2020 Summer Issue, Part 2, Innovation and Material Religion - Editorial
In this Summer 2020 issue* of The Jugaad Project (TJP), we continue the theme of Innovation, exploring ideas introduced earlier this year. We noted previously that innovation in its most basic sense is synonymous with creating or making something new. In a similar vein, the three photo essays and one article in this issue expand on the contextual uses of creativity, imagination, resourcefulness and talent by drawing on research among diverse communities in India and Thailand, and analyzing contemporary Western responses to the ancient Greco-Roman world.
The question of how innovation takes place and how objects are used as well as the various agents (human and non-human) involved is one that underpins TJP’s mandate. The importance of ‘making’ as a tool of efficacious and effective living encourages us to pay attention to materials, activities and techniques that are not necessarily highlighted through their sacred status. Simultaneously, the activities that some of our authors explore – flower garland making for Hindu deities in South India, professionalized creative processes in the Indian film industry, and care-taking activities in Thailand, flow across the realms of worldly and otherworldly, the everyday and the ceremonial, connected by rituals and paraphernalia of various kinds.
DJS Kumar, a highly skilled craftsman with many film credits to his name, examines leather hides in preparation for creating a breastplate. Photo credit: Cheri Vasek.
A discussion of jugaad, a term intimately related to subaltern Indian and South Asian cultural practices and histories, demands a consideration of how people negotiate the limits and possibilities of their lives under societal and material pressures. In their photo essay, Vasek and Chatterjee emphasize the skill of costumers, designers, make-up artists and hair stylists who work in unglamorous conditions under intense time pressure from producers. In the high octane and often chaotic environment of the Indian film industry, practitioners emphasize the importance of ingenuity as well as reliability. Using an “assemblage” approach (Bennett 2010), the authors conclude that it is “the intermingling of energies, creative forces, media—whether sacred art or art in profane and secular projects” that makes it possible for their interlocuters to thrive in the demanding Indian film industry.
New Year display inside Arulmigu Manakula Vinayagar Temple in White town, Pondicherry 2019. Photo by Leah Comeau.
Situated in a different part of India, Leah Comeau’s photo essay follows the objects and agents of Tamil “flower culture” in the temples and markets of Goubert Market in Pondicherry. Ubiquitous in South Indian Hindu temple décor and rituals, flowers are grown, sold, and bought by a variety of communities with a wide range of religious, social, commercial, and aesthetic aims. Comeau focuses on a few garlands that decorate the elephant-faced god Ganesha and explores how various threads of sensory engagements accumulate into an idea of community aesthetics. A bricolage of colors, fragrances, and the clamor of the market and festive temple grounds, all accumulate into “sensational forms” (Meyer and Verrips 2008), from which a devotee might draw to interpret and participate in forms of material religion.
Making Merit. Lamphun, Thailand, 2008. Photo by Felicity Aulino.
Our third photo essay turns to a different part of the world, Thailand, as well as placing the topic of innovation within the context of care and change. Felicity Aulino’s poetic images of bodies, objects and spaces suggest what attuned perceptions and responses to Thai spirits, ghosts, and ancestors can reveal about care; that notions of universal care ideals and meaning-filled intentions may have to be replaced with thinking with ghosts. Aulino connects the powerful effects of innovation to the fact that change disrupts those habits that continually re-substantiate our social structures. So, from where does the “new” emerge in these everyday moments, routines and practices of concern and consideration?
Our last offering in this issue is an article by Aimee Hinds, delving further into the now well-known idea that classical sculpture was originally polychromic – a fact has been systematically suppressed in Western art since the Renaissance. Hinds shows how the artificial whiteness of classical sculpture fits within a tradition of presenting false racial narratives of the Greco-Roman historical past and mythology, one that may present most bodies as white, young, and hetero-normative. Through the example of receptions of the Farnese Hercules, Hinds explores why color and its lack have been weaponized 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.
*Parts of this Summer issue will be published on a staggered schedule.
References
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Birgit Meyer and Jojada Verrips, “Aesthetics.” In Key Words in Religion, Media and Culture, ed. David Morgan. London: Routledge, 2008, 20-30.
