Stone Works: The Religious Power of Lithic Media in Contemporary Cambodia

Stone Works: The Religious Power of Lithic Media in Contemporary Cambodia

Elizabeth A. Cecil
Articles, Photo Essays

How do Indigenous repertoires of ‘care’–i.e. scripted and ad hoc practices of using, maintaining, repairing, and beautifying religious sites and objects–intersect with the ‘work’ of historical conservation? In what ways are religious values expressed through the continued use and reuse of historical sites? Finally, can these works of piety be integrated within current conversations around the preservation of ancient temples and religious sites in Southeast Asia? To explore these questions, this essay brings images collected during field research in 2023 at premodern Hindu and Buddhist temple sites in Cambodia into conversation with historical sources that contextualize the reciprocal relationships that exist between religious practitioners, sites, and objects.

Amateur or Professional?: Reclaiming the Role of the Amateur at the Intersection of Work and Religious Faith

Peter Bush
Articles

I am a Presbyterian minister serving St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Fergus a small town in Ontario, Canada, and that fact impacts how I view the intersection between religious faith and work. The Presbyterian Church in Canada defines my status as being a professional church worker. Woven through the essay will be engagement with the Judeo-Christian assertion that human beings are called to love the Lord their God with their entire being. The proposed essay will explore how the professionalization of clergy impacts the work-life of clergy including shaping their religious lives outside of work. Professionalization invites a splitting of work from the personal creating two spheres of life, this contrasts with the all-encompassing claims that the religious makes on life.

2023 Winter Editorial: What Matters in Work?

2023 Winter Editorial: What Matters in Work?

Emily Levick and Urmila Mohan

Work is “good to think with”, situated at the intersection of various socio-cultural and ontological contexts and complexities—and for our purposes—practices, materials, and interactions. What does ‘work’ mean, make, and do in different contexts? As a noun, work is associated with effort, labor, occupation, and achievement while, as a verb, it suggests the process of operating, forming and cultivating something. Through the notion of cultivation, a context in which the word culture itself arose, we see the overlap between work and culture. In this issue we cover a range of contexts from the work of clergy to weavers and embroiderers, and span geographic areas from the Americas to Asia.

Re-Engaging Islamic Materials and their Heritage Values

Re-Engaging Islamic Materials and their Heritage Values

Sara Ann Knutson
Peer Reviewed, Articles

Coins have long been important materials for examining values and exchange networks in the past. Housed today in museum collections around the world, Islamic coins are no exception. But Islamic coins are more than simply material traces of the past, they also hold important contemporary meanings that have been overlooked and undervalued by academics. In this peer-reviewed article, Sara Ann Knutson shares how she has begun to explore the possibilities for, and ethical commitment to, community involvement in the meanings and values that are constructed around museum-based materials. She discuss some results from her cultural heritage survey of people culturally connected to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and how stakeholder voices revealed the understated importance of museum-housed assemblages for cultural heritage and community values, including those that span across national borders, languages, and religious beliefs. This work envisions transformative approaches to collections and museum practice in which communities are recognized for their values regarding materials from the Islamic World’s vibrant past, rather than remaining the “recipients” of museum narratives and academic research.

White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle

White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle

Kajal Nisha Patel
Articles

Over the past decade, postural-yoga classes have grown to become “museum yoga” attracting new audiences to North American and Western European museums and galleries. The author argues that the museum yoga spectacle is a derivative trend that follows International Yoga Day as a virtue-signalling performance. These annual events are largely attended by a global cultic milieu of affluent white women, who organise themselves into a grand spectacle of mass participation. Through their involvement in the museum yoga spectacle, programming staff and participants are “spiritually bypassing”. As an alternative, the author moves towards examples of museum-yoga education that better engage learners.

Curating Ornament and Textile Exhibitions as Highwire Acts: On Guest Curator Negotiations with Lenders and Museum Director

Curating Ornament and Textile Exhibitions as Highwire Acts: On Guest Curator Negotiations with Lenders and Museum Director

Susan Rodgers
Articles

In studying museum exhibitions, there is value in looking at hidden negotiations (even combat)  among academic guest curators, museum directors, and collector/lenders. These often-veiled interactions occur as different ideological stances and positionalities come into contact and friction with each other regarding what is important in displaying material culture. In this essay, I provide a close-up view of such negotiations in the planning and implementation of three shows that I guest curated as an anthropologist (one at the Asia Society Gallery, two at Cantor Art Gallery at Holy Cross). All concerned indigenous arts from island Southeast Asia. Judicious compromises and consensus resulted in stronger exhibitions.

A conversation on difference, Otherness and possibilities in museums

A conversation on difference, Otherness and possibilities in museums

Poornima Sardana and Shivangi Pareek
Articles

How is the new museology of museums rooted within communities different from museums displaying communities? What can this new museology learn from previous engagements by museum actors with source communities and multiple stakeholders? Using ‘Otherness’, ‘difference’ and ‘communities’ as analytical frames, this conversation between a museologist (Poornima Sardana) and an anthropologist (Shivangi Pareek) aims to bring together perspectives at the intersection of museum studies and ethnographic work, and reflect on plural entanglements within museums.

Whitewash: Robert E. Lee and the New Iconoclasm

Whitewash: Robert E. Lee and the New Iconoclasm

Howard Skrill
Articles

Through plein-air drawings and studio works on paper, this essay grapples with processes of national belonging and exclusion brought to bear on the surfaces of extant public monuments in the racialized landscape of the U.S. ‘Whitewash’ is an opaque layer that is slathered over what lies beneath so that the latter is concealed and, hopefully, in time, forgotten. However, even a cursory inspection often reveals what was meant to remain hidden. Similarly, an exploration of the fate of two representations of the U.S. Confederate general Robert E. Lee reveals the nationalist, political forces that led to these monuments’ raising and subsequent removal.

(Mostly) Indigenous Readings that Challenge Imposed Euro-Enlightenment [aka Colonial] Perspectives in Museums

Laura Phillips
Bibliographies

The Enlightenment era names an 18th-century European philosophical movement whereby reason or human intellect informed what was considered knowledge and understanding of the world. As collecting institutions, museums founded with these logics use processes of acquisition to collect items, objects, and specimens to understand the world, supposedly to move humanity forward in the name of progress. Mechanisms that (re)named and classified the world enabled Euro-Enlightenment minds to feel they (we) knew and understood the world, through this mastery of placing complex beings within predefined structures. This annotated bibliography presents resources for museum professionals to understand the errors of the past in our inherited present so we can move towards more equitable, decolonizing, and Indigenizing futures. 

Caring for the Body and Spirit of Altars: An Ethical Exploration

Caring for the Body and Spirit of Altars: An Ethical Exploration

Emma Cieslik
Articles

As spaces of cultural heritage preservation and education, museums are responsible for respecting the communities whose objects live within their collection, as well as the belief systems within which these objects were/are created and used. In the context of heritage approaches to ‘living collections’ there is a whole subset of objects in museum collections that have spiritual power and/or require traditional, sacred, and religious care. This care and what it involves can only be determined through community consultation, from handling, housing, and orientation to ritual use and access. This article attempts to spark further exploration of traditional, spiritual, and religious care within museums, focusing on the example of altars.

2023 Spring Editorial: What Matters in Museums and Cultural Heritage?

2023 Spring Editorial: What Matters in Museums and Cultural Heritage?

Emily Levick and Urmila Mohan
Editorials

This issue turns to Museums as sites for heritage with new approaches to questions of decolonization, community engagement, and the display and interpretation of often sensitive media and narratives. Aspects discussed include ensuring the correct practices of care and conservation of sacred, “living” objects; furthering the decolonizing and Indigenizing efforts of museums; including contemporary Islamic communities in the interpretation and appreciation of ancient coins; and the joint efforts of curators and collectors to create fresh and stimulating exhibitions. In addition, this issue covers heritage-focused activism and iconoclasm.

Interview with Sedekah Benih – Urban Ecology and Community-based Art Activism

Interview with Sedekah Benih – Urban Ecology and Community-based Art Activism

Anissa Rahadiningtyas
Interviews

Sedekah Benih is a collaborative and urban environmental practice initiated by an urban farming activist, Dian Nurdiana (Mang Dian), and artist Vincent Rumahloine in 2020 in one of the dense urban neighborhoods in Cibogo, Bandung, West Java. It aims to share and exchange knowledge of urban farming more widely and build a community of “tiis leungen” (Sundanese for “cold arms”), a term comparable to the English “green thumbs”. Drawn from a localized Arabic word and concept of صدقة (sadaqah), which means “righteousness” and refers to the giving of charity, Sedekah Benih aims to share seeds of everyday staple plants that can be grown in dense community spaces and used for local and domestic needs. It encourage collaborators to share the seeds of plants they received with others from their communities, growing connected communities.

Activating the Value of Handmade: The Role of Social Enterprises in Transforming India’s Artisan Economy

Activating the Value of Handmade: The Role of Social Enterprises in Transforming India’s Artisan Economy

Priya Krishnamoorthy and Aparna Subramanyam
Interviews

Urmila Mohan interviews Priya Krishnamoorthy, Founder and CEO of 200 Million Artisans, and Aparna Subramanyam, Partner at 200 Million Artisans, an ecosystem enabler reimagining the potential of India’s artisan economy. 200 Million Artisans is a social enterprise catalysing self-reliance and responsible innovation in India’s artisan economy by providing access to knowledge, resources, and networks that empower artisan-producers and impact entrepreneurs.

Timur Merah Project: A Pilgrimage of Narrative, Memory, and Historical Legacy

Timur Merah Project: A Pilgrimage of Narrative, Memory, and Historical Legacy

Citra Sasmita

Balinese artist Citra Sasmita writes about her ongoing project “Timur Merah” and its interest in probing the important role of women in the Indonesian literary and artistic canon. She maps stereotypical depictions of women in canonic texts, and in a counter reading of women as leaders and resistors, emphasises heroes such as I Dewa Istri Kanya, Queen of the 19th c. Klungkung kingdom. In the second half of the essay, Sasmita tracks the effects of the indigenous male gaze on women, art and the island of Bali, as it transforms into the Dutch colonial gaze, determining what is “authenticity” and privileging what/who should be deemed valuable in shaping Balinese artistic heritage.

A Drawing Out: Visibilizing the Labor of Care, Enacting Mutual Aid

A Drawing Out: Visibilizing the Labor of Care, Enacting Mutual Aid

Angela Beallor
Articles

The author explores the proposals and policies for radical caretaking labor reform drafted by Soviet theorist and policymaker Aleksandra Kollontai during the Soviet 1920s. She meditates on the potential of depiction and enaction in artistic production and collaborative performance. This is to help pre-figure mutual aid, collaboration, community organization, and caretaking in the current world as we struggle to upend the current capitalist and patriarchal status quo(s). She draws on her collaborative performance project, A Drawing Out :: Lactic Orchestration, first staged in 2018, as well as the ideas of those, such as Angela Garbes, who have made compelling intersectional calls for valuing the essential labor of care work within the context of the current global pandemic.

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