What’s the Matter with You, Rock?!: What the Study of Daoism Can Say about Religious Images

Abstract This essay is about the trouble we scholars have with addressing religious images and object agency. It introduces one moment in a Daoist ritual to suggest alternative models for thinking about what images do. To do so, it intentionally looks outside scholarly discourse and to the music of Nina Simone to frame Religious Studies’ concern over Idol Anxiety as a way to circumvent the limits of what we can and cannot say about images. By reframing the paradigm of what images mean into the emic imperative of what images do , we avail ourselves to untapped models and vocabularies to address non-subjective agency.