Deconstructing Essentialism: Translocality as a Conceptual Tool in the Study of Eclectic Material Cultures
Abstract: Cultural essentialism, as a colonial legacy, is defective and problematic especially when it comes to the study of diverse cultures. Essentialism reductively exaggerates, sharpens, and over-estimates the differences between cultures. Further, it projects these differences among classifications as intrinsic qualities or essences. The persistence of colonial-style essentialism even today indicates the urgency of adopting new conceptual tools to not only decolonize mindsets but also reconstruct a more productive and unbiased theoretical framework in the analyses of eclectic material cultures. ‘Translocality’ might be one of those promising conceptual tools. Based on the reflections on ‘transculturality’ and the case study of the images of Vajrapāni in Gandhāran art, I propose that translocality, which respects the agencies of local cultures and the complexity of cultural exchanges, is a more productive concept.
Citation: Zhao, Chunrong. “Deconstructing Essentialism: Translocality as a Conceptual Tool in the Study of Eclectic Material Cultures.” The Jugaad Project, 15 Jul. 2020, thejugaadproject.pub/deconstructing-essentialism [date of access]
Since the collapse of the global colonial system after World War II, many academic analyses of eclectic material cultures have stumbled into the quagmire of essentialism. Essentialism, as a colonial legacy closely related to Orientalism, escaped postcolonial criticism. We urgently need reflective and heuristic conceptual tools to help us not only deconstruct the enduring colonial mindset of essentialism but also reconstruct a productive and unbiased theoretical framework to analyze and represent eclectic material cultures. Translocality might be one of these conceptual tools.
Essentialism: A Colonial Legacy
Essentialism is a reductionist idea. It assumes that there is some “essence” to individuals in a particular category. Each individual subsumed into this category shares in some essence that organizes and determines their conditions, properties, or behaviors “from the inside out.” [i] Essentialization usually depends on classification, which already rests on particular interests or purposes of the subjects who classify and categorize things. Essentialization, as a further step based on classification, tends to exaggerate, sharpen, and over-estimate the differences or the boundaries among the classified categories by projecting some essences as intrinsically possessed by these categories. Essentialism distorts reality by setting immutable or unchanging essences and ignoring the internal diversity and changes within these categories. The interests behind the prior act of classification are thus naturalized, justified, and reinforced, generating even more prejudices and stereotypes. The essentialization of cultures since the colonial era also implies colonialist interests and agendas. Through colonial encounters in South Asia, Western colonialists deliberately essentialized the differences and constructed distinct boundaries between themselves and the colonized, between “the Self” and “the Other,” and between “Western” and “non-Western,” in order to maintain their self-proclaimed superiority. Not only were culturally essentialist discourses facilitated by colonial interests, but they could in turn also reinforce and exculpate the colonial agendas.
In such colonial contexts, highly eclectic material cultures could be reduced to colonialists’ tools, legitimizing the colonial agenda. For example, Gandhāran Buddhist material culture was once used by Western colonizers to demonstrate the desirable civilizing achievements of the ancient Greeks on the East. This historical narrative of ancient Gandhāra was thus placed “in parallel with the contemporary British politics of a civilizing mission in India” [ii] in order to justify British Indian imperialism. Western academics at that time attributed the Gandhāran “hybridity” to ancient interactions between the East and the West, reflecting the Orientalist presupposition of an essentialist division between the two worlds. Many of them were inclined to particularly elevate the Western classical (Greek and/or Roman) influences, while devaluing the Eastern traditions.
Figure 1: Fragment of a panel showing Vajrapāni (bottom left) and other attendant figures. The club, usually held by Heracles in ancient Greek iconography, has been substituted with a sword. 2nd -3rd century AD. Gandhara (Pakistan). British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Such Orientalist interpretations of Gandhāran Buddhist material culture were already being criticized during the period of British colonial rule in India (1908-1920s). Some scholars, like Ananda Coomaraswamy, adopted a nationalistic view, arguing that Gandhāran art originated in Indian traditions rather than in Western classical traditions. [iii] Since the 1960s, scholars focusing on the inception of Gandhāran art have recognized traits from other “foreign” (such as Saka and Parthian) cultures besides Western classical cultures. [iv] Some scholars (e.g. Mortimer Wheeler) have even adopted an aggregative approach to provide a seemingly unbiased interpretation by incorporating as many principal “contributory influences” as they could to triangulate the existing one-sided explanatory framework. [v] However, although the anti-/post-colonial interpretations have tried hard to get rid of the impact of colonialism, they have been caught, ironically, in the trap of a colonial legacy, namely cultural essentialism, which is manifested by the continuing use of the conventional concept of cultures that regards cultures as externally exclusive but internally unified spheres. [vi] To this day, the essentialist view of cultures persists in the explanatory notes about Gandhāran art displayed in many prestigious museums around the world. [vii] This phenomenon has indicated the obstinate continuation of essentialist discourses as well as the necessity and urgency of reflecting upon the essentialist mode of thinking.
As a colonial legacy, cultural essentialism has three main flaws. First, it encourages a reductionist way of thinking that simplifies the complexity of cultural exchanges and interactions in social-historical reality. It tends to reduce the intricately entangled network of cultural interactions behind eclectic traits to simple relationships between several foreign cultural spheres that are deemed to be “pure.” Second, it makes the eclectic material cultures in question lose their subjectivities and agencies. Being seen as “impure,” “mixed,” or “hybrid,” they are reduced to the periphery of the influential cultural centers and become the passive recipients of other active foreign influencers. Third, since the act of classification usually serves specific purposes, cultural essentialism is more likely to make the relevant academic discussions vulnerable to exploitation by particular political agendas. The apparently self-evident differences between cultural essences usually become a foundation for the unfair treatment of particular groups, which often leads to cultural chauvinism. Considering the defects of cultural essentialism, we urgently need a conceptual tool that can help establish a more productive and unbiased theoretical framework for us to analyze and represent eclectic material cultures.
In Search of a Promising Alternative Conceptual Tool
Transculturality first appears as a promising concept that is dedicated to deconstructing the essentialist assumptions of cultures. However, it also has limitations. Transculturality challenges the traditional understanding of cultures as cohesive, homogeneous, and self-contained entities, encouraging us to take cultures as something fluid, that is, always in the dynamic processes of making and re-making. [viii] Thomas Tweed is one scholar who has adopted a transcultural view to study religions in a non-essentialist manner. By drawing upon aquatic metaphors, he aims to “emphasize movement, avoid essentialism, and acknowledge contact.” [ix] He sees religions as confluences of various cultural flows, which are never fixed or static. He also introduces crossing and dwelling as two concepts to suggest that religions help people cross boundaries and make homes at the same time. [x] Inspired by Tweed’s theory of crossing and dwelling, my work has paid attention to the dynamic interdependent relationships between crossing and dwelling of material cultural flows. A culture can be both a specific fluid moment in a dynamic process of interactions (crossing, fluid aspect) and a marker of a particular local identity (dwelling, anchoring aspect). In terms of cultural flows, the anchoring aspect can also be seen as a result of the localization and sedimentation of particular religious or cultural flows in specific spatial or social contexts, contributing to agentive formations of local identities, cultural idiosyncrasies, and stylized local expressions of cultures. Although transculturality has great potential for deconstructing cultural essentialism, scholars who employ this concept usually tend to emphasize the fluid aspect of cultures rather than the anchoring aspect. This is not surprising, since the root concept “culture” in transculturality is also ambiguous and vague. Scholars who attempt to analyze the anchoring aspect of cultures through the use of transculturality also have to face the unrealistic task of defining “culture.” Thus, the primary theoretical task of transculturality is usually to deconstruct the traditional essentialist assumptions of cultures by highlighting their fluidity and permeability, but not to reconstruct a framework that also pays enough attention to the anchoring aspect of cultures.
In comparison to the root concept “culture” in transculturality, the root concept “locality” in translocality is more precise, feasible, and flexible in terms of revealing the anchoring aspect of cultures. Compared with fluid cultural flows, localities need to be anchored in specific spatial or social contexts, because people need to know who they are, where they live, and what makes them different from people in other localities. In this sense, the concept “locality” is not merely a spatial concept that “assumes a site of relatively limited scale,” [xi] but also a phenomenological one. As Arjun Appadurai enunciated, the concept “locality” has a complex phenomenological quality that is “constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity and the relativity of contexts.” [xii] Therefore, a locality is also an imagined shared social space that is phenomenologically identified by the people at a specific local level. This phenomenological quality “expresses itself in certain kinds of agency, sociality and reproducibility.” [xiii] The subjective quality of the concept “locality” lends the concept itself sufficient potential to discuss the role of local agency as well as the formation of local subjectivity in the dynamic processes of crossing and dwelling.
Both “locality” and the conventional essentialist conception of cultures recognize the anchoring aspect of cultures. However, compared with the essentialist conception of cultures, “locality” has three advantages. First, since the concept “locality” is based on an idiographic strategy that highlights “the importance of local-local connections,” [xiv] it can effectively blur and confuse the boundaries of the essentialist cultural spheres, and decentralize the cultural “centers” that once influenced and even dominated the corresponding “peripheries” in the conventional essentialist framework of cultural interactions. Second, the concept “locality” is more flexible in scales. According to the specific concerns of my research, localities can refer to different shared social relation networks of local meanings, histories, experiences, and practices in a microscopic sense. Thus, a locality is not limited to a fixed geographical scope or the lowest level of local administrative divisions. Depending on specific research concerns, a locality is defined by a particular social relation network at a particular microscopic local level. Third, due to its subjective quality, the concept “locality” also encourages us to pay attention to the agency and subjectivity of specifically located people in the dynamic formation, maintenance, and remodeling of localities that are fostered by the dynamics of cultural encounters and interactions. Unlike the essentialist conception of cultures, the concept “locality” does not assume that the local people are merely the people living in the peripheries of certain cultural centers, passively receiving foreign influences emitting from these cultural centers.
The prefix “trans-” in the term “translocality” highlights the mobility and connectedness of cultural flows in translocative processes. To put the prefix “trans-” in front of the concept “locality” means “to move beyond/across locality” or “to transgress locality.” Therefore, in the words of Oakes and Schein, translocality significantly “draws us to images of connectedness, flows, networks, rhizomes, decenteredness, and deterritorialization.” [xv] Due to its connectivity, the concept “translocality” has the potential to reveal extensive entangled networks that connect to broader geographical and social histories, meanings, experiences, and practices. It is thus able to transcend any fixed essentialist scales.
Figure 2: Scene from the life of Buddha, the conversion of the Kasyapas. Vajrapāni, with bearded face and defined musculature, is standing on the Buddha’s left, holding a vajra in his left hand. 2nd -3rd century AD. Gandhara (Pakistan). British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
The combination of the prefix “trans-” and the root concept “locality” means that the concept “translocality” pays equal attention to both the fluid and the anchoring aspects of cultures. It also reveals the dynamic dialectical unity between these two aspects. The fluid cultural flows and the relatively anchored localities seem to contradict each other, but in fact, neither of them can exist independently from the other. On the one hand, the processes of formation, maintenance, and remodeling of localities are inseparable from the role of cultural flows, precisely because identity formation depends on the interactions with “the other.” Besides, the fluid cultural flows also enrich and strengthen the relatively anchored localities by continuously providing more resources for the formation, maintenance, and remodeling of localities. On the other hand, the fluidity of cultural flows is also inseparable from the anchoring aspect of localities. If there is nothing that is relatively anchored or fixed, and everything is absolutely fluid, we no longer need to discuss either fixity or fluidity. The mobility of cultural flows can only become noticeable and observable by the contrast of relatively anchored localities. If there is no relatively anchored locality to be crossed, there is no longer any effort to cross localities, let alone the meanings that need to be created or marked by crossing localities. Therefore, both the fluid and the anchoring aspects of cultures are indispensable in cultural interactions. Together, these two seemingly mutually opposite aspects constitute a dynamic dialectical unity. They are indeed against each other but also mutually dependent, enriching, supplementing, and completing one another. It is the dynamic and dialectical balance between crossing/mobility and dwelling/locality that we should pay more attention to, instead of over-emphasizing boundaries (as cultural essentialism does) or completely deconstructing boundaries on a theoretical level. On the one hand, if we over-emphasize the fixity of cultures, our attention to the relationality of cultures might be reduced. On the other hand, if we put too much emphasis on the mobility and fluidity of cultures, we might not be able to pay enough attention to the formation of the relatively fixed local expressions and cultural idiosyncrasies. The concept “translocality” is thus helpful precisely because it avoids any over-emphasis on either one of these two aspects, which might lead to one-sided interpretations in academic discussions. Thus, compared with the concept “transculturality,” the concept “translocality” has not only the deconstructive capacity to challenge the essentialist conception of cultures, but also the reconstructive potential to re-establish a more productive and unbiased locality-based theoretical framework to analyze the entangled rhizomatic networks behind eclectic material cultures.
Translocative Method in Gandhāran Studies
Using the theoretical tool of translocality, my work draws upon the method of translocative analysis proposed by Thomas Tweed to re-examine Gandhāran Buddhist material culture. Projecting his theory of crossing and dwelling onto the methodological plane, Tweed suggests a translocative method to trace the dynamics of religion, asserting that to study religion is also to trace the flows of people, rituals, artifacts, beliefs, and institutions across spatial and temporal boundaries. [xvi] In this way, Tweed’s theory of crossing and dwelling is helpful not only for studies of the migration and transmission of religious/cultural traditions but also for interpretations of the mixing of religions/cultures.
Figure 3: A detail of the image of Heracles driving a bull to sacrifice on a two-handled jar (amphora). Ca. 525-520 BC. Attica, Greece. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston.
Figure 4: Heracles at rest, early 3rd century AD. This statue, known as ‘the Farnese Hercules’, is an enlarged copy of a lost bronze sculpture which was created by the Greek sculpture Lysippos in the fourth century BC. Now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen. CC BY 2.5
We might take the figural characteristics of Vajrapāni in Gandhāran Buddhist material culture as an example to demonstrate how a translocative perspective can help to analyze and represent eclectic material cultures. [xvii] Some of the most iconic characteristics of Gandhāran Vajrapāni [Figure 1 & 2], such as lion-skin headgear and muscular torso, originated from the image of Heracles [Figure 3 & 4] in ancient Greece. Heracles’ figural characteristics traveled through a huge number of localities in Eurasia, including Attica in Greece (6th century BC), the Hellenistic outposts in Western and Central Asia (4th-1st century BC), Gandhāra (2nd-3rd century AD) and Hadda (4th century AD) in today’s Pakistan and Afghanistan, and even farther localities such as Kizil and Maijishan (6th century AD) in China. Heracles’ figural characteristics traveled through these localities to reach farther localities in the broad network but also dwelled in these localities, being diffused and transformed. However, we cannot simply attribute the emergence of Gandhāran Vajrapāni to Gandhāran culture’s passive acceptance of ancient Greek culture. For one thing, the dwelling or the localization of Heracles’ figural features in Gandhāra cannot be separated from the agency of local Buddhist devotees and sculptors. They were not passively “influenced” by the flow, but actively domesticated it with possible negotiation for their own religious purposes. They consciously retained some of Heracles’ iconography (Heracles’ lion-skin headgear and muscular torso) but abandoned others (such as Heracles’ club) to shape their own Buddhist deity. Cultural flows always incorporate new elements from the different localities they move through, taking them along with the retained elements to move toward farther areas. Cultural flows are never pure and static. They are constantly reacting to the localities that they move across, being diluted or concentrated, discarded, or retained. Therefore, I argue that Gandhāran Buddhist material culture is diversely entangled and highly translocative. It is the translocality that lends Gandhāran Buddhist material culture itself to crossing boundaries and simultaneously dwelling in its own locality, absorbing various cultural flows from different localities to facilitate and situate its own innovation, while providing resources of cultural inspiration for the adjacent areas and even farther regions by sending its cultural flows outward. Gandhāran Buddhist material culture, as an integral part of a broader entangled network of cultural flows, played an active role in the constant processes of cultural making, re-making, and innovation.
Conclusion: The Values of Translocality
To summarize, the concept “translocality” has three advantages that correspond to the three deficiencies of the essentialist conception of cultures in the studies of eclectic material cultures such as Gandhāran Buddhist material culture. First, instead of following a reductionist approach, translocality provides us with a more nuanced way to represent eclectic cultures by attending to local idiosyncrasies at a microscopic level. It can thus reveal cultural diversity without reducing or neglecting the complexity of cultural interactions, integrations, and innovations in certain social-historical contexts. Translocality encourages us to adopt an idiosyncratic strategy by paying attention to the relations between various localities (in both the geographical sense and the phenomenological sense) at a microscopic level to observe cultural diversity.
Second, translocality is helpful for acknowledging the agencies and subjectivities of the localities embedded in larger entangled networks. It does not regard localities as the passive recipients of foreign influences but sees them as agents actively engaging with the processes of dwelling and crossing, making and remaking of cultures, and cultural innovations. Therefore, it is able to transcend the rigid center-periphery model by adopting an alternative model that allows us to pay more attention to the nuanced relationality reflected through the intricate entanglements of religions and cultures.
Third, translocality can encourage us to reflect upon the politicized discourses of earlier scholarship, and to provide a relatively unbiased interpretation. It can help us to challenge colonial discourses and their colonialist implications. Moreover, it can help us to reflect upon anticolonial discourses and their nationalist assumptions. By attending to cultural idiosyncrasies at a microscopic local level, translocality aims to restore agency and subjectivity to the flexible localities in a microscopic sense but not to any essentialist entities such as “the East” or “the West,” nations, or essentialist cultural spheres. Therefore, it respects the autonomy of people in microscopic localities to the greatest extent. However, since translocality does not disregard the larger extensive networks in which these microscopic localities are embedded, it also recognizes the restrictive effects of the complex and multiple local-to-local connections brought about by these larger networks on the agencies and autonomies of localities. Therefore, in a translocative framework, local agencies and autonomies are not absolute. Instead, they are balanced and restricted by the intricate connections in the extensive networks.
Besides these three advantages of translocality that correspond to the three defects of cultural essentialism, translocality has further advantages. For one thing, translocality encourages us to pay attention to the dynamic dialectical relationships between dwelling/locality and crossing/mobility in religious/cultural interactions and entanglements. Both these two aspects are indispensable in the translocative processes of religions or cultures. Both of them deserve equal academic attention. Translocality can also help to open up more space for interdisciplinary cooperation in Gandhāran studies in particular, and in cultural and religious studies in general. For example, translocality might inspire archaeologists and art historians to rethink their stylistic analyses, much of which is built on an essentialist theoretical framework. It might also be helpful for archaeologists to further reflect upon some concepts that they commonly use to describe eclectic materials, such as “hybridity,” “mestizaje,” and “creolization,” which also usually presuppose the purity of cultures existing prior to the mixture of cultures. In addition, the translocal perspective is likely to shed some light on the fields of museum curating and public history, in terms of how to represent and display highly eclectic material cultures.
Bibliography
Appadurai, Arjun. “The Production of Locality.” In Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, edited by Richard Fardon, 208-29. London: Routledge, 1995.
Berg, Esther, and Katja Rakow. “Religious Studies and Transcultural Studies: Revealing a Cosmos Not Known Before?.” Transcultural Studies 2016, no. 2 (2016): 180-203.
Brickell, Katherine, and Ayona Datta. “Introduction: Translocal Geographies.” In Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections, edited by Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta, 17-34. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2011.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish. “The Indian Origin of the Buddha Image,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 46 (1926), 165-70.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish. “The Influence of Greek on Indian Art,” Studies in Comparative Religion 8, no. 1 (Winter 1974).
Fabrègues, Chantal. “The Indo-Parthian Beginnings of Gandhara Sculpture.” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 1 (1987): 33-43.
Falser, Michael. “The Graeco-Buddhist style of Gandhara—a ‘Storia ideologica’, or: how a discourse makes a global history of art.” Journal of Art Historiography 13 (December 2015): 1-53.
Martin, Craig. A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion (Second Edition). London and New York: Routledge, 2017.
Narain, Awadh Kishore. “First Images of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas: Ideology and Chronology.” In Studies in Buddhist Art of South Asia, edited by A. K. Narain, 1-21. New Delhi: Kanak Publications, 1985.
Nehru, Lolita. Origins of the Gandhāran Style: A Study of Contributory Influences. Delhi etc.: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Oakes, Tim, and Louisa Schein, ed. Translocal China: Linkages, Identities, and the Reimagining of Space. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.
Tanabe, Katsumi. “Qiantuoluo fo he pusa xiang qiyuan yu yilang” 犍陀羅佛和菩薩像起源於伊朗 [Gandhāra Buddha and Bodhisattva Images Originated in Iran]. Translated by Tai Jianqun 台建群. Dunhuang Yanjiu 敦煌研究 [Dunhuang Studies] 3 (October 1989): 101-10.
Tweed, Thomas. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The puzzling form of cultures today.” Spaces of culture: City, nation, world (1999): 194-213.
Wheeler, Mortimer. “Gandhāra Art: A Note on the Present Position.” In Le rayonnement des civilisations Grecque et Romaine sur les cultures périphériques, edited by Huitième congrès international d’archéologie Classique, 555-65. Paris: Éditions E. de Boccard, 1965.
Further Reading
Hsing, I-tien 邢義田, “Helakelisi zai dongfang: qi xingxiang zai gudai Zhongya, Yindu, yu Zhongguo zaoxing yishu zhong de liubo yu bianxing” 赫拉克利斯在東方——其形象在古代中亞、印度與中國造型藝術中的流播與變形 [Heracles in the East: The Diffusion and Transformation of His Image in the Plastic Arts of Ancient Central Asia, India, and China]. In Zhongwai guanxi shi, xin shiliao yu xin wenti 中外關係史——新史料與新問題 [History of Sino-Foreign Relations: New Historical Materials and New Issues], edited by Rong Xinjiang 榮新江 and Li Xiaocong 李孝聰, 15-47. Beijing: Kexue Chubanshe 科學出版社 [Science Publishing], 2004.
Zhao, Chunrong, “Overcoming Essentialism: A Transcultural Approach to Gandhāran Buddhist Material Culture.” Masters thesis, Utrecht University, 2019.
Endnotes
[i] Craig Martin, A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion (Second Edition) (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 52, 54.
[ii] Michael Falser, “The Graeco-Buddhist style of Gandhara—a ‘Storia ideologica’, or: how a discourse makes a global history of art.” Journal of Art Historiography 13 (December 2015): 10.
[iii] For more details, see Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, “The Influence of Greek on Indian Art,” Studies in Comparative Religion 8, no. 1 (Winter 1974), first published by Essex House Press in 1908, and Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, “The Indian Origin of the Buddha Image,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 46 (1926): 165-70.
[iv] For more details, see Awadh Kishore Narain, “First Images of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas: Ideology and Chronology,” in Studies in Buddhist Art of South Asia, ed. Awadh Kishore Narain (New Delhi: Kanak Publications, 1985); Chantal Fabrègues, “The Indo-Parthian Beginnings of Gandhāra Sculpture.” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 1 (1987): 33-43; and Katsumi Tanabe, “Qiantuoluo fo he pusa xiang qiyuan yu yilang” 犍陀羅佛和菩薩像起源於伊朗 [Gandhāra Buddha and Bodhisattva Images Originated in Iran], translated by Tai Jianqun 台建群, Dunhuang Yanjiu 敦煌研究 [Dunhuang Studies] 3 (October 1989): 101-10.
[v] For more details, see Mortimer Wheeler, “Gandhāra Art: A Note on the Present Position,” in Le rayonnement des civilisations Grecque et Romaine sur les cultures périphériques, ed. Huitième congrès international d’archéologie classique (Paris: Éditions E. de Boccard, 1965), 558; and Lolita Nehru, Origins of the Gandhāran Style: A Study of Contributory Influences (Delhi etc.: Oxford University Press, 1989).
[vi] Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: SAGE Publications Ltd, 1999), 194-96.
[vii] I have visited major museums in Europe and North America to conduct fieldwork on the essentialist explanatory notes about Gandhāran art. These museums include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden, the British Museum in London, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the Corfu Museum of Asian Art in Greece. For more details, see the introduction chapter of my Masters thesis “Overcoming Essentialism: A Transcultural Approach to Gandhāran Buddhist Material Culture”.
[viii] Esther Berg and Katja Rakow. “Religious Studies and Transcultural Studies: Revealing a Cosmos Not Known Before?” Transcultural Studies 2016, no. 2 (2016): 186.
[ix] Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), 55.
[x] Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, 74.
[xi] Tim Oakes and Louisa Schein, ed., Translocal China: Linkages, Identities, and the Reimagining of Space (London: Routledge, 2006), 18.
[xii] Arjun Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” in Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. Richard Fardon (London: Routledge, 1995), 208.
[xiii] Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” 208.
[xiv] Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta, “Introduction: Translocal Geographies,” in Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections, ed. Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 3.
[xv] Oakes and Schein, Translocal China, 1.
[xvi] Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, 23.
[xvii] For more details about this case study, see Chapter 3 in my Masters thesis “Overcoming Essentialism: A Transcultural Approach to Gandhāran Buddhist Material Culture.”
