The Cultural Hybrid in Colonial Java and Pekalongan Buketan (Bouquet) Batik

The Cultural Hybrid in Colonial Java and Pekalongan Buketan (Bouquet) Batik

Karina Rima Melati
Articles

Karina Rima Melati examines the development of the batik buketan (bouquet) motif and how the creativity and labor of batik workers in Pekalongan of the North Coastal region in Central Java, Indonesia, helped contest, produce and reproduce what has now come to be known as an iconic batik style of that area.  Melati draws from previous studies of batik in different contexts, the marginality of batik labor, the growing trend of batik, batik and the postcolonial theoretical framework, and batik from a global perspective.

On Context

On Context

David Morgan
Articles

David Morgan offers us a thought-piece on the idea of ‘context’, a concept integral to The Jugaad Project. He notes that artifacts do not carry their meanings within themselves, though they may bear the traces of their contexts, of the settings from which time, history, and events have withdrawn them. The task of scholarly study is to re-situate artifacts within the settings that we find underlie their interpretation.

Heavenly Garden: Creating Intimacy, Developing Empathy

Heavenly Garden: Creating Intimacy, Developing Empathy

Ratu Saraswati
Articles, Reviews

The author, a performance artist, describes the impetus behind “Optik-Optik Kecil” (Tiny Optics), a participatory artwork of collecting morning dew. The performance was held in an area of land in Depok, a city close to Jakarta in West Java province. It was set at a specific time—weekend mornings during the holy month of Ramadan when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. Participants canvassed the landscape collecting morning dew and, much like the practice of fasting, the performance itself aimed at cultivating people’s empathy. With dew as the materiality of hope and awareness, the artist hoped to make the participants’ realities intersect, even if briefly, within the space of the landscape.

2019 Fall Issue, Landscapes and Material Religion - Editorial

2019 Fall Issue, Landscapes and Material Religion - Editorial

Urmila Mohan
Editorials, Issues

Our Inaugural Issue on the theme of “Landscapes and Material Religion” deals with land and its representation as vital to life and identity. The Fall publications deal with ‘land’ and ‘scapes’ via a performance artwork in interior Java, Indonesia, the creation of a batik style called buketan in coastal Java, and the materializing of sacred landscapes in Pompeii, Italy.

Religion and ‘Radiation Culture’: Spirituality in a Post-Chernobyl World

Religion and ‘Radiation Culture’: Spirituality in a Post-Chernobyl World

Elena Romashko
Articles

How can atomic power be interpreted through the lens of spirituality and mythology as a cultural response? The author shows us by focusing on the Chernobyl explosion in 1986. She proposes the innovative idea of a ‘radiation culture' where nuclear radiation has evolved from a purely scientific concept, first observed in the controlled environment of the lab, to a culture with its vivid beliefs and folklore.

The 'Magritte Effect' in the Study of Religion, Part I and II

The 'Magritte Effect' in the Study of Religion, Part I and II

Jean-Pierre Warnier

In this theoretically rich piece, the author discusses the entanglement of ‘things’ and their representations. In most religious traditions, this topic plays an important historical role in determining how devotees respond to imagery and materiality, especially as these media convey or embody their most important religious concepts. Cycles of iconophilia and iconoclasm relating to this issue form a central thread in the Abrahamic faiths, for instance. Warnier insists that scholars of religion need to be more circumspect regarding the ‘cognitive gap’ that exists between the praxeological ‘things’ of a religious tradition and the representations of those things.

Material, Embodied and Lived Religion: Basket Divination in Practice and Theory

Material, Embodied and Lived Religion: Basket Divination in Practice and Theory

Sonia Silva
Articles

The author draws upon her ethnographic work with basket diviners and their clients in northwest Zambia, Africa, to argue that the practice of basket divination is a material and embodied one. Further, it is a lived religion defined by the precariousness of human life and the transformative force of suffering. Without this broader existential context, basket divination would not be a lived religion.

Between Temples and Toilets: Sanitation Worship in India

Between Temples and Toilets: Sanitation Worship in India

Jacqueline Cieslak
Articles

The author artfully describes the complicated relationships between sanitation, reverence, and political contrivance in contemporary India. She focuses on the phenomenon of ‘The Toilet’ and its objectification as artefact and cultural institution. She argues that officials have not simply recruited religious imagery but that sanitation itself has become an object of worship.

Aura and Inversion in a Marian Pilgrimage: Fatima and her Statues

Aura and Inversion in a Marian Pilgrimage: Fatima and her Statues

David Morgan
Articles

The author analyses Marian devotion as an ‘economy of the sacred’, mediated by the statue of Our Lady of Fatima. Through data gathered in churches in the U.S., Morgan shows how a divine economy relies on material devices and embodied practices to satisfy a specific Christian theology, helps devotees render penance and devotion to the Virgin, and ensures her grace in return.

Load More