All tagged translocality
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.
Meekyoung Shin discusses her extraordinary soap sculptures, inspired by Classical art. Her work often uses Greco-Roman imagery to explore themes of translation, transience, and the movement of people and artefacts across cultural boundaries.
Led by UCLA anthropologist Jason de León, the Undocumented Migration Project is changing the way we think about the U.S.-Mexico border. Using a fusion of archaeological, ethnographic, visual, museological, and forensic perspectives, the project is fostering conversation and understanding about the human impacts of American immigration policies. Through an exhibition, field school, and ongoing interdisciplinary research, de León and his team are making the tangible, material traces of migration visible.
The author, an anthropologist, discusses how she is at last confronting her oversights in publications about Indonesia. In doing so, she is dealing with racialized ideologies and their corrosive, real-world consequences for persons such as Indonesian Chinese individuals. This highly personal essay reminds us that the discursive power of ideas to contest hegemonies relies on basic acts of experiencing, acknowledging and recording.
This think-piece on the theoretical potential of ‘translocality’ helps counter the colonial legacy of cultural essentialism in the analyses and representation of eclectic material cultures. Based on reflections on ‘transculturality’ and the case study of the images of Vajrapani in Gandharan art, the author concludes that translocality, which respects the agencies of local cultures and the complexity of cultural exchanges, is a more productive, heuristic concept in analyzing and representing diverse material cultures.
This Special Issue explores the theme of translocality as connections that disrupt. The pieces in this issue vary in the degree to which they explicate ‘religion’. Yet, the uniting thread is how they invoke connections, and conceptual and physical flows across borders, both imagined and real. Simultaneously, this issue indicates that flows take place in fields of uneven power relations with (challenges to) hegemonic systems of being and thinking that are regarded as being self-evidently ‘in place’. Translocality, thus, also works against essentializing representations that support or authenticate the virtues and values of dominant religions and cultures.
