245. President's Roundtable: The Magic of Things: A Conversation across Regions and Disciplines about Agentive Statues and Masks

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

The “material turn” in anthropology, religious studies, and related fields brings magic back into the conversation about statues, masks and other manifestations of things otherwise unseen. Armed with a new theoretical tool kit, students of material religion are again attentive to the ways that these objects were made to “work” as magical, agentive, animated, or empowered things and to how empowerment is a function of the sacred and mundane technologies and material substances deployed in their manufacture, veneration, and use. Where once-sacred objects now inhabit secular museum spaces as objects of art or ethnography, an appreciation of their active former lives broadens the possible scope of exhibitions and bridges the divide between museum protocols and popular religious practice.

Asianist writing about magical things usually addresses specialist audiences, either by area or discipline. This roundtable is intended as a larger conversation, bringing together five scholars working in different parts of Asia, whose work draws upon anthropology, art history, religious studies, Asian Studies, and museum practice. Sarah Horton explores the agency of “secret buddhas” in Japan: empowered statues despite the fact that they are enclosed in box-like shrines (zushi) and cannot be seen. Joyce Flueckiger articulates an indigenous Indian theory of the agency of materiality through performative and ethnographic analysis of a range of different kinds of material that are not usually included in the study of religion. James Robson’s decoding of the diverse materials used to animate Chinese local religious statuary ranges from textual and genealogical analyses to questions of botany and zoology. Another magic is at work in the masks Laurie Margot Ross studies from coastal Java, Indonesia, whose amulets often interface with the inner eye chakra, synthesizing indigenous, Hindu-Buddhist, and Islamic meaning along the Indian Ocean rim. Chia-yu Hu, a specialist on Taiwan Aborigine culture, found herself organizing a wedding for a Paiwan wooden ancestral post preserved in the Anthropology Museum of National Taiwan University, engaging in the Paiwan community’s sense of the pole as an active presence.

Each participant will introduce a PowerPoint image of an object that helped to open a particular path of intellectual inquiry.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Laurel Kendall, American Museum of Natural History

Chair

• Laurel Kendall, American Museum of Natural History

Discussants

• Sarah J. Horton, Sōtō Zen Text Project

• Laurie Margot Ross, Independent Scholar

• James Robson, Harvard University

• Joyce B. Flueckiger, Emory University

• Chia-yu Hu, National Taiwan University