All in Peer Reviewed

Women, Work, and Wine: Shifting Cultures of Brewing in Northeast India

Women, Work, and Wine: Shifting Cultures of Brewing in Northeast India

Upasana Goswami and Abhishruti Sarma
Articles, Peer Reviewed

In many indigenous households of the region, rice wine is offered to guests as an honorific welcome drink. Rice wine for these communities is also an essential medium for interacting with forest spirits, performing rituals, and celebrating harvest festivals. However, much of the work that goes into making rice wine such a popular custom often remains unrecognised. This invisibilisation is rooted in the informal and vulnerable nature of women’s homestead-based brewing work, stemming from Liquor Prohibition Acts and prohibition movements, changes in indigenous religions and ideas of morality, or the easy accessibility of Indian-made Foreign Liquor in the region.

Green Thumbs: The Politics and Precarity of Land Care Labors

Green Thumbs: The Politics and Precarity of Land Care Labors

Maggie Hansen
Articles, Peer Reviewed

Urban landscapes are created, in part, from living materials and are shaped by human use and care. Human actions of maintenance and stewardship produce and sustain designed environments over time. Like other care labor, this work is physical, ongoing, and requires specific local knowledge, yet it is often considered ‘unskilled’ labor. Recent discourse in landscape architecture and planning has highlighted the role of land care work in addressing the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss, while creating ‘green jobs.’ This article aims to identify opportunities and particular approaches for creating meaningful social change through stewardship activities.

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.

A Theory of Relational Affliction and Healing: Evil Eye in Iran and Greece

A Theory of Relational Affliction and Healing: Evil Eye in Iran and Greece

Rose Wellman and Dionisios Kavadias
Peer Reviewed, Articles

Rose Wellman and Dionisios Kavadias offer a comparative ethnographic study of the evil eye in contemporary Iran and Greece. With rich ethnographic detail, the authors explore the ongoing significance of evil eye affliction as well as the diagnostic approaches and remedies used for removal of this curse. Their analysis shifts focus from previous paradigms of social cohesion to local cultural logics, ways of knowing, and realities that foreground bodily integrity and experiences of energy. They present evil eye as a case study in relationality and embodied affliction/healing.

Wounded Landscapes: Debris of War, Residual Vulnerability, and (Toxic) Intimacy in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia

Wounded Landscapes: Debris of War, Residual Vulnerability, and (Toxic) Intimacy in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia

Chairat Polmuk
Articles, Peer Reviewed

This paper investigates transnational ecologies of the vestiges of war in Southeast Asia, where a shared experience of vulnerability has become the very condition of everyday reality and aesthetic expression. Focusing on the legacies of the U.S. bombardment campaigns in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand during the Second Indochina War, the author looks at how artists and filmmakers such as Allan Sekula (USA), Tada Hengsapkul (Thailand) Vandy Rattana (Cambodia), and Xaisongkham Induangchanthy (Laos), document the lingering effects—and affects—of Cold War atrocities through topographic aesthetics as a locus of “residual vulnerability”.

Breaking Down Colston: Destruction and Transformation in London and Bristol

Breaking Down Colston: Destruction and Transformation in London and Bristol

Lindsay P. Crisp
Articles, Peer Reviewed

This article investigates articulations of material and cultural affects in the deplinthing of the Bristol memorial to Edward Colston in June 2020, and Michael Landy’s destruction of his belongings in the art event Break Down in February 2001. In Break Down, as in the deplinthing of the Colston memorial, destruction changes and expands the plane upon which objects are intelligible by bringing to our attention their material composition. The protesters’ action in Bristol and Landy’s project of systematic dismantling and granulation differ profoundly in epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic terms. However, both events confront us with the fact that matter is never entirely ‘gone.’

Colorism, Castism, and Gentrification in Bollywood

Colorism, Castism, and Gentrification in Bollywood

Rebecca Peters
Articles, Peer Reviewed

Colorism, prejudicial attitudes towards people with darker skin tones, like all -isms, creates a toxic environment for anyone who does not fall into the ideal category. When major media sources, like Bollywood in India, reinforce the oppressive attitude of discrimination based on skin color, it adds to the normalization of colorism and resulting social hierarchies and stigma. I argue that Bollywood’s desires for respectability among upper class Indian and diasporic audiences emboldens its attitudes about class, caste, and color, contributing significantly to the power and reach of colorism.

Gǝʿǝz manuscripts in Ethiopia: What a trained outsider can see today

Gǝʿǝz manuscripts in Ethiopia: What a trained outsider can see today

Nafisa Valieva
Peer Reviewed, Photo Essays

Ethiopia, one of the oldest Christian countries on the Horn of Africa, remains one of the few places in the world where parchment manuscripts are still produced and allows scholars to historically trace textual transmission. As the technology of mass print production competes with this ancient practice, this photo essay considers how church communities preserve manuscript production and protect its sacred value in liturgical practices.

Cinema as Metaxu

Cinema as Metaxu

Anat Pick
Peer Reviewed

In this article, Simone Weil's notion of the material world as "metaxu," an in-between or bridge between this world (gravity) and the absolute (grace), is positioned within the tradition of cinematic realism to consider how the natural world in film functions as a bridge to the supernatural. In this way, the cinema intertwines ecology and theology in ways that are particularly resonant now, at a time of large scale environmental collapse and the search for new values to support human and other lives.

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

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

Anissa Rahadiningtyas
Peer Reviewed, Articles

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.

Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth

Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth

Aimee Hinds
Articles, Peer Reviewed

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.

Garlands for Gods in Southeast India

Garlands for Gods in Southeast India

Leah Comeau
Photo Essays, Peer Reviewed

This is a study of flowers and garlands in Tamil South India as they travel through temples and markets and are grown, sold, and bought by a variety of communities. Various threads of sensory engagements, including colors, fragrances, and the clamor of the market and festive temple grounds, all accumulate into a sense of community aesthetics and sensational forms, from which a devotee might draw to participate.

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

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

James Mah
Articles, Peer Reviewed

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.