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.     

A ritual garment,the synagogue,and gender questions

ABSTRACT

The now-global presence of Samayapuram Mariyamman, a goddess from Tamil Nadu, has complicated discussions about her identity as a “local” deity of limited influence. This article details the contemporary veneration of the goddess in the urban, island city-state of Singapore. For the past thirteen years, her devotees in Singapore have observed a festival in her honor, christening it the “Sri Samayapuram Mariyamman Kul Varppu Celebrations” (KVC). This goddess festival is framed around the core ritual of kul varppu, a “porridge offering” to the deity, anchoring the event firmly within the votive tradition of devotional Hinduism. While this ritual has persisted in households over time, it has now been incorporated into, and stands at the center of a consciously organized, collective, goddess festival in an urban, multicultural, cosmopolitan context, and has acquired a fresh set of meanings. Its guiding principles rest in a commitment to the “ways of the ancestors,” a set of customary religious practices, which have been largely “forgotten” and that are being revived for the “benefit of future generations.” “Bringing back the old ways” is an idiom through which devotees articulate their revitalization efforts, manifest concretely in privileging ritual attention to folk Hindu deities. The article begins by offering an ethnographic grounding for this project, specifying the research trajectory and recording the methodological routes traveled. Next, the article narrates the form of the festival I observed in 2004 and 2005, followed by a turn to its material dimensions, emphasizing the cooking of the porridge, the reproduction of sacred space, and the movement of the deity within this. Coming to the present, the article ends by charting the shifts that have taken place in the festival's enactment over a thirteen-year period and in the organizing group's portfolio and agenda.     

Sacrament and sculpture: liturgical influences on the choir screen of modena cathedral

ABSTRACT

The twelfth-century choir screen, or pontile, sculpted with Passion scenes by the Campionesi for Modena Cathedral, Italy, dominates the nave and dictates both visual and physical access to the sacred east end of the church. In the past, such monuments were viewed primarily as barriers between the privileged clerics and the laity but recently scholars have begun to examine them as integral parts of the audience's experience of the rituals performed within the building. Although the relationship between the Campionesi's imagery and religious rites has been noted in passing, an in-depth analysis of the connections between the art and the liturgy has not been undertaken. This paper attempts to partially fill this void by studying the sculptures of Christ's last days on earth in relation to the High Mass as outlined in a twelfth-century missal (Modena, Archivio Capitolare, O. I. 20), medieval allegorical interpretations of that rite, as well as contemporary Easter rituals. This examination reveals that the liturgy and the sculptures functioned together in order to make the historic-religious events more tangible and to encourage the viewers' active participation in the rites.     

Museological Framings of Islam in Europe

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the evocation of the sacred in the realm of material heritage practice, drawing on the creation of Freedom Park, a monumental, state-driven post-apartheid heritage project, as a case of heritage formation. Heritage formation refers to the casting of material cultural forms as heritage through sacralizing practices that set these objects apart at the center of social relations and their maintenance as powerful registers of the past for the “hailing” of collective identities. Specifically, it shows how southern African indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) and religious concepts were appropriated, translated, and employed in the formation of three material elements at Freedom Park: the//hapo, or museum, as recounting a cosmogony of nation, the Wall of Names as generating a transcendent ancestry, and the Isivivane as focalizing a national sacred center. Overall, it serves to expand our understanding of the dynamics of heritage production in a transforming South Africa, the dynamic power and appeal of heritage as sacralized material culture, and the significance of a critical religious studies approach for interpreting the dynamism of contemporary heritage practice.     

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.     

Displacement and re-placement: the international friendship bell as a translocative technology of memory

ABSTRACT

The International Friendship Bell is a traditional Japanese bonshō bell that was installed in Oak Ridge, TN, in 1996 to mark the city's fiftieth anniversary. I interpret the bell as a highly ambivalent site of cultural memory, drawing on memory studies theory to analyze its multiple meanings. Its backers represented the bell as an elegant tribute to Oak Ridge's post-World War II scientific legacy, while its detractors interpreted it as offering an unacceptable apology for Oak Ridge's role in constructing “Little Boy,” the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Describing the bell as a translocative technology of memory, I argue that the selection of a Japanese Buddhist bell served two important functions. First, despite having appropriated the bell from its original ritual context, its designers used it to sanctify Oak Ridge as sacred space. The bell was thus secularized, precisely as it sacralized civic space. Second, the bell's alien nature enabled it to serve as a screen on which Oak Ridgers could work out their ambivalence and anxieties about their civic identity. The bell thus provides a lens for understanding how religious ritual objects acquire new meanings when displaced from their intended contexts.     

Spontaneous memorials and contemporary modes of mourning in america

ABSTRACT

Buddha-recitation devices (nianfo ji 念佛機) use modern technology to reproduce the name of the Buddha endlessly, offering this function in the form of portable plastic boxes akin to small radios or iPods. These devices raise key questions for our understanding of contemporary Buddhism: Why is a specialized device necessary? How is the device shaped by earlier traditions of recitation and sound? The Buddha-recitation device uses packaging and ornamentation to establish its status as a religious object, thereby sanctifying the ordinary function of producing sound. Although this mechanized recitation appears to replace that of human voice, analysis of miracle tales, personal testimonials, and doctrinal discussions shows that these devices more closely emulate the sacred sounds spontaneously produced in the environment of the western paradise where Buddhists aspire to be reborn.     

Pixelating the Sacred: Digital and Mechanical Reproduction and the Orthodox Christian Icon in the United States

Abstract

Drawing upon recent ethnographic research (interviews and participant observation) conducted among members of an Orthodox Christian parish (Orthodox Church in America or OCA) located in the southern United States, I explore the ways that contemporary digital and other mechanical modes of reproduction complicate how contemporary American Orthodox Christians integrate icons, two-dimensional images essential to Orthodox worship, into their devotional lives. While theologians have traditionally emphasized hand-painted icons as fundamental to the Orthodox liturgical experience, mass-produced print and digitally downloaded reproductions have largely supplanted such traditionally crafted images in the lived, everyday experience of American Orthodox Christians. A key theme of this paper is the way these developing technologies enhance the agency of my informants as they make critical decisions regarding which images (within a prodigious visual landscape) to accept as “icons” over and against others simply dismissed and disposed of as mere “pictures.” The inherent tensions informants confront in the process of this decision-making as well as the ways they appeal to Orthodox tradition in sanctifying their iconographic selections will be featured in this article.     

Krishna's prasadam: “eating our way back to godhead”

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the preparation, consumption, and distribution of food in ISKCON, and the ways in which ISKCON has absorbed and remade the Hindu tradition of prasadam, transforming it into a major vehicle of proselytization, a sacred cuisine, a health cure, a worldwide charitable enterprise, and increasingly a successful method of fundraising. The article contextualizes ISKCON's food culture, arguing that it emerges from the encounters between Chaitanya Vaishnavism and modernity, and the shifting patterns of overlap between Hindu and Western culture. Like ISKCON itself, it is the result of an uneven process of creative adaptation to some aspects of modernity and of resistance to others. Analysis of Krishna's prasadam reveals a dynamic tension between traditionalism and the reappropriation of tradition. While ISKCON's cultural and religious context is undoubtedly Hindu, its revisioning of prasadam as an instrument of global mission is radical. Its “kitchen culture” has grown to incorporate eco-projects, free food distribution, mass food production, and largescale catering. ISKCON claims that its food culture will restore human physical health and the health of the planet at a time when affluent nations are eating themselves to death. Its emphasis on ethically sourced food and sustainable lifestyles is therefore increasingly in harmony with international plans for environmental protection and climate change.     

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.     

luther's thesenportal: a case study of a “ritual-architectural event”

ABSTRACT

This article is part of a larger field-based study of contemporary festivity and religious tourism in Lutherland, a geographic and symbolic place associated with the life and work of Martin Luther. My aim, with reference to the work of Lindsay Jones and Victor Turner, is to develop an approach for studying the intersection of material culture and ritual. Material culture does not simply signify into empty space, shining meanings into its surrounding environment as a street lamp does light. Rather, material culture is produced, handled, used in a variety of ways. An exemplary case for studying how built space and ritual performance intersect is the Thesenportal of Wittenberg's Schlosskirche, an object and performative space commemorating the origin of the German Reformation.     

Prophetic products: muhammad in contemporary iranian visual culture

Much like religious objects produced and consumed elsewhere in the Islamic world, images of Muhammad are often associated with acts of play and worship, their power to cultivate joy and direct religious feelings in various faith communities strengthened in large part by their remove from the commodity situation. As scholars of visual and material culture have highlighted, a product is never merely an object to be acquired and used, stripped of symbolic import and application. On the contrary, it is a thoroughly socialized commodity central to cultural practices of exchange—of sending and receiving social messages—that take place in regimes of value. Within postrevolutionary Iran in particular, images and objects depicting the Prophet Muhammad have been manufactured en masse over the past three decades, catering to official regime ideology and popular devotional practices alike. This study explores how these types of prophetic products serve to visually reinforce and materially reify narratives about the ascendancy of the Shi’i faith, the legitimacy of Islamic governance, and the value of martyrdom within the larger religious and political landscape of contemporary Iran.     

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.     

Opening up the ritual casket: patterns of concealment and disclosure in early and medieval chinese religion

Ritual caskets—potent containers of precious stone or metal housing divinely granted treasures and esoteric texts—appear with some frequency in the literature of early medieval Daoism. These caskets reveal a rich complex of mythic narratives and ritual practices in Chinese religion as a whole. This article focuses on three aspects of religious practice involving a range of ritual caskets from the ancient to the early medieval period, including: (1) the vessels' function in the acquisition of the Heavenly Mandate tianming for imperial rulership as well as for immortality; (2) their mediating role in disclosing the revelation of sacred texts, especially from the Latter Han and into the narratives of early Daoism; and (3) their use in ritualizing expiation in early medieval Daoism through the depositing of “substitute bodies” into hidden caches and the advancing of liturgical petitions to otherworldly offices. On the most fundamental level, the ritual casket is a container that both conceals as well as reveals. We may thus see the hollow of the casket as a generative emptiness into which have been inserted a multiplicity of applications and interpretations over time, illustrating an esoteric dimension lying at the heart of the Daoist tradition.     

Agency and Affectivity of Paintings: The Lives of Chitrajis in Hindu Ritual Contexts

Numerous roles given to prints, paintings, and photographs in contemporary Hindu religious practices can be traced to changes in the ritual status of paintings. By advocating an ontological shift to a purified non-dualism called shuddhadvaita, the sixteenth-century religious philosopher Vallabhacharya established a new Hindu community who subsequently developed their own elaborate traditions of ritual that allowed devotees to personally interact with live images of Krishna. Within this new ontology of purified non-dualism, paintings were given roles normally reserved in Hinduism for sculptural images of gods and goddesses. This developed into a tradition of caring for and worshiping paintings considered live gods called chitra seva. The “picture turn” created by chitra seva led to other roles being given to paintings, where they were not only allowed agency, but could manifest affective powers within the classical Indian rasa system of aesthetics applied by Vallabhacharya to religious experience.     

The eagle and the dove: constructing catholic identity through word and image in nineteenth-century united states

ABSTRACT

In nineteenth-century United States the subject of Catholic devotional practices figured prominently in anti-Catholic polemical literature. To combat anti-Catholic sentiment the editors and illustrators of Catholic popular literature recast devotional practices through the lens of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution. Through images and narrative these authors forged connections between Catholic rituals and American practices of civil religion like the observance of national holidays and the veneration of the American flag. By recasting the practices like the veneration of relics, the lives of saints and devotions within the framework of an American civil religion, Catholics claimed that Americans engaged in similar practices and rituals. In this way Catholics naturalized their dogmas and interpreted them within a framework familiar to non-Catholic Americans, thus countering claims by detractors that they were superstitious and idolatrous.     

Embodying transcendence: on the literal,the material,and the cinematic sublime

ABSTRACT

This essay looks at the phenomenological relation between immanence and transcendence, the material and the immaterial, in films focused on “spiritual” or “religious” subject matter and themes. These films employ a variety of cinematic strategies meant not only to represent but also to present and solicit transcendent or “spiritual” states of being from the viewer. Each of these strategies is also an act of belief about the relationship between immanence and transcendence and about the relationship between the viewer's lived and sensual body and the visions and sounds expressed on the screen. Thus, certain strategies sublimate the experience of ek-stasis in literal dramatizations that emphasize the transcendent as “other” than material immanence, others emphasize the transcendent as located in immanence and thus sublimate the experience of ek-stasis in the materiality of existence—and still others emphasize the transcendent as immaterial and ungraspable except as an apprehended gap and/or opening in immanence. Considering such films as The Diary of a Country Priest, Thérèse, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Passion of the Christ, and Bee Season, the essay describes how certain ek-static moments are presented not only to but also on the viewer's lived-body, where both immanence and transcendence emerge and phenomenologically constitute both the sense and meaning of religious or spiritual experience.     

Culture as a Battleground: Subversive Narratives in Constructivist Architecture and Stage Design

Abstract

In Russia of the twenties, the connections that were forged between architecture and theater were so strong that the narratives of one cannot be read without knowledge of the other. A lack of awareness of the extent of this interdependence has obscured understanding of both. Inverse but identical, the “acting machine” became an environment, and the building became a mechanical theater. Both transitions were predicated on a visual language that united the carnival with the machine and on the existence of a new type of relationship between the stage set and the play, a relationship that became a model for the spectator's engagement with art and society.     

Material religion,education, and museums: introduction

ABSTRACT

Introducing the themes and contexts for this special issue of the journal, this editorial reflects particularly on the experience of museums and museum and heritage educators in the UK and Asia in interpreting religions and religious art. It looks at successful examples of specialist museum programs and exhibits on religions; and distance learning resources that include faiths in suggesting new approaches to citizenship education through cultural learning. It looks more broadly at new approaches to religious education that encompass sacred spaces.