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.”     

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.     

Bed and throne: the “museumification” of the living quarters of a candomblé priestess

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the way in which the living quarters of a famous priestess from the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé were turned into a heritage site. The Memorial de Mãe Menininha do Gantois shows that the form of the museum might be understood as a particular “language” of status and prestige. The site therefore allows us to discuss what happens when new actors in the public sphere pick up, appropriate, and transform this language of “museumification.” Although the profane dimensions of “museumification” are hard to miss, we argue that in the case of the memorial this language does not at all diminish the sacred nature of this site, but actually articulates it in a new way.     

The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments and The See-through Years: Creation and Destruction in Texas Architecture and Real Estate, 1981–1991

Abstract

The Planwerk Innenstadt (“master plan for the inner city”) was passed in 1999 by the Berlin local government as the official model for local architectural projects in an extended area that includes the historic city center. The plan is based on the urbanistic concept of the “European City” and has been the subject of a heated debate since its first publication.     

Mise en application

L'expérience sur les prototypes, à Dar es-Salaam, a déterminé la teneur en ciment nécessaire aux différents éléments de construction faits de pisé. Les résultats ont aussi montré que le pisé revenait moins cher en année d'occupation que les autres matériaux.     

Re-viewing The Way Beyond “Art”: Herbert Bayer,Alexander Dorner,and Practices of Viewership

Abstract

Architect, painter, and designer Herbert Bayer was a progenitor of modern exhibition design that emphasized the visual perception of its audiences; his associate and occasional collaborator, Alexander Dorner, also approached the conception of exhibitions by focusing on viewer experiences. Their similar emphasis on the centrality of subject-viewers and differing philosophies of perception and publics came together in the first United States touring retrospective of Bayer’s work, organized by Dorner. The story of that exhibition, The Way Beyond “Art,” is one episode within a larger, trans-continental conversation between two modern exhibition-makers. Bayer’s galleries oriented information for a visitor’s optical register, often at a massive, immersive scale. Dorner’s conveyed experiences of cultural perception, allowing exhibited objects to be overpowered by “atmospheres,” were meant to progress learning and action outside of exhibition spaces. In the book associated with the Way Beyond “Art” exhibition, Dorner advocated (now famously) for the museum to become a “powerhouse” for producing new energy, rather than exhibiting only existing artifacts and works. Their negotiations over Bayer’s art within Dorner’s “Way” ultimately were not only discussions about the roles of curator and artist in determining subject matter, but also reckonings over the degree of responsibility that an exhibition has to its public: whether the task of the exhibition is to situate and inform or to catalyze new cultural movement.     

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.     

“Watchful Wandering”

Abstract

Through close readings of John Ruskin's notebooks and diaries (related to The Stones of Venice) and the city itself, this paper explores his “watchful wandering”—as he characterized it—as a mode of urban experience and analysis, and that connected vision wherein the concrete fragment emblematizes the whole. Within a long history of ambulatory urban contemplation and journeyings, the paper locates Ruskin at the cusp of the pre- and early modern, exposing thereby a tension between the ethical and the aesthetic; between Ruskin's threefold vision—imbricating the romantic, scientific, and symbolic—and the blasé detachment of the urban flâneur.     

Selected Theories of Urban Growth and Structure

A COMMUNICATIONS THEORY OF URBAN GROWTH M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, 1962. by Richard L. Meier

“THE URBAN PLACE AND THE NONPLACE URBAN REALM” by Melvin M. Webber in Webber (ed.), EXPLORATIONS INTO URBAN STRUCTURE, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1963.

“A THEORY OF URBAN FORM” by Kevin Lynch and Lloyd Rodwin Journal of the American Institute of Planners, XXIV (November, 1958), 201–214.

“URBAN STRUCTURE AND URBAN GROWTH” by Albert Z. Guttenberg Journal of the American Institute of Planners, XXV (May, 1960), 104–110.

TRANSPORTATION AND URBAN LAND Resources for the Future, Inc., Washington, D. C., 1961. by Lowdon Wingo, Ir.

URBAN GROWTH DYNAMICS by F. Stuart Chapin, Jr. and Shirley F. Weiss, eds. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1962. (Especially initial part of Chapter 1 and Chapter 13.)     

Haptic Diagrams: From Cinematography to Architectural Performance

Abstract

Contemporary design practices use the diagram as an active agent in the development of form and matter into architectural space. Deleuze and Guattari, following Foucault,¹ defined the diagram as an “abstract machine,” which “does not function to represent even something real, but rather constructed a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.”² This formulation emphasizes the diagram's configuration and its modes of operation through virtuality and potentiality. In this sense, the diagram is the architects' way of dreaming, the “no-place” encompassing the utopian act. Simultaneously being reality and process, the diagram delays the relation between sign and meaning and promotes a shift from architecture as form or sign to an architecture of forces, performance, and performativity.³     

An Architecture of the Whole

Abstract

This article offers a history and theory of “whole design” as it emerged through countercultural ecology, by offering a critical reading of the Whole Earth Catalog and its affiliate publications, and correlating it with design projects and related philosophies from the 1960s to the present day. The article proposes that the Catalog was itself a sort of architecture, a colloquium connecting its participants to design and to the world at large. Despite its determinist, systems-based origins, the article suggests that whole design harbored an ideologically and aesthetically vibrant indeterminism of continuing relevance to sustainability.     

The Heromartyrs of Cyprus: National Museums as Greek Orthodox Hagiographical Media

ABSTRACT

In 1961, a “Museum of the Struggle” was created to remember and glorify the heroes of the Greek Cypriot anticolonial war (1955–1959). The museum functions, this article argues, as an apparatus of hagiographical mediation, rendering for local and international publics an aura of sanctification around the war’s fallen fighters. Such an impression is generated by the museum’s spatial mise-en-scène, its progressive orientation of visitors who move through its halls, its ways of curating belongings and images of the dead, its narrative construction of the life and conduct of the fighters, and its subtle evocation of traditional saintly patronage associated with the island’s communities. Drawing on original fieldwork in Cyprus between 2012 and 2018, the article treats the musealization of the Greek-Cypriot national struggle as a tight lens through which to consider the diversity of processes by which modern Orthodox Christians in (post)colonial situations construe, commemorate, and maintain relationships with holiness. In particular, it finds that the celebration of the dead anticolonial fighters as “heromartyrs” (ērōomartyres) serves to constitute a distinctive category of Christian martyrdom that infuses a post-Byzantine martyriological identity with the imagination of ancient Greek heroic virtue and epic violence.     

Relics,liṅgas,and other auspicious material remains in south asian religions

ABSTRACT

This article reconsiders sites, practices, and ideas about the physical remains of the special dead in South Asian religions. Questioning the common notion of “relics” as a point of distinction between “Buddhism” and “Hinduism,” it explores the constellation of ideas and practices surrounding the remains of gods, demons, people, and animals in South Asian religions. Archaeological and literary evidence for li?gas, stūpas, and related sites and structures are used to explore shared discourses and practices among Buddhists and ?aivas in particular. Through such test cases, it shows how bones and other physical remains of the special dead could become areas of engagement, especially when linked to sacred landscape. Attention to these contact zones reveals sharing, borrowing, and competition among ancient and medieval groups that modern scholarship has studied primarily in terms of assumed differences between “Hinduism” and “Buddhism.”     

Interstitial Space and Everyday Housing Practices

Abstract

This paper explores the role of interstitial space and everyday housing practices at the domestic scale. Interstitial space is often framed as “empty” or “in-between” space located in the shadows of conventional built form and everyday practices. In this paper, we focus on interstitial space as a site of often undervalued or taken-for-granted housing possibility. We begin the paper by outlining the contours of interstitial space as a theoretical concept before highlighting two cross-cultural examples of domestic housing storage practices within the Australian context: (1) “under the house” in the Queensland vernacular and (2) “close to the wind-break” in a remote Aboriginal community in the centre of Australia. We conclude by drawing attention to the importance of interstitial spatial practices for housing theory and practice and offer suggestions for further research.     

‘To make something with nothing’: Le Corbusier's proposal for refugee housing—Les Constructions ‘Murondins’

This paper discusses the complex political trajectory of Le Corbusier's little-known project for war refugees, Les Constructions ‘Murondins’, and examines how it embodies a significant transformation in both his social orientation and formal ideas during the 1930s and the Vichy period.

In 1940, Le Corbusier and his partner Pierre Jeanneret designed the ‘Murondins’ scheme as a means to erect provisional housing and villages rapidly (including a school, club and youth centre). Le Corbusier proposed that these structures would be built by local youths using pisé (‘rammed earth’), tree trunks, branches and other readily available materials. Beyond housing those in need, he hoped that these new settlements would be the foundation of a new grassroots regional culture that would revitalise the French countryside. For the following two years, he actively promoted the ‘Murondins’ project to the Vichy government (unsuccessfully) as a means of mobilising rural youth; after France's liberation, he campaigned for it again as a solution for housing war victims. Nor did he abandon it in subsequent decades: in 1955, he proposed it to Abbé Pierre's Faim et Soif as a solution for sheltering the homeless; and in 1963, he offered it as a means of housing Algerian Muslims fleeing to France after the Algerian war.     

The Ontogeny of Dolls: Materiality,Affect, and Self in Afro-Cuban Espiritismo

Abstract

Objects are fundamental components of cosmology in Afro-Cuban religions; they serve to represent, pay homage to, and feed a constellation of covetous spirits. In a moral universe of practitioners materiality allures and potentially corrupts; it grounds personal and collective ritual agency; mediates thoughts-feelings; materializes the immaterial; and invariably transcends all these dichotomies and becomes gods, parts of people, concepts. In this article I wish to understand “things” as continuous with the unfolding of selfhood, but more contentiously, with and as affects. Drawing on my long-time research with practitioners of Cuban Creole espiritismo in Havana, for whom “representation” objects are essential to the development of spirits, muertos, and thus extended selves, I argue that the dolls and figurines that mediums regularly fabricate and care for are less “representational” than they are affective forms themselves. Dolls are not symbols for feelings-for-spirits made material or registers of affective perception towards one’s muertos; in a very real sense they are affects that may grow roots and bloom. In the ethnography I will describe these relations as a system of affectively invested selfhood, one that encompasses the very muertos in question.     

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.     

Historicizing Pedagogy: A Critique of Kostof's A History of Architecture

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the practical problem of shaping a “History of Architecture” in a way that expands the dominant canon while acknowledging the complex and difficult realities of articulating difference. Through a critical analysis of Spiro Kostof's A History of Architecture and an exposition of the shortcomings of Kostof's attempts to discuss “alternative” histories, this paper investigates how architectural history textbooks could play an important role in initiating a broader, critical teaching of history.     

Monumental Waste

Abstract

The Amagerforbraending waste-to-energy plant designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, the BEI-Stockton scheme by Heatherwick Studio, and Ennead's work on the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, are examples of a new brand of urban monument. Using Sert, Gidieon, and Léger's 1943 manifesto “Nine Points of Monumentality” as a starting point, the author examines these projects and their images to track the collective values they symbolize.