Civil Religion in Turkey: The Unifying and Divisive Potential of Material Symbols

Civil Religion in Turkey: The Unifying and Divisive Potential of Material Symbols

Patrycja Hala Saçan
Articles

Civil religion refers to citizens’ devotion and loyalty to the nation and state. Like other religions, it needs symbols that bond citizens to different notions and experiences whether non-tangible forms (political beliefs, the law, or a constitution) or tangible (flags, images, statues, and spaces). Visual representations of these forms can unite people around common values, goals, and history. This paper aims to widen our understanding of the importance of material objects in developing and sustaining national bonds in Turkey where objects and spaces have long helped to form and maintain Turkish identity, and mobilize and unite people.

Cecil John Rhodes: ‘The Complete Gentleman’ of Imperial Dominance

Cecil John Rhodes: ‘The Complete Gentleman’ of Imperial Dominance

Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Articles

Incompleteness engenders an understanding of resilient colonialism epitomised by Cecil Rhodes’ monuments and statues in Southern Africa. It draws on Tutuola’s metaphorical ‘The Complete Gentleman’ and the lessons on being and becoming from Tutuola’s skull to remind us that Rhodes’ legacy still suffers from illusions of completeness and a denial of debt and indebtedness. The call for humility and alertness to the imagined dream of a rainbow nation demands that South Africans stop learning the wrong lessons from Rhodes as exclusionary articulations of belonging informed by superiority and zero-sum games of conquest.

The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesque

The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesque

Jessica Hughes and Urmila Mohan
Curatorial Essays

A curatorial essay accompanying the digital exhibit “The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesques” on a body of work by the French artist Claire Le pape, inspired by the frescos of the Italian painter Giotto. This essay places us on a voyage of discovery, to see color as a passionate muse for artists across widely differing centuries, worlds and materials. Through Le Pape’s video testimonials and intricate tapestries woven out of fishing twine we see how color and religion overlap to create spaces of immersive and transcendental experience. Le Pape’s series of weavings called ‘Giottoesques’ showcase the ability of colorful materials to sensorially evoke the numinous as well as reference the artist’s own religiosity or spirituality.

The Prismatics of Silk

The Prismatics of Silk

Alexandra Dalferro
Articles

Silk is so famously shimmery because of its prism-like, triangular protein structure that allows it to refract incoming light at different angles and thus to produce different colors. Yet this inherent material brilliance depends on the qualities of the silk threads and environmental conditions, like the amount and type of light. The author expands a literal approach to prismatics to metaphorically encompass the situated and contingent nature of material, bodily engagements with silks and their colors. This essay renders the prismatics of the three “mother colors” of silks in Surin, Thailand to reflect upon how colors are inseparable from sociocultural, economic, political, and historical considerations of their origins.

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

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.

Of Kiwi Fruit and Kewpie Dolls: The Wonder of Modern Alankara in Bangalore

Of Kiwi Fruit and Kewpie Dolls: The Wonder of Modern Alankara in Bangalore

Tulasi Srinivas
Photo Essays

The daily aesthetic ornamentation of the deity known as alaṅkāra is an everyday feature of temple ritual. This colorful ornamentation, traditionally of flower garlands and fruit offerings, is synchronized to daily and festival calendars, with spectacular alaṅkāra offered during festivals. Alaṅkāra offers the temple priests scope for creativity, yet it is carefully controlled and codified according to liturgical texts, for it is thought to how God is revealed. Speaking to new practices of alaṅkāra in temples in Bangalore through the usage of new materials such as Kiwi fruit and Kewpie dolls the author suggest a new understanding of modernity and Hindu aesthetics, not only expanding devotees’ understandings of divinity, but inviting devotees to feel adbhutha or wonder.

2020 Winter Issue, Color and Material Religion - Editorial

2020 Winter Issue, Color and Material Religion - Editorial

Urmila Mohan and Jessica Hughes
Editorials

Color does not exist independently from the bodies and materials we encounter daily. It represents, refracts, reflects and redirects so that we perceive and make our world in a new light. In many cases, color helps us categorize and structure our world. Our tangible and intangible experiences are embodied in the ideas, aesthetic qualities and properties of colorful matter. And recognizing the contextual uses of color (whether as embodied or representational, real or imaginary) is vital to understanding its influence.

Gǝʿǝz manuscripts in Ethiopia: What a trained outsider can see today

Gǝʿǝz manuscripts in Ethiopia: What a trained outsider can see today

Nafisa Valieva
Peer Reviewed, Photo Essays

Ethiopia, one of the oldest Christian countries on the Horn of Africa, remains one of the few places in the world where parchment manuscripts are still produced and allows scholars to historically trace textual transmission. As the technology of mass print production competes with this ancient practice, this photo essay considers how church communities preserve manuscript production and protect its sacred value in liturgical practices.

Cinema as Metaxu

Cinema as Metaxu

Anat Pick
Peer Reviewed

In this article, Simone Weil's notion of the material world as "metaxu," an in-between or bridge between this world (gravity) and the absolute (grace), is positioned within the tradition of cinematic realism to consider how the natural world in film functions as a bridge to the supernatural. In this way, the cinema intertwines ecology and theology in ways that are particularly resonant now, at a time of large scale environmental collapse and the search for new values to support human and other lives.

Gazing to Africa: A Conversation with Art and Ethnology at the Museum

Gazing to Africa: A Conversation with Art and Ethnology at the Museum

Alexandra Antohin
Articles

This short essay explores how museum displays have traditionally shaped static public knowledge about Africa and Africans. Impressions from the spectator’s experience of the exhibit Beyond Compare: Art from the Bode Museum will serve as a springboard to reimagine how art and ethnological collections can dismantle ideologies of cultural domination embedded in these items’ preservation and presentation to the public.

The Fruits of the Loom: Cosmopolitanism Through the Eyes of the Commissioner

The Fruits of the Loom: Cosmopolitanism Through the Eyes of the Commissioner

Morgan Spencer
Articles

The author interrogates the idea of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in Colonial textile trade through the eyes of the object’s commissioner by focusing on four different textiles, from Italy, China, and India. Just after the ‘Age of Discovery’, this time period (16-17th c.) helps us situate depictions of cultural ‘othering’ within a historical lens. These textiles act as embodiments of political power and ‘worldliness’, making them early examples of translocal consciousness.

Buraq and Landscapes: Anchoring Islamic Identities and Images in Works of Modern Indonesian Art

Buraq and Landscapes: Anchoring Islamic Identities and Images in Works of Modern Indonesian Art

Anissa Rahadiningtyas
Peer Reviewed, Articles

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.

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