Apotheosis and memory: Ishii jūji,a savior for our times

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between history, sacred architecture, and the production of meaning. In particular, it discusses the way in which the historical figure of Ishii Jūji (1865–1914), a renowned child relief activist and religious utopianist of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Japan, becomes constituted as a sacred symbol through the interplay of architecture, displays, and iconography at the Ishii Jūji Museum in the grounds of the Ishii Jūji Kinen Yūaisha (the Ishii Jūji Memorial Center of Loving Friendship; hereafter Yūaisha). Through its commemoration, the Yūaisha draws upon a complex historical legacy as the source of its present vision and attributes to Ishii a divine status through material representations in the form of texts, photographs, objects, and religious iconography. Moreover, the Yūaisha, propelled by Ishii as sacred symbol, has come to produce new material spaces, through the construction of buildings, fields, gardens, through which its vision of social care may be realized. As a result, history and material religion collide to produce new spaces of meaning in the present.     

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.     

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.     

The Plymouth Rock of the American West: Remembering,Forgetting, and Becoming American in Utah

Abstract

This paper examines how Utah’s 1947 This Is The Place Monument functioned in two contradictory ways: First, it confirmed the Mormon narrative of their entry into the Salt Lake Valley as a mythic narrative about a chosen people entering into their promised land. Second, it reinforced Mormonism as one among many traditions participating in the civil religion of Utah and the American West. In its exploration of these contradictory impulses, the paper examines the intersections of historical memory and the creation of sacred space.     

官尺·营造尺·乡尺——古代营造实践中用尺制度再探

本文结合近年考古实践的最新成果,以尺度的确定和使用作为主要探讨对象,阐述了我国的早期营造尺度的确定方法,历代标准尺的确定及其绝对尺度地变迁状况。在此基础上,重点对古代营造尺的使用,营造尺和标准尺的关系,地域尺度即＂乡尺＂的应用进行了相应的研究和探讨,并对地域尺度的分布范围、使用方式及研究意义的关系提出了相应的看法。     

What factors influence the abundance and distribution of sacred forests in Odisha,a densely forested state in eastern India?

This is a report on sacred forests of Odisha, a large and densely forested state in eastern India. Using district-level data from government agencies on geographical area, demographics, forest cover, and sacred forest sizes and numbers, we test what factors influence the observed distributions and abundance of sacred forests. Results show that at the district level, population size of scheduled tribes was unrelated to total population size. Forest area was greater in larger districts, and where tribal populations were greater, but per cent forest cover declined with overall population density. There are 2166 documented sacred forests in the state of Odisha, with most being small (median = 0.2 ha). Multiple regression analyses show that the number of sacred forests is unrelated to total forest area but is significantly positively associated with Tribal population size. Sacred forests have survived decline during recent deforestation, and indigenous cultural practices appear to promote the persistence of natural vegetation.     

门光尺

门光尺又叫做门尺,也称为“八字尺”,在长江下游及东南沿海一带则称之为“鲁般尺”,这是古代木工用以量度、掐定门户尺寸乃至屋宇、庭院、床房器物尺寸的尺子。门光尺历史悠久,使用时在古代是相当讲究的。     

In Search of the Uncanny: Inspirited Landscapes and Modern Witchcraft

Abstract

The uncanny is commonly identified as an emotional encounter, where the known somehow slips out of place; it is embodied and sensory, but understood primarily as feelings. Home is safe and familiar, history is considered rational and chronological, and the supernatural is both untrue and to be feared. Yet all these are challenged by modern witches with their view of an inspirited world. Practitioner-visitors to the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall report a wealth of eerie experiences. Situated at the foot of Boscastle harbor, nestled down a steep and winding route, its place in the landscape encourages ready connections to esoteric experiences. This sense is reinforced by a network of sacred sites weaving outwards from the museum, and the well-used occult and folk magic items held in the displays: tangible and material sites of the uncanny. For these visitors, such encounters in the museum hold particular significance. Here, a dynamic landscape, inhabited by genius loci (spirit of place) combines with an inspirited material culture contained inside the museum. In an animated cosmology, the uncanny is encountered through emotional, sensory, and embodied materialities.     

Modern thai encounters with the sublime: the powerful presence of a great king of siam through his portraits

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the specific capacities of portraits as objectifications mediating religious experience (cf. Meyer 2006). It will be argued that portraits of a divine being—in this case of King Chulalongkorn, king of Siam from 1868 until 1910—enable worshipers to establish a direct link with the divine while producing its direct presence at the same time. This immediate presence of King Chulalongkorn does not concern the historical person of the king, however, but the mythical figure of King Chulalongkorn as the great Buddhist king who modernized his kingdom and saved it from becoming a colony. King Chulalongkorn, therefore, is the epitome of Thainess, the embodiment of a specific, nationalist sublime. The king is omnipresent in the Thai public domain through myriads of mass-produced portraits since the early 1990s. A number of cases of personal experiences will show how his worshipers experience King Chulalongkorn's mythical presence directly, and how the king is directly involved in their daily lives. Within the boundless category of material religious objects, portraits have a special place because each portrait, whether “original” or “reproduction,” has the same potential to establish the immediate presence of the sublime.     

Number, Spoils, and Relics: Totemic Images in aMnemotopia

At northern Italian Counter-Reformation pilgrimage sites known as sacri monti (sacred mountains), the traditional focus on a site made sacred by events of religious importance is replaced by a condition of exile to a remote and difficult landscape. Judith Wolin argues that sacri monti as a group can be understood as mnemotopias, "memory places," whose primary function "is to allow the revisitation of 'remembered' events." An unusual site with similar intentions, designed in the 1590s by Vincenzo Scamozzi as part of a villa project, shares some defining qualities of sacri monti . Yet Scamozzi's project is unique; the goal of this paper is to show how Scamozzi participates in the mnemotopic tradition without employing explicit representational narrative. In its place stand number correspondence, a narrative use of the orders, and a layered speculation on bodies and fragments.     

Mary's rain and god's umbrella: religion,identity, and modernity in the visionary art of a chicana painter

ABSTRACT

Heritage formation involves some kind of sacralization, through which cultural forms are lifted up and set apart. But success is not guaranteed in the making of heritage, and the cultural forms that are singled out may well fail to persuade. Heritage formation is a complicated, contested political—aesthetic process that requires detailed scholarly explorations and comparative analysis. Which aesthetic practices are involved in profiling cultural forms as heritage? What are the politics of authentication that underpin the selection and framing of particular cultural forms? To which contestations does the sacralization of particular cultural forms—in particular, those derived from the sphere of religion—give rise? Which aesthetics of persuasion are invoked to render heritage sacred for its beholders? Calling attention to various facets of the relation between heritage and the sacred, this special issue offers detailed explorations of how form, style, and appearance seek to vest selected objects and performative practices with sacrality.     

The serpent column: the persistent meanings of a pagan relic in christian and islamic constantinople

ABSTRACT

In the heart of Istanbul, on the site of the former hippodrome, stand the remains of the Serpent Column, one of the most ancient and most enigmatic monuments in the city: a three-headed snake made of bronze to which various sacral and magical properties have been attributed in the past by pagans, Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Originally set up as a votive offering in Greece's central sacred site, Delphi, the column commemorated the Greek triumph in the Second Graeco-Persian War (480–479 BCE). This powerful icon of victory, couched in pagan principles of cosmology, was brought to Constantinople in the fourth century CE to become an emblem of the universal rule of the Christian Roman emperor. In late Byzantine and Ottoman times, the Serpent Column was seen as an apotropaic talisman safeguarding Constantinople from poisonous snakes. In this paper it is argued that the column retained its status as a powerful sacred object for so many centuries because in Constantinople it came to be associated with the Brazen Serpent lifted up in the desert by Moses (Numbers 21:4–9), which in turn was believed to prefigure the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ (John 3:14–15).     

山中教堂湖南株洲朱亭堂

这座坐落在山路边的乡村教堂运用迂回的空间序列来适应狭长的基地,依靠室内外空间的结合来产生神圣空间,并通过使用者参与设计及施工来吸收当地形式及建筑材料。这些措施不仅有助于只用有限的经费建成本工程,同时也是对现代建筑本土化的一个尝试。     

Relics,protestants, things

ABSTRACT

Reformation Protestants’ detestation of Catholic sacra, holy objects, and sacred sites is well documented. To probe the later history of this contempt, this essay observes two nineteenth-century Protestants in Palestine. Both, as might be anticipated, exhibit disgust at those physical phenomena revered by other Christianities. But surprisingly, both also obsessively collect alternative things that are associated with the Holy Land. Contemporary theory—namely Bill Brown's Thing Theory—is brought to bear on the preoccupation with things represented by this substitution of safe objects for abhorrent ones. However, instead of providing an explanatory frame for this behavior, Thing Theory seems to reproduce it. The essay concludes by suggesting that a primal Protestant anxiety about powerful things continues to haunt contemporary Western scholarship.     

The Point is to Change It

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how planning practices contribute to the reification of the ‘state’ through the case of Singapore’s new urban waterfront, Marina Bay. Instead of assuming Singapore’s state-led planning model as inherently ‘top-down’ and ‘long-term’, it disaggregates the planning process into three specific modes of abstraction – calculation, historicity and imagination – and analyzes the role of each in reifying the ‘state’ as the singular author of history and development. The case contributes to the literature by illuminating how ‘states’ can appear to have different forms, spatialities, agencies and ultimately consequences, without compartmentalizing planning models based primarily on ideological or geopolitical divisions.     

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.     

Gendered substances and objects in ritual: an australian aboriginal study

ABSTRACT

The creative action of the foundational beings known as Dreamings lies at the heart of Aboriginal Australian ceremony. In ritual, gender is drawn into a nexus of generative action and interaction. I will make the case that gender characterizes country, ceremonies, many sacred sites and many objects and substances. People, country, sites and ceremonies are integral to the bringing forth of the life of the world, and draw on a root paradigm of birth. I will examine that paradigm from the perspective of gender in domains of blood, ritual, country, men and women, and objects. The analysis will show that while gender is most assuredly a difference that makes a difference, in Gregory Bateson's famous words, it is the play of difference itself that is most productively worked with in ritual.     

The Emergence of the global and social city: Golden Mile and the politics of urban renewal

ABSTRACT

This study discusses the conflicted ideas of urban renewal under the economically progressive but inexperienced leadership of a young Singapore government. As the site of this study, the Golden Mile shares its aspirational name with the first building built on it – the Golden Mile Complex. This district was planned to carry Singapore into the era of the global city. During the period of modernization in the 1960s, influential ideas were propagated through different United Nations experts. Singapore used these recommendations to legitimize an aggressive form of urban renewal, but it also encouraged greater participation by think tanks with greater intellectual and research sophistication. This marked Singapore’s most democratic period of public debate and participation in urban policy-making. The advancements made by the Singapore Planning and Urban Research group, and Lim’s built megastructure and unbuilt linear city came about under these liberal conditions. Consumerist functions and civic-minded forms were combined to produce unprecedented but ultimately incomplete socio-urban effects. This episode revealed that Singapore’s successful legacy of modernization was always exclusively narrated by the state, but there was an under-documented tussle was between the sociopolitical capital of Singapore’s public housing programme, and the economic acceleration of private and global consumerist functions.     

Overseas military cemeteries as american sacred space: mine eyes have seen la gloire

ABSTRACT

The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) maintains twenty-three cemeteries worldwide for American soldiers and war workers killed in the Great War and World War II. This article examines ABMC cemeteries as American sacred space, foregrounding their fusion of Christian and American symbol and text and the barely submerged theologies and mythologies to which they point. ABMC cemeteries have given families of fallen soldiers places to mourn and remember. They have also served as spaces for the United States to tell all comers of the righteousness of the American soldier and the saving power of dying while fighting for the United States. Compelling as these memorial landscapes are, the sacred narratives they construct are often in subtle but real tension with the histories they contain and conceal.