Absent Objects and the Study of Material Religion

Abstract

This article explores how absent objects continue to work on religious communities using two case studies: the gold plates from which Joseph Smith said he translated the Book of Mormon, and the first 116 manuscript pages of that translation. Neither of these objects are available to believers now, but they played and continue to play an outsized role in the early history of the Mormon tradition, but in different ways. Based on these case studies, this article argues that scholars of material religion need to attend to the absence of objects in their explorations of how religious assemblages operate.