A Tale of Two Façades: Archaeology and the Secularization of an Islamic Past

Abstract

This article examines how certain forms of preservation work to recast the past in rigid terms of secular and religious. Focusing on a series of early Islamic period sites in the Levant, collectively known as the Umayyad qusūr (sometimes referred to as “desert palaces”), this essay traces the ways in which scholars signal the realms of the secular through interpretation of architectonics and iconography. This process of secularization is then further advanced through practices of preservation and display within colonial and nationalist museum contexts on a grand scale. At stake are ethical claims about the value of religion, specifically Islam, in larger discourses of culture and civilization. The paper explores the role played by these approaches to the material past of the early Islamic world for how they perform and police the boundaries of religious and secular materiality.     

Afterword—gendering religious objects: placing them as agents in matrices of power

ABSTRACT

The articles in this special issue demonstrate how objects can be interpreted as agents, as gendered images that make a statement, and how their impacts can be understood and assessed by human actors. They are differentially placed in matrices of power, and they can be manipulated to shift genders, to play with gendered combinations, to expand the limits of a particular gendered domain, to creatively play with reproductive imagery, and even to sell commodities in new and enticing ways in the mass media. Gendered religious objects are “statements” addressed not only to the eye but to the emotions, and part of a complex cultural field in which things can play important roles in people's lives. The links that connect ritual power to other forms of agency and biographical significance are perhaps the most significant links that we need to examine to understand them better in a world of many diverse cultural forms.     

Is Planning ‘Secular’? Rethinking Religion,Secularism, and Planning

ABSTRACT

Responding to the call for a deeper understanding of the religious phenomenon in planning – advanced, among others, by Leonie Sandercock and June Thomas in this journal – this paper argues that understanding religion in planning entails understanding religion’s constitutive other: secularism. This position draws on the burgeoning field of secular studies as well as examples of entanglement of religion, secularism, and planning in the United States and France. It problematizes a long-held assumption that good planning is based upon the notion of ‘religious indifference,’ for the assumption is conceptually anachronistic and practically untenable. This paper offers a set of methodological considerations as to how planners can radically rethink this assumption while effectively attending to the religious subjectivities of their constituencies and actively working through the structures of the modern state. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of this analysis for planning practice against the backdrop of recent improvements fostered by the American Planning Association as well as the relevance of this analysis across international contexts.     

Making spirits,making art,Nat carving and contemporary painting in pre-transition Myanmar (Burma)

ABSTRACT

Embodiment, materiality, and technology intersect in the production of sacred images where tools, media, and intangible studio protocols inform the production of efficacious things. In Myanmar nat spirits appear in the bodies of costumed spirit mediums and in the intimately tended statues that adorn their altars. Prior to the recent democratic transition, nats appeared as the subjects of paintings, sometimes offering sociopolitical commentaries. This article explores the resonances between technologies of nat making in workshops that produce images for mediums and the techniques deployed by contemporary artists who have made nats the subjects of their paintings. In the Burmese religious world view, nats are lesser entities than the Buddha; their troubled histories of injustice account for their continuing agency as spirits in the human world. Appropriately, nat images are cruder than Buddha images; carvers are less likely to use precious wood or to observe Buddhist precepts and aesthetic guidelines while carving. A similar sense of the unrefined, unsettled nat is conveyed through the daring representational techniques and liberties of artists. We argue that connections between media, technique, and object agency can have resonance when sacred subjects are deployed in secular art.     

Media and the senses in the making of religious experience: an introduction

ABSTRACT

This introduction places the articles presented in this special issue in a broader frame by outlining current issues in the study of religious material and visual culture. It argues for an understanding of religion as a practice of mediation to which media, understood as “sensational forms” are intrinsic. Such sensational forms are central to construing specific religious subjectivities, generating religious experience, and calling upon the divine by appealing to, and tuning, the senses and the body in ways peculiar to the specificity of religious traditions.     

Pilgrimage in graeco-roman and early christian antiquity seeing the gods Elsner,JaŚ and Rutherford,Ian (eds.)

ABSTRACT

This study is an ethnographic and conceptual analysis of religious objects, their uses, and mediation of authority within the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Universal Church) in Brazil. Drawing on scholarship within media studies, religion and media, and material religion, I distinguish between artifacts used to cement implicit contracts between Universal Church followers and their church community, which I call contractual media, or swag, and those that followers bring to meetings to be blessed and then take home to mediate both good and evil forces in family, work, and social life—these I call portable media. While portable object media are seen by their owners as powerful tools, contractual media, on the other hand, create implicit power relations that keep followers tied to the institutional church in a reciprocal exchange predicated upon expected prosperity as evidence of faithful attendance, fidelity, and personal sacrifice. The physical exchange of material goods in religious spaces constitutes a perpetuation rather than a disruption of institutional religious authority. As infrastructure, contractual object media establish and maintain conditions for otherwise mundane materials to mediate power on a daily basis. Through attention toward portable and contract object media, as part of what I am calling material microstructure, we can further complicate religious authority as it is mediated through objects, not just in one-way flows but as dynamic exchanges and trade-offs between personal empowerment and institutional control.     

Religious Materiality in Elizabethan Essex (1558-1603)

Abstract

Based on an analysis of over 11,000 Elizabethan Essex wills, this article presents the first systematic study of the everyday religious environment of Essex. While scholars of the English Reformation increasingly study the everyday behaviors, routines, and rituals which defined English Protestant life, this article articulates how smaller household objects expand our knowledge of religion, practice, and remembrance in post-Reformation England. It also reinvestigates the potential for using wills as a foundation for the study of objects. This, in turn, helps us better understand and appreciate the substantial role objects had as part of an English Protestant religious identity increasingly built around remembrance and memory and, more broadly, enables us to question our historiographical assumptions about the speed, spread, and efficiency of the Reformation.     

Beautiful and efficacious statues: magic,commodities, agency and the production of sacred objects in popular religion in vietnam

ABSTRACT

In his provocative rethink of the anthropology of art, Alfred Gell offers the radical suggestion that people commonly abduct agency—acts of thought, will or intention—to things and suggests that the relationship between people and things be studied in the manner that anthropologists analyze other kinds of human relationships. In Gell's terms, the relationship between people and temple images, as sacred objects, follows the “the rules laid down for idols as co-present others.” We will explore how one such a relationship fares in the accelerated market economy of Vietnam where workshops have rationalized the production of “idols,” wooden temple statues, making them more like commodities and where a global market in Asian antiquities encourages theft. Tim Ingold critiques studies of “agency” and “materiality” for too often ignoring the tangible materials and methods of production, but we suggest that in the marketplace for sacred objects, attention to both object agency and artisanal process can be mutually enriching. To do this, we first describe how popular religion in Vietnam renders statues as animated, sacred and agentive and how devotees experience and describe statue agency in and through their own relationships with divine images. We then show how production methods are implicated in the creation of agentive images and consider how these understandings and processes have and have not been compromised since the opening and acceleration of the market from the late 1980s. We argue that a sophisticated market permits a hierarchy of value and a range of consumer choice in the production and consumption of sacred objects.     

Scents,Community, and Incense in Traditional Chinese Religion

In a religious context incense is used for a variety of reasons in various cultures, usually for the purposes of healing or purification. In traditional Chinese religion, incense and incense objects are essential for making a connection with spiritual beings as well as establishing and maintaining religious communities. For Chinese religious practitioners, burning incense opens up communication with deities, and incense ash is required to found new temples. Through pilgrimage, incense is used to demarcate the territory of a deity and maintain relationships between temple communities. Chinese communities have also had a long history of forming voluntary associations, religious and otherwise, that have been organized around the use of incense objects. This article examines the use of incense in traditional Chinese religion, how incense objects are used to build and maintain communities, and how incense acts as a tangible bridge between the spiritual and material.     

Iconic Religion in Urban Space

Abstract

In order to understand current dynamics of religious diversity, a focus on the tangible presence of religion and the co-existence of new and longstanding religious buildings, sites and artifacts in urban spaces is a fruitful starting point. Launching the notion of iconic religion, this introduction seeks to contribute to developing a scholarly framework for the nexus of religion and the city from a spatial, material, aesthetic and semiotic angle. Situated in the interface between matter and religious meaning, religious icons are not simply carriers of meaning, but make it present.     

Transgressing religious boundaries: the power of aesthetics in tamil catholic and hindu worship

ABSTRACT

This article discusses shared material culture and sensorial practices in prayer among Hindu and Catholic Sri Lankan Tamils living in Paris, such as the clockwise circling of incense, the use of flower garlands, and the worship of Mother Mary. Rather than classifying these practices into religious categories, I argue for a need to examine how such practices come to be shared. By employing a material approach to religious aesthetics which recognizes that objects or “things” are active and have agency and affect how we sense and thus experience our world, I suggest that common aesthetic elements are able to produce feelings of religiosity and, particularly for people who share a common aesthetic in everyday life, to bridge the levels between humans and the divine.     

Treacherous matters,or some notes towards a symptomatology of crisis

ABSTRACT

A stone surrendered by a Muslim to a Christian on an urban battlefield in Ambon (Indonesia), circulated with stunning effect in a Christian prayer group. Within no time it infected this core scene of Christian worship and community, triggering illness and possession, turning the group's prayers into a Qur'anic reading session and inserting the spectral presence of a North Moluccan sultan's daughter into its midst. This scene is only the most dramatic instance of the promiscuous traffic in poisonous and protective objects across religious boundaries during the war that racked the Moluccan city and its surroundings from 1999 until the 2002 peace. It also attests to the often carefully policed difference between magic and religion at the time. From rosaries flaunted by Protestants aiming to pass as Catholics, magical amulets worn alongside tiny Qur'ans or Bibles into battle, and Jesus billboards emerging as brandmarks for Christian neighborhoods, the war fostered and witnessed an explosion of religious and occult technologies along with the objects through which these technologies operate. Of particular interest is the tension and interplay between the deployment of amulets, which often functioned as boundary markers, and the war-torn terrain in which they appeared and occasionally went astray, betraying the intentions with which they were first set in motion. Attention to the capricious waywardness and mediating capacities of things as symptoms of profound crisis provides a point of departure for a larger symptomatology of crisis in which both the shape-shifting effects of objects and their taken-for-granted status as fixtures of everyday worlds are explored.     

Mediality and materiality in religious performance: religion as heritage in mauritius

ABSTRACT

In Mauritius, religious performance often doubles as officially recognized diasporic heritage, institutionalized as a component of Mauritians' “ancestral cultures.” Such forms of religious expression not only point to a source of authority outside Mauritius but also play a key role in legitimizing claims on Mauritian citizenship. In this article, I examine two kinds of practices that help to instantiate religious links as heritage: ritual performance combined with the cultivation of “ancestral language” in the context of a Hindu pilgrimage and the role of sound reproduction techniques in popularizing a particular genre of Islamic devotional poetry. I argue that these embodied and material practices illustrate two contrasting modes of engaging with spatially and temporally removed sources of authenticity. While the pilgrimage aims at naturalizing diasporic links through their objectification and iconization, uses of sound reproduction technology in Islamic devotional contexts establish links to sources of religious authority under the assumption that the medium used is relatively transparent. Ultimately, the modalities of materiality presupposed in the ethnographic examples account for the authenticating effect of religion as heritage.     

Ex-votos in lourdes: contested materiality of miraculous healings

ABSTRACT

The modern Marian shrine in Lourdes (southern France) attracts six million pilgrims every year. While the site is known worldwide for the miracles that occur there, the dominant official discourse hardly recognizes people's miraculous experiences. This ethnographic study focuses on ex-votos, the religious objects by which pilgrims offer their thanks to Mary for working a miracle. These are situated on the contested boundary between pilgrims' lived religion and officially prescribed religion at the Lourdes site. The article aims to understand what power politics are at stake in the handling of ex-votos as well as what motives pilgrims have to leave offerings at the site. This is illustrated by the in-depth analysis of the story of one ex-voto that also shows that the bonds within families, and between families and Mary, are crucial elements of the stories told. By offering an ex-voto, pilgrims not only remember Mary, but also their family and ancestors.     

Activating sacred objects in public space: Bernini’s angels on the ponte sant’angelo in early modern Rome

ABSTRACT

In 1667, Pope Clement IX commissioned Gian Lorenzo Bernini to design 10 sculptures of angels to decorate the Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome. Contemporary accounts record that the faithful experienced Bernini’s statues as animated celestial figures at the heart of the city. The ability of the marble angels to persuasively move beholders fulfilled the aims of the papal commission to expand the reach of the Church into the urban space of Rome. This paper examines how these religious objects were activated in a public space, a setting composed of sacred and profane elements. In the early modern era, the Ponte Sant’Angelo connected Rome’s city center to St. Peter’s Basilica while also serving as a setting for civic processions, spectacular fireworks displays, and public executions. While angels were ubiquitous in the city’s sacred spaces, like church interiors, Bernini’s sculptures materialized a flock of angels at an outdoor, urban nexus of theology, spectacle, and justice. Drawing on theories of performance that conceptualize the profound religious encounter that can result from the simultaneous juxtaposition of sacred and profane elements, this paper argues that the public setting activated Bernini’s marble statues so that they were experienced as lively celestial figures by the faithful.     

Seeing religion with new eyes at the asian civilisations museum

ABSTRACT

In Asia and even in cosmopolitan Singapore, religion still plays a major role in national affairs as well as in the everyday lives of many ordinary people. Singapore is a secular state with a multifaith and multi-ethnic showcase. The plurality of cultures, religions, races, and origins still has a significant impact on state matters such as the school curriculum, citizenship education, and preservation of traditional cultures. Museum educators need to understand the opportunities and challenges diversity creates so that our collection and programs may be rendered relevant and meaningful to our visitors. Continual experimentation and responsive improvisation raised many questions and offered numerous possibilities for our museum educators to help visitors see religion with new eyes, not as exclusive sets of beliefs but an ecosystem of diverse ideas bound by rich civilizations that are connected by centuries of trade and cultural exchange. The Asian Civilisations Museum is the first museum in the region to present a broad yet integrated perspective of Asian cultures and civilizations. Can this museum really help people in our society, especially students; discover “selves” and “others“? Is it necessary to introduce new ways of looking at religion? Is impactful learning about various religions possible in a secular space?     

Apotheosis and memory: Ishii jūji,a savior for our times

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between history, sacred architecture, and the production of meaning. In particular, it discusses the way in which the historical figure of Ishii Jūji (1865–1914), a renowned child relief activist and religious utopianist of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Japan, becomes constituted as a sacred symbol through the interplay of architecture, displays, and iconography at the Ishii Jūji Museum in the grounds of the Ishii Jūji Kinen Yūaisha (the Ishii Jūji Memorial Center of Loving Friendship; hereafter Yūaisha). Through its commemoration, the Yūaisha draws upon a complex historical legacy as the source of its present vision and attributes to Ishii a divine status through material representations in the form of texts, photographs, objects, and religious iconography. Moreover, the Yūaisha, propelled by Ishii as sacred symbol, has come to produce new material spaces, through the construction of buildings, fields, gardens, through which its vision of social care may be realized. As a result, history and material religion collide to produce new spaces of meaning in the present.     

Ethical pleasure,visual dzikir,and artistic subjectivity in contemporary indonesia

ABSTRACT

Drawing from a long-term ethnographic collaboration with Indonesian painter A. D. Pirous, this article examines the mingling of art and religion for what it may tell us about subjectivity and the senses in a predominantly Muslim public culture. Recent statements describe subjectivity as the site of a social actor's sensibility, reflexivity, and judgment and as an annex to prevailing social, cultural, and ideological circumstances. Following some brief reflections about artistic and religious subjectivity, this essay discusses the Islamic revival in Indonesia since the 1970s, a revival that has given spirituality, and Sufism in particular, new popularity and appeal. It then turns to a set of artistic practices that Pirous associates with “ethical pleasure” and with dzikir, the “mindfulness of God” that Muslims, and Sufis in particular, are careful to cultivate. Subjectivity acquires artistic and religious dimension in these practices, particularly as the senses engage with paint and canvas in devotional-aesthetic acts of “visual dzikir.” We see that the intermingling of aesthetic and religious ideologies in the reflexive, sensorial sphere of subjectivity is not an interior or ethnographically unavailable phenomenon, but one that is cultural and public, worked out in the sensuous materiality of things and the world of social discourse.     

Are We Afraid of Magic? Magical Artifacts in Estonian Museums

Abstract

Despite the importance of folk religion in Estonian identity, material collections of magical objects are formed randomly. Scarcity is characteristic also of academic interest towards magical objects, resulting on the one hand in ignoring magical objects, on the other hand in ungrounded over-interpretations. This article explores the formation of museum collections holding magical objects and ways of exploiting magic in academic studies.