Icons in Theory and Practice: An Orthodox Christian Example

Margaret E. Kenna's Icons in Theory and Practice, An Orthodox Christian Example, published in History of Religions, volume 24, by the University of Chicago Press in 1985, is an anthropological study of Greek Orthodox icon devotion built on Kenna's own fieldwork on a small Greek island and among island migrants in Athens, examining tamata, the small metal votive plaques offered to icons, alongside the formal theology of icon veneration. Its strength is that it pairs the Church's own doctrinal account of what an icon does with what Kenna actually observed ordinary devotees doing, a combination that a purely theological or purely ethnographic study on its own would miss. Its limit is that it is grounded in one island community's practice in a particular period, so a claim about Orthodox icon devotion generally, across the wider Greek or the broader Orthodox world, needs a source with that wider scope rather than this single community study.