for consideration. Together they think about what it means for each object to be involved in the material economy of religion. Their conversation traverses various geographies and traditions, and ponders how material objects can be carriers of religion.

If the Marxian dialectic culminates with the mystification of the commodity, these essays seem to envision a sacralization and re-sacralization of the profane, such that matter is the accumulation of sacred value. Transcendence and enchantment in this account are very much “real” and just as ontologically entrenched as capitalism.

Anna Bigelow and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri introduce this special issue of MAVCOR Journal devoted to Material Islam. It explores devotional objects, the Islamic sensorium, the book as a material object, the Muslim body, and the various roles of the mosque as a social, political, and spiritual space. Taken together, its varied essays demonstrate an incredibly wide-ranging, rich, and exciting arena of study.

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri and Anna Bigelow speak with Christiane Gruber about changes and growth in field of Material Islam, new arenas of inquiry, and their hopes for further interdisciplinary scholarship.

The marketing of “wudhu socks" provides an interesting window onto how the forces of consumer capitalism in twenty-first-century America are brought to bear on a centuries-old hermeneutical, legal, and theological tradition in Islam that has long conceptualized purity through embodiment and objects.

This article examines the genealogy of Afro-Brazilian mosques, answering some of the most immediate and puzzling questions that they force all who see them to ask. The answers to these questions demonstrate the fluidity of categories such as European, African, Islamic, and Christian, and how West African Muslims effectively drew on an architectural vocabulary with connections to three continents to forge an emergent cosmopolitan identity.

The Bībī kā ʿalam, as it is popularly known, occupies a special, sacred class of ʿalams for the Hyderabadi Shiʿa. Containing Fatimah’s funerary plank, is a reliquary ʿalam and, while Hyderabad is distinctive for the extraordinary number of relics it possesses that are associated with the Imams and Ahl-e Bait, very few connect to Shiʿi women saints.

A parchment bifolio from the Kairouan collection presents a mystery. But like pottery in an archeological dig, this fragment is in situ, and clues to the identity of the author, the text, and the community of scholars that wrote and preserved it, are found in the rich context of this unique collection. Together, these manuscripts bear witness to a fascinating history of literary and cultural production, not only in North Africa, but in the broader Islamic world of the ninth and tenth century.

This article traces a fourteenth-century Persian history from Anatolia, Bazm wa Razm (Feasting and Fighting), written by ʿAzīz al-Dīn Astarābādī, from its presentation copy to its various recensions down to the modern period, examining how each era visually refigures this textual manifestation of its original patron, Burhān al-Dīn Aḥmad (r. 783-800 AH/1381-1398 CE), for a new purpose.

Rasheed Araeen’s Bismullah is noteworthy as the first work by the Karachi-born, London-based artist to enter the collection of Britain’s Tate Gallery in 1995. Bismullah deploys strategies of juxtaposition, disjunction, and doubling to combine visual imagery that references religion, empire, art history, and the artist’s personal biography. Through its montage tactics Bismullah not only maps the binaries of self and other that structure colonial discourse within and beyond the artistic field, but also recontextualizes these signifiers.

Hüdayi Yolu represents a modern artist’s loving depiction of his hometown and neighborhood, an homage to a local Sufi saint, the romanticized communal memory of Istanbul as an Ottoman metropolis, and Barutçugil’s approach to “Sufi” art.

Ubiquitous across the medieval Islamic world, khalwa is the practice of self-isolation, typically in a small cell, in order to focus on pious devotions. This article offers one possible approach to theorizing the heterogenous elements of khalwa coherently by insisting that we take the material and the social as seriously as we do the human and the spiritual.