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.     

Materializing performance and ritual: decoding the archaeology of movement in tallensi shrines in northern ghana

ABSTRACT

The static is often given prominence within much archaeological interpretation and conceptualization in relation to ritual and religion. This is potentially due to the fact that static material residues are being considered and, in turn, this static image is transferred onto the ritual practices, beliefs, and communities that generated the archaeological material. Instead some of the material encountered archaeologically might be structured by much more dynamic, fluid, and active ritual behaviors. Considering performance, movement, and bodily understandings in relation to space and material culture offers a potential mechanism to begin to explore this, and will be considered with reference to the Golib festival and the archaeology of Tallensi shrines in the Tongo Hills of the Upper East Region in Northern Ghana.     

城市社区堆肥:美国实践案例研究及其对中国的启示

社区堆肥是城市垃圾减量与资源化的有效途径,亦是城市与社区可持续发展的重要基石.近年来,分散式社区堆肥实践在国外方兴未艾,其中的理念、模式与方法亟待总结.文章探究了美国社区堆肥的目标、特点和类型,进一步选取其典型案例,分析各案例社区堆肥项目的实践模式,并总结美国社区堆肥实践的要点.最后,阐述对中国的启示,以期为我国社区生...