All in Articles

Civil Religion in Turkey: The Unifying and Divisive Potential of Material Symbols

Civil religion refers to citizens’ devotion and loyalty to the nation and state. Like other religions, it needs symbols that bond citizens to different notions and experiences whether non-tangible forms (political beliefs, the law, or a constitution) or tangible (flags, images, statues, and spaces). Visual representations of these forms can unite people around common values, goals, and history. This paper aims to widen our understanding of the importance of material objects in developing and sustaining national bonds in Turkey where objects and spaces have long helped to form and maintain Turkish identity, and mobilize and unite people.

Cecil John Rhodes: ‘The Complete Gentleman’ of Imperial Dominance

Incompleteness engenders an understanding of resilient colonialism epitomised by Cecil Rhodes’ monuments and statues in Southern Africa. It draws on Tutuola’s metaphorical ‘The Complete Gentleman’ and the lessons on being and becoming from Tutuola’s skull to remind us that Rhodes’ legacy still suffers from illusions of completeness and a denial of debt and indebtedness. The call for humility and alertness to the imagined dream of a rainbow nation demands that South Africans stop learning the wrong lessons from Rhodes as exclusionary articulations of belonging informed by superiority and zero-sum games of conquest.

The Prismatics of Silk

Silk is so famously shimmery because of its prism-like, triangular protein structure that allows it to refract incoming light at different angles and thus to produce different colors. Yet this inherent material brilliance depends on the qualities of the silk threads and environmental conditions, like the amount and type of light. The author expands a literal approach to prismatics to metaphorically encompass the situated and contingent nature of material, bodily engagements with silks and their colors. This essay renders the prismatics of the three “mother colors” of silks in Surin, Thailand to reflect upon how colors are inseparable from sociocultural, economic, political, and historical considerations of their origins.

Gazing to Africa: A Conversation with Art and Ethnology at the Museum

This short essay explores how museum displays have traditionally shaped static public knowledge about Africa and Africans. Impressions from the spectator’s experience of the exhibit Beyond Compare: Art from the Bode Museum will serve as a springboard to reimagine how art and ethnological collections can dismantle ideologies of cultural domination embedded in these items’ preservation and presentation to the public.

The Fruits of the Loom: Cosmopolitanism Through the Eyes of the Commissioner

The author interrogates the idea of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in Colonial textile trade through the eyes of the object’s commissioner by focusing on four different textiles, from Italy, China, and India. Just after the ‘Age of Discovery’, this time period (16-17th c.) helps us situate depictions of cultural ‘othering’ within a historical lens. These textiles act as embodiments of political power and ‘worldliness’, making them early examples of translocal consciousness.

Buraq and Landscapes: Anchoring Islamic Identities and Images in Works of Modern Indonesian Art

As a semi-mythical steed that accompanies the Prophet Muhammad in the isra/mi’raj narrative, the Buraq occupies an important place in Muslim imaginations across the globe including Indonesia. The author explores the works of two Indonesian modern artists, A.D. Pirous (b. 1932) and Haryadi Suadi (1939-2016) to understand how the form and function of Buraq is reimagined according to the genealogy of their artistic practices, as well as their religious and cultural backgrounds.

Not Writing as Not Seeing, Not Recording: Embodied Racism in Indonesia -- Reflections on Fieldwork since 1974

The author, an anthropologist, discusses how she is at last confronting her oversights in publications about Indonesia. In doing so, she is dealing with racialized ideologies and their corrosive, real-world consequences for persons such as Indonesian Chinese individuals. This highly personal essay reminds us that the discursive power of ideas to contest hegemonies relies on basic acts of experiencing, acknowledging and recording.

Deconstructing Essentialism: Translocality as a Conceptual Tool in the Study of Eclectic Material Cultures

This think-piece on the theoretical potential of ‘translocality’ helps counter the colonial legacy of cultural essentialism in the analyses and representation of eclectic material cultures. Based on reflections on ‘transculturality’ and the case study of the images of Vajrapani in Gandharan art, the author concludes that translocality, which respects the agencies of local cultures and the complexity of cultural exchanges, is a more productive, heuristic concept in analyzing and representing diverse material cultures.

Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth

The polychromy of classical sculpture has been systematically suppressed in Western art since the Renaissance resulting in an artificial whiteness that fits within a tradition of presenting false racial narratives of the Greco-Roman historical past and mythology, one that codes all idealised bodies as white, young, and hetero-normative. Using an intersectional framework to consider the significance of class, gender and race, the author analyses receptions of the Farnese Hercules and explores why (lack of) colour has been weaponised as a way for Western culture to claim an inheritance from the ancient Greco-Roman world, and how this is perpetuated in modern classical reception.

Sri Krishnan Temple: Doing and Making Sense of a Shared Multi-sensorial, Multi-religious Space in Singapore

Singapore is renowned for being a multi-ethnic, multi-religious haven, home to a plethora of religious communities that live in putative harmony because they tolerate and respect each other’s differences. This paper tries to modulate such a narrative, through an original study of the shared multi-sensorial, multi-religious space at the Sri Krishnan Temple in Singapore. It is argued that sameness, not difference, reigns there and that this is possible because Hinduism, or for that matter, lived religion, is mediated through the senses.

On Innovation

A think-piece on the value of innovation in the “just do it” age of late capitalism. The author, James Bielo, parses jugaad as frugality, experimentation and creativity, and illustrates his point through a brief description of two historical figures: Brother John’s making of the Ave Maria Grotto in Alabama as well as the carvings of Elijah Pierce, an African-American self-taught artist from Mississippi.

Anchoring Devotion in a Layered Terrain - Bartolo Longo and the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary in Pompeii

Jessica Hughes introduces her ongoing research project on the Catholic sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary in Pompeii, Italy. Focussing on the writings of the sanctuary’s founder, Blessed Bartolo Longo (1841-1926), she explores how far early devotion at Pompeii was anchored within the local terrain – a complex, enchanted landscape made up of multiple layers, both historical and geomorphological. In doing so, she also thinks about how the many international devotees of this Italian Madonna have developed material techniques for connecting with the deeply sacred landscape of the Pompeian Valley.

The Cultural Hybrid in Colonial Java and Pekalongan Buketan (Bouquet) Batik

Karina Rima Melati examines the development of the batik buketan (bouquet) motif and how the creativity and labor of batik workers in Pekalongan of the North Coastal region in Central Java, Indonesia, helped contest, produce and reproduce what has now come to be known as an iconic batik style of that area.  Melati draws from previous studies of batik in different contexts, the marginality of batik labor, the growing trend of batik, batik and the postcolonial theoretical framework, and batik from a global perspective.

On Context

David Morgan offers us a thought-piece on the idea of ‘context’, a concept integral to The Jugaad Project. He notes that artifacts do not carry their meanings within themselves, though they may bear the traces of their contexts, of the settings from which time, history, and events have withdrawn them. The task of scholarly study is to re-situate artifacts within the settings that we find underlie their interpretation.

Heavenly Garden: Creating Intimacy, Developing Empathy

The author, a performance artist, describes the impetus behind “Optik-Optik Kecil” (Tiny Optics), a participatory artwork of collecting morning dew. The performance was held in an area of land in Depok, a city close to Jakarta in West Java province. It was set at a specific time—weekend mornings during the holy month of Ramadan when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. Participants canvassed the landscape collecting morning dew and, much like the practice of fasting, the performance itself aimed at cultivating people’s empathy. With dew as the materiality of hope and awareness, the artist hoped to make the participants’ realities intersect, even if briefly, within the space of the landscape.