All tagged embodiment
Embodied Worlds is our newest educational and programming initiative, and extends our rich platform and process to those who enjoy the immediacy and aurality of conversation. Each episode of Embodied Worlds explores and connects worlds, small or big, ranging from those made by anthropologists to artisans and community facilitators.
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.
The author draws upon her ethnographic work with basket diviners and their clients in northwest Zambia, Africa, to argue that the practice of basket divination is a material and embodied one. Further, it is a lived religion defined by the precariousness of human life and the transformative force of suffering. Without this broader existential context, basket divination would not be a lived religion.
As one of the founding members of the ‘MaP’ (Matière à Penser) working group and author of “The Pot King”, Jean-Pierre Warnier authored this brief description of the main ideas of the group, belatedly turned into an informal network, and devoted to the study of bodily and material culture with an emphasis on empirical field research and on theoretical sophistication.
David Morgan comments on the entanglement of body, material culture, and lived religion in this article. Of particular use, he offers a set of operational definitions regarding material culture, embodiment, lived religion, aesthetics, and the material economy of the sacred.
An essay on the details and aesthetic significance of a votive offering that artist Yves Klein made to St. Rita of Cascia. While art has always played an ineliminable role in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it seems that Klein was particularly sensitive to the entanglement of votive offering, economic sacrifice, and the experiential dimensions of ritual. In many of Klein's works, it would seem that the subsumption of art into religion has been inverted.
A review of recent artwork by contemporary Balinese artist Citra Sasmita and her use of archetypal objects such as cloth and symbols drawn from nature.
