All in Editorials

2023 Spring Editorial: What Matters in Museums and Cultural Heritage?

2023 Spring Editorial: What Matters in Museums and Cultural Heritage?

Emily Levick and Urmila Mohan
Editorials

This issue turns to Museums as sites for heritage with new approaches to questions of decolonization, community engagement, and the display and interpretation of often sensitive media and narratives. Aspects discussed include ensuring the correct practices of care and conservation of sacred, “living” objects; furthering the decolonizing and Indigenizing efforts of museums; including contemporary Islamic communities in the interpretation and appreciation of ancient coins; and the joint efforts of curators and collectors to create fresh and stimulating exhibitions. In addition, this issue covers heritage-focused activism and iconoclasm.

2022 Fall Editorial: What Matters in “Material Activism”?

2022 Fall Editorial: What Matters in “Material Activism”?

Urmila Mohan
Editorials

Our Fall 2022 issue is on practices geared towards “activating” selves and others. Being socially active invokes power as something that is enacted or accomplished not only on an individual basis but via convincing/persuading others to act too—we see this in the language of “shifting” people towards “justice” and “solidarity”. The common thread that runs through this issue is the role of bodies with all of their entities (emotions, senses, actions, beliefs). Following the agency and efficacy of materials and bodies draws our attention to often overlooked practices. From the closeness of a mother’s care-work for her child to the democratic potential of new rituals.

2022 Spring Issue - Craft

2022 Spring Issue - Craft

Simashree Bora and Urmila Mohan
Editorials

How are craft production, techniques and skills interwoven into the space of the “everyday” as culture and identity in South and Southeast Asia? How are different understandings of tradition and indigeneity to be incorporated into such a discussion? Our Spring 2022 issue on Craft explores those questions via communities and cultures in India and Indonesia, featuring peoples’ cosmologies and beliefs in different ways. Lira Anindita Utami’s article on gringsing, a sacred double-ikat textile of Bali, and Debapriya Chakrabarti’s article on the infrastructural impact of Durga Puja idol-making in Kolkata deal with more explicitly religious objects. Lalita Waldia’s article on the woodcarving craft of likhai in Uttarakhand, India, and Amira Rahardiani’s study of bamboo weaving development in Central Java, Indonesia, delve, instead, into the complexities of craft as livelihood and heritage.

2021 Fall Issue - Healing

2021 Fall Issue - Healing

Lillia McEnaney & Urmila Mohan
Editorials

What processes, movements, and epistemological or physical structures make productive spaces for healing? How can we think about healing in a sense that moves via and past the physical, interrogating temporal ways of being throughout time, place, and space? How can relationality, place-based thinking, and embodied ways of knowing come together to form a collective consciousness around healing when framed as well-being, care, mindfulness and gratitude? Fundamentally, if anthropology and cultural studies are about paying attention to certain contexts what does the praxis of healing mean and do in varied contexts?

2021 Summer Issue - ReBuilding 2

2021 Summer Issue - ReBuilding 2

Urmila Mohan
Editorials

ReBuilding 2 continues themes of the Spring Issue, relating processes of damage and restoration, loss and healing, and the never-ending making and doing of things in human lives. In light of the pandemic, and historical and socio-cultural issues that long pre-dated 2020, the question of how we rebuild and remake is in urgent need of consideration. The articles, interviews and essays in this issue encourage us to reflect on the religious and secular beliefs and practices that cohere communities as they cope, create, resist, protest and move forward.

2021 Spring Issue - ReBuilding

2021 Spring Issue - ReBuilding

Urmila Mohan
Editorials

ReBuilding relates processes of damage and restoration, loss and healing, and the never-ending making and doing of things in human lives. In light of the pandemic, and historical and socio-cultural issues that long pre-dated 2020, the question of how we rebuild and remake is in urgent need of consideration. The articles, interviews and essays in this issue encourage us to reflect on the religious and secular beliefs and practices that cohere communities as they cope, create, resist, protest and move forward.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.