Sacred materialism: Things and relations in a US Pagan community

Abstract

Ever since Marcel Mauss wrote The Gift, the notion that things exchanged as gifts take a personalised social form, and that they partake of and mediate relational sociality, has held an important place in anthropology. Examining material practices among contemporary Pagans in the Reclaiming tradition, this article shows how they seek to imbue things with personhood, exploring the sacredness of things as alive, active and participating in social relations. In doing so, these Pagans work to forge an alternative economy founded on gift exchange and generous labour, which they hope might form a basis for a different kind of sociality from the capitalist system dominant in the United States. In practice, the encounter between gift and commodity forms in this community is a source of both conflict and emergent forms of sociality, as these alternative economic practices are fashioned around the margins of mainstream economic life.