The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling - Tapa dura

"This rewarding book will provoke thought and re-vision... Highly recommended." Choice "With clarity and great insight, Morgan scrutinizes ways of engaging with religious worlds and consider how such worlds are made habitable... A compelling read and one that allows for cross-fertilizing between different academic fields and disciplines." American Anthropologist "Morgan's clever and penetrating academic analysis of case studies provides his text with profundity and interest." -- Jeremy W. H. Arnold Religious Studies Review "A first-rate work of scholarship... Anyone piqued by these subjects will find David Morgan's pioneering vision deeply satisfying." Image "Excellent analysis of the social dynamics of the visual field." -- Monique Scheer, Universitat Tubingen Journal Of Religion In Europe

David Morgan builds on his previous groundbreaking work to offer this new, systematically integrated theory of the study of religion as visual culture. Providing key tools for scholars across disciplines studying the materiality of religions, Morgan gives an accessibly written theoretical overview including case studies of the ways seeing is related to touching, hearing, feeling, and such ephemeral experiences as dreams, imagination, and visions. The case studies explore both the high and low of religious visual culture: Catholic traditions of the erotic Sacred Heart of Jesus, the unrecognizability of the Virgin in the Fatima apparitions, the prehistory of Warner Sallman's face of Jesus, and more. Basing the study of religious images and visual practices in the relationship between seeing and the senses, Morgan argues against reductionist models of "the gaze", demonstrating that vision is not something that occurs in abstraction, but is a fundamental way of embodying the human self.