“Our Lady of Congo”: The Creation and Reception of an Early Missionary Propaganda Devotion

Abstract

In 1891, the founder of the Matadi mission commissioned a master sculptor in Ghent to create a neo-gothic Madonna and child with a kneeling, imploring African released from the shackles of slavery at the Virgin’s feet. “Our Lady of Congo” was expected by its creators to become the tutelary figure of the new colony. In Belgium, it was successfully used as missionary propaganda, notably by the Society for Congolese Children, a pious association settled in Ghent to ransom young slaves in the Congo Free State. Yet the sculpture only had mixed success in the Leopoldian colony. It took part in the creation of a nostalgic space for the missionaries of Matadi, but failed to elicit the devotedness of the local population, despite over three centuries of Kongo Christianity elaborated by the local elites and the Catholic missionaries. These divergent receptions are analyzed based on historical and visual sources, using comparative data to shed light on the representations of slavery, race, and redemption as appraised in Belgium and in Congo.     

A pragmatic approach to church construction in Northern China at the time of Christian inculturation: The handbook “Le missionnaire constructeur”, 1926

In 1926, French Jesuit missionaries from Daming published at Xianxian (Hebei province) a little handbook for church construction in Northern China: “Le missionnaire constructeur, conseils-plans” (“The missionary builder: advice-plans”), containing 67 pages of text and 54 plates. After a short introduction about handbooks and pattern books of churches, this paper describes and analyses the handbook׳s content and its different practical aspects about building materials, masonry, roofs, etc. The book, however, is more than a compilation of technical hints and reveals a lot about the missionaries’ perception of Chinese building traditions as well as the transmission of Western techniques to Chinese workers. The paper also contextualizes the handbook and tries to identify both the authors and the addressees. In the mid-1920s, the Vatican launched the Christian inculturation process in China, which concerned architecture too. Nevertheless, many missionaries resisted, preferring Gothic or Italianate architecture to a new Sino-Christian style. The handbook participated in this debate.     

Rhizomorphics of Race and Space

Abstract

This article discusses the slave-holding forts and castles erected on the coast of West Africa between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, and argues for their centrality in conceptualizing race as a maker and marker of modern, transnational American identity. It reconfigures Paul Gilroy's notion of “fractal” and “rhizomorphic” structure of the Black Atlantic to cast the castles as a collective architectural monument to centuries-long cultural exchanges between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. By linking these sites to recent “roots” tourism, it also demonstrates their continued vitality to mapping the history and theory of African diasporic spaces in the United States.     

Haunting the buddha: indian popular religions and the formation of buddhism DeCaroli,Robert

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the presence of “images” in the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé. In many traditional houses of Candomblé it is often said that it is not allowed to photograph or film rituals. On the other hand, in recent years, the presence of Catholic and other figurative images in Candomblé shrines has been questioned by recent “purification” movements—often led by these traditional houses—who fight syncretism, separating Catholicism from African religion. Still, in many cases figurative images are present in shrines, and rituals are photographed and filmed. This article argues that, beyond syncretism, images in Candomblé are contentious because they can be powerful: they can be indexes of the presence of Candomblé santos, they can become instances of a “distributed person.”     

Domesticating Buddha: Making a Place for Japanese Buddhist Altars (Butsudan) in Western Homes

Abstract

This paper explores how white, Western followers of Japanese Buddhist schools (primarily Sōka Gakkai) practice Buddhism through acts of purchasing, decorating, and positioning altars (butsudan) in the space of their homes. Drawing on a pilot ethnographic study of altar practice, I detail the oft-overlooked dimension of becoming and being Buddhist that is material consumption. Western consumption of Buddhist popular culture is often critiqued as aesthetically driven and Orientalist. However, aesthetics, “Japanese-ness,” and ease of use are often not the only or primary concerns when crafting an altar. Rather, altar-making can be a continuous process involving significant deliberation, DIY, and compromise. By directing attention to the domestic religious sphere and the concrete artifacts via which Buddhism has crossed oceans, I show how making a place in the home for butsudan is tied up in the process of making Buddhism “at home.”     

Humanism and the Teaching of Architecture

Abstract

“Urban Threads” was an architectural installation that explored the ways in which those without land, money, and power shape the urban fabric, in particular the private territories that are staked out in the public realm and the spatial practices that connect them. All creative works in the installation were produced by women who were homeless in the context of a support group, TimeOut @ The Place, run by a collaboration of welfare agencies in Melbourne. Nine sites, located in minor lanes and alcoves in Melbourne's Central Activities District, each housed “bedrooms” and “WAR(d)robes,” a “dining room,” and a “Living Room.” The “Path of Most Resistance (and Least Distance)” was marked out between them. The installation was conceived of and curated by the author as part of a PhD by Creative Works. The question “to what extent can architecture be 'tactical' (de Certeau's definition)” is at the basis of the project.     

The religion of the mithras cult in the roman empire mysteries of the unconquered sun Beck,Roger

ABSTRACT

For most of its history, candomblé was a marginal and persecuted spirit possession cult. From the 1920s onward, however, the cult evolved into the “trademark” of Bahia, a state in northeastern Brazil. The color white—a spotless and impeccable white—has come to dominate the public face of the cult: evoking positive connotations such as cleanliness and purity, the color helped to portray candomblé as the splendid cultural heritage of the Bahian state as well as a respectable African religion. However, the “politics of white” has always been intersected by a “poetics of white,” as Bahian artists, writers, and other image producers sought to destabilize the condoned meanings of white. Hinting at that which is absent from the impeccable surfaces of candomblé's public appearance, this “poetics of white” produced a layered public understanding of the cult. As people engage in speculations over the “true” candomblé that lies hidden behind its public façade, claims to be “in the know” reconfigure the notion of cultural capital, and new standards of belonging come into being.     

Forces shaping urban morphology in Southern Africa Today: unequal interplay among people,practice and policy

ABSTRACT

This article explores public participation and its impact on urban structures in Southern Africa. Often, public participation stands in opposition to existing legislation and prevailing urban policies. Using textual analysis and case studies of Harare, Zimbabwe, Johannesburg, South Africa and Luanda, Angola, this study concludes that the urban fabric and structure of Southern African cities are in a state of instability. The rise of public participation–“right to the city”–has given way to “cities of rebels” in which citizens react or rebel against urban policies and legislation. These forces threaten sustainable urban morphology and service delivery, complicating the roles of urban planners and managers.     

From darkest england to the hope of the world: protestant pedagogy and the visual culture of the london missionary society

The Hope of the World, painted by Harold Copping for the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1915, is arguably the most popular picture of Jesus produced in Britain in the twentieth century. It was an iconic image in the Sunday school movement between 1915 and 1960, embodying the shift to a progressive child-centered pedagogy, and providing the inspiration for juvenile involvement in the missionary project. Millions of copies of the picture were sold globally and its vision of the world united in the loving embrace of Christ was the inspiration for many variations on the same theme. Despite this success, The Hope of the World remains absent from the histories of the period in which it was produced, belonging to a genre of representation commonly dismissed as “picture postcard piety.” This article seeks to establish the socio-historical importance of The Hope of the World through an account of its conception, production, circulation, and reception. It argues that this, together with similar pictures produced by the LMS, can, despite their imperialistic veneer, provide evidence of progressive thinking about issues of ethnicity, gender, and class.     

Kitaro Nishida's Philosophy of Emptiness and its Architectural Significance

Abstract

In order to reconcile the breach between the “typologist” and the “populationist” in contemporary architecture, this article discusses Kitaro Nishida's philosophy of emptiness. The article first introduces Asian artistic examples to illustrate the significance of emptiness in art. It then discusses Nishida's emptiness as the ultimate foundation of reality from which being and nonbeing coemerge. The article also summarizes three interrelated lessons from Nishida's emptiness pertaining to architecture: the dialectic of opposites, the bodily subject of immersion, and the dialectic between the ideal and the real. The article finally explicates these concepts by discussing Asian and Western architectural examples.     

Ordering Space: Types in Architecture and Design

Abstract

Embedded in the culture of modern architecture is the directive that a façade ought to fit tightly around its building, like a well-fitting suit. “False façades,”“façadism,” and the “screen façade” have been derisive terms used by architects and critics to describe buildings whose façades appear either too big or too small for their buildings. Postmodernism changed this, so that façades relatively independent of their interiors were encouraged. The neo-modernism of the last two decades has integrated this “disconnected” façade into the practice of what otherwise is a revival of the system of the heroic period of the movement.     

Seismic Design

Abstract

“We took the building down with dignity.”¹ Through the act of removing an unstable but culturally significant structure in an African American community, Studio South explored architecture as process and politics. The necessary erasure of this Segregation era landmark resulted in a series of celebratory events within the community through the Studio's method of disassembly and revelation. The site of the landmark has been reactivated by the intervention of Studio South and will now continue to evolve even as it recalls the past.     

The Visual,The Invisible,And Blindness: The Uncanny In Self–landscape Relations

Abstract

This article examines experiences of the uncanny within woodlands of Southern England among walkers who have impaired vision. It proposes that uncanny experiences disrupt assumptions that humans actively perceive a passive landscape by approaching the landscape as an actant provoking uncanny experiences that shift senses of self–landscape relations. Optical tropes have pervaded notions of both the uncanny and conceptualizations of self–landscape relations in contemporary European intellectual thought. Here, attention to the case study of blindness reconfigures these understandings and reveals the slippery nexus of the visible and the invisible in uncanny experiences. Motifs of vision are refracted in the experiences of “phantom vision” through which people who have noncongenitally impaired vision might “see” in their “mind’s eye.” The palpable, felt, multisensorial senses of the uncanny are revealed with the presences of trees and visceral nature of darkness. Uncanny landscapes are characterized by presences, the unknown, and disjunctures, in which notions of familiarity and strangeness, known and unknown, collide.     

E-Capital and Economic Growth in European Metropolitan Areas: Applying Social Media Messaging in Technology-Based Urban Analysis

ABSTRACT

Innovation is an elemental part of regional economic growth. In the past years, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have enabled new means for data collection, and analysis for the study of regional innovation systems. This paper investigates innovation and technology messaging in Twitter, which has been described as the SMS of the Internet. The concept of electronic capital (e-capital) is applied in order to find out how technology messaging relates to the economic situation in metropolitan areas. The recently introduced concept of e-capital is cultivated from the conceptualizations of innovation acknowledging that different forms of capital, including human, social, and economic, circulate and have an effect on each other. The analysis indicates that clusters of e-capital and potential growth clusters are identifiable by using Twitter activity. In Europe, e-capital agglomerates to previously identified clusters of the “Blue Banana” and the “Golden Banana” (or the “Sun Belt”). Based on spatial statistics, we apply Categories of Metropolitan Areas (COMAs) in order to classify Twitter intensive locations across Europe. We defined four COMAs and estimated their e-capital potential. The most problematic COMA lies in Eastern Europe whereas the strongest concentration is found in Western Europe.     

The Decline of Image of China Under the Background of Rites Controversy in Qing Dynasty

At the turn of the 18~(th)-19~(th) century,in the process of developing missionary business in China,there was a debate about the nature of traditional Chinese sacrificial rites among missionaries,that is,whether the traditional rites of Confucius and Christianity were consistent.With the intervention of the Vatican and the Qing Dynasty,the Chinese rites controversy evolved into the dispute over Chinese imperial power and Roman religious imperial power.The missionary career in China also experienced the transformation from the toleration order,exclusion order and the ticket receiving order to the prohibition order.The sharp opposition between Chinese imperial power and Roman religious imperial power led to the desperate situation of Christian career in China.The missionaries naturally vented their dissatisfaction with China,the good image of China gradually collapsed,and the western image of China began to decline rapidly.     

cataloging magic: an introduction

Abstract

This Introduction, by the co-editors of this special issue, outlines the background to, and aims of “Cataloguing Magic.” It considers the ambiguity of the term “magic” and how it will be employed in relation to museum contexts throughout the issue, before specifying the broad questions this issue aims to address. The co-editors then detail the issue’s international contributors, who include academic researchers and curators, and the contexts in which they engage with the concept of “cataloguing magic.”     

The Effect of Mandated Planning on Plan Quality

Problem: What is a “good plan”? Among their key goals, plans aim to communicate, influence and engage. Persuasiveness (the ability to engage and motivate) is, therefore, an essential plan quality. Unfortunately, all too many comprehensive plans lack this important quality. In addition, state planning mandates intended to strengthen planning can instead worsen this shortcoming.

Purpose: To develop a methodology to measure and compare the communicative and persuasive qualities of plans in states with and without planning mandates.

Methods: A specially designed protocol was developed to measure the communicative and persuasive qualities of comprehensive plans. Plans of 20 municipalities in states with planning mandates were compared with those of 20 municipalities in states without planning mandates. Statistical analyses of the results were conducted using the Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney (U) test and simple t tests.

Results and conclusions: Requiring local governments to prepare plans did not result in better plans—at least as measured by a protocol tailored specifically to assess the persuasiveness and communicative quality of plans. Plans prepared in mandate states were much more rigid and standardized than those prepared in nonmandate states. Nonmandated plans also scored much higher in terms of their narrative and storytelling qualities than mandated plans. Private consultant involvement in plan making significantly increased the communicative and persuasive qualities of plans.

Takeaway for practice: Plans in all 40 municipalities fell far short of the ideal communicative and persuasive qualities set forth in the protocol. The deficiency was greatest in states with planning mandates. The involvement of private consultants had a positive impact on plan quality, while the provision of state funding for planning did not.

Research support: None.     

Seeing syncretism as visual blasphemy: critical eyes on caodai religious architecture

ABSTRACT

The exuberant, eclectic architecture of the Caodai Holy See in French Indochina was described as a “grotesque combination” of European and Asian elements by several famous writers and this sense of horror served to construct a notion of “visual blasphemy” which merged aesthetic and ethical elements. Architecture is always read and misread though a cultural lens. It has been argued that the colonial “world as staged” (Mitchell 1999) produced its own “reality-effects,” so I argue that an anti-colonial counter project of large public works tied to an innovative Asian synthesis of world religions served not only to bolster the morale of a once downtrodden people but also to convince them of the historical inevitability of their triumph. Caodaism was a new religious movement followed by 3 million people in French Indochina and its daring and “presumptuous” architecture was a visual act of insurrection, an iconographic revolution designed to precede and prepare the way for the political revolution to follow.