“If You’re Looking to Radicalize an Archaeologist, Force Them to do Something Traditional:” An Interview with Dr. Jason de León

“If You’re Looking to Radicalize an Archaeologist, Force Them to do Something Traditional:” An Interview with Dr. Jason de León

Lillia McEnaney
Interviews

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.

Not Writing as Not Seeing, Not Recording: Embodied Racism in Indonesia -- Reflections on Fieldwork since 1974

Not Writing as Not Seeing, Not Recording: Embodied Racism in Indonesia -- Reflections on Fieldwork since 1974

Susan Rodgers
Articles

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.

Deconstructing Essentialism: Translocality as a Conceptual Tool in the Study of Eclectic Material Cultures

Deconstructing Essentialism: Translocality as a Conceptual Tool in the Study of Eclectic Material Cultures

Chunrong Zhao
Articles

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.

2020 Special Issue: Translocality as Connections that Disrupt

2020 Special Issue: Translocality as Connections that Disrupt

Urmila Mohan and Jessica Hughes
Editorials, Special Issues, Issues

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.

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.

2020 Summer Issue, Part 2, Innovation and Material Religion - Editorial

2020 Summer Issue, Part 2, Innovation and Material Religion - Editorial

Urmila Mohan
Editorials, Issues

Our Summer 2020 issue on the theme of Innovation is the second of a two-part series that explores instances of creativity and change drawn from various parts of the globe – India, Thailand, and the Western world. Our offerings include a photo essay on jugaad practices among costumers in the Indian film industry, a photo essay on sensory and community aesthetics in a South Indian flower market, a photo essay on care practices and questions of change in Thailand, and an article by Aimee Hinds on how color (or its absence) perpetuates false racial narratives in modern classical reception of the Greco-Roman past.

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.

On Innovation

On Innovation

James Bielo
Articles

A think-piece on the value of innovation in the “just do it” age of late capitalism. The author, James Bielo, parses jugaad as frugality, experimentation and creativity, and illustrates his point through a brief description of two historical figures: Brother John’s making of the Ave Maria Grotto in Alabama as well as the carvings of Elijah Pierce, an African-American self-taught artist from Mississippi.

2019-20 Winter Issue, Part 1, Innovation and Material Religion - Editorial

2019-20 Winter Issue, Part 1, Innovation and Material Religion - Editorial

Urmila Mohan
Editorials, Issues

Our Winter 2019-20 Issue, Innovation, Part 1, explores different aspects of innovation with examples drawn from various parts of the world – India, South East Asia (Singapore and Cambodia), and the US. Our offerings include an article on worship in multicultural Singapore, a think-piece on innovation, an essay on how traditional rituals are being adapted for new publics in Cambodia, and a discussion with an Indian anthropologist about craft and heritage.

Anchoring Devotion in a Layered Terrain - Bartolo Longo and the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary in Pompeii

Anchoring Devotion in a Layered Terrain - Bartolo Longo and the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary in Pompeii

Jessica Hughes
Articles

Jessica Hughes introduces her ongoing research project on the Catholic sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary in Pompeii, Italy. Focussing on the writings of the sanctuary’s founder, Blessed Bartolo Longo (1841-1926), she explores how far early devotion at Pompeii was anchored within the local terrain – a complex, enchanted landscape made up of multiple layers, both historical and geomorphological. In doing so, she also thinks about how the many international devotees of this Italian Madonna have developed material techniques for connecting with the deeply sacred landscape of the Pompeian Valley.

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