Uncanny Images and the Literalism of Modernity

Ali Qadir and Tatiana Tiaynen-Qadir offer an initial description of the widespread presence of uncanny images in religious practice in South Asian Islam and Russian Orthodox Christianity. Drawing on their multi-sited fieldwork, the authors map the presence of two religious images in each tradition that are familiar yet eerie, and that signal a rupture from the ‘normal’ order of things. Their analysis proposes that uncanny images make a phenomenological demand of the viewer that inherently challenges literalist or allegorical readings. While literalist readings increasingly attempt to tie down singular meanings of such images (or ban them altogether as in many Islamic cases), in practice many faithful viewers assign differing meanings to them as part of their locale, era, and life condition. The persistent use of such inexplicable images in vernacular religious practice opens the path for further empirical mapping and theoretical analysis into our collective religious unconscious.