The Jugaad Project

Sep 22

Sep 22 Giving Form to Memory: Drawn Thread Embroidery as Embodied ‘Re-membering’ of Trauma Narratives

The enquiry merges textile craft and feminist discourse and methodologies to probe women’s subjectivities. Through inherited objects and memories, it considers generational wounds and patriarchal neglect as channels for trauma narratives, and explores material objects as acts of ‘re-membering’. It examines the significance of drawn thread embroidery work or Taarkashi as a tangible link between individuals across cultures, generations, and geographies. The juxtaposition of reflective pieces and needlework enables me to experience Taarkashi as practiced by my great-grandmother, Amma. Simultaneously, the craft becomes a testimony to limitations as it can only be done on an open-weave fabric, horizontally or vertically. This constraint reminds me of how the freedom and exposure of skilled women needle workers in the Punjab Province are gendered and controlled by society through disciplines of various kinds.

Jan 24

Jan 24 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.

Jun 9

Jun 9 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.

Jun 3

Jun 3 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.

May 20

May 20 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.

May 15
May 15 (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.

May 8

May 8 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.

May 8

May 8 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.

Apr 5

Apr 5 Likhai: A journey through the craft of wood carving

Lalita Waldia

Articles

The article unfolds the journey of Likhai, a craft of wood carving in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand from a glorified past to a disappearing craft. Likhai, which was once an integral part of communities, is an amalgamation of diverse cultural influences and represents the land and its people. The article makes the case that it is vital to understand the whole system that revolves around the practice, providing details of the origin of the craft and how it represents the importance of Likhai for the communities. A narrative is thus created that connects the changes in the region with changes that have impacted the craft and the craftspeople. Likhai is no longer part of modern Kumaoni houses but despite this still manages to be in the hearts of people.

Apr 5

Apr 5 2022 Spring Issue - Craft

Simashree Bora and Urmila Mohan

Editorials

How are craft production, techniques and skills interwoven into the space of the “everyday” as culture and identity in South and Southeast Asia? How are different understandings of tradition and indigeneity to be incorporated into such a discussion? Our Spring 2022 issue on Craft explores those questions via communities and cultures in India and Indonesia, featuring peoples’ cosmologies and beliefs in different ways. Lira Anindita Utami’s article on gringsing, a sacred double-ikat textile of Bali, and Debapriya Chakrabarti’s article on the infrastructural impact of Durga Puja idol-making in Kolkata deal with more explicitly religious objects. Lalita Waldia’s article on the woodcarving craft of likhai in Uttarakhand, India, and Amira Rahardiani’s study of bamboo weaving development in Central Java, Indonesia, delve, instead, into the complexities of craft as livelihood and heritage.

Mar 12

Mar 12 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.’

Mar 9

Mar 9 Monument Lab Town Hall: Shaping the Past

Lillia McEnaney

Reviews

In October 2020, Monument Lab hosted their annual town hall, “Shaping the Past.” Through conversations between memory works, artists, and interdisciplinary scholars, “Shaping the Past” asked questions surrounding the future of monuments and monumentality, setting the stage for the future(s) of public space, artistic and curatorial activism, and community-building in the wake of 2020.

Mar 4

Mar 4 Seeing the Lost Mural: How Damage and Restoration Inform Close Looking

Eliza West

Articles

The 110-year-old Lost Mural, damaged by almost 30 years behind a false wall, is a patchwork of tones – some areas carefully cleaned by art conservators, other still dirty and showing chipped and missing paint. In this state, it exists simultaneously as an example of damage and restoration, and as both a significant cultural artifact and a work of religious art. This article shows how the conservation process and the practice of close looking allow us to better understand each of these aspects of the Lost Mural.

Dec 2

Dec 2 Color, Graffiti and the Senses: Visitors and Worshippers at Indian Archaeological Sites

Uthara Suvrathan

Photo Essays

This essay examines ancient Buddhist monastic sites, now archaeological/tourist sites, and the ways in which people experience and interact with the past, mediated through material culture. For example, the historic sites of Ajanta and Ellora in India are known for their vibrantly colored paintings, protected in various ways including signs banning the performance of rituals. And yet, we find that visitors respond to these sites in unexpected ways, for instance, by placing gold foil on carvings of the Buddha as a form of veneration and worship. The traces of this interaction, both past and present, can be seen in various kinds of graffiti and in the use of architectural form and light. By observing contemporary practices and the ways visitors develop their own experiences, one can suggest new ways in which heritage can be managed and presented.

Jul 9

Jul 9 Thinking with the Tabot: The Material Dimensions of Waiting in Addis Ababa

Alexandra Antohin

Articles

Alexandra Antohin uses the material analogy of the Ethiopian tabot to explore alternative dispositions to waiting and indeterminacy. She explores how ‘moving foundations’ of the home and church facilitate conditions of sustaining instability. This thought-provoking discussion considers how dilemmas of displacement and the manipulation of time during crises, such as urban resettlement, can revise sociocultural assumptions about the march of time as moving fast and forward.