All in Articles

Women, Work, and Wine: Shifting Cultures of Brewing in Northeast India

Women, Work, and Wine: Shifting Cultures of Brewing in Northeast India

Upasana Goswami and Abhishruti Sarma
Articles, Peer Reviewed

In many indigenous households of the region, rice wine is offered to guests as an honorific welcome drink. Rice wine for these communities is also an essential medium for interacting with forest spirits, performing rituals, and celebrating harvest festivals. However, much of the work that goes into making rice wine such a popular custom often remains unrecognised. This invisibilisation is rooted in the informal and vulnerable nature of women’s homestead-based brewing work, stemming from Liquor Prohibition Acts and prohibition movements, changes in indigenous religions and ideas of morality, or the easy accessibility of Indian-made Foreign Liquor in the region.

Green Thumbs: The Politics and Precarity of Land Care Labors

Green Thumbs: The Politics and Precarity of Land Care Labors

Maggie Hansen
Articles, Peer Reviewed

Urban landscapes are created, in part, from living materials and are shaped by human use and care. Human actions of maintenance and stewardship produce and sustain designed environments over time. Like other care labor, this work is physical, ongoing, and requires specific local knowledge, yet it is often considered ‘unskilled’ labor. Recent discourse in landscape architecture and planning has highlighted the role of land care work in addressing the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss, while creating ‘green jobs.’ This article aims to identify opportunities and particular approaches for creating meaningful social change through stewardship activities.

Pathologies of Labour: How Work Destroys Health in Urban India

Pathologies of Labour: How Work Destroys Health in Urban India

Tanuj Luthra
Articles

While conducting fieldwork with informal doctors in low-income neighbourhoods in Delhi, I noticed that several patients consulted them for what appeared to be work-related ailments. Reflecting on these encounters at the intersection of medicine and labour, I thought about how work consumes both our time and our vitality, and how responses to the effects of work mobilize particular ideas of care and wellbeing. I wondered: if health is socially constructed, in what ways does labour construct it? In this essay, I explore how, across various urban work contexts — from informal sector work to supposedly good jobs in “India Inc.” — people experience and differently articulate a range of symptoms and conditions (such as stress, tension, fatigue, pain, injury, and various infectious diseases) in relation to their labour.

Stone Works: The Religious Power of Lithic Media in Contemporary Cambodia

Stone Works: The Religious Power of Lithic Media in Contemporary Cambodia

Elizabeth A. Cecil
Articles, Photo Essays

How do Indigenous repertoires of ‘care’–i.e. scripted and ad hoc practices of using, maintaining, repairing, and beautifying religious sites and objects–intersect with the ‘work’ of historical conservation? In what ways are religious values expressed through the continued use and reuse of historical sites? Finally, can these works of piety be integrated within current conversations around the preservation of ancient temples and religious sites in Southeast Asia? To explore these questions, this essay brings images collected during field research in 2023 at premodern Hindu and Buddhist temple sites in Cambodia into conversation with historical sources that contextualize the reciprocal relationships that exist between religious practitioners, sites, and objects.

Amateur or Professional?: Reclaiming the Role of the Amateur at the Intersection of Work and Religious Faith

Peter Bush
Articles

I am a Presbyterian minister serving St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Fergus a small town in Ontario, Canada, and that fact impacts how I view the intersection between religious faith and work. The Presbyterian Church in Canada defines my status as being a professional church worker. Woven through the essay will be engagement with the Judeo-Christian assertion that human beings are called to love the Lord their God with their entire being. The proposed essay will explore how the professionalization of clergy impacts the work-life of clergy including shaping their religious lives outside of work. Professionalization invites a splitting of work from the personal creating two spheres of life, this contrasts with the all-encompassing claims that the religious makes on life.

Re-Engaging Islamic Materials and their Heritage Values

Re-Engaging Islamic Materials and their Heritage Values

Sara Ann Knutson
Peer Reviewed, Articles

Coins have long been important materials for examining values and exchange networks in the past. Housed today in museum collections around the world, Islamic coins are no exception. But Islamic coins are more than simply material traces of the past, they also hold important contemporary meanings that have been overlooked and undervalued by academics. In this peer-reviewed article, Sara Ann Knutson shares how she has begun to explore the possibilities for, and ethical commitment to, community involvement in the meanings and values that are constructed around museum-based materials. She discuss some results from her cultural heritage survey of people culturally connected to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and how stakeholder voices revealed the understated importance of museum-housed assemblages for cultural heritage and community values, including those that span across national borders, languages, and religious beliefs. This work envisions transformative approaches to collections and museum practice in which communities are recognized for their values regarding materials from the Islamic World’s vibrant past, rather than remaining the “recipients” of museum narratives and academic research.

White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle

White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle

Kajal Nisha Patel
Articles

Over the past decade, postural-yoga classes have grown to become “museum yoga” attracting new audiences to North American and Western European museums and galleries. The author argues that the museum yoga spectacle is a derivative trend that follows International Yoga Day as a virtue-signalling performance. These annual events are largely attended by a global cultic milieu of affluent white women, who organise themselves into a grand spectacle of mass participation. Through their involvement in the museum yoga spectacle, programming staff and participants are “spiritually bypassing”. As an alternative, the author moves towards examples of museum-yoga education that better engage learners.

Curating Ornament and Textile Exhibitions as Highwire Acts: On Guest Curator Negotiations with Lenders and Museum Director

Curating Ornament and Textile Exhibitions as Highwire Acts: On Guest Curator Negotiations with Lenders and Museum Director

Susan Rodgers
Articles

In studying museum exhibitions, there is value in looking at hidden negotiations (even combat)  among academic guest curators, museum directors, and collector/lenders. These often-veiled interactions occur as different ideological stances and positionalities come into contact and friction with each other regarding what is important in displaying material culture. In this essay, I provide a close-up view of such negotiations in the planning and implementation of three shows that I guest curated as an anthropologist (one at the Asia Society Gallery, two at Cantor Art Gallery at Holy Cross). All concerned indigenous arts from island Southeast Asia. Judicious compromises and consensus resulted in stronger exhibitions.

A conversation on difference, Otherness and possibilities in museums

A conversation on difference, Otherness and possibilities in museums

Poornima Sardana and Shivangi Pareek
Articles

How is the new museology of museums rooted within communities different from museums displaying communities? What can this new museology learn from previous engagements by museum actors with source communities and multiple stakeholders? Using ‘Otherness’, ‘difference’ and ‘communities’ as analytical frames, this conversation between a museologist (Poornima Sardana) and an anthropologist (Shivangi Pareek) aims to bring together perspectives at the intersection of museum studies and ethnographic work, and reflect on plural entanglements within museums.

Whitewash: Robert E. Lee and the New Iconoclasm

Whitewash: Robert E. Lee and the New Iconoclasm

Howard Skrill
Articles

Through plein-air drawings and studio works on paper, this essay grapples with processes of national belonging and exclusion brought to bear on the surfaces of extant public monuments in the racialized landscape of the U.S. ‘Whitewash’ is an opaque layer that is slathered over what lies beneath so that the latter is concealed and, hopefully, in time, forgotten. However, even a cursory inspection often reveals what was meant to remain hidden. Similarly, an exploration of the fate of two representations of the U.S. Confederate general Robert E. Lee reveals the nationalist, political forces that led to these monuments’ raising and subsequent removal.

Caring for the Body and Spirit of Altars: An Ethical Exploration

Caring for the Body and Spirit of Altars: An Ethical Exploration

Emma Cieslik
Articles

As spaces of cultural heritage preservation and education, museums are responsible for respecting the communities whose objects live within their collection, as well as the belief systems within which these objects were/are created and used. In the context of heritage approaches to ‘living collections’ there is a whole subset of objects in museum collections that have spiritual power and/or require traditional, sacred, and religious care. This care and what it involves can only be determined through community consultation, from handling, housing, and orientation to ritual use and access. This article attempts to spark further exploration of traditional, spiritual, and religious care within museums, focusing on the example of altars.

A Drawing Out: Visibilizing the Labor of Care, Enacting Mutual Aid

A Drawing Out: Visibilizing the Labor of Care, Enacting Mutual Aid

Angela Beallor
Articles

The author explores the proposals and policies for radical caretaking labor reform drafted by Soviet theorist and policymaker Aleksandra Kollontai during the Soviet 1920s. She meditates on the potential of depiction and enaction in artistic production and collaborative performance. This is to help pre-figure mutual aid, collaboration, community organization, and caretaking in the current world as we struggle to upend the current capitalist and patriarchal status quo(s). She draws on her collaborative performance project, A Drawing Out :: Lactic Orchestration, first staged in 2018, as well as the ideas of those, such as Angela Garbes, who have made compelling intersectional calls for valuing the essential labor of care work within the context of the current global pandemic.

The Artivism of Incantations in Isan

The Artivism of Incantations in Isan

Peera Songkünnatham
Articles, Issues

Artivism is not necessarily a harmonious intersection between art and activism—it may also result from a head-on collision. This article explores the art of Patiwat “Molam Bank” Saraiyaem, a Thai folk poet-singer and former student activist who has shied away from the label “activist.” How does one soldier on doing activism with a wounded soul? My answer: through the power of ritual poetry and performance in restoring wholeness as well as acknowledging brokenness. This argument is constructed through description, comparison, and analysis of the words, the emoting, and the reception in two incantatory poems by Patiwat. Isan, the term meaning the Northeast as well as the hybrid Lao vernacular of the region, unlocks an understanding of how Patiwat’s art both serves Thai pro-democracy activism and resists its dominant language and emotional regimen, sparking new activist possibilities in and beyond Isan.

Just Images

Just Images

Rajgopal Saikumar
Articles

In 2010 a High Court in India found Shabnam and Saleem guilty of conspiring and murdering seven of Shabnam’s family members. They are both currently in death row. If executed, Shabnam will be the first woman to be so killed in independent India. In the decade she’s spent in prison, Shabnam learnt to knit, stitch, and embroider textiles as clothing and bags. Her lawyers documented and presented images of these objects as evidence of reform and a promise of rehabilitation. I am interested in taking the materiality of these objects seriously, and treat them as aesthetic objects. What happens when these photographs enter a legal plea, as evidence of reformation, and a prayer for the commutation of sentence?

Bamboo Crafts Development Projects in Indonesia: Who to Develop? What is to be Developed?

Bamboo Crafts Development Projects in Indonesia: Who to Develop? What is to be Developed?

Amira Rahardiani
Articles

The crafts development project model has played a crucial role in developing Indonesian socio-economic situations at the communal, regional and national levels. The top-down development project model adopted by the government has caused an overlap of development systems among agencies trying to reach the grassroots levels for the past three decades. Yet, the attempt to “develop” craft industries inevitably conflicts with preserving producers’ work and customs. This article unveils subject-object relations in a traditional bamboo cottage industry in Cikiray Hamlets, West Java, where the ecological factors around the hamlets shape the daily and seasonal routines of the craftspeople involved in commodifying their crafts.

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