2019 Fall Issue, Landscapes and Material Religion - Editorial
By Urmila Mohan and Alexandra Antohin, Editors
Our Inaugural Issue on the theme of “Landscapes and Material Religion” deals with the entity of land and its representation as integral to life and identity. Our three 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. Landscapes are central to all of these discussions as a means to create place and context through culture. Indeed, the etymology of the word culture derives from the Latin cultura for “cultivating, agriculture.”
While religious themes are implicit and explicit in our line-up, we hesitate to categorize these articles primarily by the prevailing faith of the land, that is, Islam in Indonesia and Christianity in Italy. Instead, we used the theme of landscapes to invoke ideas of nature, representation and identity, and try to explore them as sites of spirituality, divinity, and/or re-enchantment.
This inaugural issue also marks our exploration of the relationship between context, matter and practice in religion. Following our project’s focus on ‘Material Religion’ as one that involves the study and use of materials and bodies in context, we encourage our readers to explore our Fall line-up as a practice of Jugaad. That is, the process of innovating and creating by bringing elements at hand together in a flexible manner. Please read the three articles as an experimentation with contexts via the multi-disciplinary perspectives of a performance artist, textile scholar and classical studies expert, as well as a comparison between the scapes of Indonesia and Italy. In addition, a thought-provoking note “on context” by Professor David Morgan, Duke University, completes our offerings for this season.
As noted elsewhere (Mohan and Warnier 2017), all religions require actual bodies and their transformative interactions with materials. Bodies act on materials and other bodies, and in turn the latter are also agentive. Across the articles in this issue, flowers, plants, dew, volcanic soil, lakes, and archaeological sites are transformed and represented as floral offerings, textiles, paintings, myths, performances, and rituals. We would be hard-pressed to find a religion (or an artform) that does not rely on some combination of media and practices. The process of religious living, doing, making, mapping, and identification with a space as ‘place’ (or here, a scape) involves bodily and material strategies that may seem special or mundane, it all depends on the context.
The first piece in the line-up is an essay authored by the Indonesian artist Ratu Saraswati (Saras) who is currently based in Jakarta, Java. Titled Heavenly Garden: Creating Intimacy, Developing Empathy, it describes a recent performance artwork by the artist called “Optik-Optik Kecil” (Tiny Optics)—a participatory performance of collecting morning dew. Saras draws upon common symbols familiar to Java’s predominantly Muslim population, such as the image of heaven as a garden or oasis, and the importance of fasting (saum) as a way to exercise control over human desires, and to experience the struggles of others. The goal of the performance is to encourage people to develop empathy for each other despite their different backgrounds, as they move around the land collecting dew and conversing. While nineteenth century Indonesian artists may have depicted the archipelago’s landscape in grand, transcendental terms, Saras’ art facilitates an experience of land and nature as small, intimate and (inter)subjective. Through the very ephemerality and delicacy of dew, the artist invites us to think more deeply about the materiality and practice of hope and awareness in an increasingly divided world.
Scene at Liem Ping Wie's batik production. Kedungwuni, Pekalongan, Central Java. 2010. Photo by Karina Melati.
The second piece is an article titled, The Cultural Hybrid in Colonial Java and Pekalongan Buketan (Bouquet) Batik by Karina Rima Melati, a batik scholar from Jogjakarta, Indonesia. Pekalongan is a city on the northern coast of Java, famous for its passisir or coastal batik style. As Alfred Gell (1992) proposed, human minds are fascinated by artisanal technology because it ‘enchants’ them both aesthetically, as well as socially. Java’s iconic artform, batik, captivates people who struggle to understand how a trained hand and eye, as well as the basic tools of metal pens, copper stamps, and molten wax can produce such artistry. Melati’s exploration of batik serves as a dynamic historical imprint of the cultural hybridity active in Indonesia from the late 1800s until the present day. Originally developed and featured in Indic Javanese palaces, batik served as both marks of high culture and distinction, as well as objects of desire created by the colonial subject towards an exotic Other. Buketan (bouquet) batik with its prominent floral bunches became a way to showcase exchanges of local and foreign ideas, and thus issues of Indonesian modernity and tradition. The factors that lead to what Melati calls "taste formation" of Pekalongan society are grounded not only in batik’s close relationship to cultural identity, but also to the consequences of socio-political shifts of wage labor activities and local participation as market consumers.
Our Lady of Pompeii
Jessica Hughes’s article Anchoring Devotion in a Layered Terrain - Bartolo Longo and the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary in Pompeii is the third in our Fall series on the materiality of landscapes and the ways in which religious, spiritual or magical themes are invoked. A Classical Studies scholar, Hughes introduces her current research project on the nineteenth-century Catholic sanctuary of the Virgin of the Rosary in the modern Italian town of Pompeii, close to the ruins of the ancient Roman city. Hughes explores the relationship between the ancient past and more recent times via an analysis of how the sanctuary’s founder, Blessed Bartolo Longo (1841-1926 CE), embedded his new church within the volcanic landscape of Pompeii. To make this landscape a sacred site—what Hughes terms an “enchanted landscape”, Longo mapped it through legends, miraculous ‘hotspots’, and archaeological traces.
References
Gell, Alfred. 1992. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” in Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, eds. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 40–63.
Mohan, Urmila and Jean-Pierre Warnier. “Editorial: Marching the Devotional Subject: The Bodily-and-Material Cultures of Religion.” Journal of Material Culture 22 (4): 369-384.
