2019-20 Winter Issue, Part 1, Innovation and Material Religion - Editorial
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. It is striking that synonyms of innovation include to create or make something new as well as to modernize. Juxtaposing these connotations of innovation encourages us to ponder the role of ‘newness’ as well as other values that arise at a particular point in history, such as modernism and notions of progress.
James Bielo’s think-piece on innovation reminds us that we live in the “just do it” age of late capitalism. 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.
South East Asia is famed for its diversity of cultures, and our second piece situates itself in the commercial nexus of Singapore with its emphasis on multiculturalism (Malay, Indian, Chinese). But how is religion actually encountered and practised in relation to the prevailing official emphasis on culture as ‘difference’? James Mah’s insightful article, first in our peer-reviewed series, uses the concept of ‘sameness’ to explore a Hindu temple, visited by Indian and Chinese worshipers. Mah productively entangles multiple forces – civil, socio-cultural, and spiritual – through the ‘banality’ of everyday practices.
Our third offering is an interview with Chandan Bose, author of Perspectives on Work, Home, and Identity From Artisans in Telangana: Conversations Around Craft. The interview explores some of the core ideas in his ethnography of ritual scroll painters in the state of Telangana, India. One key takeaway from this discussion is how craft specialists use their positionality both in the production of art objects as well as situating themselves in the contemporary Indian craft and heritage industry.
Finally, we move to Cambodia to learn how a silkworm festival in Siem Reap was adapted by Kikuo Morimoto (1948-2017), Japanese founder of the weaving cooperative Institute of Khmer Traditional Textiles (IKTT). Author and designer Emilee Koss explores how the IKTT silkworm festival and its attendant fashion show act as spaces that adapt and perform traditional rituals for the local community as well as global publics.
By moving through these different sites and spaces, we can consider the values of innovation through the lens of sameness, renewal, adaptation and alteration. Although ‘tradition’ is not explicitly the subject of this issue, it is in the background, bringing to mind John Picton’s (1992) discussion of the kinds of biases and colonial histories invoked when we deem the arts of Others as changing or unchanging, tradition or traditional. What kind of spaces, objects and powers are facilitated by the idea of creativity as a transcendental force? Further, within a Western perspective, can innovation itself be considered a form of belief? Does our preference for, or anxiety about, cultural change enable us to recognize and favor certain kinds of religious and ritualistic production as ‘innovative’?
*Each piece in this Winter issue will be published on a staggered schedule. An issue on Innovation, Part 2, is currently being planned for publication in 2020.
Reference
John Picton, “On the Invention of Traditional Art,” Principles of 'Traditional' African Art, ed. Moyo Okediji (Ibadan, Nigeria: Bard Book, 1992).
