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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

A Careful Balance: Materialist Concern Meets Spiritual Function in Balkh,Afghanistan

ABSTRACT

This article outlines the Aga Khan Trust for Culture’s heritage preservation practices at the shrine of Khwaja Parsa in Balkh, Afghanistan. It explores how this organization’s approach to the preservation of authenticity supports both classic preservation principles whilst also showing allegiance to Islamic practices that are compatible with the way this mosque and shrine complex is used in Balkh. One focus of the critical approach to heritage research has been on describing the tension between a ‘preservationist’ approach to heritage work - with its attached focus on the values of materiality, monumentality and aesthetics - and an approach that shows allegiance to religious or spiritual traditions that make sense in situ. This paper argues against this constructed dichotomy to reveal how the Aga Khan Trust for Culture’s heritage work in Balkh empowers a hybridized, vernacularized heritage preservation practice that reflects both this organisation’s worldview and political objectives.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Islam,Heritage, and Preservation: An Untidy Tradition

Abstract

In this article I argue that the study of cultural heritage preservation practices in the context of Muslim societies has been constructed—and obstructed—through specific historical trajectories and challenges. These originate within the field of cultural heritage preservation, through its own history and principles which have complicated the interplay between heritage and religious values and uses. As a result, situated studies of preservation practices in and by Muslim communities are in their infancy. In this article I revisit the points of contact between the emergence of a Eurocentric preservation dogma and its encounter with different articulations and practices related to Islam that are now approached as part of heritage assemblages and debates. I consider specific biases inherent in these discourses and propose, as a result, to approach the study of Islam and heritage in its own terms—rather than as an alternative to Western preservation paradigms.     

Old stones,new rites: contemporary pagan interactions with the medway megaliths

The Medway Megaliths, a series of seven archaeological monuments located in Kent, South-eastern England, are today viewed as “sacred sites” by practitioners of various contemporary Pagan religions, including Druidry, Heathenry, and Wicca. Examining how these Pagans understand the Megaliths as both ancestral spaces and sources of “earth energies”, this paper then looks at the forms of religious expression that are carried out there, and in doing so examines how this example fits within established understandings of “sacred spaces” in religious studies scholarship. From there it explores how these Pagans express a sense of guardianship over the Megaliths, and how they have interacted with commercial developers, heritage managers, and archaeologists. It thus deals with issues surrounding the contested nature of sacred space and the conflict that can arise when both sacred and secular interpretations of a site clash, before highlighting how areas of common interest have been successfully established between different interest groups, to the benefit of the archaeological sites themselves. In providing a regional case study of how Pagans interact with archaeological monuments, this article hopes to offer useful perspectives for those involved in Pagan studies, public archaeology, and studies into the materiality of religion.     

When is a Hat a Mountain? The Material Religion of Gesar Bards’ Hats

Abstract

Based on interviews performed in Qinghai, this article examines the ritual for creating the “mountain hat” used by bards of Tibet’s Gesar epic in the Yushu and Golok provinces to argue for its importance in constructing local ideas of identity and authority. After introducing a typology of bardic hats, this paper relates the two-week ritual to make a “mountain hat” and analyses how it unites epic narrative, local ideas of place, and the authority of Buddhist institutions into a single, distinctive object used in the performance arena. Utilizing David Morgan’s work on embodiment and identity through the act of seeing, this article argues for the “mountain hat” as a microcosm of a religious imaginary that influences and shapes the viewer’s and the bard’s self-understanding. Additionally, this article considers the interpretation of the “mountain hat” and the religious imaginary it represents in the larger context of contemporary Tibet, where competing forms of economic and cultural authority challenge Tibetans’ experience. Ultimately, this article draws attention to the central role of ritual in constructing the “mountain hat” and imbuing it with the necessary symbolic complexes to become a potent visual object of identity.     

Dreams of an Iconic Mosque: Spatial and Temporal Entanglements of a Converted Church in Amsterdam

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the making of iconicity through religious architecture in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Examining the Fatih Mosque housed in a former Catholic church in the city center, we show in what ways the efforts at making this mosque iconic are shaped by the building’s iconic field, by which we denote its entanglement with other (religious and non-religious) sites in the past and the present. This iconic field is characterized by the conversion chains that preceded the mosque, material and discursive legacies of “hiddenness” and contemporary symbolic interactions with nearby sites such as the Western Church. By developing an analysis of the mosque’s temporal and spatial entanglements in Amsterdam’s urban space, we seek to revitalize a relational and diachronic approach that has suffered from neglect, particularly in social-scientific studies of mosques in the West. Rather than looking at a singular place of worship at a particular moment in time, we draw attention to the relations between Islamic and other religious architecture and to the ways in which this mosque intersects with broader genealogies and geographies of religion, not only by association but also by actual links in relationships, politics or material culture.     

“Their Fires shall not be Visible”: The Sense of Muslim Difference

This article examines the nexus of Islam, difference, and the senses. Amidst the diverse ethno-religious landscape of post-conquest Islam where communal boundaries often blurred, religious and state authorities defined belonging in the Muslim community through differences; they felt compelled to set apart Muslims from non-Muslims and other “wayward” Muslims by disciplining the physical body, including the sensorium. Building upon a robust theory of the senses advanced by Abbasid Muslim litterateur Jā?i? (d. 868/9), I demonstrate how pre-modern (7th – 14th centuries CE) Muslim discourses and practices of difference configured the senses in specific ways, transforming body, object and landscape into material signs of collective identity in public life. Drawing upon literary and material sources, I narrate four episodes set in the pre-modern Islamic Middle East where Muslim authorities defined ritual and everyday quotidian practice along lines of communal difference. Together, the episodes highlight the multisensoriality of Muslim difference: the visibility of Christian crosses; acoustic memories of the adhān (audible call to prayer); the expensive taste of gold and silver metalware; and, finally, sensory overload at commemorative public gatherings (?īds)—holiday celebrations, tomb visitations, and funerals.     

Seeing the self “in frame”: early new england material practice and puritan piety

I offer here a set of observations about the use of pictures in the Puritan devotional practice of self-examination. Specifically, I consider a cluster of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century gravestone carvings and one oil painting, the Thomas Smith Self-Portrait (c.1670–91). Both kinds of artifacts, on stone and canvas, might well be described as means of “framing” the godly self. If Puritan diaries and journals, elegies and meditative poetry, biographies and autobiographies are literatures of and about the self, the gravestones and portrait painting that constitute my subject facilitate the performance of similar introspective labor. The fact that Thomas Smith likely painted his own resemblance while looking in a mirror represents only the most literal assertion of relations between his picture and the Puritan piety of self-examination. In approaching these material objects as “technologies of the self” (to appropriate a phrasing pursued by Tom Webster with respect to diaries), I also resituate them in particular environments and contexts and in relation to common practices and patterns of vision and behavior. I begin to suggest, furthermore, the intimate connections between these objects-in-place and other pictorial and textual forms of contemporary Puritan manufacture and imagination.     

Zulu dreamscapes: senses,media, and authentication in contemporary neo-shamanism

Abstract

In Western Europe, Muslims are increasingly demanding the right to amplify the Islamic call to prayer, the azan. Local resistance to the azan has prompted a search for technologized alternatives, of which architectural proposal to use light signals instead of loudspeakers is the only public alternative. By describing the light-azan proposal in the Netherlands, followed by an analysis of the extent to which it has been actually adopted, its association with spirituality is investigated from the perspective of mosque aesthetics negotiations. Aesthetic technologies of ordering physical spaces, in this case a transduction of sound into light, but also the use of glass in mosque architecture, can regulate the extent and quality of Muslims’ presence in European cities. Whether the medium of light can faithfully convey the human voice, however, is bound with questions of religious authority.     

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.     

Sacred objects into state symbols: the material culture of chieftaincy in the making of a national political heritage in ghana

ABSTRACT

Although chieftaincy has remained a highly contested institution, it is one traditional institution that most Ghanaians identify with: chiefs have been and still are regarded as the custodians of the nation's cultural beliefs and practices. Their position as intermediaries between the ancestral spirits and the people they represent makes them sacred figures and their regalia sacred objects. Chiefs are also very important in facilitating the provision of social infrastructural projects and ensuring law and order in their communities. Such was the power and prestige of chiefs that under colonialism the British administration incorporated them into colonial governance. However, while the nationalist leaders in the immediate postcolonial era did not find it appropriate to incorporate chiefs into national governance, they nonetheless used some cultural materials of chieftaincy to legitimize and Africanize their authority and give the new state of Ghana a unique political identity. By incorporating chieftaincy objects into the newly designed political culture, the state profiled and reified chieftaincy as a national heritage. This article discusses the intricacies of turning sacred objects of chieftaincy into national state symbols.     

Large-scale Disasters on World Heritage and Cultural Heritage in Japan: Significant Impacts and Sustainable Management Cases

Abstract

On 11 March 2011, the East Japan Great Earthquake occurred off the east coast of Japan. This magnitude 9 earthquake caused a tsunami of 8–9 m in height, which subsequently reached an upstream height of up to 40 m, causing extensive damage over a 500-km span along the east coast of Japan. Damage was caused to 295 National Cultural Properties of Japan, most of which was due to the associated tsunamis rather than the earthquake. Particularly, significant damage was seen in the coastal cultural landscapes. In addition, Japan has extremely large typhoons every year. In recent years, it has not been unusual to see typhoon-caused storms, heavy rains and flooding, causing intensive damage such as landslides to World Heritage properties and their buffer zones. Such damage is seen in the pilgrimage routes of the “Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range” and in the natural elements of their associated cultural landscapes. The author presents a report on the damage from the East Japan Great Earthquake and other disasters on World Heritage and cultural heritage, and on their increasing occurrence in Japan. A discussion on remedial measures and the need for sustainable protection and management for World Heritage and other significant heritage is included.