Experiencing Materiality: Museum Perspectives 9781800730359

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EXPERIENCING MATERIALITY

Experiencing Materiality Museum Perspectives

P Valentina Gamberi

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Valentina Gamberi All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gamberi, Valentina, author. Title: Experiencing materiality : museum perspectives / Valentina Gamberi. Description: First Edition. | New York : Berghahn Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020041647 (print) | LCCN 2020041648 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789209846 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781800730359 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Material culture. | Anthropological museums and collections. | Museums—Curatorship. Classification: LCC GN406 .G36 2021 (print) | LCC GN406 (ebook) | DDC 306—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041647 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041648 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-984-6 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-035-9 ebook

To my family

A scuola mi somministrano tonnellate di nozioni che digerivo con diligenza, ma che non mi riscaldavano le vene. Guardavo gonfiare le gemme in primavera, luccicare la mica nel granito, le mie stesse mani, e dicevo dentro di me: ‘Capirò anche questo, capirò tutto, ma non come loro vogliono. Troverò una scorciatoia, mi farò un grimaldello, forzerò le porte’. —Primo Levi, Il sistema periodico In school they loaded me with tons of notions which I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: ‘I will understand this, too, I will understand everything, but not the way they want me to. I will find a shortcut, I will make a lock-pick, I will push open the doors.’ —Translation by Raymond Rosenthal, 1984

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Contents

List of Illustrations

viii

Preface and Acknowledgements

x

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. What Thing Is This? Indian Storytelling Scrolls

19

Chapter 2. Curatorial Understanding of the Sacred within Museum Walls: Metalogues in Dialogue with Scholarship

36

Chapter 3. Manipulating Sacred Force: Scrolls and Copies

51

Chapter 4. Material Engagements in the Colony: Legacies and Changes in Perspective

69

Chapter 5. Reconstructing the Sacred: Temples or Museum Galleries?

93

Chapter 6. When Religious Power Is Limiting: The World Museum in Liverpool

112

Chapter 7. For a Reappraisal of Phenomenology: A Perspectival Approach to Materiality

128

Conclusions. Returning to Museums

149

Appendix to the Pictures

158

References

164

Index

179

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Illustrations

The images shown in this book are from temporary or permanent exhibitions where the author had been given permission to photograph and publicly publish them. Figure 4.1. The Harrison Rotunda of the Penn Museum.

81

Figure 4.2. The Crystal Ball of the Imperial Palace in Peking.

82

Figure 4.3. What remains of Sommerville’s Buddhist Temple in the Harrison Rotunda; a Thai artisan has realized the temple infrastructure.

83

Figure 4.4. Photograph of the author; the glass surface reflects the Rotunda and the researcher in a phenomenological dynamic.

85

Figures 4.5 and 4.6. Maxwell Sommerville and his Buddhist Temple (in the second image, readers can see Sommerville sitting on the side of the temple with his robe).

87

Figure 5.1. A processional palanquin at the Oriental Museum.

95

Figure 5.2. Particular of a shrine’s drawer at the Oriental Museum.

97

Figure 5.3. The shrine dedicated to Lakshmi at the Oriental Museum.

99

Figure 5.4. The shrine to Ardhanarishvara at the Oriental Museum.

100

Figure 5.5. The shrine dedicated to Kali at the Oriental Museum.

102

Figure 5.6. The shrine to Santoshi-Maa at the Oriental Museum.

103

Figure 5.7. Particular of Kali’s shrine at the Oriental Museum.

104

Illustrations ⧫ ix

Figure A.1. Pābūji (on the black mare) defeats Ravana.

159

Figure A.2. Particular of a par..

160

Figure A.3. Goddess Chandi sitting in her lotus in the company of a little Ganeś while receiving the visit of Sripati tai Srimata.

161

Figure A.4. Goddess Chandi in her form of Durga; Ganeś in the bottom left and Sripati tai Srimata in the bottom right.

162

Figure A.5. Particular of a chaksudan pat.

163

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Preface and Acknowledgements

This book is the result of five years of reflection, desperation and invention – of thoughts and selves. After receiving my Ph.D., I experienced one of the most challenging and metamorphic periods of my life, spanning from a profound existential crisis towards my suitability for academia to a desire to contribute to a world, that of museums and exhibition design, that had been alluring to the deepest recesses of my creative self. In the meantime, my scholarly thinking has evolved and keeps always morphing, to the extent that words written in 2015 and 2016 are adjusted to and interpreted under the light of this flux of thoughts. The book is, therefore, a trace of a thinking self, what Alfred Gell (1998) would have called an œuvre – although I do not deem myself to be at the level of such an artist as Duchamp, I am just a being-in-the-world, after all. In a certain sense, my ethnographic experience in eight museums scattered around Europe and the USA five, six years ago continues to talk to my current self, and certain dilemmas are still weighing on my mind: can we think of a world without museums? Can material religion serve as a source of inspiration for new methods of cultural encounter and creative works on materiality, escaping the Orientalist trap? My postdoctoral fellowship in Academia Sinica and the new ethnographic endeavour in the Taiwanese context has helped me in reviewing my doctoral research in a situation of temporary stability, after a couple of years of negotiation between part-time jobs and writing up. Readers, therefore, must expect a diverse strata of thoughts put into dialogue. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have pointed out, a book is neither a subject nor an object, made up of different speeds, times and materialities, human and nonhuman actors entangled with each other. I am extremely grateful for all these interlockings, without which I could not have finished that remote idea that led me to continue my studies with the Ph.D. The finalization of my first manuscript could not have been possible without my current postdoctoral position in Academia Sinica and for this reason, I would like to thank the Institute of Ethnology, and in particular, my sponsor, Dr Shu-Li Wang, and the director, Professor Hsun Chang, for their appreciation and trust in my work.

Preface and Acknowledgements ⧫ xi

Parts of Chapters 2, 5 and 6 are taken from an article – ‘Decolonising Museums: South-Asian Perspectives’ – I published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, which kindly granted permission for the use of its content, and for which reason I deeply thank it. The content of this article helped me to sharpen my argument in Chapters 4 and 5 of this book. I am extremely thankful to the Kulttuurien museo, the Penn Museum, the World Museum in Liverpool, the Oriental Museum at the University of Durham, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, the V&A Museum, the Musée du Quai Branly, the Museum der Kulturen, the Volkerkundenmuseum at the University of Zurich and the Museum Rietberg, without which this research could not have even started. I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr Alana Vincent and Dr Suzanne Owen. Our journey together was constituted by ups and downs, and we did not understand each other completely. Nevertheless, I am grateful to your support and humanity. Thank you for sharing the downsides of academic life, reminding me that we are, first of all, human beings. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Daniel Rycroft, my external examiner, who has seen the evolution of this work from start to finish and has stimulated my scholarly development, and to Dr Wendy Dossett, my internal examiner. According to certain cosmologies, in creating something new, we must pay homage to our ancestors. In this case, I must be thankful for my anthropological guide and master, Professor Cesare Poppi, who has demonstrated himself to be a putative father during my existential crisis towards academia, for following my evolution from undergraduate to postdoctoral researcher. I thank Dr Roberto Brigati for his support during my most challenging transition period. I express my sheer gratitude to Dr Lucia Zaietta, and for our engaging debates on Merleau-Ponty despite the distance. I also thank Dr Elisa Farinacci for our conversations on materiality. Very much food for thought! A special thank-you goes to my friends, Miss Eleonora Adorni and Dr Alessandro Nannini. Thank you, Eleonora, for teaching me forgiveness and resilience, despite our very different approaches to life. A very warm thank-you to the brilliant Alessandro, with whom I have been sharing the sweat and intellectual exaltations of our jobs. I would also like to thank so much my lovely Ph.D. comrade and friend Dr Emily Pennington – a shoulder on which I can always rely, in good and bad moments. I express gratitude to all my other friends, far away or close, in Asia, Europe and everywhere else, for their laughs and compassion. A touching thought goes to all those orphans and abandoned children who have not the possibilities of finding their talents and ways of expression as I have had. I will carry on the responsibility of representing their dreams as a small molecule of that world. This book has been published when my social

xii ⧫ Preface and Acknowledgements

assistant, Selma Santiago da Costa, has departed from this world. I hope children in the world can have the privilege of being rescued by strong women like her. I promise I will never again feel embarrassed in talking about my origins. They are what I am. Last but not least, I would express my love to my family, to whom this book is dedicated. Many thanks to my nonhuman mates, and first of all, my cat, for bearing my temper when the days are bad and for nurturing cherished moments. Thanks to every cup of tea, every colour, every leaf, every drop of rain: what the world is made of, who I am. Taipei, December 2020

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Introduction

Lorsque l’on cherche à rendre compte de sa complexité spécifique, l’objet animé est en réalité beaucoup plus proche d’un cristal que d’un miroir. C’est une image multiple, plurielle, composée de traits partiels et inachevés, provenant d’identités différentes et parfois antagonistes. —Carlo Severi, L’objet-personne1

Materiality, or the Problem I was observing the pats belonging to a member of a cultural organization in the UK which promotes Indian folk art in the art market, at the home of the owner. Pats are scrolls depicting religious scenes, mostly Hindu deities, as well as social themes, and are used by painter-storytellers in West Bengal. The pats were rolled up and placed on the floor. Suddenly, their owner’s little child appeared and looked at the scrolls with interest. His face depicted a clear desire to touch them, and he put his little toe on the frame of a pat with the intention of jumping on it. His mother shouted at him, saying that deities cannot be trampled on; they must be respected. The pats influenced the child’s behaviour and intervened in the relationship between mother and son: on the one hand, they invite the child’s propensity to play, and on the other, they reproduce the religious conduct of respect and reverence that regulates the everyday activity of the child’s family. Non-living things, human and nonhuman are therefore interwoven, interdependent. Ingold (2000, 103) suggests abandoning categories such as human and nonhuman and viewing them as organisms developing according to a self-transformation triggered by being immersed in the environment (ibid., 345–82). Rather than a willing mind opposed to a non-willing matter, in what Ingold (ibid., 103) calls the relational model, mind coincides with the world itself. Thoughts, emotions, memories are directly given via the

2 ⧫ Experiencing Materiality

embodied engagement with the world, a world that it is itself animated (Ingold 2006). Ingold derives his relational model from Heidegger’s (1971) essay The Thing. The latter is structured around Heidegger’s investigation of a blue jug. If we interrogate ourselves about the ‘what’ of the pitcher, we could say that a jug is made for containing liquids. We arrive at this conclusion because we have talked with its maker or because we refer to a standardized way of using jugs that we have observed during daily life or has been implanted in us at school. It is by thinking of the jug as something made, as a crafted thing that we can also assume the ‘how’ of it. There must be a conch, a vessel that technically allows the deposit of liquid(s). However, the conch is not enough; it is necessary to build around it a protective surface that impedes any liquid from spilling over, and which is anatomically sufficiently fitted to reinforce the base of the conch and give sufficient structure to the whole to prevent its collapse. Our reasoning so far does not define the jug as such, though: we only refer to the different constituents of it that can efficaciously contain liquids (ibid., 165). Even when we apply the scientific method to our analysis of the jug – that should be detached for its actual making – we are using criteria abstractedly and universally defined, as is proper of scientific investigations. For instance, we can observe that pottery does not absorb water, or we can determine the physical laws to which water and pottery are subjected, or their chemical compositions. However, what we can single out are dynamics that can be described and observed in other materials as aggregates of matter (Heidegger 1971, 168–69). We are still not able to say what makes a jug a thing and which thingness coincides with the pitcher. We can also think that we cannot clearly understand the jug as a thing if we do not compare it with other things and describe its independence from liquids. Indeed, a jug can have different functions according to the user: it can contain flowers or become a nest for insects. It is undeniable, therefore, that things usually constitute a cognitive problem for humans: they seem inert, as they cannot be animated if they are not moved by humans or animals. Likewise, they cannot be easily described by linguistic means, as their bond with humans pre-exists the birth of language. The material thing condenses social relations, laws and principles, as well as the imagined – for instance, the ancestors’ word – with the real; thus, it is a socially total entity in its expression of all the phenomena and dynamics of a society (Augé 1988, 143–44). The condensing enacted by materiality is possible in virtue of the ‘humility of things’ (Miller 2005, 5), that is to say, the tendency of things’ social properties to resist conscious definitions and understandings and, therefore, to be strictly connected to the human unconscious (Miller 1987, 100). In other words, the more things are not perceived as actors in social relations, the more materiality affects human actions and, conversely, the more humans recognize the impact of the material on their lives, the more they can intervene.

Introduction ⧫ 3

We can consider the relationships nurtured by material things as ‘intensive relations’, continually shifting and made up through space and time. They are therefore based upon a substantial ‘ontological instability’ rather than on ontological differences per se (Harvey and Knox 2014, 8). If we continue with Heidegger’s essay, each relationship that the jug has, even in the scientific analysis, can be read as a projection. The perceiver, since she enters into contact with the jug, projects herself onto the jug. At the same time, the jug projects stimuli to the perceiver. Heidegger calls these projections a ‘mirroring’ of each human and nonhuman actor involved (Heidegger 1971, 177). The jug, the human and the nonhuman perceivers are immersed within a world that pre-exists their existence. They coexist with each other and their subjective meaning cannot be independent of this co-belonging. They express their presence to the world by projecting it onto the others with a mutual appropriation of each other’s reflections (ibid.). There is, therefore, an inescapable condition of ambiguity and fuzziness in the definition of any ‘entity’. In the formation of the concept of ‘person’, we can see an appropriation of humans towards nonhuman things. Marcel Mauss (1985; cf. 1990) identified the differences between personae and res as a fact of law: personae are the representations or ‘images’ (simulacra and imagines) of the ancestors of the patres familiae gathered in the Roman Senate. Derived from the masks used by actors, through which (per) their voices resound (sonare), persona started to coincide with the essential or true nature of an individual, which in turn coincides with the ownership of a body, ancestors, names and personal belongings. Things, then, are the expressions of ownership, the sole criterion for the identification of an agency. Therefore, they exist only in legal terms. In fact, ‘Germanic and Latinate terms for “thing” are etymologically related to the words for cause (causa, cosa, chose, Ding)’, and as a result, things ‘tend to be admitted to reality only by legal tribunals and assemblies’ (Cohen 2012, 6). Human projection onto matter seems to be the only way through which humans make sense of the latter. Anthropomorphism is therefore at the core of the very definition of humanity (Miller 2005, 2). Let us return to the ethnographic example of the Bengali scroll. The collector established some criteria for the scroll, such as its sacredness and how to relate to that sacredness. These criteria can derive from the curator’s engagement with the materiality of the scroll, when she assists in a storytelling performance or contemplates it in a museum or in the intimacy of her home. She projects these criteria onto the scroll. As a result, the scroll, it seemed to me, was for her an ambiguous encroachment between a work of ‘Indian vernacular art’ and a deity’s embodiment. Nevertheless, her consideration of the scroll did not seal it off from different forms of manipulation and control. Her child saw it as a plaything – maybe because it was rolled up on the floor, reminding him of individual toys or cosy

4 ⧫ Experiencing Materiality

rugs. Can we infer that different actors project different ideas onto the scroll? Probably, this is the case. However, we cannot think of the scroll as something passive and permeable to human whims. There is undeniably something at play between the human and the nonhuman that determines a vast array of unpredictability and heterogeneity. Starting from this cognitive and experiential conundrum, our vision of material culture seems to crumble. The common idea, for instance, that museum artefacts are malleable to curators’ practices is no longer so obvious. When a religious artefact is displayed, the curator has to deal with behaviours that are in contrast to standard museum etiquette and are out of their control, such as touching despite prohibitions to do so (Elliott 2006), and prayer or meditation (Berns 2015, 2017a, 2017b). Heidegger, therefore, captured something essential in museums: the more one tries to identify the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of an artefact, the more this attempt is frustrated and incomplete. Museums, as sites where visitors know by observing things, continually reproduce this paradox. Experiencing Materiality responds to an inevitable frustration towards studies of material artefacts and museums. It is an account of curatorial practices towards two types of Indian storytelling scrolls, the pats (from West Bengal) and the pars (from Rajasthan), as an example of an interaction between the human and˙ the nonhuman in a setting usually defined as ‘non-Western’, ‘nonscientific’ and ‘religious’. I combined an on-site analysis of exhibitive spaces with archival research and qualitative interviews with museum curators in eight European and American museums which hold collections of pats and pars. The chapters highlight the contradictions of museum practices and, at the˙ same time, the potentialities that contemporary museums could offer for an engaging relationship between visitors and museum artefacts, and for rethinking, or better, ‘softening’ specific approaches in material culture studies. In particular, the book suggests two methodological strategies: on the one hand, to use museum spaces and artefacts as a medium through which to formulate new theoretical stances in material culture studies, thus viewing museums as producers of theories, as well as sensuous engagements. On the other hand, the storytelling scrolls and other South Asian or Asian religious artefacts challenged both the curators and me as a researcher, suggesting unexpected turns in our methodological approaches towards materiality. Experiencing Materiality is thus testimony to the ‘backstage’ of museums. Here, bodies and minds struggle with reflecting on, as well as representing the human symbiosis with, materiality. Humans are engaged and contaminated by material fusion and hybridism. In the end, I suggest that scholars engaged in the debate on materiality reconsider phenomenology, rather than condemning it. My research on religious artefacts showed that materiality behaves in unexpected ways. Each human

Introduction ⧫ 5

actor, no matter her background, prejudices and goals, can only have a partial vision of it that might be in contrast with other human perspectives on the same portion of materiality. Scrolls, religious statues and paintings have and produce, therefore, a myriad of properties, abilities and sensuous engagements that can be hardly contained by the limited, mortal and subjectively biased human condition. As opposed to considering the latter as an illusion or an obstacle to accessing the ‘real material essence’, as a Kantian standpoint would say, our perspective is the only way through which we can come to terms with materiality. The partiality that materiality expresses to us, I argue, is a potential source of creativity that urges us to deconstruct our assumptions, leading to new languages and forms of knowledge. The approaches towards materiality of the last two or three decades – spanning from Appadurai (1986) and Gell (1998) to new materialisms and Object-Oriented Ontology – seem to me inadequate in addressing the perspectival nature of materiality and material engagements. Materiality has been turned into a debate on agency, thereby forcing the fundamental hybridism between it and humans into a causal ‘point of origin’ that must be necessarily located in the human or in the material pole. The risk of this quest for agency is that it reduces the richness and potentiality of material engagement into rigid and unilateral categories that cannot account for social phenomena. If we take the example of museums, the idea that materiality is a mere reflection of a curatorial agenda hinders the development of terrain of dialogue with local communities and visitors. In particular, curators cannot predict, or are not able to face, the unpredictable material engagements within galleries. They might, consequently, guide visitors too rigidly or design exhibitions that do not include or respond to the sheer variety of the audience’s expectations, needs and backgrounds. Experiencing Materiality humbly deconstructs these curatorial and scholarly limits, and corroborates the achievements of the so-called ‘New Museology’ (Vergo 1989; Karp and Lavine 1991; Karp, Kreamer and Lavine 1992; Karp, Kratz, Szwaja and Ybarra-Frausto 2006) with new food for thought.

Some Annotations on Language, Part I: Why Materiality? My adoption of the term ‘materiality’ throughout this book consciously emphasizes two aspects of the scholarly coming to terms with material culture. I want to deconstruct some common-sense assumptions on museums and material things by taking inspiration from a reflection of Tim Ingold (2013). Ingold establishes a sharp differentiation between material artefacts, or more broadly, materiality and materials. ‘Materiality’ is connected with hylomorphism, namely the idea that mind shapes inert matter. In contrast, ‘materials’ is linked

6 ⧫ Experiencing Materiality

to morphism. With this term, Ingold means a morphogenetic process, proper to organisms within a relational anthropology (ibid., 20–22). Not only would the term ‘artefact’ emphasize the idea of hylomorphism, it is also synonymous with that of ‘object’, namely ‘completed forms that stand over and against the perceived and block further movement’ (Ingold 2013, 439). In other words, artefacts would have nothing to say about life, in contrast with mutable gatherings of materials, which Ingold terms ‘things’ (ibid.). Artefacts could only serve as testimonies of past material engagement, without, consequently, a creative contribution to anthropology as the science of relations. It is not surprising, then, that Ingold considers museums as places where things cease to grow and are condemned to death (Ingold and Hallam 2014). We can assume from his approach that curatorial practices would be restricted to the care of material traces rather than to their usage for critical, active intervention in contemporary society. We can consult cabinets as informative books, but the world, with its transformative potential, is outside of museum walls. Given these premises, I use the term materiality in a way that is devoid of its hylomorphic contents. Nevertheless, my terminology consciously goes against Ingold’s subdivision between materials and material artefacts. Although not intuitively identifiable with an organismal process of morphing, material artefacts can significantly impact and challenge human society. The very engagement with materiality allows us to formulate theories and ways of action, regardless of our conscious awareness of this material intake in our lives. Museums, as collections of and dispositions to the public encounter with materiality, represent the headquarters of this material reconsideration of our thinking.

The Museum as Fieldsite: A Methodological Journey As MacDonald (1996, 1–18) has argued, the discipline of museology started to flourish from the 1980s onwards, with the ‘New Museology’ (cf. Vergo 1989; Karp and Lavine 1991, Karp, Kreamer and Lavine 1992 and Karp, Kratz, Szwaja and Ybarra-Frausto 2006). Museums, in this museum turn, started to be seen as having a role in society as cultural products of identities; as articulators of concepts and values embedded in society, or conversely, of new thinking and perspectives to address social and cultural conundrums and issues; as instruments of cultural advocacy by some groups; and as hybrid cultural products of colonialism first and localism subsequently. An analysis of museums, therefore, would capture the production of meanings and policies. At the same time, it would provide the means through which to translate cultural concepts and social issues proper to the disciplines of anthropology and cultural studies into performative, political works that can be appropriated by visitors in their social-political engagement with the world.

Introduction ⧫ 7

This potential can nonetheless be manipulated by authoritative powers to inculcate values and precepts as ‘natural’ and ‘taken for granted’. Let us think, for instance, about the positivist collections of museums in the twentieth century, where different imprints of crania were used as proofs of racial theories. In this sense, Bennett (1995), Findlen (1989, 1994) and Hooper-Greenhill (1991, 1992) have shown how museums act as political assemblages and validations of specific knowledge systems, thus following Foucault’s (1969) archaeology of power. However, Macdonald (1996, 1–18) warns researchers that restricting the analysis to the archaeology of power impoverishes the complexity and unpredictability of museums. In particular, the communicative triad between curators, exhibitions and visitors is not a mechanical delivery of curators’ messages to a passive audience that ‘absorbs’ it as a ‘rule’. Otherwise, the audience would be deprived of its imaginative and decisional power. It is, therefore, necessary to adopt new theoretical and methodological lenses through which to address museums. In Macdonald’s case, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork (Macdonald 2002) on the museum community of the Science Museum in London, in which museum staff are viewed as a ‘community of practice’ (Wenger 1998), or a social group finalized for the fulfilment of the creation of collective and cultural debate. Museums are therefore seen by museologists as material translations of theories, or as a social phenomenon that must be addressed in theoretical terms. In a well-known article from 2010, Nicholas Thomas proposes that researchers transgress the conceptual boundaries of museums as institutions or collections in favour of grasping them as materially driven activities which produce in themselves new insights and forms of knowledge. As activities, museums are epistemological ‘methods’ where discovery and unpredictability are central pivotal forces: ‘Discovery’ is more ambiguous; it often involves finding things that were not lost, identifying things that were not known to others, or disclosing what was hidden or repressed. What needs to be considered is not the ‘selection’ of artifacts and art works, but their discovery, the encounter with arrays of objects, and the destabilization that encounter may give rise to. (Thomas 2010, 7)

In line with these approaches, Grewcock (2014) proposes that research about museums be carried out relationally. Relational research on museums implies that museums are performative places, in which the nonhuman intervenes and which are intimately intertwined with the world outside (ibid., 6). It is no longer sufficient to consider the curators’ perspectives as the only ones that are imparted to visitors and modelled on material artefacts. What researchers must consider in dealing with museums are ‘partial perspectives’, where museum artefacts and buildings adapt themselves to different users and interpreters. This aspect of museums does not mean that they do not possess an internal structure and consequently are amorphic. It means that their specific structure

8 ⧫ Experiencing Materiality

is open to translation from an experiential world to the other, that of visitors, curators, researchers, designers, communities and so on. Grewcock names this museum structure as a ‘boundary object’, a concept directly taken from Donna Haraway (ibid., 7–9). Researchers’ engagement with museums must, therefore, be taken into account in the analysis of museums. Museum ethnography cannot merely interpret curators’ intellectual endeavours. On the contrary, it must evoke, in literary ways, non-representational understandings of exhibitions. For instance, Grewcock takes readers into the journey that he has undertaken since he saw an exhibition focused on the anthropology of collage techniques. What does it mean to juxtapose sensations, images, forms and sounds, what message can we single out from the hybrid connections between phenomenological fragments? Grewcock’s body suggests to him to go outside the museum, to walk into the woods and the hustle and bustle of the city of London, collecting sensuous fragments on his own. The researcher’s existential journey runs parallel to what he understood and took from his visit to the exhibition. When I read Grewcock’s work, my memory immediately established a connection with Austerlitz’s peripatetic journeys in Sebald’s eponymous novel (2001). Austerlitz came to London as a child of one of the Kindertransports, that is, the rescue scheme of the British government that rescued ten thousand children from Nazi-occupied countries before the outbreak of the Second World War. Austerlitz’s past progressively emerges through a series of conversations between the narrator and Austerlitz himself. Austerlitz’s long walks, in particular to Euston station, are multi-media, sensorial anecdotes in which his past comes to the fore as attached to phenomenological sensations: ‘Fragmented and fleeting sensations become the materials for a sensory ethnography of Austerlitz’ past’ (Mair 2007, 245). As Arnold-de Simine (2012, 26) emphasizes, Sebald narratively demonstrates how the past can be differently accessed through a ‘complex interplay’ of embodied experience, memory, oral witnesses and mediating reflections of things, either non-experienced or non-remembered. It is this complicated matrix of media and sensorial fragments that leads Arnold-de Simine to compare Austerlitz’s discovery of his past to what museums, in particular the cabinets of curiosities, do. In accounts such as those by Grewcock, museums can be read as a swift back and forth between composite voices and prismatic overviews of the world that would be materially rooted at the level of imagination and feelings, and where a distinction between curators and visitors/researchers is blurred. In the words of Andrea Witcomb, museums must stimulate this immersion and hybridism of the Self with the ‘Other’ – other ideas, other bodies, other spectacles: Museums are . . . places of the imagination in which one can perform a multitude of identities, largely because one can lose a sense of self in them. Travel, imagi-

Introduction ⧫ 9

nation and immersion are, in this image of museums, a productive constellation of ideas that capture some of the experiential aspect of visits to museums and heritage sites. (Witcomb 2013, 152)

Therefore, in the ‘museum-as-method’ paradigm, museums are experiential tricksters. Different interpretations of, engagements with and reactions to material displays are contingently conjured up together, in oxymoronic compositions, within galleries. They thus articulate a ‘dissonance’ (Turnbridge and Ashworth 1996; Message and Witcomb 2015, xxxvi) that challenges our epistemological equilibrium about ‘what things are and what they represent’ (Thomas 2010, 8). According to Witcomb and Message (2015, xl), museum researchers, given these dissonant contingencies, must start from what they observe in museums, rather than applying theoretical frameworks and adapting them to museum material. The museum is itself a theoretical producer, as ‘theory is generated within the museum’ (ibid., xxxvi). Experiencing Materiality follows the relational understanding of museums. Initially, my research was shaped by the collections and temporary exhibitions of storytelling scrolls I was able to trace, contacting the museums involved and further proceeding with research once they gave their informed consent. I visited, in total, ten museums: the Kulttuurien museo in Helsinki, the Penn Museum at the Penn University in Philadelphia, the World Museum in Liverpool, the Oriental Museum at the University of Durham, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Musée du Quai Branly, the Museum der Kulturen, the Volkerkundenmuseum at the University of Zurich and the Museum Rietberg, also in Zurich. I decided to employ a comparative analysis to obtain a broader view of how curators deal with storytelling scrolls. The second reason for the comparative approach is that I came to these museums with the idea of verifying specific theories, of finding their ‘empirical expressions’ in the sheer variety of cases. What I discovered, however, was that museums themselves ‘have’ their theories, and that I should listen to them in order to communicate that fact to readers. This discovery was a progressive process of awareness that extended itself even after the discussion of my doctoral thesis. My ethnographic records and archival material have spoken back to me and made me decide to ‘invert’ my methodology. This inverted methodology entails a writing style that combines ethnographic descriptions, interviews and analysis of displays with archival material. Not only do I account for my standpoint and those of the interviewed curators, but I am also searching for perspectives coming from different times and spaces. By consulting past curators’ diaries or publications and reflecting upon current curators’ words, Experiencing Materiality attempts to depict the backstage of an exhibition or a display. The diaries and publications both ex-

10 ⧫ Experiencing Materiality

press curators’ struggles in dealing with religious materiality. They substantiate the phenomenological processes curators have experienced. At the same time, each chapter leads to a theoretical reflection that partially criticizes certain scholarly assumptions that, I argue, have produced my general disappointment towards the field of material culture studies. In other words, the empirical analysis contains a debate on the definition of materiality. In particular, one or more aspects of the latter have been singled out. I was guided by material artefacts and the challenges that they posed to curators, instead of aprioristically applying a phenomenological method. My initial plans to re-evaluate phenomenology, then, changed in perspective. This idea emerged from research rather than being confirmed by it. Artefacts suggested that phenomenology is an apt, although limited, methodology for approaching materiality. I let curators speak and retrieved my past interpretations and reactions. By immersing my thoughts in my empirical experience, I have answered the dilemma around materiality. Curators’ engagements question whether we can have total access to materiality and how we can describe it. In these terms, museums are the principal loci of theories on materiality. They are field sites of their own. The overview of curators’ practices with and experiences of materiality is based on conversations, rather than direct observations of their manipulating of material artefacts. I spoke with curators and subsequently observed whether they had revealed traces of their sensuous relationship with material artefacts, and what the latter had evoked in them in terms of theories and abstractions. I therefore engaged in something similar to what the narrator of Austerlitz does. I also asked curators to search for archival material and storage specimens related to the cultural context of Indian storytelling, which meant allowing curators to face more directly and explicitly the contradictions implied by exhibiting religious material culture. Unravelling storytelling collections implied an understanding of the broader logic of collecting, its phylogenetic evolution and its employment in curatorial and exhibitive strategies. The collections examined usually have their origins in the colonial past, during which they were collected in response to specific conceptualizations of the Other; conceptualizations which currently condition curatorial practices. The scant information about the items’ usages by local communities, as well as the lack of knowledge on the circumstances of collecting, restrict curators’ perspectival understanding of them. The result is that many of these items are not displayed in the galleries, or conversely cannot be highlighted according to their value because they are outside the curators’ field of expertise. Many collections of South Asian storytelling scrolls have ‘succumbed’ to this limit, thereby restricting my research on their archival and photographic documentation.

Introduction ⧫ 11

On the one hand, my initial focus on the scrolls’ treatment in storage rooms and galleries turned into a broader investigation of Asian religious materiality in museum settings. One of the main consequences of this investigation was considering the museum as a whole organism; in this way, ethnography must not be restricted to the field of research, in this case, Indian storytelling scrolls, but must convey the entirety of curatorial strategies and narratives. Interviews with curators were important moments in which the researcher, as in a Socratic maieutic, stimulated them to reflect upon their curatorial assumptions, and to reconstruct their strategies in addressing the collections and in using them in exhibitions, thereby illuminating the contradictions that they have to face in their work.2 Differently put, our interviews were similar to what Bateson (1987) had called metalogue: a fluid and ongoing discussion between the researcher and the curators about specific dilemmas faced by the latter. Having a metalogue with curators was, in particular, crucial in reconstructing their previous phenomenological experience with religious artefacts, as already mentioned here. Although not explicitly stated during the interviews nor consciously researched by me in that period, curators’ words reflect their research on materiality, in a similar way to what Heidegger attempted with his essay. In this book, therefore, I emphasize words, questions and pauses that indirectly and imaginatively conduct the reader towards what curators might have felt the first time they encountered the material artefact, the object of the conversation. My circumstances also determined my primary focus on curators. Since funding was not sufficient for staying in museums over long periods, I would not have had enough time to investigate visitors’ responses. If it was true that visitors could only be addressed with difficulty in the exhibitive spaces, given the contingencies of their usually rather rapid museum visits, it was also undeniable that my short research period restricted the occasions for extensively observing their interactions with artefacts. Furthermore, the flux of visitors at the time of fieldwork was significantly low. These limits in reaching the public are also due to the difficulties encountered by museum curators themselves. For instance, since 2014, the Kulttuurien museo in Helsinki, which is the result of different collections of the University of Helsinki from the nineteenth century, has been incorporated into the National Museum of Finland. The condensation of museum space has resulted in huge problems of authority, because the National Museum has given just two rooms to the Kulttuurien museo to be used as permanent exhibitive spaces. Furthermore, the Kulttuurien museo, at the time of my fieldwork, had two showcases inside the National Museum to ‘advertise’ its change of location. The curator told me that the design and the lights must not be changed, and this limited the choice of the artefacts to exhibit. For these reasons, the Kult-

12 ⧫ Experiencing Materiality

tuurien museo had to negotiate and collaborate with other museums in the city, such as that of the University.

Some Annotations on Language, Part II: On the Predicament of ‘Western’ A significant change from my doctoral thesis is my current hesitance in using the terms ‘West’ and ‘Western’. My adoption of the terms in the doctoral thesis was mainly geographic – to locate European and American museums – and polemic, as I consciously wanted to attack anthropocentric approaches to materiality as elaborated since the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, I progressively decided to abandon this term or to bracket it as ‘West/Western’. The concept of the West implies a homogeneous ‘culture’ and philosophical system, whereas what we have are historically relational dynamics between different system of thought. Colonialism, or a colonial mindset, is not a prerogative of Europe, although Europe had a more considerable impact on the world than other colonial regimes, an example of which is the Japanese colonial empire (1895–1945). More importantly, maintaining a concept such as the West implies, even if just nominally, a dualistic opposition with an exotic, irrational world that coincides with Said’s (2003) notion of Orientalism. Therefore, I would like to propose a language that can be as situated as possible, thus privileging ‘European’, ‘American’ and ‘Asian’ as ways to differentiate different locations – of material artefacts, thoughts, practices – with an extreme precaution towards possible reifications.

Plan of the Book Chapter 1, ‘What Thing Is This?’, embraces the Heideggerian method. It starts from the specificities of Bengali pats and Rajasthani pars. These artefacts have initially been chosen as research subjects, with the aim˙ in particular of investigating how their material characteristics are manipulated within museum spaces. They are storytelling scrolls with religious contents that, at the same time, imbue divine forces. Therefore, they demarcate a ritual performance that coincides with the plot narrated and, at the same time, goes beyond it. The scrolls’ affordances derive from how the stories are graphically depicted. The painted surface immerses the audience within a virtual temple that evokes the presence of deities. The audience can thus communicate with deities through darśan, an exchange of gazes between the worshipper and the deity’s embodiment. Through this reciprocal looking, the worshipper identifies herself with the deity, to the extent that her body hosts the deity’s force. In this darśanic exchange,

Introduction ⧫ 13

the scroll itself acts as a repository of sacred power. Consequently, worshippers touch it to receive blessings and empowerment. According to the biographical approach of Appadurai (1986) and Kopytoff (1986), as well as the concept of ‘communities of response’ as formulated by Davis (1997), when the scrolls enter the museum, they are disentangled from religious engagements. Instead, they become metonymies of vernacular Hinduism, of its theology and world view. By looking at them, the visitor can thus retain some crucial information. However, I argue that Appadurai and Kopytoff have not paid enough attention to the peculiar material characteristics of museum artefacts, their affordances. The latter partly escape from human control. On the other hand, human projections and usages shape some of their characteristics. In the conclusion of this chapter, I urge readers to extend Kopytoff ’s biographical approach in order to include the fuzziness and ambiguity of the material artefact. In particular, I emphasize how the storytelling scrolls can still stimulate a religious response from visitors and express an attractive sacred force within South Asian museums, regardless of the visitors’ religious background. Chapter 2, ‘Curatorial Understanding of the Sacred Within Museum Walls’, offers to readers what emerged during metalogues with curators, as well as with other actors who have contributed, directly or indirectly, to the museumification of storytelling scrolls. The principle that guides curators is that visitors are the protagonists of the museum experience: they can or cannot have religious responses in galleries. What curators have to do is create the conditions through which multiple experiences and interpretations are allowed. Given the extreme complexity of the human–nonhuman relationship (which curators experience themselves when they participate in rituals or visit religious sites to then imagine exhibitions related to these phenomena) curators are not able to control and successfully manage museum design. Metalogues, therefore, challenge the literature on the intersection between religious and museum studies: curators are far from being ‘soteriological specialists’. I argue that it is necessary for scholarship to turn to the microphysics of material engagement, thus emphasizing its internal contradictions and fuzziness. Chapter 3, ‘Manipulating Sacred Force’, further delves into the proposal for a new methodology with a presentation of four displays observed. This portrait articulates the different ways in which curators deal, from a design point of view, with religious materiality. The chapter will also present the case of the Rietberg Museum, where South Asian religious materiality drove the first contributors to the museum to initially have a mystical experience and subsequently conceptualize the Rietberg as a museum of ‘Asian fine arts’. This dynamic is still present in the museum’s contemporary practices, whereby artistic quality is predominant over anthropological information. At the same time, specific

14 ⧫ Experiencing Materiality

pieces, such as Shiva Nataraja, are accompanied by a mystical allure. I thus anticipate the main argument of the following chapter: that the phenomenological goal in curators has roots in the colonial period. Two of the exhibitions represent the rare occasions on which I could observe displayed storytelling scrolls. Storytelling scrolls are, in fact, not usually displayed in galleries. Most of the time, they remain in the storage rooms for the experts’ examination, in particular that of scholars. Consequently, only a tiny portion of curators in charge of Asian collections have expertise in storytelling scrolls. However, fieldwork can indirectly reveal how storytelling scrolls are employed within the exhibitive spaces. First, there is a concern about displaying religious material without ‘offending’ practitioners. Disrespect generally coincides with manipulating sacred force without any forms of control by ritual specialists. This lack of ritual control would entail, according to practitioners, a dangerous menace to both the religious community and the curators or visitors themselves. A material effect of this concern is the displaying of copies of religious artefacts or incomplete versions. Second, curators are particularly careful in guiding visitors towards a phenomenological understanding of religion. The latter can facilitate the identification of the audience with the religious experience described, thereby nurturing visitors’ reflexive and imaginary skills. In this way, specific elaborated religious philosophy becomes intuitively understandable. Chapter 4, ‘Material Engagements in the Colony’, starts from Latour’s (2010) reflection on the modern era, which coincides with a progressive ‘work of purification’ (Latour 1993, 14) from a sensuous engagement with materiality. Sensuous engagement would be the tangible proof of abstract theories – what Latour calls ‘factish’. In contrast, ‘non-Western’ forms of engagement with the nonhuman would be ‘fetish’, in the pejorative sense of idolatrous. We can infer from Latour, Appadurai and Kopytoff that museums would be centres where material fetishism is suppressed in favour of the factish. However, the collecting practices in Europe from the modern era to the colonial period problematize Latour’s theoretical stance. On the one hand, collectors wanted to experiment on their bodies, by touching, smelling, even tasting (Classen 2007) the ‘exotic’ or ‘wondrous’ materiality. This process was a form of learning and immersing oneself in an atmosphere of wonder. On the other hand, they catalogued what they had experienced, transforming sensations into aesthetic or scientific theories. This chapter insists on the phenomenological encounter that colonial collectors subjectively experienced. More specifically, readers engage with the diaries of Thomas Hendley (1847–1917) and Fanny Parks (1794–1875) on the one hand, and with the guidebook that Maxwell Sommerville (1829–1904) wrote for his recreation of a ‘pan-Buddhist’ temple at the Penn Museum on the other. Their knowledge of the ‘Other’s’ material culture partially suspended prejudices towards ‘the natives’ in favour of a sensu-

Introduction ⧫ 15

ous training. This ‘material knowledge’ (Martin 2015, 58) is at the core of the museum enterprise. ‘Material knowledge’ continues to be present in current curatorial practices and colonial collections. The last two chapters further develop the conflict between ‘material knowledge’ and Latourian ‘purification’. Chapter 5, ‘Reconstructing the Sacred’, investigates current reconstructions of religious settings in museums, with the Oriental Museum in Durham and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge as case studies. The reconstructed altars and shrines are intended to act as instructive examples of Indian or Tibetan material culture. In particular, museum curators aim to engage with the Indian and Asian diaspora by empowering their voices and extending their identities beyond their religious affiliation. Curators also use reconstructions to revitalize scanty information related to individual colonial collections. We can say that reconstructing and assembling different pieces from the museum collections and storage rooms is a way for curators to research and understand materiality. Working in museums is thereby an occasion for a phenomenological encounter that articulates the archival information. It is also undeniable that these assemblages continue to have an experimental function for visitors, who can transitorily discover religious interactions and meanings that complete or go beyond the projections and hints left by curators. I consequently argue that the literature on the copies and reconstructions must be ‘softened’. In other words, we do not have automatic translations from the ritual to the museum sphere, and nor do we have necessarily a ‘wondrous’ or ‘respectful’ atmosphere. On the contrary, we can say that these displays also reproduce a substantial conflict between the inheritance of colonial ‘material knowledge’ and curators’ desire for decolonization. Chapter 6, ‘When Religious Power is Limiting’, focuses on the recreation of a Tibetan shrine in the World Museum in Liverpool as an example of these curatorial contradictions. The shrine expresses different curatorial positions towards the extensive Tibetan collection in the museum. Previous curators saw the reconstruction of a ritual setting as a way of respecting Buddhist practitioners. A shrine within a museum would build an inclusive space where believers could meditate and pray, while nonbelievers could have a ‘faithful’ understanding of Buddhist doctrines. I see in this curatorial strategy a continuity with colonial reconstructions, in particular with Maxwell Sommerville’s Buddhist temple. However, the current head of the ethnological section of the World Museum, Emma Martin, views this curatorial intervention and the response from the British Buddhist community as highly problematic. In her research on Charles Bell’s (1870–1945) Tibetan collection, she realizes that a religious and phenomenological interpretation of Tibetan Buddhist artefacts hides the political exchanges between the Dalai Lama and Bell. The emphasis on the historical acquisition of the collection can help visitors in decolonizing the idea

16 ⧫ Experiencing Materiality

of Tibet as a ‘spiritual’ country. Tibetans used religious materiality to resist colonial control and oppression, and reading through the colonial archive can help in understanding their agency. Accordingly, Martin engages in different curatorial projects aimed at enriching and problematizing ‘Asian materiality’. In the exhibition Telling Stories, she challenged the idea of ‘Indian folk art’, in which painter-storytellers, along with other painters, are no longer within a darśanic performance but respond to the tourist and art market. Inspired by the richness of the World Museum, the chapter ‘For a Reappraisal of Phenomenology’ proposes a restoration of phenomenology. Phenomenology reflects the perspectival views on materiality in museums. I oppose the phenomenological stances belonging to two main approaches to materiality, principally from an anthropological and philosophical background. Certain scholars, in particular Alfred Gell (1998), argue that humans project their will onto materiality, thus experiencing it as imbued with agency. I call this approach anthropomorphic. In contrast, social scientists and philosophers such as Bruno Latour and Levi Bryant consider materiality as independent from the human. For instance, assemblage thinking and the new materialisms argue that a portion of materiality produces effects by gathering or assembling with other material artefacts. On the other hand, Object-Oriented Ontology views materiality as shaping the world according to its necessity and without being influenced by human projections. Both these two positions are part of the materialist approach. The anthropomorphic approach minimizes the peculiarities of each material artefact. The latter would be a mere projection of the human mind, and thus totally under the control of the human or the subject. The materialist approach, on the other hand, denies any interrelation between the human and the nonhuman. It has the ambition of scientifically describing materiality and, more broadly, the nonhuman without acknowledging the subjective perspective of researchers. In 1926, the biologist von Uexküll had already realized that every single organism, human and nonhuman, is immersed in the world. Each can define itself as a specific living being by carving a niche in the world and a particular way of seeing and dealing with the world. Each material thing is, therefore, differently perceived according to the organism that comes into contact with it. In contrast with both the anthropomorphic and the materialist approach, von Uexküll acknowledges that scientists and researchers occupy their own subjective and human perspectives. Consequently, they must deconstruct their perception to reach those of other organisms, of which, however, they can only grasp an approximate idea. Von Uexküll’s intuition paves the way to the phenomenological approach. This approach is what William James (1925) would call ‘mosaic philosophy’ or ‘radical empiricism’. It starts from the practical embodied engagement with the

Introduction ⧫ 17

world, with the purpose of then formulating a more general statement about reality. According to a phenomenological view, the human and the nonhuman coexist. They build ambiguous and hybrid relationships with each other. As such, they cannot be ontologically isolated, as the materialist approach would infer. At the same time, there is no projection of the one to the passive other, as the anthropomorphic approach would maintain. Any social scientists, curators or philosophers must start from their specific perspective and the ways in which it conditions their knowledge of materiality. Certainly, knowledge of materiality consists of a hybridism between the researcher’s projection and materiality’s affordances. However, certain material features escape from the sensuous contamination with the human and are totally outside the researcher’s control. It is impossible to reach materiality as such, in its totality: we, as humans, can have just a perspectival knowledge of it. The concluding section of this book suggests adopting a phenomenologically perspectival view to address materiality and material artefacts in museums. In the example of the World Museum, the co-presence of diplomatic-historical circumstances with the reconstructed shrine can challenge visitors’ prejudices towards Tibetan Buddhism. Temporary exhibitions on current works of Tibetan artists – as planned by Emma Martin (2017) – can further emphasize the creative resources of Tibetans without reducing them to a ‘static’ and ‘eternal’, ‘ossified’ culture. In the Conclusion, I develop a personal theoretical and methodological framework from the rehabilitation of a phenomenological approach. I account for materiality’s specificities and view humans’ constructs as materially driven. At the same time, I consider the hybridism and contamination between materiality and the human. Rather than being a bias, human positionality is an openness to an understanding of matter. I propose again – Lucia Zaietta and I already formulated this concept (Gamberi and Zaietta 2018) – a ‘weak’ anthropomorphism. In scholarly analysis, we cannot escape from researchers’ positionalities and their projections on matter. Anthropomorphization, though, cannot exhaust things for what they are. There is always an element of materiality that is totally other from us and outside our control. Our phenomenological engagement with material artefacts enlightens only certain aspects of them: the others impact on us in unexpected ways. However, a ‘weak’ anthropomorphism does not mean that materiality constitutes an ontological reality per se. It is in the interaction with the human that materiality reveals its inexhaustibility and ineffability. What we have is an ambiguous, hybrid and volatile flux between the human and the nonhuman. Ambiguity and hybridity are not just given in the process of making artefacts. Our broader sensual engagement with them stimulates heterogeneous, sometimes contrasting responses, such as memories, free associations, information, bodily sensations and so on. Besides, our reactions vary according to the different perspectives

18 ⧫ Experiencing Materiality

occupied by each one of us. Consequently, material artefacts reveal a huge variety of properties and abilities. Instead of definitive solutions to the dilemma of materiality, Experiencing Materiality stresses the creative potential of the inexhaustible and the perspectival. Instead of categorizing the human and the nonhuman according to their differences or their ‘agency’, we must focus on their unpredictable relationships, and pay attention to the shifts (Strathern 1991) and reterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari 2005) of meanings and practices. It is only in this way that we can challenge preconceptions, which seem ‘naturally’ part of us, about the material world.

Notes 1. I was not able to find an English translation of this passage. However, the concept of crystal recurs multiple times in the last works of Severi. See for instance this quote: ‘The artefact appears as the image of a set of relations (rather than of an individual, whether they are mythical author or supernatural ghost) and this depends on the production of a series of partial identifications. A tradition is thus authorized by a dispositif of anonymous utterance: though they emerge out of a series of clearly defined interactions, its agentive power and its speech never coincide with an actual intervention from a ritual participant. Behind the supposed presence of an utterer whose identity remains indiscernible, we can glimpse the object’s evidential function, which ties harp and fetish to an image of the truth. In other words, the (paradoxical, at least from a Western perspective) space where the artefact is endowed with agency is that of an authorless authority, where the ritual artefact does not work as a mirror reflection of a human agent, but as a crystal capturing several identities in one. The kind of ‘distributed I’ that the artefact enacts is not formed by a single identity distributed n several material occurrences (as Gell would have had it). It is better described as a set of different identities condensed in a single, but complex one’ (Severi 2016, 148; cf. Severi 2020, 183). 2. I decided to offer to participants the possibility of maintaining their anonymity, both because that guaranteed a more spontaneous and relaxed interaction and because I could state from the beginning the transparency of my research purposes. However, I knew that especially in the case of museum curators, the ideal of uncontaminated anonymity could not be completely fulfilled, as a lot of information related to the artefacts, as well as to the stories and characteristics of the collections, might be used as clues for identifying some of the participants. In addition, the choice of anonymity discouraged some of the hypothetical participants, especially scholars, from getting involved in the research project, because of the popularity achieved either by their exhibitions or by their published works, leading to their desire to be named in the research. Even though I clarified with them that the anonymity issue was only an offer to protect their privacy and not a fixed and unconditional code of conduct, they did not usually change their minds. In this current account of my research, I decided to disclose the identity of one curator, Emma Martin of the World Museum in Liverpool. Her name cannot be anonymized since she has written scholarship that I deemed fundamental for the theoretical and reflexive intake of this book.

CHAPTER 1

P

What Thing Is This? Indian Storytelling Scrolls

From the Things Themselves! Everything starts with a material artefact. If we continue the Heideggerian image of the blue jug, to investigate the multifarious engagements between the human and the nonhuman within museums, it will be necessary to understand artefacts first. This chapter investigates the functions, meanings and ways of interaction of two storytelling scrolls, the pats and the pars. Scholars, especially in the field of anthropology, also ˙begin their narratives from the ‘original context’ of an artefact, to then emphasize the process through which it enters into contact with different human actors. They also address how the fluctuant semiotic of artefacts can radically change if it intertwines with heterogeneous contexts of usage. The volume edited by Appadurai, The Social Life of Things (1986), has played a central role in disentangling things from a pure Marxist framework according to which they are just products made for a demand. Thereby, the volume shows how material value is subjected to complex social judgements and projections. Davis (1997), in particular, talks about ‘interpretative communities’ or ‘communities of response’. For instance, a religious statue can contemporarily be seen as a work of art or an object of devotion according to the different communities – that is, groups of people who identify common values to use the thing in a certain way – that enter into contact with it. Steph Berns (2017b) defines common expectations and values as the ‘cultural/spiritual baggage’ of humans. Experiencing Materiality as a whole investigates whether museum spaces manipulate religious values and religious responses. According to Kopytoff (1986, 73), museums are places where the material artefact is singularized, that is, secluded from the hands that normally transpose it from different contexts of usage and meaning-making. Let us imagine, for instance, the favourite pen of our great-grandfather, which has been given to us by our grandfather on a special occasion. For our grandfather, this gift could be a way to express to

20 ⧫ Experiencing Materiality

us his memory and love for his father. For us, conversely, it is a way to trace the different stories of our family. The pen passed through its usage by our great-grandfather to being an object of intimate memories of our grandfather. We can, in our turn, decide to use it as a fortune amulet for our exams, or keep it in our wardrobe imagining a moment in which we will give it to a particular person with whom we want to have a deep connection. If we decide to give it to a museum, this passage from hand to hand is interrupted. Disjointed from the accumulation and expression of different givers’ subjectivities, the pen can reveal to us different aspects that render it unique. In other words, the thing can be admired for its uniqueness, transformed into a sacred, non-ordinary thing. This uniqueness, according to Thiemeyer (2015), can vary depending on the different displaying techniques that emphasize the unique feature. For instance, our inherited pen can provide testimony or recollect the instant of a historical event – if we imagine our great-grandfather as a politician who signed a crucial treaty. It can also exemplify a specific kind of metal forging peculiar to the period of our great-grandfather. Therefore, we can put it within a series of other pens or metal works to visually trace the historical evolution of metal forging. We can also singularize the pen, put it in a single cabinet and play with light and darkness to signal its historical preciousness. I argue, however, that in following Kopytoff ’s biographical approach we can run the risk of dismissing ambiguous and fuzzy traces of values and embodied responses that do not fit with the conventional, usual treatment and consideration of a museum thing by a community of response. Our pen, for instance, can stimulate an artistic composition for an artist who sees it behind the glass of the cabinet, or convince an able thief to steal it and bond it with other metal substances to produce an amulet, use it for a scientific experiment, or some other purpose. Certainly, there is a form of control over the pen, but it is also true at the same time that the pen itself can guide or evoke particular and disparate uses. In this chapter, I suggest analysing the ‘original context’ of the scrolls in order to reflect on their possible potentialities – on a theoretical, practical and methodological level – in the following chapters. Rather than viewing the ‘original context’ as the ideal way in which the scrolls must be used, I embrace the ethnographic literature on them as a way to address questions to readers and, possibly, to understand how and why curators have operated in cataloguing or displaying them.

Indian Storytelling Scrolls: An Overview Indian painted scrolls used for storytelling ‘can be traced back through literary evidence to at least the second century BC and are known to have existed al-

What Thing Is This? Indian Storytelling Scrolls ⧫ 21

most all over the subcontinent’ ( Jain 1998, 8), and currently exist in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Bengal, Bihar and also in Deccan (ibid.). The scrolls’ stories are usually hagiographies, chronicles of ancestors and other deceased persons (ibid.). Furthermore, it is believed that the audience can spiritually benefit from the process of storytelling. For instance, the Garoda storytellers (from Western India) wander from village to village in what is called jatra, which means pilgrimage (ibid., 76). The ritual dimension of storytelling is further strengthened by the fact that storytellers often have sorcerer-like or priestly roles and names through their storytelling performances. Bhopa, the Rajasthani storyteller, for example, means ‘sorcerer’ (McLain 2009, 54). Nevertheless, some scholars contest this term, as the bhopa has minor priestly functions and does not fall into trances. More importantly, the painted scrolls are considered shrines of the deities because of darśan. Darśan is both a piece of theoretical knowledge and individual experience (Grimes 2004, 531), as either a religious practice (contact with the divine) or an essential part of the pūjā or the worship of deities by means of offerings (Scheifinger 2009, 277). Consequently, the material representation of the deity is considered to be its incarnation, and so is treated as a human being. In the past, in the region of Deccan, ‘When an old scroll was badly damaged, it was cremated and immersed in a river like a dead person, and all the Hindu death ceremonies were observed’ (Mittal 1998, 58). Examples of the connection between storytelling performances and scrolls and the creation of a ritual space are the storytelling boxes called kavad in Rajasthan and the murals related to the local god Pithoro in Gujarat. The kavad is a portable wooden box used in Mewar (Rajasthan), which is painted with sequences of religious and mythic stories. The origin of the word is related to an episode in the Ramayana, which is about Shravana Kumara carrying his blind parents on a pilgrimage on his shoulder ‘in order to restore their sight’ (Sabnani, 1989, 95). From this epic account, the meaning of kavad ‘as carried on the shoulder’ is derived (ibid.).1 Storytellers of the kavad (kavadiyas) are said to be Shravana Kumara’s descendants, because they display the temple-like kavad to those who cannot personally visit the holy temples and sites, thereby granting them darśanic interactions and gods’ blessings (ibid.). The Rathva tribe’s mural depiction of the marriage of their god Pithoro is characterized in a precise way. The mural shows a bhalon, a vehicle by which Pithoro descends from heaven. In the original myth, this is a spider web, but in contemporary pictorial renditions the bhalon is shown as an aeroplane, as the Rathva started to see aeroplanes flying in the sky and thought of them as divine vehicles ( Jain 1984, 39). In fact, the ritual installation of the mural uses two different expressions, specifically Pithoro behādvo, or ‘to get Pithoro seated’, and Pithoro lakhvo, or ‘to inscribe Pithoro’, indicating the act of painting (ibid., 44). These allude to a movement from one realm to another and prepare the

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ground for the trance possession of the badvo (or master of ritual), who starts to give names to each character depicted (or Pithoro vācvo – ‘to read Pithoro’ or ‘reading Pithoro’) after having received offerings and been ritually bathed (ibid., 56). The spirit who possesses the badvo is that of Pithoro’s birth father, Kun.du Rāno. After the sacrifice of the goats, the ceremony of the mural’s consecration ends with the sign made by the badvo’s knife in correspondence with the horses’ clogs. By ‘cutting the rope’ the agricultural forces represented by Pithoro’s mother can be spread in this world; hence the use of the rice grains offered during the ceremony and sanctified by the badvo in the fields (ibid., 58). The anthropological literature refers to patuas and bhopas, as well as other Indian storytellers, as untouchables (Sen Gupta 2012, 66). This characteristic trait of storytellers is accompanied by the belief that painting is a sacred activity, the process of materializing the presence of the deities, of annihilating the distance between the ordinary and the supernatural realms. As Douglas claims in Purity and Danger (2009), the activities centred around the ritual and the sacred entail a double and contrasting set of responses. On the one hand, handling the sacred creates a separation or an interdiction of the ordinary, and so the roles of the social actors within the ritual change. On the other hand, dealing with the sacred also means the degradation of, or the possibility of degrading, the sacred, because of the common features of the actors engaged within the ritual. Materiality, thus, together with the adaptability of darśan to contexts different from that of the temple, gives storytellers an ambiguous status, in the tension between quasi-priestly functions and socially degraded roles. The ambiguity of storytellers is even more emphasized if we look at the fact that they create the possibility of reaching the deities for the lowest, mostly rural, social strata, whose access to the orthodox temples is usually restricted. Furthermore, darśan via storytelling scrolls justifies the cult of tribal or regional deities: by representing them in the scrolls, storytellers give to these minor deities the importance of those in the Hindu pantheon, as well as the deities of the other religions present in India, first of all Islam. With this research, I want to explore the curatorial practices towards the pats and the pars, especially how darśan is perceived within museum spaces and ˙ museum curators. Pats and pars seem to me particularly apt re-elaborated by in adapting themselves in disparate contexts, not˙necessarily or explicitly linked to that of the ritual. For instance, Bengali scrolls are used nowadays as a means of political propaganda or of ethical education. Furthermore, the scrolls are adapted by the publishing house Tara Books and turned into graphic novels of various themes and cultural traditions.2 Pars are simplified and miniaturized for tourists in an extemporaneous and quite˙ recent phenomenon. The broader chitrakatha tradition has been adopted by the comic book publisher Amar Chitra Katha in order to create a national cult of the hero and of Hinduism more generally. Darśan occurs, thus, in different ways, which demonstrate the

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overlapping of the sacred and the profane, as well as the resistance of religious materiality to the change of contexts. I was therefore curious to see how darśan continues its existence within museum spaces. At this point, then, a detailed introduction for readers to darśan is necessary.

Darśan Distinct religious cultures have explained the act of looking.3 Looking is not an activity detached from the senses, but rather is how physical contact with the supernatural is established. Within Hinduism, a phenomenology of vision plays a significant role in defining the relationship between the worshipper and the god worshipped, as well as the divine nature, which can be represented and contained by the material object (Malamoud 1994, 263). The concept of darśan can summarize this phenomenology of vision. Darśan is simultaneously a religious practice of seeing and the belief in the capacity of the material to be imbued with life. Darśan relies on the activation of images, a ritual operation by which the divine bestows life on the image so that it becomes or coincides with the entity it embodies. Since it becomes a simulacrum of a person or an anthropomorphized deity, the image has the power to re-enact the presence of a departed person. It is, therefore, connected with the funerary cults. As Freedberg (1989, 98) observes, the consecration demonstrates ‘the potentialities of all images’, in the fact that they already work before being consecrated. For instance, Indian comic books depicting Hindu deities, despite not being subjected to a ritual consecration, have been venerated as religious icons, and a new and subtle form of the cult has developed. According to this religious understanding of the visual, seeing is not a passive and distant contemplation, but rather a form of engagement and relationship with the seen object, through the experiencing of its essences and properties, and through touching it (Hadders 2001, 32): In English, the verb behold suggests this relationship between sight and touch. To see can mean ‘to want to touch’ or ‘to want to be touched by another,’ especially if one means ‘to expect,’ ‘to seek out,’ ‘to long for.’ The element of desire is evident in each, and that is one reason why cultured despisers of imagining from Plato to Calvin have commonly attacked the practice of making or admiring images: they invite the indulgence of desire. Seeing is dangerous because it leads to touching. (Morgan 2012, 111)

Deriving from the Sanskrit root drś (‘to see’), darśan includes vision, intuition and the instrument to reach them, as well as theories and systems of belief (Grimes 2004, 531). Furthermore, darśan is conceived as a doctrine of different sources (not just religious, but also more generally intellectual; Hulin 1996, 4):

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‘looking (drishti) . . . is integrally linked with cognizing form (rupa)’ (Coorwala 1996, 19). The darśan, in classic Sanskrit literature, has the goal of demonstrating the importance of the Vedas (Hulin 1996, 5, 6). There are two Sanskrit terms used to indicate an image: pratimā, meaning reproduction, reflection or portrait, and mūrti, meaning bodily form restrained into limits, condensed presence or stopped movement (Malamoud 1994, 263, 264). In this second meaning, the proper darśan takes place. In the contemporary age, the advent of the Internet has brought new types of deities’ images. However, their nature as mūrti is controversial because of their unstable availability, for instance due to informatics crashes and similar (Karapanagiotis 2013, 72). It is not coincidental that Christopher Pinney (2004, 194) has made an explicit comparison between darsán and Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible (1968). In Merleau-Ponty’s conception of flesh, the perceiver and the perceived environment are intermingled. There is thus an open-ended circularity between our flesh and the flesh of the world. Flesh, then, is a structure or openness to the world, ‘a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself ’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 146). Similarly, in darsán there is a transfer of energy from the deity’s embodiment to the worshipper, which is subsequently returned through homage: ‘It is another type of flow taking, in which the beneficiary mingles a superior, apparently fluid-like “seeing” with his own, thereby appropriating its powers’ (Babb 1981, 396). Pinney suggests considering darsán within a logic of ‘corpothetics’, which elevates the efficacy (barkat) of the image as ‘the central criterion of value’ (Pinney 2004, 194): images have a disruptive power, an allurement (akarshan), for humans (ibid., 190–91). Consequently, darsán implies a different type of ‘attentive looking’ (Alpers 1991) in which the visual component is part of a bodily and emotional relationship with the deity, a ritual homage with prescriptive ‘physical services’. Since the ritual words focus on the image of the transformation, which invests the sender and the recipient (Severi 1993, 39), the worshipper chooses an image from the possible mūrtis and begs the god to enter into this mental mūrti by reciting hymns which describe the physical appearance of the gods and have the power to make them manifest. The devotee interacts with the deity through dhyan sāmadhi, or meditation, during which the individual seeks identification and unification with the god addressed ( Jhala 2000, 119). Thus, the worshipper’s body becomes, during this imaginary worship, which precedes the moment of darśan (Lal Nagar 2007, 543; see also DuPertuis 1986, 121), the deity’s mūrti, where the god breathes his life (prāna-pratisthā) (Malamoud 1994, 266). More specifically, the worshipper offers a mental worship (mānasī pūjā) to the deity conceiving his body as a yantra [seat] for her and thereafter takes her ‘glow’ (tejas) out of

What Thing Is This? Indian Storytelling Scrolls ⧫ 25

his heart through his prān.a (=breath) and places it in the image after having abstractly drawn a yantra in it. The sum and substance of this ‘eternal’ worship (bahiryāga) of the sagun.a (qualified) aspect of the deity is to treat her as an honourable guest who has just arrived at the place of the host, the worshipper (Tripathi 1978, 289).

This union between the worshipper and the god, which is the equivalent of bhakti (Tripathi 1978, 266), is made possible by the nature of the eyes: their pupils are permeable orifices that connect the inner with the outside (Gell 1998, 147). Darśan is an exchange of gazes between the devotee and the deity: while the latter gives darśan (darśan dena), the former brings it (darśan lena) (Mallebrein 1998, 8). Darsán implies the co-presence and intertwining of the signified and the signifier. In other words, the act of darsán is an ‘apprehension of God’s totality’ (Davis 1997, 50), insofar as it coincides with a ‘cross-contamination’ and ‘mimetic concatenation’ ( Jain 2007, 347) between the human and the nonhuman. For instance, posters of Tamil actors are revered as religious icons, and their auspicious sight bestows on their fans the actors’ charisma and attractiveness. In calendar art, access to religious icons within temple spaces, usually denied to the masses, can be substituted by reproductions of religious images by virtue of chromolithography ( Jain 2007; Pinney 2004). Since darsán is based upon a ‘transformation and intensification of elements that were already part of a popular visual consciousness’ (Pinney 1999, 211), it can be decontextualized from its Hindu origins in order to identify an underlying visual consumption typical to South Asian communities. Let us turn our attention to the relationships between storytellers and scrolls again to understand how darśan is implied.

Patuas and Pats The holders of the Bengali storytelling tradition are the Muslim patuas,4 an artisan caste (jat) predominant in the Medinipur, Murshidabad, Birbhum and Purulia districts ( Jain and Aggarwala 1989, 106). Risley’s The Tribes and Castes of Bengal describes the patuas as ‘very lax in their religious practices’ (quoted in Hauser 1998, 12). Although they do not respect the Qur’anic precept not to represent living beings (Saeed 2007), the patuas have a worldview formed by beliefs and practices from both Hinduism and Islam. This double religious identity seems to be confirmed by a foundational myth. According to the version given to Dutt by an informant in 1930, the ancestor of the patuas portrayed Mahadev (Shiva) without the god’s approval. Shiva found this out, and, in panic, the poor painter swallowed his brush. Because of his polluting act, Mahadev condemned the painter to be a Muslim. However, since such a de-

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cision entailed the renouncing of the patuas primary source of profit, the god relented and decided patuas would be neither Muslim nor Hindu (Chatterji 2012, 42). However, scholars have found different mythological explanations; therefore, there is not a unique foundational myth (cf. Bhattacharjee 1980, 3, Chakraborty 1989, 9 and Kaiser 2012, 34, 41). The earliest sources confirming the existence of the patuas can be found in Sanskrit texts (Hindu, Buddhist and Jain) dating from the third century CE ( Jain 1998, 11). In Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshsa (ibid., 10) and Bana’s Harshacharitam (ibid., 11), picture showmen are called yama pattika. Fruzzetti and Östör (2007, 11) add that they are described in the first play as exhibiting yama patas, or scrolls depicting the punishments of hell. In the commentary of the Buddhist Samytta Nikaya, the mobile pictures of some heretical Brahmins, or charanchitra, are mentioned. Jain literature gives an even more detailed account of the patuas. In the Aupapatika Sutra, around the third–fifth century CE, two different names are used to distinguish between painterstorytellers (mankla) and bards (magaha) (ibid., 8). The Kavalayamala, from the eighth century CE, recounts the adventures of an itinerant master painter, who showed a panel about the universe cycle, a samsarachakra, to a Jain monk (ibid., 9). The origin of the patuas as a caste is firmly linked to the diverse culturalreligious context of the subcontinent in the Middle Ages, when several theatrical expressions developed; in particular in Bengal, where from the thirteenth century until the birth of the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century (Hauser 1998, 182), the penetration of Islam favoured cultural syncretism. From the beginning of the fifteenth century, the mangalkabyas (‘auspicious poems’), a significant corpus of epic narrative poetry, became prevalent. This genre, hugely popular in rural Bengal (Chatterjee 2008, 517), was musically accompanied, sung and sometimes graphically rendered through painted scrolls. It is not a coincidence that the narration of these kabyas is based on legendary events aiming to justify the presence of a particular goddess (ibid.). Indeed, Sen Gupta (2012, 39) states that religious propaganda usually employs pre-existing myths in order to popularize new deities. The art of the patuas, heavily syncretistic in nature, has been influenced by many traditions, genres, practices and beliefs (Hauser 1998, 155). An example of the continuous influence of different local artistic expressions is that of the Kalighat paintings. Kalighat pictures were created between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth by some patuas who settled around the main Kalimandir in Kolkata ( Jain and Aggarwala 1989, 107). However, other artisan castes were involved in the realization of the Kalighat painting. In particular, it is interesting to see how the sutradhar (carpenters) influenced the volumetric style of the Kalighat, which made them closer to the theatrical forms and also had the function of emphasizing the satirical tone

What Thing Is This? Indian Storytelling Scrolls ⧫ 27

of the representations ( Jain 1999, 13, 24). These paintings, then, combined the established pictorial representation of the goddesses with the new artistic means (such as theatre, cinema and photography) that developed during the days of the British Raj. The underlying intention was that of criticizing mass media and presenting them as destroyers of the traditional social balances (Ghosh 2003, 864). The social critique of the Kalighat painters borrows heavily from their eclectic background. Considering the different religious traditions in Bengal – Islam and its mystical tradition (Sufism), Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism and Tantrism – the patuas learnt how to interpret and handle different, often contrasting, ethical interpretations of reality to transmit sacred and divine rules. The contents of the story of the pats, or patgan, comprise two categories: puranik (ancient) episodes from Hindu mythology (Figures A.1–2), and adhunik (contemporary) tales taken from ordinary life, for instance of social criticism, communalism and similar themes. (Hauser 1998, 155). Dutt (1999, 70–71) establishes, however, three types of pats: those centred around the Rama-līlā, and everything related to the heroic and practical aspects of life; those depicting the Krishna-līlā, or the romantic, idealistic life and spiritual devotion (bhakti); and those dealing with metaphysical themes and Tantric philosophy. In addition, particular pats are dedicated to folk deities who are usually associated with medieval martial heroes, such as Bāghaidevatā, Satyapīr and Badekhān Gāzi, known for defending the Bengali population from the Mughals or demanding fees for their feuds by deploying an army of tigers, (ibid., 75, 76). In the 1970s, according to Kaiser (2012, 47), a new ‘sub-category’ was added: that of the social (samajik) which involves collaborations and work with NGOs and political parties in promoting ‘social criticism’. The pats are perceived as communicative channels with the supernatural and a way to be purified from sins (Singh 1998, 110). During the 1930s, each pat ended with a depiction of the final judgment by the King of Death, Yama, and ‘the artist invariably ends up chanting the eternal law of the ultimate triumph of virtue and the defeat and punishment of vice’ (Dutt 1999, 72). In addition, ‘they also depict a presiding deity, like the image of “Bhoot” or ghost who is the messenger of jom, the king of death in ancient myth’ (Sen Gupta 2012, 97). Furthermore, many old scrolls have on their backs an inscription of the name of those who made offerings (dana) ‘to have the pata displayed again and again’ (Chatterji 2012, 63). Chatterji adds that ‘the repeated display of the sacred history to the accompaniment of the pata song acted as a blessing spreading to all the members of the audience’ (ibid.). These esoteric skills are distinctly visible among the jadu-patuas of the Santal adivasis (indigenous community), whose name, according to many scholars, means ‘magic painters’ (Kramrisch 1968, 70). However, Kaiser (2012, 12) and Hadders (2001, 22) have pointed out that the jadu-patuas do not attribute such

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meaning to their name. They deny any link with magic activities, and, interestingly, urge the use of the terms jādopatiā, jādobabā or jādo, rather than the Bengali jadū, i.e. ‘magic’. Despite working among the Santals, the jadu-patuas constitute a distinct religious group (Kaiser 2012, 13), adopting Muslim practices while professing the Hindu religion (Hadders 2001, 14). Apart from recounting Santal myths, these scroll-painters travel from village to village, carrying readymade portraits with empty eye sockets (Chaskudan pat, see Figure A.3) (Sen Gupta 2012, 97). When a family member dies, her relatives pay a jadu-patua to draw eyes in a portrait, so that her soul cannot wander in the world of the living, but instead becomes an ancestor (ibid., 71; cf. Dutt 1999, 80).5 The prayer Balahariman (praise to Hari or Krishna) is written on the pat so that the soul of the deceased person can be released to heaven (Sen Gupta 2012, 97). The entire mortuary ritual is called cockhodān (Hadders 2001, 3), while the depiction of the eyes is termed caksudān, or ‘the gift of the eye’ (ibid., 18). It is interesting to see how the jadu-patuas borrow Hindu categories in order to professionalize their work among the Santal: The Jādopatiā claims that he is the Brahman (thākur) and the priest (purohit) of the Santal. The work (kāj) and service that he renders the Santal relatives after death is equated with rites performed for the dead, and the service offered by other funeral priests after a death has occurred. Thus the Santal is compared to the patron (jajmān) of the Brahman and the purohit. The gift (dān) the Santals give to the Jādopatiā are compared to the gifts that the Brahman and the purhohit receive for his funerary work. (Hadders 2001, 30)

We can see that the capacity of pats to evoke the presence of deities or deceased ancestors and to transmit transformative forces to those who look at or touch them can be grasped within a darśanic field of forces. However, as confirmed by Emma Martin, the head of the ethnological section of the World Museum in Liverpool, who, as we will see in this book, crafted an exhibition entirely dedicated to Indian storytellers in contemporary times, darśan does not play a pivotal role anymore. In order to survive, patuas have transformed their artistic capacities into marketable resources for attracting customers coming from different parts of India or abroad, since the possibilities of performing from village to village are drastically reduced due to the advent of other media such as the television.

Bhopas and Par.s The bhopas, or ‘devotee performers’, were a seminomadic and endogamic community of storytellers who controlled an area of ten villages dominated by a ruler in the area of Rajasthan (Wickett 2010, 3). After India’s independence,

What Thing Is This? Indian Storytelling Scrolls ⧫ 29

they started to conduct a sedentary life, settling within the dhanis, or enclaves in the town’s outskirts (ibid.). However, they can return to the nomadic life when they are no longer supported by patrons, mostly Rebarī and Raika camelrearing nomads (ibid.). According to Smith’s informant, Par.bū Bhopo, the epic text of Pābūjī was initially a written text (Pābūprakāśa) composed by high-caste poets, the Rajpūts (Cāran.s), and kept in Pābūjī’s temple in Kol.ū (Smith 1991, 18). According to Par.bū, the Nāyaks, who were corrupted Rajpūts, started to memorize and orally transmit the text (ibid.). In contrast with the patuas, the bhopas do not paint the pars on their own. ˙ painters beInstead, their patrons commission the painting from the citeros, longing to the Josī caste and settled in south-east Rajasthan, mostly in the towns of Bhilwara and Shahpura (Srivastava 1994, 597; Smith 1991, 9). In the case of the pars, we have two types: one narrating the epic of Pābūjī, a folk hero venerated as a˙ deity, and the other centred on the epic of Devanārāyan., a local deity. To be more specific, there are two types of bhopas in the Devanārāyan.’s epic: the first dedicated to the administration of the shrine, and the second gravitating around the par (scroll): ˙ The story of the creation of the institutions of the ochre-colad (bhekdhārī) and the scroll bearing (par.dhārī) bhopās . . . . . . . their ochre-clad, celibate counterparts, who control not only the administration of shrines and temples but ultimately also the activities of the former. The context of the story is provided by a ‘competition’ between a famous physician, Baidnāth Bābā, and Devanārāyan.. After curing hundreds of individuals who have been afflicted by leprosy, Devanārāyan. challenges the physician to do the same or at least to cure his son, Bīlā of the disease. In this manner the story also highlights Devanārāyan.’s sovereignty over matters relating to physical healing (Malik, 2005, 41).

The priestly functions of the patuas are also shared by the bhopas. The latter claim to have inherited the pars and their robe from their Bhil ancestors, two ˙ the cloth from Pābūjī while he was ascending of Pābūjī’s courtiers who received to heaven, hence the sacredness of the cloth (Wickett 2010, 5). Consequently, the par is treated as a portable temple and shoes must be removed in front of ˙ 1989, 30). In addition, a symbolic offering of food (akha) must be it (Smith delivered to Pābūjī during a time when the god is believed not to be fasting, and particularly not on the eleventh day of the lunar calendar (see Smith 1991). Offering food is essential, both because of the corporeal reality attributed to Pābūjī, and because of his role in ensuring the welfare of the flora and fauna of the Thar desert (see Smith 1991). The bhopas, then, are called to perform on the occurrence of natural calamities or animal disease (Wickett 2010, 4), and Pābūjī is believed to be the healer of animals and the environment (ibid., 11). Remedies are found when the bhopas are possessed by his spirit during their performance.

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Furthermore, ‘touching the par cures illnesses’ (Smith 1989, 30). Pābūjī’s ˙ (‘big work’ or motakam), such as marriage, epic is also used in critical situations migratory herding and feasting (Srivastava 1994, 599). However, Pābūjī’s sacredness is reserved only for men, as it is forbidden for women to touch the par. ˙ This interdiction probably reflects Pābūjī’s chastity.6 Devanārāyan.’s sacredness is much stronger even than that of Pābūjī. Indeed, the cloth is a valuable item both for the representation of sacred images and for the construction of a place of worship, as well as stressing the importance of the weaver community in Devanārāyan.’s cult (Malik 2005, 45).7 The par should be painted by following a prescribed ritual: an auspicious ˙ day for starting work on the par must be chosen, and offerings must be made ˙ In addition, the first brushstroke must be to Sarasvati, goddess of learning. made by a virgin of the painter’s family or from a high caste (Kaiser 2012, 23).8 Before delivering the scroll to the bhopa, the painter depicts the pupils in the eye sockets of the gods, thereby imbuing the gods with life ( Joshi 1976, 23). An old par9 is ‘cooled (t. han.dī karn.o) by immersing it in the holy lake of ˙ Pushkar. If Pushkar is too far away, a good well may be used instead’ (Smith 1991, 67). When a par becomes too damaged to be used, it is immersed in the ˙ a ritual known as Thandi Karna, where a ritual bath lake of Pushkar following and an offering of Kansa (sweet dish) is made to Brahmins and Devanārāyan.ji (Sharma 1993, 72). It is understandable, then, that the selling of a par is considered sacrilegious (ibid.). However, in the present day the realization˙of a par is influenced by the tourist market ( Joshi 1976, 19), resulting in the loss of the˙ ritual procedures during painting. A patron usually requests a performance (jāgaran., or ‘all-night wake’) in order to fulfil a promise (bolmā) which has been made with a supplication directed to Pābūjī (Singh 1980, 119). The audience is structured according to the criteria of gender, power and caste pureness; thus, women are separated from men, untouchables from pure castes, and patrons (jajmāns) from non-patrons. Even menstruating women are separated from the rest of the family (Sharma 1993, 73). The names of donors (dhanis) and the date of purchase of the par are written on ‘the lower corner of its right side’ (Srivastava 1994, 597). Each˙participant in the performance can make an offering, and the bhopa proclaims their name and their offering while blowing on a conch shell (sańkh) (cf. Smith 1991, 9 and Malik 2005, 13–14). Before the performance starts, the bhopa worships Pābūjī with a flame (ārātī) (Smith 1991, 8). The audience often interacts with the bhopa during the performance, even claiming more knowledge and starting confrontations characterized by critical questions (Malik 2005, 14–15). In the Devanārāyan.’s case, the performance is called jāgran, or night wake, and implies the invocation of Devanārāyan. (ibid., 12). This performance can happen either at a devotee’s home, in front of Devanārāyan. or Savājī Bhoj’s temple, or at the

What Thing Is This? Indian Storytelling Scrolls ⧫ 31

community meeting place (hathāī). Performances do not take place during the rainy season (caumāsā), because the deities are supposed to be asleep. During this period, the epics can be sung without the scroll in seated postures (bait. ho gān.o) (ibid.). Pābūjī (Figures A.4 and A.5) belongs to the category of bhomiyos, or local heroes venerated as minor deities after their death (Malik 2005, 70–71). More particularly, Pābūjī is a medieval warrior prince, who resists and defeats ‘the barbaric cow-killing Muslim ruler Mirzā Khān’, protecting women from his attack (Smith 1991, 4). He is also an incarnation of Lakșman.a, Rama’s brother, therefore born from a celestial nymph, and a folk god especially worshipped by shepherds and Rebārī camel herders (Smith 1989, 8, 30). Despite his role, Pābūjī follows the principle of nonviolence (ahimsā), and his strength derives from his sexual continence (Smith 1991, 4), because due to his involvement in battle, Pābūjī’s marriage has been delayed several times and is not completed. Devanārāyan. is a mythical and godly figure, son of the very first human pair’s incarnation, who freed the cows from the Rajput ruler of Rān. City as both incarnations of Rāma and Rāvana (Malik 2005, 103).10 By combining the notion of avatāra (incarnations) with that of yugas (time cycles), the cult of Devanārāyan. is extended in temporal terms, thus evoking the avatars’ presence in the present (Malik 2005, 45, 92). It is emblematic that ‘the cloth of Devanārāyan.’s coat is extended to accommodate the size and dimensions of a par’, which is, therefore ‘connected to Devanārāyan.’s apparel’ ˙ The par, as a manifestation of Devanārāyan, must be (Malik 2005, 40, 41). . ˙ the bhopa’s narration, an interrelation revealed to the audience through of visual and oral texts, in which the avatāra functions as an intertextual linkage and the materiality of the par is a ‘proof ’ of the epic narrated (ibid., 15–16, 90). Singing the epic’s lyrics (gāv)˙is interspersed with the explanation of what can be found on the par’s surface (arthāv) (Smith 1991, 14). ˙ Pābūjī’s scroll reveals a cosmic map in which the forces of good Similarly, and evil are conflicting (Smith 1991, 66) and are structured around a symbolic symmetry. At the centre, Pābūjī and his court (Figure A.5) establish marriage ties with the surroundings (Ūmarkot and Sāmbhar’s courts), while they fight against Rāvana on the left and Jindrāv Khicī and Jaisingh Bhāt.side on the right, at the extremes of par and, therefore, of Pābūjī’s territories (Smith 1991, 66). The epic is composed˙of an ensemble of parvāros, the episodes of the epic – not ˙ ˙ surprisingly, parvāro means ‘battle’ – and sāyls, or the stories of miracles per˙ ˙ formed by Pābūjī, either during the epic or after his ascent to heaven. Parvāros ˙ and sāyls aim at helping the suppliant – hence the meaning of the epic as˙‘petition’ (Smith 1991, 19). At this point in our analysis of the ‘original context’ of the scrolls, it is essential to concentrate the thoughts of readers on how the scrolls’ force adjusts itself

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to museum settings in South Asia. This reflection is an opportunity to guide the reader towards my intellectual struggle, and that of curators, on materiality in the following chapters.

Some Dilemmas: When Scrolls Enter the Museum What happened to the storytelling scrolls once they were collected by South Asian museums during and after the colonial period might have been similar to the cases of other religious artefacts, on which Guha-Thakurta (2004) has focused her work. To understand how the scrolls’ religious force might have been manipulated, it will first be necessary to analyse the peculiar nature of museums in South Asia. South Asian museums were designed because of a systematic delineation of the historical development of archaeological and artistic specimens (see Guha-Thakurta 2004). This is particularly clear in works such as James Ferguson’s Picturesque Illustrations of Ancient Architecture in Hindostan (1848) and History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1876). The goal of these books was learning through seeing. In contrast with the overwhelming experience of darśan, South Asian religious materiality was systematized as part of a cultural heritage that had to be photographed, mapped and reproduced into copies for their scientific analysis (cf. Guha-Thakurta 2004, 18, 33, 60 with Prakash 1999, 21, 30). In colonial India, then, a systematic and extensive museumification of the religious landscape occurred, informed by a specific politics of the gaze. An example of museumification is the Catalogue and Handbook of the Archaeological Collection of the Indian Museum of Kolkata, written by John Anderson in 1882–83 (Guha-Thakurta 2004, 76). The catalogue was realized by conceiving Western scholars as possible, distant readers, with the consequence of promoting a type of ‘informed viewer’ (ibid., 79) who could indifferently switch from the object to the textual source and vice versa. The process of vision, therefore, became in an Indian museum context a detached activity similar or parallel to reading, by layering the ‘visual aura’ of the museum with textuality (ibid., 77). Furthermore, the textualized nature of the museum implied a political intertwining between knowing and seeing: a full ‘education’ of the lay visitor should necessarily pass through textual support that would sublimate the sensuous engagement with exhibited artefacts into ‘civilized’ knowledge. As Prakash notes while interestingly tracing the historical formation of scientific disciplines in India, colonial museology condemned darśan as an ‘unlearned’ or superstitious type of seeing, to which a careful confrontation of the seen artefacts with scientific theories must be opposed (Prakash 1999, 30). Here it is essential to note the difference between gazing and seeing, inasmuch as colonial South Asian practices massively relied on this distinction. While

What Thing Is This? Indian Storytelling Scrolls ⧫ 33

gazing means an entanglement with material surfaces that engages all the senses and connects subjective feelings and desires with the material surfaces, viewing must be considered as a different operation. Through a guided and trained procedure, the viewer makes a selection of the perceptual in order to find a proof or sign of what she is looking for (cf. Casey 2007, Pattison 2007, Appadurai and Breckenridge 1999, 409). By purifying gazing with seeing, scientists, as well as museum curators in the colonial context, sought to construct a typified and ‘ideal’ viewer as opposed to ‘inappropriate’ practices of gazing (Guha-Thakurta 2004, 81). On the one hand, then, museums became repositories of an alleged ‘South Asian’ artistic history, or to put it another way, of the evolution of ‘Indian civilization’. On the other hand, they were forums for visual instruction, a learning-cum-viewing device (Guha-Thakurta 2004, 50). However, this process of ‘education’ could not be accomplished straight away, but experienced a gradual transformation. In other words, Indian scientists continued to use the magical language of gaze when relating to Indian audiences: an example is represented by the term belatee Muntur, literally ‘the European charm’, adopted for explaining mesmerism to Indian medical assistants (Prakash 1999, 32). The Indian colonial museum thus faced an inherent contradiction: it was designed for the ‘Western’ and ‘Westernized’ ‘small initiated circle’ (GuhaThakurta 2004, 47). However, insofar as it was an educational device, it was also experienced by lay visitors with their own culture of gaze, that of darśan. It is not coincidental, then, that local visitors referred to museums as ‘tamasha (show) houses’ (ibid., 80), ‘jadughar’, or ‘house[s] of magic’, and ‘tirthas (pilgrimage sites)’ (Elliott 2006, 66–67). In the case of the Lahore Museum – which was popularized in Western imagination with Rudyard Kipling’s tale Kim (Kipling 1981) – audiences used the expression Ajaib Ghar (‘Wonder House’) (cf. Guha-Thakurta 2004, Prakash 1999, Bhatti 2012 and Elliott 2006). Accordingly, this terminology reflected a particular behaviour in the audience. For instance, Bhatti (2012, 154), in analysing the annual report of the Lahore Museum (1891– 92), remarks that several shoe thefts were denounced, thus attesting that visitors used to remove their shoes before entering the museum, in a similar pattern to the usual behaviour observed in temples and mosques. The South Asian museum therefore played the role of an ‘interstitial’ space between ‘science’ and ‘superstition’ (cf. Prakash 1999, 34 and Bhatti 2012, 157). As such, curatorial practices reflected a recurrent ambiguity towards the museums’ educational mission. Curators firmly disliked and condemned the use of the exhibitive spaces for pilgrimage, thereby preserving museums’ elitist status. Nevertheless, they could not refrain from accomplishing their educative purposes through any possible means (Guha-Thakurta 2004, 80).11 The colonial centrality of the ‘ideal’ visitor and the sheer ambiguity in the museum experience remains untouched in postcolonial South Asia, as shown

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in Bhatti’s (2012) and Elliott’s (2006) ethnographies on contemporary museum practices, respectively in Lahore and Kolkata. Both stress that museum curators judge and despise the vernacular terminologies used by illiterate audiences to refer to museums, as well as their ‘inappropriate’ behaviour in visiting the exhibitive space, such as touching (Bhatti 2012, 143; Elliott 2006, 66). At the same time, the contemporary curators want to retain a certain control – regarding which Bhatti even adopts the term ‘dogmatic’ – over how exhibited artefacts should be interpreted (Bhatti 2012, 143). Bhatti’s ethnography of museum practices shows that several participants have described a visual-emotive response to the objects, a ‘pull’ which touches the heart (dilkhush). The shrines and their decorations and scenography would instil roshiani (‘brightness’) in the viewer’s body. Roshiani in turn transforms, or better, ameliorates viewers’ minds and hearts (Bhatti 2012, 221). I cannot help but notice the similarity between roshiani and the flow of power described by Babb (1981) in the analysis of darśan, as well as what Cort (2012) observed in Jina icons. It can be said, then, that scrolls and other material artefacts activating darśan continue to exert their force even in museum settings, at least in India or, more generally, South Asia. As such, storytelling scrolls clearly demand a theoretical reformulation of the biographical paradigm envisaged by Appadurai and Kopytoff. What kind of theoretical ideas and information about materiality itself, or about the interdependences between the human and the nonhuman, can scrolls suggest to us? The next chapter will address curators’ thinking from the scrolls.

Notes This chapter’s arguments have been partially based on research previously published in ‘Incarnations: The Materiality of the Religious Gazes in Hindu and Byzantine Icons’ in the journal Material Religion (13:2) in 2017, and before that in my doctoral work. 1. The term kavad derives from the word kivad, which means door (Sabnani 1989, 95). 2. See for instance Sita’s Ramayana (Arni and Chitrakar 2011); I See the Promised Land, centred on Martin Luther King’s biography (Flowers, Chitrakar and Rossi 2010); and The Patua Pinocchio, a folk rereading of the Italian fable of Pinocchio (Collodi and Chitrakar 2014). 3. See for instance Morgan 2005, 2012. 4. For an analysis of the origin of the term patua, see Chatterji 2012, 43; Hauser 1998, 183; Kaiser 2012, 12; and McCutchion and Bhowmik 1999, 3–5. For a detailed account of patuas’ contradictory religious affiliation and caste relations within patuas, see Bhattacharjee 1980, 45; Chakraborty 1989, 10; Chatterji 2012, 42–43; Ghosh 2003, 865; Hauser 1998, 186; Kaiser 2012, 42–43; Sen Gupta 2012, 38, 50–56; and Sharma 1993, 20. For an account of the relationships between patuas and the rest of society see Ghosh 2003, 866, and Hauser 2002, 110. For a historical survey on the or-

What Thing Is This? Indian Storytelling Scrolls ⧫ 35

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

igin of the patuas’ caste, see Chatterjee 2008; Fruzzetti and Östör 2007; Ghosh 2003; Hauser 1998; Jain 1998; Kaiser 2012; Kramrisch 1968; Kulke and Rothermund 2004; McCutchion and Bhowmik 1999; and Sen Gupta 2012. ‘The soul hovers in the atmosphere for a maximum of seven days and within these days the soul of the deceased person enters into the womb of a married woman of the Patua community only, preferably one among the near kin. Pregnancy is caused due to this entry of the soul’ (Bhattacharjee 1980, 69). According to a scholar during an interview (Scholar 1). ‘Before using a par. for the first time (the term is par. bă˜cn.au, ‘reading the par. ,’ or par. kholn.au, ‘opening the par. ’), the Bhopā is obliged to give a feast to all the members of his family and community, and this deters a Bhopā from getting a par. made’ (Singh 1980, 163). Kaiser adds that these operations can be observed among the killekyatha, a Marathispeaking caste of shadow-puppeteers in southern India (Kaiser 2012, 23). The par. is always rolled from left to right; thus, the signs of damage on the right-hand side signal the age of the par. (Smith 1991, 8). ‘ The Bagar.āvat . . . narrates the adventures of the 24 sons of Bāghjī: all of them are slain in battle by Rān.ājī, and Devanārāyan., the son of one of them, avenges the death of his father and his brothers’ (Singh 1980, 162). Devanārāyan. can be distinguished from Pābūjī in the par. , as he is always depicted with a snake in front of him and seated on Śes.. Furthermore, his par. is much longer than that of Pābūjī (ibid.). The condemnation of Hindu worship as ‘superstitious’ and ‘dirty’ was a colonial trope. Not only did the division and the competition between Hindu worship and scientific investigation occur in archaeological sites (Sutton 2013), but at the same time, British collectors also clearly despised Hindu customs in their accounts and diaries, such as in Horniman’s case (Levell 2000).

CHAPTER 2

P

Curatorial Understanding of the Sacred within Museum Walls Metalogues in Dialogue with Scholarship

As already discussed in the introduction to this book, the qualitative interviews I conducted with nineteen respondents were semi-structured debates. The interlocutors were curators and registrars of public museums, art collectors involved in the realization of temporary exhibitions and scholars who have studied Indian storytelling scrolls. Along with information related to the specific collection or museum, I stimulated their reflection on religious materiality in museums. The debate was ignited by my conscious quotation of some scholarly works on the theme – such as Duncan (1995) and Paine (2013), among others – and their insertion and contextualization in curators’ daily practices and projects. This chapter will directly compare curators’ elaborations with scholarly statements, to push further the book’s general idea of considering museums and curatorial practices as intrinsically theoretical. I thereby invite museum scholars to focus on ethnographic experience in order to relativize their interpretations of galleries.

Metalogues The majority of interlocutors were extremely cautious towards the idea of the museum as a space comparable to that of the temple. The sentence ‘it is not the object which explains religion, it is the context behind the object’, often repeated by all participants in my research despite their diverse backgrounds, suggests that museum staff attempt to build a new epistemological space for visitors. In this space, museum artefacts are differently assembled in order to convey an overview of how they are usually employed outside museum walls. In other words, curators perceive their practice as transformative: the so-called ‘original context’ is deconstructed, dissolved into its constituent parts and re-

Curatorial Understanding of the Sacred within Museum Walls ⧫ 37

composed according to museum purposes, which are necessarily different to those of the ritual context. While the latter conveys a sensuous engagement with material artefacts, the handling of museum artefacts is ultimately aimed at intellectual scrutiny. Museum operations, therefore, essentialize ritual dynamics by extrapolating them from their contingent circumstances in order to represent an ideal type of a religious habit or cultural trait that would inevitably ‘eradicate’ the ‘original context’. Museum artefacts are thus turned into corpses, while museum curators become specialists with a status in between that of funerary attendants and forensic scientists. They are like funerary attendants since they take care of the museum artefacts by preserving their conditions, while they are forensic scientists since the artefacts’ constituent parts are dissected for a scientific analysis. I would say that we mainly try to decontextualize the objects, so we try to give the visitors an impression of the aesthetics and the meaning, but, at the same time, we try to have the focus that this is an artificial situation. We don’t like to rebuild authentic situations in our museum like to musealize the life of other people, but we try to show examples of the specific tradition or the specific religious belief to show all the aspects that are connected with it but not in a quite natural setting. We avoid this, so the visitor could enjoy the aesthetic dimension of the objects on the one hand, but get information on how that is used, what’s the meaning, on the other hand. . . . We try to get clear that a museum is an abstraction of reality but could never be reality itself and you have to deal with the people behind the objects to have an idea about reality and show them as reality, that is not possible. . . . For me a religious object is dying when it comes to the storage because it is not part of a performance anymore and I think that sacredness is touched insofar as the dealing with the object is necessarily part of being sacred, of being seen as a sacred object. If we don’t deal with it, I’m not sure if the sacredness survives when it comes to the storage. Every sacred object needs a special handling, offering and we don’t do that, for example, and so the sacredness might diminish step by step by step, but in my eyes, the objects are dying step by step, because they are [pause] some kind [pause] they are not able to speak anymore, they are not able to touch somebody anymore, and I think that it is a poor effect of musealization. (Interview with Curator 1; my emphasis)

The abstraction is necessary for not objectifying the life of the people who use the material artefact. Museums are therefore an aid for thinking about materiality, for enhancing its epistemological potentialities. The curator is fundamentally ambiguous towards the ‘real context’ or ‘life’: as a phenomenological engagement, the ‘original context’ gives direct access to the understanding of material artefacts. At the same time, the ‘context’ is a moment in which ‘real people’ are involved, thereby demanding an intersubjective relationship between the ‘audience’ and the performer that museums cannot and must not substitute. They must not because inter-subjectivity directly implies the subjectiv-

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ity of whoever is practising darśan. Darśan can be summarized schematically, by singling out some aspects without which it cannot be operative. However, this basic structure is performed, dwelled in and lived in substantially different ways by each individual who experiences darśan. The curator seems to imply, therefore, that enacting darśan in museums would mean bringing subjectivity into their spaces. Something inherently intimate thus turns into a public viewing or show. Would it be ethically correct to do so? Why privilege one perspective over others? Does being publicly viewed substantially change the nature of the subjective experience, which thus runs the risk of being objectified and exoticized? A non-museumified darśan would allow its ‘enactor’ to choose with whom to disclose an experience that can be extremely intimate. Museums are at opposite poles to the temples for other reasons. The latter are spaces in which an emotional engagement with religious artefacts is stimulated and sustained by ritually activating them – for instance by invoking the deity to move into material elements. The former, instead, have facilities and tools for preserving materials that would usually experience a process of deterioration and decay due to their ritual usage. In addition, museums can make people aware of the cultural and artistic traditions which have produced the exhibited objects in a more substantial way than temples do. More clearly, the everyday qualities embedded in the objects are incorporated by worshippers into their sphere, without a comparative and historical perspective, at least obviously and directly. In contrast, museum narrative is based upon an ‘archaeological’ approach to cultural patterns that museum artefacts embody. Therefore, the latter cannot substitute the ritual dynamics: they can only be systematized and intellectually scrutinized. An efficacious understanding of religious experience can be reached only through visiting temples: We are not able to observe the pūjā or something like that, it is theoretical, and it is not in a practical way. I would suggest to people to go to one of the Hindu temples . . . to see what darśan means and to get involved in this process, I think, it is easier to understand than in a museum context. (Interview with Curator 1; my emphasis)

Nevertheless, interviewees often noticed some ambiguities. The conventional conceptualizations of museums and temples are thereby problematized and stratified. While the latter, especially in Asia and as confirmed by scholarship (Mathur and Singh 2014; Robson 2010), assume an organization comparable to that of museums, the prior experience of religious contexts by both curators and visitors may or may not contribute to constructing or to enacting a religious response to a particular museum disposition. Curators recall the phenomenological experiences they had in Asian religious settings. Their sensuous understanding of the ‘context’ is validated by the

Curatorial Understanding of the Sacred within Museum Walls ⧫ 39

knowledge and information they collected, within and outside museum walls. Narrations, then, although descriptive, reflect an encroachment of and intersection with thoughts, practices, feelings. Their phenomenological experience contains in itself a museum gaze. The disconnection of what they are observing from what they usually see and do in their daily life triggers an interrogation on the meaning of the different artefacts. This investigation is, therefore, a co-presence between ritual engagement and mental investigation that the curators identify with what they usually practice in storage rooms and galleries. Museums would concentrate uniquely on an intellectual investigation. The decontextualization from ritual would add to the epistemological journey a visual appreciation of artefacts’ surfaces, which in museum jargon can be labelled as aesthetic contemplation. The latter is conceived as abstract and cultivated in the solitude of visitors’ interiors, thereby significantly transforming the experience of visiting a religious site, which automatically becomes the ‘context’. Individual mental journeys are consequential as further singularization and manipulations of context. That is also a paradox because the statue is really the deity’s residence when two operations are realized, first the opening of the eyes, which is a symbolic action, and the prān.a, the vital breath. The statue in that moment is the avatar, the deity’s descent because there has been a ritual operation. The statues need a re-consecration, the bigger ones every twelve years. Theoretically, once the statue is taken out from the temple, it is no longer a sacred object. This is a paradox, because I noticed in a big museum in Cambodia, the museum of Phnom Penh, small altars in front of the statues and the people bow, prostrate themselves. These situations are blurred, and it is this fluidity which allows different usages. (Interview with Curator 2; my emphasis)

Most of the interviewees perceive temples as spaces characterized by a double nature: on the one hand they are cultic places, and on the other, depositories of artefacts with an aesthetic value, where nonbelievers can understand material expressions of other religions. This contradictory nature of the temple is suppressed in museum spaces: aesthetics entirely substitute the cultic and spiritual engagement, and religious belief and art thereby represent two opposite poles through which to define the interaction with material religion. Some of the curators have made a comparison with their religious background in order to better explain this point. The discussion with the researcher is, therefore, a moment of phenomenological experiment, where different regimes of practices and material engagements are re-evoked and re-enacted. Readers and listeners therefore have to translate different experiences deposited in curators and interlocutors’ sensuous memories. For example, a scholar said that the sign of the cross is made in a church, not in a museum. The following excerpt shows these insights with vividness:

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Of course, there is a contradiction. You visit a church, there are beautiful art works, and then it is also a museum. Here everything is homogeneous, coherent and organic: the artwork, the sacredness, the place constitutes a unicum. It is clear that these art works are hung somewhere, are moved from their context, the religious meaning is lost, it is not so strong as in a church or in a monastery. . . . Let us take as an example a saint. You enter in a church and you see a painting of this saint. Inside that context, you admire the beauty of the painting, but you also interrogate yourself about the functions and meanings of the saint depicted, you contextualize this figure. Decontextualize this saint and put her in a museum. In my opinion, people would say firstly if she is awful or beautiful, then they would wonder about her meaning. . . . Imagine visiting a temple in the south of India, where there are the bronzes of the exhibition. During the moment of the pūjā, when the Brahmin and the statue are all dressed, the former takes a spoon with some water and puts it on the mouth of the latter, takes a piece of prasad and puts it on Shiva’s mouth, does the abhisheka [pouring milk, yogurt, rosewater, etc., on the statue] surrounded by oil lamps and rows of women and men watching and waiting for the prasad, etc., we have a context! If that statue is decontextualized, put in a museum, is no longer the god’s incarnation, it is an art object. That is it. (Interview with Curator 2; my emphasis)

Interestingly, the curators’ standpoints are shared by the few visitors I had the chance to interview. Museums can give a glimpse of how material religion is experienced by other religious systems. A museum visit can be comparable to what a tourist usually does in a church, stepping towards significant artistic expressions and trying to understand them as part of a specific culture, historically and spatially situated. In this case, then, museums and temples can overlap, if visitors’ religious beliefs are suspended in favour of an intellectual quest. To understand the whole you have to be born, but for me it represents religious art, not art in . . . in general. For me it is how like I go to an old church here and I see the painting on the wall for our religion. For me it is the same. Only I know some image what is art, at other I do not know, I should be grown in India to understand, to know more about the religion there for understand . . . I see the religious sense. . . . I do not think that the museum could become a religious place, but I remember another exhibition was here from Bhutan, and now with these series of architecture of temple, I saw you can feel a little bit for what it is used or what it was used. I saw because when the other exhibition was, also, they had made a small temple in it and so it is not only looking to a wall with an image, they find a good thing, but it is kind like going to a church. (Interview with a visitor to the temporary exhibition at the Museum Rietberg; my emphasis)

Visitors’ subjectivity is therefore crucial for understanding how museum and temple spaces can differ or show similarities. Both museum curators and visitors concur in delineating a quasi-phenomenological definition of subjectivity. In other words, subjectivity is constructed by the ontogenetic development

Curatorial Understanding of the Sacred within Museum Walls ⧫ 41

of each organism – in this case, the visitor – and its intersubjective relationship with material artefacts. Material surfaces speak differently to a believer and a nonbeliever. Curators are aware of the prismatic potentialities of the human–materiality encounter, and are thereby meticulous in maintaining a neutral perspective towards that which they view as subjective, such as sacredness, in designing exhibitions. If, on the one hand, assuming a ‘zero’ perspective would reflect respect towards visitors’ positioning, on the other hand, they refer to their scholarly understanding of religion as a social fact and, as such, constructed and artefactual. Religious artefacts do not automatically express sacred power, but rather the latter is the result of a social attribution by a group of people. Materiality, in these terms, is a medium, a neutral membrane for meanings and behaviours. It is also true that acknowledging the prismatic nature of the bond between humans and material artefacts leads specific curators to privilege a creative understanding of museums as fluid spaces of practices and meanings, whose unique nature coincides with these polyvalent encounters. Any place can be a religious space, it depends on what is going on inside of you . . . Something transcendentally, you mean . . . Look . . . Even worship in the tram or on the train, or even when driving, you can make a temple inside of you. (Interview with a visitor to the temporary exhibition at Museum Rietberg; my emphasis) The sacredness is something you give to the object and if you are gone, the object does not remain sacred. You have to have people who donate, who accord this sacredness to the object. If you do not . . . I mean, if you say [bringing forth a cup of coffee and placing it forcefully at the centre of the table] ‘this is a sacred object’ and you worship it, for me [vigorously turning the cup up and down] it is just a dirty coffee pot, you know? So it depends on the perspective. If you find two thousand people who follow your opinion and worshipping this holy object and you convince them to do this, you convince me I believe ‘OK, this is a holy object’, I join you, convince me, but this is a negotiation which is established and it has to do with power and hierarchies, and norms, and rules and things, but otherwise, I mean, if I do not believe in God, a church is not a sacred space for me. You know? It is the convention of some people, but this is not sacredness such as not existent as you do not believe in it. (Interview with Curator 3; my emphasis)

Given the centrality of visitors’ subjectivity, curators’ roles are shaped accordingly. In other words, museum curators have the duty of facilitating the possible forms of engagement with material artefacts, without imposing their own views. Museums, then, are protean and creative venues, despite their funerary functions, since the original context is suspended in favour of the autonomous reflection of visitors. To put it another way, museum curators give some keys around which a complex and multilayered phenomenon such as ritual can be

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decomposed into its constituent elements. In contrast, the personal engagement of the visitor with the material surfaces of things and their spatial displacement is encouraged. one of the things we definitely understand is that no matter what kind of presentation or structure we provide for visitors’ engagement, visitors will take potentially something entirely different from that, so I suppose what we’re trying to do is to create the space in which different forms of engagement are possible to not be prescriptive. . . . I think museums are much more polyvalent spaces than curators would like to think and, certainly, the government founders would like to think. . . . So, this museum, for example . . . is also a ritual site, it is also a library, it is a party venue, it is a place where people hang out and have meetings, it is place to learn, it is a place to get out of the rain, in the same way, I suppose, other spaces, for example the cathedral, might be. I think the diversity of forms of engagement within the space is interactions with objects, particularly in a museum like this one. I think what gives it a distinctive flavour, what is important is the immediacy of engagement between people and things, that is, I think, ritual-like, then fair enough. I think, certainly, it comes back to one of the most important points that . . . curators want to set up in a museum or a gallery, it is not curators that can of course experience or interpret of that gallery, it is the visitors and they make the museum what the museum is. (Interview with Curator 4; my emphasis)

In privileging the multiple interactions with artefacts, curators give enormous space and importance to visitors, viewing their interventions as just ‘suggestions’ or ‘guidance’ for visitors themselves, whose phenomenological encounter is rationally or scientifically reframed as ‘interpretation’. I think it is the visitor who makes the interpretation. The museum must, or the museum presents the item from those starting points where the item comes from. We tell about the cultural context the item comes from, religious or not, any item, and, then, it is the viewer who makes a second interpretation, so we can’t give, we can give some guidelines, but then it is the visitor who decides what to think or how to interpret. (Interview with Curator 5; my emphasis)

The vital role of the visitor’s interpretation in the understanding of museum spaces as religious ones can be clearly understood through one example taken from my fieldwork experience. I visited a temporary exhibition at the Kulttuurien museo, put on in collaboration with the University of Helsinki, on the studies of Siberian populations by the Finnish linguist Matthias Castrén (1813–52). The day after my visit, I had a brief discussion with the organizer of the exhibition. She told me that the choice of the mannequins, which were not kept in cabinets, aimed to evoke the marketplaces where Castrén met Siberian populations and took some photos. I explained that this technique, in my view, was used for evoking a sense of nostalgia towards endangered communi-

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ties. She reacted by saying that these were my interpretations and, as visitors’ interpretations, they were acceptable. The visitor must do the interpretative work. Thus, if the museum transmits some sacredness, this is because of the visitor’s perceptions. It must be noted that the importance given to the museum audience is indirectly proportional to curators’ phenomenological engagements, as well as to the curatorial and design experimentation. This point is crucial in making readers understand the problematic issue of authorship and its negotiation with ethical respect. On the other hand, readers become familiar with the idea that museum experience must necessarily be a singularization of knowledge, learning and sense. To put it differently, museums must be transformative media through which each one of us must discover her way of learning and be in touch with the world. This pedagogical stance directly clashes with the need for providing as much information as possible, as well as promoting a comparative gaze, which can foster equality and challenge prejudices. In short, the experiential is often in conflict with the didactic and the political agenda of museum staff. Furthermore, precise scientific definitions reveal themselves to be inappropriate in reaching a multifarious universe of creeds and opinions, thereby rendering museum activities particularly tricky. Consequently, curators face two types of challenges. On the one hand, they have to accurately explain and reproduce the ‘original’ context for visitors. They attempt to reach this goal through pictures, documentaries and sounds. These means are evocative of the peculiar context and, in combination with guided tours and conferences, are directed to an audience unfamiliar with these ritual phenomena. Sometimes, the distinction between museum and temple is transgressed by events of ‘ritual theatre’, as defined by one curator in Zurich during our interview. The curator defines events in this way when a religious specialist is asked to perform a ritual using the artefacts. On the other hand, curators do not want these means of guidance to be prescriptive. Therefore, they even accept situations in which the secular and the sacred are blurred within museum spaces, something which is particularly alien to curators’ ideas of the museum as an abstraction from reality and as a research unit. This intrinsic contradiction is particularly evident in the case of working with local communities. The latter usually show two types of reaction: on the one hand enthusiasm, and therefore the desire to perform religious activities within museum spaces, and on the other hand discomfort, especially if they feel that museum representations and practices do not respect their religious beliefs. Many immigrants from Somalia and other Islamic countries came to the exhibition, and they held their prayers there, and they liked the exhibition very much, and it was such a wonderful thing, and we thought that now we have succeeded to telling about the wider audience, Finnish audience something im-

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portant about Islam and the variety of Islam, it is not one tradition or one way to practice Islam or to be a Muslim, but there are many ways, and all of them are equally important, and also we thought that we were able to give the Muslim audience something that they liked and they considered to be important. (Interview with Curator 5) We had a project that we did in Middlesborough in 2012, and they were working at the Captain Cook’s museum on the Maori collections, and they did a lovely project with local apprentices, and they created a Maori storytelling chair, and they did this with the help and assistance of an elder whom they were in contact with in New Zealand, and they were very pleased with the project at the end of the day, and he came to visit them in Middlesborough . . . and when it was completed they were visited by another Maori elder who was horrified that anyone who wasn’t Maori could have created these things and that was totally inappropriate and completely the wrong thing to do, and for me, it was a lovely example of how you can try as hard as you can to work with single members of the community and to be sympathetic, and then someone else has a completely different view. (Interview with Curator 6)

Working with local communities and at the same time trying as much as possible to respect visitors’ beliefs can sometimes be problematic, especially in the case of exhibitions that attempt to compare different religions. Of course, a museum is more about science and not about, let us say, for religion, but for me, I think it would be interesting to merge things a little bit, but, of course, we must be very careful, and this is also a sensitive question. . . . we are going to mix items from different religions and put them in the exhibition in a thematic way, so we can have, for example, rosaries from different religions and we are putting them together. . . . this is also the kind of politics we have chosen to show that religions share things; they are not just separate things; of course, they are separate but also share things. . . . There are two rooms which are displaying the Christian history in Finland and some visitors have been complaining about that . . . sometimes when school children and kindergarten groups are coming to workshops, some families, they are not many, but I remember some cases of kids’ Christian families wanted to know in advance that, for example, Hinduism, it is not taught to our child, so when we had an exhibition about a particular village in Rajasthan . . . and we had a workshop, storytelling workshops with kindergarten groups about Krishna, the story of Krishna, then there were few parents very concerned that not anything about Hindu gods, they did not want anything about Hindu gods being told to their children. . . . These are faithful Christian cases, I think, that every other religion is conceived as pagan for them, so for them, it was a kind of sin or bad thing to call a Hindu god with the name god, because they do not consider Krishna as a god. . . . Well, religion-as-such is very difficult to define. For example, Buddhism, there is no God. Basically, it is an atheistic doctrine, but, of course, how people practise it is a very religious way or religious-like activity, but if there is a god and the religion is atheistic it has to

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do with, it has a meaning and some atheistic trends, they act like in a religious way, so it is not going to be things in the exhibition, but it has to be mentioned because it is a thing it can be compared to more religious religions and many atheistic groups, shall I say, they are so much against religions that their all activity resembles a religion, so we give the audience to the idea of comparing these things. (Interview with Curator 5)

Curators’ ambiguity towards and sophisticated understandings of the relationship between museums and temples are maintained in storage precautions. The ICOM Code of Ethics itself includes a specific reflection on religious artefacts and the conservatory practices associated with them: Collections of human remains and material of sacred significance should be acquired only if they can be housed securely and cared for respectfully. This must be accomplished in a manner consistent with professional standards and the interests and beliefs of members of the community, ethnic or religious groups from which the objects originated, where these are known. (ICOM 2017, 10)

Some of the interviewees confirm that their storage activities are religiously informed in order that the sensitivity of local communities can be respected: In terms of what we are doing in the stores . . . particularly the Buddhist figures, Buddhist statues . . . we placed them in the order that they would be placed on a monastic shrine and, so, the hierarchy of sacredness is maintained, so the Buddha goes on the top shelf, the bodhisattva would go on a shelf down from that and . . . the peaceful and powerful protectors would go again in their respective shelf levels. (Interview with Emma Martin)

If we reflect for a moment on curatorial practices towards Indian storytelling scrolls, we can see that the passage of the scrolls from a ritual to a museum context entails new meanings that intertwine with the standard depiction of objects’ biographies. As already discussed in this book, the par. is considered a religious shrine and temple and is treated with all the care due to a sacred object. The par., then, is given away only on the premise that it is treated with religious respect. In particular, it must not be damaged – cutting it is sacrilegious – and it must be kept in a clean, ‘purified’ space. The bhopa cleans the par. with extreme care before its installation in a specific place. For instance, the scholar must not sew a damaged par.. Instead, the bhopa would sew in a purified context, removing his shoes and taking other necessary actions. In a certain sense, then, the owner of the par. (for instance a museum curator or gallery owner) might partially assume the function of the bhopa. According to one scholar I interviewed (Scholar 1), bhopas perceive museums as suitable places for the par.s. However, the lack of complete certainty around the correct use of the par. makes the bhopa carry out a series of ritual procedures, which are

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similar to those adopted when selling a camel to a purchaser who is external to the community. A museum can be considered a place, I am not saying sacred, but destined to gather specific artworks. Probably, the guarantees that purchasers gave to the bards were to put the par. in a place which is worthy of the scroll. Clearly, it is the task of the purchaser, because you can give all the possible guarantees, but, once you are at home, you can cut the scroll, you can treat it without the promised respect. As a Raika cannot conceive the killing of an animal and, nevertheless, sells his animals. Due to the fact that they have passed from the camels’ breeding, even if there is somebody who eats camel’s meat, to that of sheep and cows, they are perfectly aware of the fact that the male cattle, they do not sell female one, which they sell goes to the slaughterhouse, then how do they sort out this problem? By making a sacrifice. They do a pūjā every time they sell a cow. They do pūjā in the evening, and they light a sacred fire where they pour down gee, clarified butter, millet’s seeds, and every element which constitute a bloodless sacrifice. . . . the bloodless sacrifice is transformed into a symbolic sacrifice by putting a piercing in the animal’s ear. When the latter is dead, it is buried with a ritual, and it is believed it belongs now to the deity. . . . In a similar way, the par. is sold with the awareness that it will be put in a respectful place. If the par. is not sold, it is thrown away in the sacred lake or buried or burnt in a sacred fire during a pūjā. . . . It is rare the fact that the par. is sold. (Interview with Scholar 1)

Another interviewed scholar (Scholar 2) reported that bhopas perceive museum practices as being respectful even when they are not religiously informed, inasmuch as they are aimed at research and study, and are thereby not serving selfish needs. The bhopas’ tolerance, however, has some limits: nonbelievers must act according to the usual code of good manners. Therefore, par.s must in all cases be collected and exhibited in suitable spaces and in a suitable manner. In a certain sense, there must be a correspondence between museums and religious sites in terms of respectful treatment that distinguishes them from individual collections. Certainly, though, respect in museums is devoid of the reverence observed in sacred spaces, and accords instead to the general rule of material artefacts’ preservation. Q: What are their opinions and reactions towards the musealization of the par.s? A: Most are unaware of it. . . . my chief informant was once shown five or six par.s laid out on the floor of a huge room in the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, to allow him to compare them. He said that ‘really’ a par. should not be treated like that, but understood utterly why we had done it. He did get a little upset on finding that one of my colleagues had a commercial par.-piece on display in his bathroom. (Written questionnaire given to Scholar 2)

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Scholarly Views Duncan (1991) and Paine (2013) are undoubtedly the authors who have most sought to understand the process through which religious artefacts enter museum spaces. Duncan, concurring with Alpers (1991, 31–32), sees museums as theatrical or structured places in which the exhibited objects experience a radical transformation: from being ordinary tools to becoming socially meaningful icons (Duncan 1991, 1–2, 95). The transformative process is sustained on the one hand by the architecture, which resembles that of ancient Greek and Roman temples, and on the other by the formulation of a particular rulebook (‘dos and don’ts’) that delimits and defines the liminality of museum spaces (ibid., 19). The very fact that the museum behaves as a liminal space, in which a form of engagement is imposed that substantially differs from what audiences experience in ordinary life, makes it analogous to a place of sacredness, where sacredness is fabricated: The root for the term sacer is *sak- or *sek denoting ‘to cut,’ ‘to set apart’ (Lat. Secare). Sacralising specific spaces presupposes a distinction between the areas of sacrum and profanum. Sacrum denotes the space that was set apart for the temple fanum or templum, the root being *tem- ‘to cut’. The area outside the sacrum was pro-fanum (Lat. Pro ‘in front of,’ ‘outside of ’). The area of the fanum was area sacra that was consecrated (Lat. Consecration) for ritual use and thus also protected from the impurities of everyday social life. The line of demarcation between sacrum and profanum was made inviolable by sanction that is derived from the notion of sanctus meaning a boundary or a fence. Sanctus is a supernatural sanction by which that which is sacer and which contains augustus (power) is protected from violation. Transgressing the boundary, violating the norm, is followed by punishment, poena. (Anttonen 2005, 189– 90)

Museums, then, according to Duncan, operate a double process of sacralization: on the one hand, they separate exhibited things from the ordinary world, thus subtracting them from their sensuous interaction with humans, and primarily touching. Pomian (2004) directly associates this type of sacralization with sacrifice: a thing from the sphere of utility is transformed into a semiophore, that is, a thing with a meaning that cannot be attained in the mundane world but rather recalls the invisible domain (ibid., 41). Through the negation of its mundane characteristics, the thing is transcended in its very materiality and, therefore, can be only approached from a distance in structured and protected places, such as temples, coffins and museums (ibid., 10). On the other hand, museums discipline visitors’ bodies by making them follow a specific route: ‘The situation resembles in some respects certain medieval cathedrals where pilgrims followed a structured narrative route through the interior, stopping at prescribed points for prayer or contemplation’ (Duncan 1995, 12).

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Paine (2013) further develops Duncan’s idea of the museum as a liminal space. In his comparison between the processes of museumification and sacralization, he is implicitly inspired by Kopytoff ’s biographical approach (ibid., 2). According to Paine, both processes entail a separation of the object from the sphere of exchange by bestowing uniqueness upon it. Paine, not surprisingly, accords great importance to the curators’ power of choice over museum artefacts. Curators, in Paine’s view, are considered an exoteric clergy with a piece of ‘arcane knowledge and an authority to control the access of laypeople to the “sacred things” they control’. Museum artefacts should reflect curatorial approaches because of their decontextualization, since ‘a museum robs them of their identity’ (ibid., 14). In such a schema, the objects are passively shaped by curatorial practices, on the one hand, and by visitors’ responses, not necessarily influenced by those practices, on the other (ibid., 24). Visitors – or as Davis (1997, 8) would phrase it, ‘communities of response’ – approach religious objects with two opposite views. On the one hand, some visitors, especially if they are ‘Westerners’, do not empathize with the idea that the seen things can be holy (Paine 2013, 8). This attitude is sometimes exacerbated by the alteration of the religious tenor of the objects, made by museum curators in order to preserve them as documents of cultural concepts or past eras (Branham 1994/1995, 33). On the other hand, visitors can react to museum representations, whether or not they are believers, and this causes varying degrees of conflict. In a nutshell, ‘Whenever museums attempt to recreate ritual context for sacred objects, they run the risk of encouraging insiders to perform the ritual (or at least aspects of it). The context also empowers outsiders to react’ (Hughes and Wood 2009, 32). Paine’s vision of the museum as a postsecular space in which a process of sacralization parallel to that observed in a ritual context occurs is based upon the idea that museum artefacts should reflect the human context in which they are situated. In other words, the specific sacralization triggered by museum practices excludes the co-presence of ritualistic sacralization, even in cases where local communities or minority groups illustrate religious practices to the visitors, since these demonstrations are part of an educational endeavour (Paine 2013, 37–42).

Some Material Deconstructions of Theory In reviewing these different theories after my fieldwork, I realized that scholarship rarely bases its core theories on systematic ethnographic data, thereby mistaking or missing fundamental characteristics of the museum experience. As seen in the first section of this chapter, curators are far from being soteriological specialists that have total control over the contents conveyed by material arte-

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facts, as well as over responses from visitors. Not only do they admit that they are incapable of administering the totality of material engagements performed in museums, but they also do not want to be prescriptive or to guide visitors in a directive way. They give priority to visitors’ enactment of intersubjective and subjective experiences over the curatorial transmission of information on the iconographies, usages and historical roots of artefacts. The latter is provided in any case, but the goal is more to embrace an ample spectrum of the audience rather than to present the scientific approach as the ‘right way’ to enjoy artefacts. The difference that curators see between religious and museum space has more to do with the idea that religious experience is subjective, intimate and shared with a closed group, rather than with the scholarly assumption that religious artefacts ‘die’ in museums. What curators mean by the death and drainage of artefacts is the impossibility of reconstructing a collective experience, like that of the church, in what is viewed as an eminently singularized journey. Museums cannot substitute churches or temples because of the specificity of museum experience: a unique space of reflection that can be differently shaped according to the idiosyncrasies of the individual visitor. Does what is considered a shared, negotiated and culturally codified ‘sensing’ in rituals fragment into singularities that may take autonomous decisions in conflict with social negotiations? Nor are curators immune to this, since they may opt for projects or actions that could potentially be offensive to religious communities, as seen in the interview excerpts above. Curators are therefore invested in a highly ambitious and risky endeavour. They must engage with materials in their way, designing exhibitions and provocative messages for audiences, but, at the same time, embrace a plurality of voices and responses and include these different perspectives in the exhibitive space. So far, materiality has been grasped as a knot of different perspectives. Therefore, working on the liminality of perspectives themselves is undoubtedly sensitive, and cannot satisfy their totality, despite the many efforts that museum practitioners have made towards an inclusive and respectful articulation of museum projects. As Arthur (2000, 7) points out, the irrational dimension of religion, in interpretations similar to Paine and Duncan’s, is avoided in favour of a conceptualization of it as artificial and intellectual. In this process, there is a mutual desire felt by religious and museum spaces to trace a clear demarcation between what should be a museum and what should be worship (for instance, the sign ‘THIS IS NOT A MUSEUM’ in Cologne Cathedral). This differentiation does not represent the real usage of the spaces, which is often characterized by the merging of scientific and emotional reactions. An analysis of responses, then, must count this phenomenological slippage (ibid., 11–12). In this, I follow Csordas (1990, 26) in defining the overlapping of the sacred and the profane as an embodied experience. This experience varies according to

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cultural-historical contexts, as well as personal subjectivities. In James’ words, ‘Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine’ ( James 1925, 31). In other words, we assume the concept of the sacred not from a theological or philological point of view, but rather ‘to grasp how experiences of the transcendental are invoked in the here and now and underpin individual and collective identities. In this sense, my approach to the transcendental is resolutely down to earth’ (Meyer 2008, 705–6). In such a way, material artefacts and humans in museums are observed in their performative intersections and reciprocal influences, rather than limiting the analysis of exhibited religious artefacts to a genealogy of them as ‘particular works of art’ (Faure 1998, 777–78, 787). The next chapter will reflect upon three different museum installations in an attempt to account for the fluid dynamics of religious materiality in museum settings.

CHAPTER 3

P

Manipulating Sacred Force Scrolls and Copies

This chapter presents four case studies: three temporary exhibitions and one permanent display. These can be considered the first ‘impact’ on curatorial practices that I had when I started fieldwork. In particular, they represent my attempt to navigate how collectors and curators rework storytelling scrolls. I wish to offer readers different ways in which divine force is manipulated in the exhibitive space. Beyond the insertion of religious artefacts into a didactic-semiotic communication, there are, in fact, more ways through which to deal with sacredness. On the one hand, curators deem that a re-enactment of what one can phenomenologically experience in ritual should guide not only the displaying techniques but also visitors’ engagement. On the other, religious power must undergo a process of museumification or aestheticization. Curators, in certain circumstances, negotiate the public view of materiality in combination with the concerns of religious communities towards the danger of an uncontrolled force.

Magie Dall’India: Between Old and New Museology The exhibition ‘Magie Dall’India’ in Treviso, Italy was created by a well-known gallery owner and art collector and a university scholar, both based in Milan. The creators were guided by their own personal categories regarding how a collection or various collections should be displayed. These categories are a mixture of abstract thinking and material re-enactment. In other words, the material determinations subjectively experienced were mentally re-elaborated to imagine theoretically driven and sustained future actions. In this mentalcum-phenomenological ideation, the anthropological stance of the scholar conflicted with the antiquarian gaze of the collector.

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The elaboration of an exhibition requires many confrontations. My colleague is a scholar . . . [and] has a little bit of an abstract approach to culture, to art and the art representations in an exhibition. In contrast, I, because of my work, because of all the exhibitions I created, and I have seen, have a much more pragmatic perspective. Besides, [the colleague] wanted to join several elements, for instance, putting a necklace, a piece of jewellery together with a statue, a miniature and a textile. To be frank, I did not like this approach, as I have a more rigid, rigorous perspective, as an antiquarian. The artwork can be contextualized, but it cannot be polluted by objects of thousands of years of difference. Otherwise, we have an anthropological exhibition. (Interview with the art collector; my emphasis)1

The radically different backgrounds of the two curators influenced the nature of the exhibition, which can be understood as divided into two central curatorial attempts: on the one hand, the scholar offered a contextualization of Indian aesthetic experience according to classical concepts developed by Indologists. On the other hand, the antiquarian delineated an artistic genealogy and emphasized the aesthetic details of each artefact. The exhibition consisted of four exhibitive spaces. The first one was an introduction to the different Indian religions, with a particular focus on Hinduism, as the scholar was interested in showing the symbolism hidden inside art objects and chose Hindu sculptures with this precise purpose. The exhibition opened with a statue of Ganeś. Putting this magnificent sculpture at the entrance of the gallery revealed the high aesthetic premises, as well as the focus on iconographic and abstract concepts. The second section, which was about the body’s eroticism, highlighted the interconnection between plastic features and Indian aesthetics. In particular, the concept of rasa was introduced to the visitor. Rasa means an emotion (bhava) experienced as idealized in an impersonal way (Chaudhury 1965, 145). The theory of rasa was born in a fifth-century treatise on theatre and dance, the Bharata Muni’s Natyashastra, where the emotions of the audience, resulting from seeing performing actors, are explored. Later, classical literary critics employed this theory, which, in the medieval ages, was applied to religious experience (Woodman 2005, 206). Rasa means to extract the immaterial and most beautiful, the essence of a concrete object, but also a pleasant condition experienced by the soul (ananda). The pleasure of an artwork is compared to that of tasting: rasika is the one who tastes, rasakanta is the artwork. In the singular form, rasa refers to the internal act of pleasure; in the plural, it means the emotive conditions which constitute the art piece (Goswamy 1991, 71). Because of the well-orchestrated usage of light and background colours, I was tempted to contemplate the voluptuous forms of the sculptures aesthetically. The materiality of carved volumes evoked in me a sense of complacency towards carnal beauty. I thereby had the impression that rasa had been partly

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readapted to a sensuous appreciation that is not necessarily connected with the philosophical contents and aims of rasa itself. If complacency and pleasant feelings are part of rasa, it is also true that the exhibition did not include other sensuous elements – such as music – that could evoke rasa’s performative features, thus reducing it to sight only. The third section abandoned for a while the interconnection between art and sign for the aesthetic and, at the same time, antiquarian view of the Marahajas’ art court, and then for addressing Italian exoticization of India. This was accomplished through a historical reconstruction of the different phases of Italian knowledge about India as the ‘Other’. In my understanding, the aesthetic dimension of rasa was completed by Italian fascination for Indian materiality. The visitor could reflect on our ambiguity towards the Other. On the one hand, we understand ‘her context’, and on the other, the unknown and the ‘wondrous’ fascinate us. I will return to this point more extensively in the following chapter. The fourth exhibitive space was introduced by two par.s, chosen by the curators as the joining link between the first three sections. In fact, not only were the par.s conceptualized by the two curators as part of the courtesan environment of the Maharajas, but also as Pābūjī’s manifestations. Thus they hid a symbolic and religious content as well. Par.s were therefore used as semantic interfaces that could reveal to the visitor the curators’ general idea of them as spatially and materially structured in the galleries. It is interesting to note the fact that the two par.s were the only artefacts in the exhibition that belonged to the gallery owner and art collector. His words elucidated both the criteria for the choice of the two scrolls and the circumstances of their acquisition. For what concerns me, one time, I assisted in the first run of the so-called desert festival. It must have been in the 1980s, near Jaipur, where several artists and musicians from the local tradition were invited, since the festival was a very local event, before an increase of its touristic features, despite its aim to spread knowledge throughout Rajasthan. On that occasion, a family of storytellers were invited. I know Pābūjī’s story from Stella Kramrisch’s book, which had been published some years before. . . . Then, as soon as I realized that the festival was making Pābūjī performances, I participated with even greater interest, and I took photos of that performance. It was realized by a traditional family of bards, of storytellers. However, at the same time it was made within a context which was not properly that of a local village, where it usually happens, so that performance was a middle way. After this event, in my extensive travels in Rajasthan, I was able to acquire some of these scrolls, one of which is exhibited . . . It is ancient, as far as the end of the scroll is partly damaged. The other one is much more recent, and it is complete because I needed to understand which differences might exist with the elder scroll. . . . these things were purchased from a local producer who made the transaction between the purchaser, the salesperson and the local world. I think that these par.s were bought. Well, the recent one has been made

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based on the developing tourist market. The other one has been sold because the storyteller must have ceased her profession unless I guess it was not a full time activity. (Interview with the art collector)

In line with what I have observed in the last chapter, the collector-curator gave me a retrospective narration of his phenomenological encounter with par.s performances. This sensorial meeting, recreated and perhaps mentally or imaginatively re-enacted at that moment during the narration, had been anticipated by an intellectual curiosity, which was materially sustained by the pages and pictures of a book. It had been, however, the performance itself that had triggered the curator’s collecting thirst, directing his attraction towards an artistic understanding of different styles and schools. In a similar vein to what I observed in the temporary exhibition, there was, in the curator’s words, a balance between material attraction to the aesthetic forms of religious artefacts and a sharpening of the scientific-cum-antiquarian aesthetic gaze, as a subsequent phase of the material encounter with ritual contents.

A Museological Incursion in the Museum der Kulturen of Basel The Museum der Kulturen (Museum of Cultures) in Basel started in the mid-nineteenth century as a mixture of ethnographic and natural history museum. In the twentieth century, due to its director, Alfred Bühler, the primary focus of the museum was textiles. The museum has four par.s, collected as part of the textile collection. Instead of considering their ritual-religious functions, Bühler emphasized the ‘material substance’ of them, thereby creating an assemblage of ‘Asian textiles’ with various usages. Three of the par.s dated from the mid-nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century; two of them were bought by Alfred Bühler in 1964, one from a family of bhopas belonging to the nomadic Vanazara group, and the second from two bhopas from the town of Beawar (in the region of Ajmer), who lived in Ahmedabad. The third and fourth scrolls were donations from a private collector, given respectively in 1975 and 1980. Apart from this archival information, I was not able to find any studies or research conducted on these scrolls. The curator in charge of the Asian collection could not provide more understanding or contextualization. In line with the majority of the curators I encountered, she did not have Indian scrolls as her field of expertise. Our documentation of the scrolls was thus primarily based on my knowledge of the literature and our phenomenological responses to the materiality of the scrolls. In terms of curatorial practices, the Museum der Kulturen is characterized by its collaboration with local communities, which have direct access to the

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storage areas and discuss their usages and their owners’ stories with members of museum staff. Due to these types of collaborations, the curators have concentrated their efforts towards creating occasional self-reflecting exhibitions, which make clear the different interpretational strata given to the objects. Furthermore, curators adopt design strategies intended to respect local communities’ usage of and beliefs about the exhibited things. At the time of my fieldwork, there were three temporary exhibitions, one for each of the museum levels, entitled: ‘What Next? The Insurrection of Things in the Amazon’; ‘Expeditions: The World in a Suitcase’; and ‘Make Up: Shaped for Life?’ For this book, I focus on the first two exhibitions, since they directly interrogated me on the usages of religious artefacts in museum settings and on the colonial encounter, a fundamental aspect of my reflection that the next chapter will develop. The first exhibition ‘addresses the relationship between museum holdings and historical events in the Amazon region’ (Museum der Kulturen 2014, 1). The majority of the museum’s acquisitions of Amazonian material coincided with the development of a high-impact politics of settlement in the Amazon by the Brazilian government, which led to significant cultural and social changes in the local communities (ibid.). The main corpus of the artefacts displayed derives from the collecting of the Swiss anthropologist Franz Caspar, who undertook fieldwork in the 1940s among the Tuparí (ibid., 21), and of the anthropologists Harald Schultz and Vilma Chiara, who spent time among the Waurá during the 1960s. In this last case, their fieldwork was the first study on the Waurá with worldwide coverage (ibid., 5–6). The third wave of collecting came from the Brazilian anthropologist Vera Penteado Coelho in the 2000s, among the Waurá, who subsequently asked the museum to return their objects. The decision taken was to donate the collection to the museum at the University of Saõ Paulo. In addition, in 2006, a delegation of Waurá visited the collection of Harald Schultz and Vilma Chiara in order to express the importance of their living cultural patrimony (Museum der Kulturen 2014, 5). The exchange resulted in a video installation in the exhibition, which compared the contemporary environment of the artefacts and documented a visit by some members of the community to the storage spaces in which they explained the meaning and use of the objects. As a result of these dynamics between the Waurá and the curators, on the one hand some objects had been repatriated to Brazilian museums. In order to highlight this process of restitution as part and parcel of the exhibition design, written tags replaced the repatriated artefacts. On the other hand, according to the community some other objects should not have been exposed, such as some drums which must not be touched by women; in this way, the Waurá’s reflections were shared within the exhibitive space. Another strategy in line with respecting the Waurá’s material culture was the acquisition of some ritual

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masks which were not completed by the sculptor, with the precise purpose of being given to the museum. The incompleteness of the carving process – with the ritual inscription of sacred force in the masks – blocked any possible transmission and translation of sacredness from Amazonia to Switzerland, thereby protecting both Waurá and curators from the danger represented by ‘wasted sacredness’. In other words, the museumification of ritual masks would coincide with the impossibility of directing the sacred force to positive interventions into Waurá society: materially blocked, this divine force would escape from human ritual control, thereby menacing the stability of society. According to this logic, other masks displayed in the Basel exhibition had been copies made exclusively for museum purposes. On a wall in the room, there were some pictures drawn by school pupils on the theme of the deforestation of the Amazon. They also appeared to me to represent the children’s reading and interpretation of Amazonian objects within museum spaces. For instance, there was a drawing of several masks displayed inside a repetitive frame, reminiscent of museum cabinets. In a certain sense, I thought, while looking around the exhibition room, children’s and Waurá’s perspectives were prismatic and complicated views of the ritual masks. The masks potentially contain supernatural and dangerous forces. At the same time, their surfaces bodily interacted with children. Masks were thus material for children’s imaginations, which was reversed in their drawings. In brief, religious materiality produced other material worlds. The second exhibition, ‘Expeditions: The World in a Suitcase’, documented the fieldwork expeditions of past curators. More specifically, the exhibition was about the cultural construction of space, precisely the curators’ space of meaning, what their eyes saw in their encounter with the ‘Other’. Another critical aspect articulated in the exhibition was the negotiation that curators had with the local inhabitants on the appropriation of some artefacts. For instance, copies of sacred pottery from Cameroon were substituted for the originals. In my view, while the exhibition on the Waurá showed the point of view of the analysed communities, this second exhibition showed the other gaze involved in the encounter, that of the museum curator or anthropologist. One installation was particularly evocative in these terms. A telescope was placed in front of a window in the room. If approached, it revealed photos taken during expeditions in Africa, which hang from a wall of the museum’s external building. The telescope was similar to a cage, along with the exhibitive space, in which drawings and short descriptions, probably from the museum’s database, were placed in order to form a large rectangular pattern. What I could mentally articulate was that the colonial past was reinterpreted as one of the core elements of the museum as ‘contact zone’ (Clifford 1997). The visitor’s bodily engagement with the things exhibited in the galleries should bring a reflection on the cultural encounter of Basel curators with

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other cultures. The exhibition itself thus became a meta-operation through which to reflect upon museum curatorial practices towards local communities’ forms of engagement with material artefacts. In both the two temporary exhibitions, the materiality of the exhibited artefacts spurred the visitors to reflect upon the peculiar nature of an ethnographic museum. In particular, the museum crafts compromise between the ‘Western’ craving for understanding the ‘Other’ and the respect for her ontology as translated into artisanal reproductions. In this sense, the two exhibitions best conveyed the idea of the museum as an organism in continuous development and interaction with the outer world. Its walls, rather than being hermeneutic barriers, are semipermeable membranes. They allow for an osmotic interaction between different actors: visitors, curators and local communities influence each other, thus creating hybrid artefacts used by each actor for their construction of meaning and self-identity. As I immediately jotted down in my field notes, the telescope could summarize, in my imagination, this osmotic relationship. I was looking at a projection made by the current curators on the museum’s past collectors and explorers. It seemed to me that the curators wanted to warn the audience against taking ethnographic descriptions from books and displays without referring to the dialogic exchange of gazes between the Self and the Other. What our phenomenological preconceptions and illusions would draw as ‘exemplars’ of the Other’s material culture were in reality compromises between an exotic fascination together with a craving for possession and a resistance posed by the Other against the invasion of the Self. Photographs and artefacts – copies and incomplete works – condense the conflictual interplay between appropriation and resistance. Our knowledge of the Other contain traces of how we react to phenomenologically new realities and how the latter become parts of our biographical narrations. This dynamic is potentially reproducible ad infinitum: museum artefacts absorb what current curators imagine, and what I imagine, about that colonial encounter and what we see right now in those things on display. What we have is a plurality of perspectives. Retrospectively, reading the different levels of my writing again brings to the fore the similarities between the narration of the Italian art collector with these two Swiss exhibitions. The museologist, in my view, must include these phenomenological narrations as the principal triggers for a poetic of the museum space within her research.

The Musée du Quai Branly The Musée du Quai Branly is the result of a work of design and re-elaboration of previous ethnological collections, mainly from the Musée de l’Homme and

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the Musée des Arts Africaines et Oceanians.2 The latter of these started as the Museum of Colonies and was created in the 1930s in connection with the public exhibition in Parc Saint Vincent. It became the Musée des Arts Africaines et Oceanians in 1962, and the Asian collection of the previous Museum of Colonies was sent to the Musée de l’Homme. The Asian collection of the Musée de l’Homme mostly contains objects from French ex-colonies, then principally from South East Asia. In addition, it received several objects from the Musée Guimet3 that were labelled as not being artistically worthy, inasmuch as the Musée Guimet focused more on the artistic rather than ethnographic properties of the objects. The heterogeneity of provenance of the original collections renders a detailed cataloguing difficult. As the curator, who also helped me in the storage room, did not have Indian storytelling scrolls and folk paintings as areas of expertise, I had to rely on the online catalogue and additional information provided by the database created for museum staff. Among the one hundred and fifty Indian scrolls, I selected: three Mithila paintings (for me the most significant4 in terms of religious representations); three jadu patuas’ scrolls (a jom pat, a Binti pat ou Santali Janma, or ‘The Birth of the Santals’ World’, and a series of chaksudan pats); three patuas’ scrolls (Satyapir pat, Manasa pat and a pat on the history of Indian Independence); and a kavad. While Katherine Dass donated the Mithila paintings, dating from the twentieth century, all the other artefacts I examined originally came from the Musée de l’Homme. All the patua and jadu-patua scrolls were sold to the museum by Jean-Baptiste Faivre (1951–84),5 while the kavad was acquired during the mission of Jacques Millot (1897–1980), who bought it in Udaipur in 1961, and came from the Basi village, of the Bhil minority (Kavadia Bhats, Rajasthan). The shape is inspired by the temple of Benares (Arapurna). Although the database reports the artists’ names, as well as those of the purchasers, I was not able to find any other information related to the artefacts, such as the circumstances of their realization and acquisition. While the kavad was described in detail, in the section of ‘usage’ of each scroll, there is continuity with the gallery labels. The curator of the Musée du Quai Branly, when introducing the permanent collection, told me about the problems of design and the logistical and practical availability of the objects. Since the cabinets – designed by a famous French architect, Jean Nouvel – cannot be changed due to artistic property rights, they do not fit with some pieces of the collections. Furthermore, because of the large number of textiles and pictures on paper, the permanent exhibition must be rotated periodically in order to prevent light damage, which is very likely to occur since light is massively used for ‘scenographic’ reasons. On the last day of my stay, my visit to the other sections of the museum confirmed the scenographic effect of the exhibition, which is sometimes even more spectacular in the case of Oceanian and African pieces. In these cases, altar and shrine reconstruc-

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tions, and a scanty use of light in the case of funerary puppets and objects, emphasize a sense of wonder. In addition, a corridor that resembles a desert sand dune and connects each section, as well as the park outside the museum, tries to give an exotic allure. The public, especially school classes, are more attracted by the display of the objects than by the contents; therefore, they perceive the spectacular renditions of the museum objects. The ritualistic and religious dimensions of the objects are described in an informative way, and their spectacular or evocative aspects are highlighted. A folk reading explains the concept of darśan: Krishna/Radha et les vachères (Nathadwara, Rajasthan, Première moitié du 20e siècle, peinture sur toile de coton) – Le jeune Krishna suscite chez les villageoises un sentiment amoureux qui est en fait le désir de liberation de l’âme individuelle par son union au divin. Le regard du dieu (darsana) est purifiant et bénéfique pour ses fidèles. Ici, comme souvent dans l’art indien, les yeux jouent un role central.6

Before analysing the rest of the exhibition, it is highly important for the aims of this book to focus on this representation of darśan, inasmuch as it illuminates curatorial strategies for dealing with religious artefacts in particular, and ‘non-Western’ ones more generally. In the contemporary museum context, by starting with the premise that the means of apprehending is the body, the aesthetic attachment to objects, understood as visual appreciation, is considered the first form of knowledge which visitors experience in front of the cabinets. Interestingly, the curator has used the expression ‘ethnocentric’ in order to explain that the audience cannot be familiar with technical terminologies. To be more specific, curators should begin from their bodies and create exhibitions as if visitors discover things entirely anew without being guided by an explanation on the objects’ original context of usage. Without a phenomenological framework, terminologies discriminate and exclude, an operation that is contrary to the pedagogic goals of a museum. Vision, as an allegedly universal experience, reduces the differences in social and cultural background, and exhibitions must be shaped accordingly in order to render museum spaces and narratives accessible to every kind of audience. Darśan, due to its link with a phenomenological appraisal or experience, is used as a valuable source of empathy established between the visitors and Indian artefacts. we have to be ethnocentric, because we are indigenous people too. We have many schools here, we are the second museum for young audience, school audience, I try to talk to the wider audience as much as possible and I am sure that twelveyear-old kids do not care . . . about the context, but to my opinion it is easier and more interesting to begin from the object and to do the experience of the eye of the visitor and it is very relevant, especially for Indian arts, because of the, you know, the darśan is just the first sensitive experience of the object, you do not have to know all

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the Puranas or read some Sanskrit to know what is the darśan and what the visitors want to see in the image and what they see first. I try to explain some concepts and just to explain how to see and what is interesting to see in this object. . . . it is very easy to say nothing about an object and just to have some Sanskrit words and do not say anything else, it is easier to show the objects. I do not like this, just because, not because, not only because it does not give any information about the object for the main audience and it is, because . . . For me, when I visit some museum, I do not know anything about Italian paintings from Renaissance, for example, and when I see a text like this which says, yes, some words in Italian, Latin words just to explain, ‘Yes, a nice contrapposto’, I do not know, it really means I do not have anything to do in this museum, it means, yes, it is not for you and it is a kind of violence, it is just . . . It is closed the museum, it is public and our function is to open the museum, not to close for specialist audience, you know, I really hate that very much. (Interview with the curator of the Musée du Quai Branly; my emphasis)

For the above reasons, darśan has started to be a curatorial guideline for realizing exhibitions. The attempt to make visitors experience phenomena and concepts, instead of using scientific jargon, would also respect how darśan is usually mediated by the spatial dispositions of material, sacred embodiments. The curator believes that by doing so, the display can produce the best phenomenological results as possible. A reconstruction of the temple setting is, therefore, viewed as a fundamental instrument for transforming visitors’ sensorium and, in this way, morphing their museum understanding. This aspect, we will see, was a constant element of the curatorial strategies I observed during fieldwork. I did a complete exhibition about this [darśan], but not in this museum . . . and we focused on the use of objects, fixed temple sculptures in the iconographic program and mobile sculptures, bronzes. We try to display just as an experience for the public, just to see different parts of the body, the breath, prajñā, the eyes and to see in a special order, just to go around the lingam and, after that, we tried to explain that mobile images can go outside the temple and can move outside the temple with the chariots and, after that, the god, who is inside the house, with the domestic altars. . . . I am aware of the way we display, the relations between the objects, especially the height. . . . I cannot put something at the head of the Buddha, which can be very bad for Buddhists. I try to put the Buddha higher than the other things or even Hindu divinities. I know that the distance and the height are very important and I think we should be aware of this, just because the objects are better seen if put in context and, for example, if you see Buddha like this, you do not see as it should be . . . . It is made to be seen in this way, even in an aesthetic point of view it is better to respect this use or hierarchy between objects. (Interview with the curator of the Musée du Quai Branly; my emphasis)

The ritual dimension of the Asian section is evident in Nepali ritual lamps and masks, Tibetan objects and the video installation on Theravada Buddhism.7 Here, a ritual scene, performed in honour of a Buddha statue, is shown, and

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even in the area dedicated to music, where the four continents are united. Here a film of ritual temple song in the Kathmandu valley is shown. The video installation, with snapshots of the ritual, remarks on the supernatural dimension of the context by zooming in on deity masks, temples and goddesses’ pictures. The three Santhal scrolls,8 the only examples I encountered of exhibited scrolls within permanent galleries, are located in a little nook of the Asian section of the museum. While the other sections (Africa, Oceania and the Americas) are organized either according to ethnological concepts (such as the rites of initiation in the African sector) or geographical units, the Asian section is subdivided into socio-structural frames (for instance, women’s clothes). The curator said to me that this organization resembles an old-fashioned ethnological encyclopaedia,9 and, in some ways, this is true. The Indian cabinets break this logical display because they are not related to a main label or title. The visitor can easily understand, however, that the common traits shared by the Santhal scrolls, ritual bronzes and other South Asian artefacts are the performative and ritualistic usages of these objects. From my point of view, the ritualistic feature of the display is apparent in the Andra Pradesh shadow puppets in the niche. Along with two video installations which reproduce the performances, one about the patuas and the other one about the shadow puppets, there are also shadow puppets from the Syrian theatre Khayâl l-dhill, used during Ramadhan. However, their position is peripheral compared to those from Andra Pradesh. In the case of the patuas, the video presents the scrolls’ realization and performance. The installation concerning the shadow puppets is a French-subtitled synthesis of the Ramayana in correspondence with the puppets dancing on the screen.10 For the three scroll paintings, there is no label translated into English, and thus their aesthetic dimension is more emphasized for non-speakers of French. The distinction between the Santhal tribe and the other patuas is blurred, since the scrolls, clearly made by jadu-patuas, are not directly identified with Santhal mythology despite an explanatory label – even though the title of the stories depicted should recall the Santhal world to the careful visitor. In addition, it is not clearly stated that the jadu-patuas are not Santhals. The fact that the scrolls are considered tools mediating between the living and the dead worlds is also briefly explained in the video, and we can find the same confusion between patuas and jadu-patuas.

Indian Art between Soteriology and Aesthetic Theories: The Rietberg Museum across Time The founder of the Rietberg Museum in Zurich and donator of its leading collections, the German Baron Heduard von der Heydt, was hugely influenced

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by Schopenhauer’s concept of Asian art (Illner 2013). Inspired by Buddhism, Schopenhauer believed that aesthetic contemplation would lead the viewer to archetypal and universal ideas. Aestheticism thereby depersonalizes the seer’s phenomenological act of seeing and introduces her to a universal world or experience (cf. Atwell 1996 with Doss-Davezac 1996). In von der Heydt’s view, then, ‘non-Western’ material culture would demonstrate the universality of aesthetics and art, as well as its spiritual mission. This view was echoed by the thoughts and reflections of one of the most generous contributors to the museum’s Indian painting collection, the ItalianSwiss painter Alice Boner (1889–1981). According to Boner, the art objects should reveal a symbol which transcends reality and connects it with ‘cosmic forces’ (Boner 1949, 43), hence the emotional and ecstatic reaction of the seer, who is in contact with these supernatural forces and feels blessed by them. Boner’s diaries, written from the 1940s to the 1960s, give persuasive examples of her conception of aesthetic contemplation, as in this excerpt: While my servants were talking to the Brahmins, I rushed upstairs into the big hall, took off my shoes and, stepping into the hall which was in dim twilight, I perceived the Shiva-Lingam deep in the recess of the central shrine almost coming forward to meet me . . . I was overwhelmed with such unspeakable emotion that I started crying . . . I felt as I was in the arms of a loving father . . . I now understood meaning of the Lingam as a symbol of the very Heart of things and as the innermost pillar of the universe, as the anchoring pole of every human heart. (Boner et al. 1993, 97)

Furthermore, she described how one day she had experienced a vivid vision of herself building a temple with shrines and images of different deities, and had had the final intuition to use the technique of mosaic. She declared that she had experienced the same feeling of joy when she had seen, for the first time, the mosaics in Rome, Naples and Ravenna (Boner et al. 1993, 118). The overwhelming experience of Indian art inspired in Boner the delineation of a new kind of aesthetics, where ‘non-Western’ art became a tool of meditation. it was a spiritual experience these sculptures gave me comparable only to what one could get in deep meditation, and this had a powerful influence upon my further life. In order to understand their meaning and significance I start to plunge myself into the sacred scriptures of Indian tradition. In course of time, however, not only their mystic or metaphysical content, but also their form-display began to exert my mind, and I started to feel the urge to probe into the secret of the extraordinary fascination they held for me. . . . In a moment, which I still vividly remember, I realized that there was a thing that was much, much deeper than the story they offered to the eye.11

Boner’s new conceptualization of aesthetics has informed current curatorial practices in the Rietberg Museum, both in its permanent galleries and in

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temporary exhibitions. Each section of the former attempts to make the visitor understand the different aesthetic approaches of ‘non-Western’ culture, while maintaining an elitist and contemplative tone. The following passage condenses this logic very clearly: In former times it was widely believed in the West that the creators of African sculptures were unknown and that therefore their work could not be judged by the categories of western art. Today we are better informed: from the region of southwest Nigeria, many Yoruba sculptors of the early 19th century are known by their full names. . . . Yoruba sculptors had two main aims. On the one hand, sculpture should make visible consciousness of form (oju ona). Each work has to mature into an artwork in artistic freedom and originality. On the other hand, an ‘inner eye’, a creative force (oju inu) is expected, one which lends an object rhythm and harmony. (Rietberg Museum n.d., 18)

As can be seen, Yoruba sculpting practices are translated into an artistic framework. This attempts to give voice to a nameless material collected in colonial times and, at the same time, reflects an allegedly universal soteriological vein in art creation. As regards the South Asian collections in the museum, the curators’ aesthetic approach to objects has led to extreme care in delineating the artistic lineage of the Indian paintings, particularly Pahari paintings, by focusing on ‘few families’ of ‘high-quality paintings’.12 In particular, curators analyse the registers of these families’ workshops to identify the development of a particular style or use of colour. In terms of museum installations, this aesthetic view is reflected in the fact that the medieval Indian miniatures are displayed in frames within easy reach of visitors, so that they can best be viewed. On the other hand, this peculiar aesthetic approach of the museum intersects with a soteriological form of engagement with material artefacts, especially in the case of the dancing Shiva Nataraja, one of the few examples of consecrated icons in European museums. Not only did the curators tell me that museum space was sometimes used for the demonstrative performance of rituals, but the museum guide itself includes an invocation to the statue, thereby changing the overall tone of the leaflet: Hymn to Shiva ‘If one may see his arched eyebrows The gentle smile upon his lips Of kovai red His matted locks of reddish hue The milk white ash upon his coral formulates If one may but see The beauty of his lifted foot

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Of golden glow The indeed one would wish For human birth upon this earth’ Appar, 7th century ‘. . . His matted locks spread, fanwise, wide with the speed of the fearsome dance and the serpent, glossy, with lines on their bodies slipping down to his waist. Clad in the skin of the awesome tiger and of the pachyderm he dances on, in wild abandon with goblins accompanying’ Sambadhar, 7th century (Rietberg Museum n.d., 28–29)

In January 2014, during my fieldwork, the museum opened the exhibition ‘Himmels Zelt für die Göttlin’. It was based on the temple cloths (chandarvos), which depict mostly local deities and are produced by the marginalized social strata of the semi-nomadic Vaghri community (from Rajasthan and Gujarat, but also Pakistan). For them, access to the orthodox Hindu temple is prohibited. The textiles are therefore used like canopies or tents to demarcate sacred from other spaces, and are believed to ensure the well-being of the worshippers. The sacred functions of the cloths are thus similar to those of the Rajasthani par.s. The chandarvos were given to the museum in 2009 by Eberhard and Barbara Fisher, whose teacher Alfred Bühler was the director of the Museum der Kulturen. They were acquired by Eberhard Fisher during his stays in Gujarat in 1965–66 and 1968–71, and attest to his academic interest in textiles.13 In the exhibition, each cloth was explained by a sketch, which resembled a sort of map since only the main features of the cloth were reproduced. The labels were like architectonic layouts, identifying the main goddesses placed in the sewed temple structure of the cloth. There was, thus, an ‘infra-structural’ description of the cloth, by which the cloth was deciphered. On the last day of my fieldwork, while waiting to interview some people from the audience, I discovered that the exhibition was a massive reconstruction of a ritual canopy, not only because of the reconstruction of a shrine in the middle of the gallery but also because of the ‘cellar’ installation. The central axis of the gallery, which could be considered the main corridor, divided the exhibitive spaces into five cells, with each one resembling a shrine since the cloths were hung from each side. Two cloths, hung above the main space and at the beginning of the exhibition, reinforced the idea of a tent. I noticed that the anthropological and contextual information was given briefly on the walls of the ‘main corridor’, and I was impressed that the term ‘ritual function’ was given only at the end rather than at the beginning. On the opposite wall, a label de-

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scribed the material aspects and the production of the cloths. A second observation I made was that the information had been kept to a minimum compared to the detailed description of the ritual given in the catalogue. After two readings using the ‘map’, I could decipher the cloths on my own by using the distinctive features – for instance, a cobra meant ‘ancestors’. My previous knowledge of the Hindu pantheon and the Ramayana and Mahabharata was beneficial. Nevertheless, it was like living under the tyranny of the labels: my eyes read the labels first before then exploring the cloths. When it was not so, I often tried to grasp the ‘infrastructure’ of the cloth on my own, by finding the temples and, hence, the main goddesses. The visitors were tyrannized by the labels as well. Their eyes moved from the cloth to the map more than once. A man, whom I later interviewed, took notes and did sketches of the pictures in the cloths, as if to appropriate them and deepen his understanding by fixing the cloth patterns in his memory and hands, thus making the visit more personal. Since two visitors had entered the shrine, I timidly entered too and noticed that there was a brief explanation of the reconstruction, but in a marginal place. The music came from the inside of the shrine. In the labels, two verses of the ritual song were written, but I could not manage to figure out if the written verses corresponded to the music. Entering the shrine meant that we could admire the cloths as freely as possible without any explanation. At the beginning of the installation, a video explained the cloths’ creative phases, as well as the rituals and ceremonies in which they were used. The video was a collage of the photos from the catalogue without any anthropological explanation, along with rather brief descriptive sentences. In this part of the main corridor, the labels were concerned with the goddesses. Since these pieces of information were put at the beginning of the exhibition, the primary emphasis was not an anthropological analysis of the cloths. The introductory label reported the circumstances of the museum’s acquisition of the cloths. My impression was that of visiting a modern art exhibition. The exhibition was centred on the figure of the owner and the iconographic deciphering of the cloths. Understanding the iconography of the cloths and their aesthetic dimension of wonder and pleasure was more important than portraying the ritualistic dimension of their usage. To this end, the exhibition began with the names of the goddesses rather than the ritual use, which was put in at the end. The labels interpreted the works’ iconography, in a similar vein to the leaflets of a modern art gallery that clarify the artists’ creative processes. My idea was confirmed by the words of one of the curators: There is a different approach depending on the museum profile, before I mentioned we consider ourselves to be a museum of, an art museum, we do not refer ourselves as an anthropological or ethnological museum, so the approach is a bit different. We can also be criticized for this. If you go to the session of African art,

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you have wonderful sculptures that, you know, we talked about the artists, we talked about how they influenced European art at the beginning of the twentieth century, but not of the ritual context, it is in this way lost. You can never read on a label: ‘OK, this is a mask used or worn when people go to the fields and, you know, pray for a big crop’. So this, you know, we put things at pedestrians, give them the way, but we do not recreate the whole original environment of them, that, yes, of course, raises some question mark, but it is our point to fence. An ethnological museum would present things, or tries to present things, differently. (Interview with the Curator of the Rietberg Museum)

The curator quoted here told me that most of the paintings, which he called ‘traditional’ (mostly Mughal paintings), came from the art market and European collections. He made a distinction between paintings and sculptures. While sculptures are usually transferred from a geographical site, normally a ritual place, paintings cannot be claimed for repatriation by the Indian government, since they belong to European collections or to specific patrons, Indians and others, who passed them from hand to hand over time. Therefore, the value of Indian paintings is only aesthetic. Nevertheless, to my question about his idea of sacred art, he answered by saying that everything can be considered sacred from a particular perspective, even the paintings of Indian manuscripts, because of the concept of darśan. What we can observe is an aestheticization according to an aesthetic, philosophical canon. At the same time, curators apply a method that refers to vernacular understandings of materiality. This substantial ambiguity towards South Asian religious materiality reveals crucial conundrums at the heart of museums. * * * We have seen so far that the current curatorial formation and level of expertise impedes an extensive representation of scrolls in museums. Curators do not go beyond a phenomenological fascination with the scrolls’ fabric and performativity. In general, there is scant information on the circumstances of collecting that could complicate both visitors’ and current curators’ perceptions towards the artefacts. Despite curators’ lack of understanding of storytelling scrolls, however, their phenomenological engagement with religious force has produced sophisticated strategies and conceptualizations, as could be seen at the Museum der Kulturen towards Waurá’s artifacts. The exhibition in Treviso has highlighted how South Asian aesthetic and phenomenological concepts such as rasa are translated into curators’ sensuous fascination towards religious artefacts. The circumstances of collecting bear witness to curators’ attraction towards South Asian materiality and how they have appropriated it. Curators manipulate South Asian artefacts according to their way of relating to materiality – in this case, the art collectors’ genealogical understanding of the scrolls’ styles.

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In the case of the Musée du Quai Branly, darśan is emphasized as the primary way through which visitors, or more generally, humans, should access South Asian material artefacts. The reconstructions of temple scenes are a way through which to include the whole variety of audiences and to intuitively give them the embodied understanding of rituals that they could obtain by visiting a temple. A phenomenological understanding of darśan is justified by visitors’ (and curators’) positionality in their cultural milieu: it is an ‘ethnocentric’ need. If we look at the curators and past collectors of the Rietberg Museum, we see that they have emptied South Asian materiality of its vernacular values and phenomenological interactions. However, their aesthetic approaches have reflected a sensuous engagement with South Asian religious artefacts. As we shall see, this necessity has roots in colonial times. South Asian artefacts are enacted by curators in continuity with colonial collectors and museum specialists, as in the Rietberg Museum, or in opposition to them, as will be apparent in Chapter 5. In the next chapter, I will interrogate colonial sources to make sense of this inheritance, as well as the curatorial implications of the colonial encounter, and the necessity of recreating or stimulating a phenomenological experience within museum galleries.

Notes 1. This interview was conducted in Italian and translated into English afterwards. 2. For further information on the history of the museum, see De L’Estoile (2007). See also the critiques on the foundation of the museum and its process of aesthetization in Clifford (2007), Dias (2008), Jolly (2011), Lebovics (2006), and Levitz (2006). For readers with fluency in Italian, Valentina Lusini (2004) has written an in-depth reconstruction of the political circumstances of the museum’s establishment and its anthropological repercussions within the exhibitive spaces. 3. The collections of the Musée Guimet originally came from the Louvre (from the interview with the curator). 4. Namely, these were a kohbar ghar, or the auspicious decoration of the marriage room; a painting of ten goddesses; and a representation of Ardhanarishvara. 5. ‘The first persons who are known to have lived among the Jādopatiās for some time are Jean-Baptiste Faivre and his friend Utpal Chakrobarty. Faivre was an artist and Chakrobarty is an art historian. From December 1978 until March 1979 they did fieldwork on the Jādopatiās in the region of Santal Parganas (Bihar)’ (Hadders 2001, 24). 6. ‘Krishna/Radha and the milkmaids (Krishna/Radha and the cowherd, Nathadwara, Rajasthan, early mid-twentieth century, painting on cotton cloth). The young Krishna arouses in the village’s female inhabitants a feeling of love, which is the desire for freeing the individual soul via its union with the divine. The deity’s gazing (darshana) is purifying and beneficial for its worshippers. Here, as is frequent in Indian art, the eyes play a central role’ (from a label of the museum, my translation). 7. L’Hommage à la statue du Bouddha.

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8. Rouleau peint, ‘La fête de Baha’ (Rampado Chitrakar, India, Bihar, twentieth century); Rouleau peint ‘Le royaume de Yama’ (Lankeshwar Chitrakar, India, Bihar, twentieth century; Rouleau peint ‘La déesse Kali’ (Nabahani Chitrakar, India, Bihar, twentieth century). 9. In the interview, he specified that this mental schema referred to the French branch of ethnological thought (e.g. Lévi-Strauss). 10. I suppose this is not a real performance filmed in India, but rather a recreation. 11. Archives consulted during my fieldwork in January 2014, Alice Boner’s personal archives, Rietberg Museum, Zurich. 12. These are expressions used by one of the curators during our interview. 13. As was written in a label.

CHAPTER 4

P

Material Engagements in the Colony Legacies and Changes in Perspective

Between Encyclopedia and Material Engagement: Proto-Museums and Modern Collecting Researching colonial displays and collections essentially brings to the table a Modern way of representing the Other, as well as a sharp conflict within European practices related to human engagement with materiality, as Latour has implicitly argued in On The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010) and We Have Never Been Modern (1993). According to Latour, in European thought since the beginning of the Modern Era, Nature is equivalent to everything that is not human, and is considered as a ‘radical transcendence’. Natural and social forces do not speak for themselves, and the only actor in the social and political scene is the human (Latour 1993, 32). In other words, there is a fundamental opposition between the thing (which must become an object of knowledge), and the human, the only entity allegedly governed by rationality. Modernity is thus a historical process by which human and nonhuman (‘objects’1 and animals) become separate entities, negating the hybridism and the conjunction between them. Everything that questions this separation between the human and the nonhuman is labelled as fetish through a strict process of distinction from what is, on the contrary, rational. Latour terms this process a ‘work of purification’ (ibid., 14). Latour here brings into consideration the double meaning of the Portuguese word feitiço, from which the notion of fetish has historically developed. Feitiço derives from the Portuguese past participle feito, which as a noun means a shape or a configuration, and as an adjective, artificial, fabricated or enchanted (Latour 2010, 2–3; see also Jackson 1998, 76–77). The enchantment is precisely aroused by the inherent demiurgic power attributed to the act of making and doing (Latour 2010, 2–3). Things thus seem to have an independent life

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from their creators once they are ‘come into being’, as argued by Gell in The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology (2006). By polemically using the terminology of fetish, then, Latour wants to highlight the fact that Moderns do not accept other cultural systems in which what is naturally shaped – what morphs – and what is shaped by humans overlap, as part of the sensuous engagement of perceptual experience. What they do, instead, is render rationality and thoughts disconnected from cognition and perception and, therefore, consider them to be self-evident facts. Museums are usually associated with Latour’s ‘work of purification’: religious artefacts, once displayed in galleries or kept in storage rooms, no longer interact, from a phenomenological point of view, with human beings. Their sensuous and metamorphic nature is ‘stripped’ or ‘cleansed away’ to represent scientific or cultural notions within a learning environment, that of the museum. Religious things can also morph into aesthetically pleasing works, to be admired in a detached experience with the aim of grasping universal truth without fulfilling specific purposes, in what the aesthetic theory of the German Enlightenment would name ‘art-as-such’ (Abrams 1985, 27). This scholarly framework or perspective, under Kopytoff ’s biographical approach, usually leads to analysis of museums as ‘cemeteries’ of artefacts (Ingold and Hallam 2014). These considerations of museums implicitly forge a dichotomy between two different phenomenological regimes: a senseless or abstract ‘West’ and a sensuous, engaging and disruptive ‘non-West’ or ‘East’. Visitors’ mystical or religious practices in museums would thus be explained as belonging in a more or less intense form to a ‘non-Western’ or ‘non-detached’ approach to religious material. For instance, Berns (2015) explains the multiple effects of religious materiality arising in galleries from different religious beliefs towards sacred power. A Protestant would not react in the same way as a Catholic towards the material embodiment of a saint. Berns’ analysis, although precious, misses the sheer, prismatic complexity of materiality and material engagement. Considering Islam as aniconic and anti-materialist, for example, does not help in understanding why Muslim visitors experience emotive and embodied responses while looking at ‘Hindu idols’ in the galleries of the Lahore Museum (Bhatti 2012). In addition, accounts like those of Constance Classen (2007), in which Wunderkammern collectors or Victorian museum curators and archaeologists tasted, smelt, touched or scratched displayed artefacts, do not conform to a vision of a ‘West’ that is phenomenologically detached and ‘rational’. In her research of primary sources, Classen has forcefully shown how single material artefacts, during the Modern Era, were inserted within a performative event held by the collector or patron. The latter often played the role of ‘animator’ of materiality by bodily activating or enhancing an artefact’s sensuous properties with music or scents for guests’

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enjoyment. This phenomenon of bodily re-enactment and performativity was not isolated to the world of paintings and sculptures, but rather included ‘curios’, namely artefacts collected in colonized or explored territories along with natural specimens that would stimulate scientific curiosity or wonder. Wunderkammern have a certain ambiguous status between encyclopedicaesthetic classifications of materiality and ‘material knowledge’ (see later in this section). Their legacy must therefore be taken into account, not only for the persistence of precise technology of display but also as a corpus to which and upon which current curators respond or reflect. For instance, in the example of the Rietberg Museum, examined in the previous chapter, curators consciously reproduce, in their curatorial projects, a specific mystical and aesthetic approach as formulated by previous collectors. On the one hand, re-enactments within and visits to Wunderkammern were part of a specific form of erudition rooted within Classical and Christian metaphysics and ontologies of nature. According to the Aristotelian Great Chain of Being and Plato’s insights, the creative entity would become transient in the manifest world according to a hierarchical concatenation: the perfection of Being would be gradually diluted on reaching the bottom of the chain, occupied by ‘imperfect’ entities. With the advent of Christianity, beauty incarnated an almighty and godly perfection from which all other beings and forms of nature derive, whereas ugliness defined the objects of God’s wrath (Park and Daston 1981). In the eighteenth century, the notion of progress further enriched this classification of nature: a living being can ascend through the hierarchy and reach, by evolutionary and moral means, the Perfect Being (Mitter 1977, 209). From the Middle Ages onwards, artefactual and natural collections were concentrations of godly manifestations. Wunderkammern were substantially books that needed to be interpreted with the help of the sacred scriptures: the analysis of artefacts traced the manifestations of the Perfect Being within what could be viewed as a spiritual, meditative journey. the Flemish artist is . . . one of the most comprehensive images of Italy as the site of collection . . . . One of four panels depicting the four continents, Europe is represented specifically by an image of Rome. In the center stands the collector (in contrast to the images of the other three continents, which are peopled only to fulfil their ethnographic intent). Displaying a frame of butterflies, he is surrounded by the objects he has assembled: objects of leisure such as the backgammon board . . . ; objects of curiosity such as the mandrake and monsters revealed behind a partially drawn curtain in the left corner, the insects arranged close to the ceiling, and the shells spilling out onto the floor; and objects of power, signified by the quantity of armour . . . removed from the context of battle, and the papal tiara and sceptre, lain discreetly on the table at which Roma sits, holding a cornucopia upright. Only two books are prominently displayed: Pliny’s Natural History and the Bible.

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In the background, the shadowy images of classicized female figures, set within their niches, alert us that the collector and his entourage inhabit the temple of the Muses. (Findlen 1994, 44)

This mystical appraisal of the world was further sharpened with the advent of the modern conception of vision, strictly connected with the scientific method (Guha-Thakurta 2004, 12). In modern sight, reality was fixed into an immovable picture from which the gaze could apprehend properties and extrapolate universal truths represented by material surfaces. Viewing was thus a learning process. Musaeum, collections and Wunderkammern were ‘epistemological structures’ that combined monastic contemplation and a humanistscientific analysis of the world (Findlen 1994, 49, 60). On the other hand, medieval and modern collectors offered visitors a ‘retelling’ (Martin 2014, 146) of their ‘material knowledge’. This term was coined by Emma Martin (2015, 58; cf. with 2017, 180, 186 onwards) in her study on Charles Bell’s (1870–1945) Tibetan collection, and must be understood within the encounter between the colonizer and the colonized, which is primarily considered as a sensuous engagement. ‘Material knowledge’ meant scrutinizing material things given by or taken from the colonized and being trained in their visual-aesthetic value and functional-contextual uses – thus, for instance, learning the criteria for judging a jade sculpture as the ‘finest work’. As seen in the theoretical and methodological pages of this book, being in touch and interacting with a material artefact entails embodying or living as a certain being-in-the-world. ‘Material knowledge’ coincided with progressive incorporation of the Other’s ‘way of being’. On the one hand, incorporating the Others meant a reification and, consequently, reproducibility of their beings, with a subsequent unbalanced subjugation and control of the same. It was also undoubtedly true that the ontogenetic and phenomenological ‘training’ entailed a metamorphosis towards the Other, reached through an intersubjective dialectic with the colonized and, at the same time, a relativization of the colonizer’s Self. The former, by instructing the latter, crucially had an instrument for exerting resistance against dominion and reification, as well as delivering specific ideas against preconceptions through material means (Martin 2019). For instance, the diplomatic exchange of letters between the Dalai Lama and the British Officers of British India was substituted by the gift of a white ceremonial scarf, the khatak (Martin 2015, 58–59). In other words, the diplomatic encounter between the two countries was inserted within a Tibetan way of communicating hierarchic relationships and power imbalance, demanding that British officers follow Tibetan etiquette, thereby going beyond their cultural comfort zone. Material knowledge is, therefore, intrinsically political and shows the subtle intertwining of phenomenological and historical ‘dynamics’.

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The embodied responses of colonial collectors were subsequently englobed within their mysticism and theorizations. They thus progressively transfigured the phenomenological regime of the colonized. On the one hand, this phenomenon rightly coincides with Orientalism and the expression of colonial dominion. On the other, it reminds us of the inescapable material interaction with religious artefacts. Even in current museum practices in the Rietberg Museum, the world-art perspective cannot elide phenomenological experiences. In my understanding of Martin’s ‘material knowledge’, I am emphasizing the conflictual and dual nature of the colonizer’s embodied learning. On the one hand, it was potentially or explicitly exploitative of the colonized, and on the other, creative and disruptive, since the Self metamorphosed by means of material alterity. We can realize this doubleness of the colonizers if we examine their written accounts of their travels to India.

Melas and ‘Museum Spirit’: British Colonial Training in South Asian ‘Material Knowledge’ According to Hulme and Youngs (2002, 192), travel writing promoted British rule in India by advocating the Mughal’s political and military deficiencies. It was strongly associated with the political and economic conditions of the Indian regions and, at the same time, offered colonialist ideology tools for thinking about non-Europeans (Rossi-Reder 2002, 53).2 The scientific attitude was an attempt to demystify the traveller’s fascination with the exotic and the supernatural in order to defend the integrity of ‘Western’ epistemological identity. However, an objective and rational analysis could not be fully achieved: ‘Michael Adas points out that even the better educated European traveller and those most informed about Asian sciences were concerned primarily with religion and not with science’ (Nayar 2005, 216). The marvellous thus found a theological explanation. In particular, Indian excesses were attributed to moral deficiency (ibid., 217–18). According to Nayar (2005, 214, 216), English travel accounts were an ambivalent combination of scientific rationality and belief in the supernatural; thus, this literary genre can also be called ‘scientific marvellous’, and was particularly frequent in the case of female writers. According to the introduction of Graham’s travel account of India, curiosities and that which ‘is interesting to a contemplative spectator’ were generally underexamined by the majority of ‘Western’, ‘well-educated individuals’ (Graham 1812, iii), who were absorbed with their affairs as soldiers, colonial officers or traders. While the first handbooks and manuscripts focused on a painstaking categorization and cataloguing of India, some works proposed alternative ways by which to represent Indian material culture (Guha-Thakurta 2004, Prakash

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1999). If we compare Indian Museums, written by Colonel Thomas Hendley (1914), and Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, During Fourand-Twenty Years Residence in the East: With Revelations of Life in the Zenāna (1850), by the Welsh traveller Fanny Parks, there is a common understanding of the mimetic concatenation or circularity between heterogeneous realms in South Asian fairs or mela.3 The vast array of material displays, for religious and non-religious purposes, made melas prolific places for training in local phenomenological regimes. They also challenge the colonizer’s preconceptions and fears towards the colonized. As Bhatti insightfully argues: Any object, be it cloth or utensil, is slowly exposed in a successive display process that is anticipated by the customer, who hopes to see the full variety of form/ style and eventually the best, latest, and ultimately, the unique piece, which the shop keepers hold back on purpose. . . . To a certain extent, this commodity revelation represents a corpothetic spectacle that combines visual display with a sensory affectivity and delight that allow imagination/discourse around the object with a view to ownership. (Bhatti 2012, 216–17)

Melas are the intersection between recreational sites and religious festivities: they are used by locals as a way of sustaining religious proselytism, as well as attracting the attention of the masses to miraculous or wondrous events. Each religious community or affiliate can use the space of the mela to exhibit their religion by building temporary shrines or organizing storytelling performances centred around religious episodes taken from the scriptures. a Jain banker of Ajmere exhibited [in a mela in Jaipur] his ideas of the birth of the first Jain lord of Tirthankar, and of the heaven from which he had descended, in the form of gilt and painted brass models . . . The seth, or banker, informed us that he pitied the ignorance of his co-religionists and was therefore moved as an act of piety to instruct them. For this reason he had caused so many models to be made for which he had built a special hall in Ajmere, in which they may now be seen. They were first shown in Jaipur, where most of them were made in the great hall of the Museum. The banker was so impressed with the value and reality of his own conception of heaven and of Adjudhya (the city in which Rakabnath, the Jain lord or pontiff, was born), that he was found one day scattering leaves of roses and other flowers, and even small seed pearls and minute precious stones, as well as bruised spices about the models in order to increase the effect on visitors, through the sense of smell as well as of sight, and because similar precious articles were showered down from heaven when the infant saint was born on earth. (Hendley 1914, 39–40)

Hendley defines South Asian visual interactions as ‘museum spirit’ (1914, 34). The museum’s emphasis on the visitors’ contemplation of selected items facilitates the worship of the charismatic aura of things, in a similar vein to what experienced in melas. In contrast with museums, though, Indian vernacu-

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lar displays appeal to a bodily and emotive experience in the viewer. The latter, as already mentioned, is metamorphically transformed by her vicinity or engagement with materiality. Significantly, these displays, and subsequently colonial museums, were locally identified as ‘houses of wonder’ or ‘houses of magic’, where the occasional visitor’s visual stimulation led to a religious absorption (cf. Guha-Thakurta 2004, Elliott 2006 and Bhatti 2012): The Churchman thought that in this way the minds of the people might be drawn to church, and coming out of curiosity, they might remain to pray. . . . This is undoubtedly true in the East, where a museum is popularly styled an Jaigarh [Hendley’s emphasis], or House of Wonders, and its principal attractions are known as tufachiz or tuhfajat (that is rarities or curiosities), both Arabic words, which perhaps even in India point to the origin of museums. (Hendley 1914, 33–34)

As a visitor to a giant, open-air Wunderkammer, Parks scrutinizes every corner of what she sees, stopping at each place and trying to sketch a descriptive label of each element. Instead of searching for a full understanding of the socalled ‘native’s point of view’, she is informed by ‘Western’ aesthetics. For instance, she adorns her neck with a pink coral and values it as fine, even though red coral is esteemed more highly by Indians (Parks 1850, 254). Indian viewing, with its search for occasions at which to display political prestige, intersects with this type of ‘Western’ gaze4 and is organized according to a proto-museum structure: The custom of making niches in the walls of a treasury, in the shape of the vessels of value, in which they could be placed, and thus easily missed if removed, is said to have arisen in Persia, and was common in India, though in later years only the remembrance of it has been preserved by paintings on the walls of buildings. The more valuable arms are now displayed in almirahs or wall cupboards or in table cases. In the Jaipur Armoury, for example, many beautiful specimens of damascened or inlaid daggers, swords, guns, etc., are now kept in such cases, and these are occasionally shown to privileged visitors. . . . the general public in India do see most of the treasures which belong to the Indian chiefs and nobles, because, on ceremonial occasions (which are very frequent), jewellery and rich dresses are worn in great variety, and arms are displayed and always attract attention and comment. (Hendley 1914, 39)

If melas led Hendley to investigate Indian ways of approaching material things and learning, Parks’s preconceived thirst for the monstrous and the exceptional was limitlessly exaggerated. One man whom I saw this day at the Melāwas was remarkably picturesque, and attracted my admiration. He was a religious mendicant, a disciple of Shivu˘. In stature he was short, and dreadfully lean, almost a skeleton. His long black hair,

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matted with cow-dung, was twisted like a turban round his head, a filthy ju˘ta. On his forehead three horizontal lines were drawn with ashes, and a circlet beneath them marked in red sanders his sectarial mark. If possible, they obtain the ashes from the hearth on which a consecrated fire has been lighted. His left arm he had held erect so long that the skin and flesh had withered, and clung round the bones most frightfully; the nails of the hand which had been kept immoveably clenched, had pierced through the palm, and grew out at the back of the hand like the long claws of a bird of prey. His horrible and skeleton-like arm was encircled by a twisted stick, the stem, perhaps, of a thick creeper, the end of which was cut into the shape of the head of the cobra de capello, with its hood displayed, and the twisted withy looked like the body of the reptile wreathed around his horrible arm. His only garment, the skin of a tiger, thrown over his shoulders, and a bit of rag and rope at his waist. He was of a dirty-white or dirtyashen colour from mud and paint; perhaps in imitation of Shivuu˘, who, when he appeared on earth as a naked mendicant of an ashy colour, was recognized as Mahadēo the great god. (Parks 1850, 256–57)

In contrast to Parks, Hendley carefully reported vernacular ‘material knowledge’, and attempted to sketch the structure of a museum in India more respondent to local visitors. However, in defining Indian attraction to magic as the result of a ‘mediæval mind’, he was driven by a positivist approach, characterized by the confinement of the non-scientific to the realm of the superstitious (Hendley 1914, 39). We can safely assume, then, that his museum proposal reflected the logic of instructing the ‘natives’. In other words, stimulating the Indian imagination is regarded as a tool through which to educate the South Asian masses, as in the case in medieval cathedrals, where the visual representations of Biblical scenes were used as forms of education for the illiterate: I am convinced that a museum in the East which ignores the display of curios, or which neglects ‘attractions,’ will not – at the present stage of education – satisfy the requirements of the public. What is urgently needed is to stimulate the imagination of the people, but a purely scientific or formal arrangement of exhibits can never succeed in effecting this great end. The mosques in India, as well as temples, do not neglect the custom which was so common in European cathedrals and churches, or go back still further to the religious shrines of Greece and Rome, in which curiosities in the form of votive offerings were displayed and Murray mentions, as an example, ostrich eggs. . . . Temples in India contain many jewels and much rich clothing among their treasures, but these articles are usually only displayed upon the images and not in the treasury itself. It is by the sculpture on the outer walls of their shrines that the priests attract attention, and through the eye teach the myths on which the exoteric part of their religion is based and made popular. (Hendley 1914, 34; quoted in Bhatti 2012, 189)

While considering the hybridization of Parks and Hendley’s phenomenological regimes, we must be aware of the fact that ‘Western’ attendance at In-

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dian fairs was part of the logic of colonial power. The colonial bazaar, to which the mela is often compared, was, in fact, a mythical trope of the exotic and the premodern, to which the colonial imagination and colonial literature referred in order to offer a familiar, and thus reassuring, portrait of the colonizer (Hoffenberg 2001, 230). More importantly, guided tours and written accounts, sketches, photographs and reconstructions are ‘material re-tellings’ (Martin 2014, 145) through which to permanently freeze the colonized in an atemporal space that can be controlled and subjugated. In this way, the collected ‘curios’ become part of the colony’s ‘imagined ecumene’ for the consumption of the colonizer (Breckenridge 1989). Therefore, I disagree with Bhatti’s (2012) estimation of Hendley’s work as pioneering in its understanding of vernacular material religion within museum spaces. On the contrary, my reading of Hendley’s words does not forget his political and positivist aims. If we return to Parks’s Wanderings, we can see that the author has the clear goal of presenting a list of curios to the reader, who could potentially become a visitor to Parks’s altar, which she herself calls ‘the museum’. Together with this spirit of a whimsical collector, proper to the medieval and Renaissance Wunderkammer (Leask 2002, 30), Wanderings of a Pilgrim seeks to recreate an esoteric atmosphere that partly emulates the local religious practices observed by Parks and partly evokes her own mystical journey in India. The connection between religious rituals and other practices (for example, that of pilgrimage) and the museum experience, as established by some religious scholars such as Paine (2013), is candidly expressed by Parks, as she often defines herself as a pilgrim: ‘a poor hājī [pilgrim] in search of the picturesque’ (Parks 1850, 240). The term ‘pilgrimage’ returns in Parks’s Grand Moving Diorama of Hindostan¯, written in 1851 to accompany and guide visitors’ experience of the threedimensional reconstruction (diorama; see Goldsworthy 2014, 9) of the banks of the river Ganges in the Asiatic Gallery of the Baker Street Bazaar, which was part of the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations in London (Parks 1850, 240). The sense of the usage of terms such as ‘pilgrimage’ and ‘pilgrim’ can be understood through two orders of things. First, the viewer – reader or visitor – must visualize and imagine India through Fanny Parks’s own body. To put it more precisely, we do not have a portrait of what Indians did, nor of Indians’ dynamics regarding religious artefacts, but we do have a faithful reconstruction of Fanny’s own dialectic with the Indian environment, or her own ontogenetic process of coming to know India. Her understanding of religious icons and her explanation of them – see, for instance, the equivalence of Buddha with the different Hindu deities (Parks 1850, 162) – is mentioned, along with, among other things, her disgust at mosquitoes, her boredom and the social life she enjoyed with other colonial aristocrats based in India. The juxtaposition of approximative ethnography with trivia should not make us merely jump to

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the conclusion of the colonial process of reification of the ‘native’ in curios and types. We must also read it as a phenomenological – in the strict sense of the term – account of her bodily experience. What Parks incites in the reader is a form of re-enactment, the same as she experienced once back in the United Kingdom. Words, things and memories constitute an intricate assemblage, but efficaciously enough to be experienced as lively. Last but not least, each element of the assemblage stands on its own and impacts on humans dwelling on the world without being a secondary result of human agency: And now the pilgrim resigns her staff and plucks the scallopshell from her hat, – her wanderings are ended – she has quitted the East, perhaps for ever; – surrounded in the quiet home of her native land by the curiosities, the monsters, and the idols that accompanied her from India, she looks around and dreams of the days that are gone. The resources she finds in her recollections, the pleasure she derives from her sketches, and the sad sea waves [Parks’s note: ‘Written at St. Leonard’s-on-Sea’], her constant companions, form for her a life independent of her own life. (Parks 1850, 496)

Parks’s altar of Ganes´, invoked in the frontispiece of Wanderings, is a clear example of a re-enactment of religious rituals. Its description can be considered a preview to the guided tour of Parks’s ‘museum’, as announced in the Diorama (Parks 1851). Careful attention to the aesthetic features of each element of the composition is intertwined with the evocation of the context of use, thus emulating the pūjā even if in a limited and non-anthropologically informed way. Religious icons are thus not merely scanned by the aesthetic gaze, but rather stimulate a sensuous engagement with their observer, who turns into a syncretic practitioner, albeit superficially: Gănésh is seated on an altar, such as is used in the mut’hs, Hindū temples, surrounded by diverse idols, sacred shells, and instruments of worship; small brass cups filled with oil, called chiragˉhs, are burned as lamps before the shrine. The worshippers pour oil and the holy water of the Ganges over the head of the god, which is thus bathed daily, and offerings of boiled rice and flowers are made at the time of prayer. The conch shell, which lies before him, is blown by the Brahmāns during the hours of pūja at different times – it is considered very holy – the priest holds it clasped in both hands, and blows into it from the top. The sound can be heard afar off, especially when on the river at the time of evening worship; it resounds from every side of the water, mingled with the ringing of the priest’s bells and the sound of a sort of brass castanet, which they strike whilst chanting forth their prayers. ... The shape of the spoon with which the rice or oil is put upon the head of the image is remarkably beautiful and antique. The top of the spoon bears the image of Ganesh, crowned by the Nāgā, or holy serpent, with a hundred heads, which are outspread, to screen him from the sun. This idol is made of solid white mar-

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ble, and weighs three hundred weight and a quarter. It is painted and gilt, as in the Frontispiece. It was brought down from Jeypur to the sacred junction of the triple rivers at Prāg, at which place it came into my possession. Although a pukka Hindū, Gan˘ésh has crossed the Kalˉā Panˉī or Black Waters, as they call the ocean, and has accompanied me to England. There he sits before me in all his Hindū state and peculiar style of beauty my inspiration my penates. O Gănésh, thou art a mighty lord! thy single tusk is beautiful, and demands the tribute of praise from the Hājī of the East. Thou art the chief of the human race; the destroyer of unclean spirits; the remover of fevers, whether daily or tertian! The pilgrim sounds thy praise; let her work be accomplished. SĀLĀM! SĀLĀM! (Parks 1850, viii–ix)

Religious icons, then, have multiple layers of meaning. First of all, Ganeś’ statue is a material thing that autonomously impacts on humans, thus constituting a peculiar form of engagement which is always in dialogue with the cultural background of each human perceiver. Second, it is the proof of cultural pillage, spatially and temporally defined, through the ‘Western’ desire to categorize and possess. Furthermore, it is a reification of the traveller’s own impressions and knowledge, to be passed to visitors or readers. As a museum artefact, Ganeś’ statue is regarded as a relic: it is the remnant of the past encounter between the collector and South Asian material culture, and a vehicle through which the visitor’s re-enactment of that experiential encounter is made possible. As Morgan (2014) would say, Parks’s museum things are ‘focal objects’: they are pivotal interfaces that shape the museum space by connecting it with the religious distribution outside its walls. More than that, museum artefacts, as assembled by collectors for the formation of reconstructions of religious spaces, emphasize and expand that distribution of the sacred. The continuity between museum and temple spaces coincides, therefore, with the very structure of the museum as a repository for collectors. The hybridity between religious and museum spaces, as well as the transformative and instructive phenomenology activated within colonial collections and museums, is particularly central in understanding contemporary curatorial practices towards Asian religious artefacts. For these reasons, we now focus our attention more extensively on colonial reconstructions of ritual settings, with the Buddhist temple created in the Penn Museum by Maxwell Sommerville (1829–1904) as an example.

Colonial Recreations: Sommerville’s Buddhist Temple in the Penn Museum I came to Maxwell Sommerville’s Buddhist temple because he, as one of the principal collectors of the Penn Museum in the nineteenth century, gathered

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fifty-six Kalighat paintings which I had the opportunity of viewing and cataloguing during fieldwork. Along with the other leading collectors of South Asian artefacts at Penn, such as Alexander Scott (1872–1925) and Gregory Possehl (1941–2011), Sommerville did not leave much information regarding the Kalighats. Therefore, I suspected that the South Asian collections were assembled as traveller’s curiosities and subsequently donated to the museum.5 In addition, the collectors’ areas of expertise usually did not coincide with South Asian studies: while Sommerville was a glyptologist – a scholar of engraved gems – Scott was primarily a tea merchant and subsequently an art amateur, whereas Possehl was an archaeologist. In contrast with the scant information about South Asian material, Sommerville’s Buddhist temple was accompanied by a meticulously written guide. It represented one of the core attractions of the newly established Penn Museum, as a conservation registrar explained to me. The building opened in 1899, the Asian section’s first exhibit was Sommerville’s temple and the other thing that were sort of being collected were artefacts from Philadelphian Chinese community, there was a lot of gaming material being collected because Stewart Culin [1858–1929], the first director, was kind of interested in games and gamings, so partially, what he was collecting, things were being collected at the world’s fairs, because a lot of times different curators couldn’t go to the countries and collecting, so it was more . . . that was an easier way to start the collecting if they couldn’t actually do excavations . . . and then a lot of times the ethnographic stuff was collected earlier on by people who had the means to travel there . . . In some cases, it wasn’t being collected necessarily by trained ethnologists who knew exactly what they were looking for or the meaning behind it, it was more salvage ethnography, where they felt that certain things were going away, so they want to get each curatorial section in the museum more everything. So each section in the museum, each curatorial section has a different history, so, to talk about the museum as a total is almost difficult to think about in terms of the different personalities and different focuses that were on the museum at different times. (Interview with the registrar of the Penn Museum, Penn University)

Sommerville’s temple, therefore, must be understood as part of the broader museum’s agenda, namely making cross-cultural comparisons between the socalled ‘great civilizations’ (Hodges 2008, 76; cf. White and Lang 2008, 97). In the case of the Asian gallery, the majority of the material was acquired between 1913 and 1926 as part of a general effort towards showing Buddhist art to the public, thereby conceptualizing Buddhism as one of the most essential elements of Asian identity (cf. Scott 1914, Winegrad 1993 and White and Lang 2008). The entire Asian gallery was realized with a spiritual outlook, especially with its Harrison Rotunda (Figure 4.1) added in 1915; ‘Unique in North America, the 90-foot high dome is one of the largest unsupported masonry domes in the

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Figure 4.1. The Harrison Rotunda of the Penn Museum. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Courtesy of the Penn Museum.

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world’ (Winegrad 1993, 60).6 The installation thus adds a sense of monumentality to the objects, most of which are already architectural pieces of temples. Sommerville’s Buddhist temple (Figure 4.3), therefore, represented on the one hand an apotheosis of the Asian gallery, thereby confirming that Asian ‘great civilization’ was identified with religion, in contrast with the others displayed. Sommerville’s goal was to present a pan-Oriental Buddhist temple in order to give an idea of a Buddhist place of worship, for teaching and educational purposes. On the other hand, though, the nature of the temple was peculiar with respect to the rest of the gallery. In fact, it was also to serve as a functioning shrine for ‘Mongolians and Buddhists’ in which ‘they may perform their accustomed acts of devotion’ (Sommerville 1904, 3). Sommerville himself usually wore the dress of a Buddhist priest (Winegrad 1993, 69), and the main photograph related to him and his temple shows him wearing these garments and holding some artefacts from the temple (Figures 4.5 and 4.6). Because of its uniqueness, the temple triggered mixed feelings, including wonder, discomfort and confusion, among the press, invited in 1899 at the inauguration of the space (ibid., 69). The temple inspired strong responses even from Buddhist visitors, thereby recalling colonial and postcolonial museum practices in South Asia (Bhatti 2012; Elliott 2006), as attested in museum chronicles:

Figure. 4.2. The Crystal Ball of the Imperial Palace in Peking. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Courtesy of the Penn Museum.

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Figure. 4.3. What remains of Sommerville’s Buddhist Temple in the Harrison Rotunda; a Thai artisan has realized the temple infrastructure. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Courtesy of the Penn Museum.

A devout Oriental who visited [the museum] was so enraptured with the Buddhist temple and the opportunity there presented for him to commune with the deities of his country that it was necessary to forcibly remove him from the building. (Philadelphia Inquirer 1903, quoted in Conn 2010, 121)

Sommerville, then, like other colonial collectors, wanted to construct a ‘real knowledge’ about Buddhism, which was characterized by bodily immersion in ritual evocations (see Hasinoff 2011, 163). This attempt is crystal clear when we examine the guide to the temple (Sommerville 1904). Like any other Buddhist temple, Sommerville’s was circumscribed, at the entrance, by temple guardians (Zuijin), to shape a sacred niche: ‘They are presumed to be constantly proclaiming: “This is a place of prayer. Leave levity behind”’ (ibid., 5–6). Realism continues with a description of the usual action of removing shoes before entering the sacred space. Sommerville perhaps wants to give suggestions to visitors about what to do when visiting the temple: ‘To be thoroughly realistic, there should be a number of sandals and shoes at the threshold, for all men entering a temple go in their stockinged feet’ (ibid., 5). In the following pages, Sommerville verbally deconstructs and reconstructs his own assemblage of Buddhist artefacts. He explains their hierarchical, as

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well as functional, order within the temple and offers a more detailed picture of the context of provenance, as a way to declare their authenticity – see, for instance, the passage on the temple towels and painted votives or emmas (Sommerville 1904, 24, 27). The virtual guided tour of the temple as depicted in the manuscript is at the same time a legitimization of Sommerville’s display as informed by local sensitivity and an excursus in Buddhist religion. The Uzumasa or Koryūji temple near Kyoto is said to have been founded A.D. 604 by Shotoku Taishi, who consecrated it to certain Buddhist images brought from Korea. Most of them were life size. It will be observed that along the wainscoting large gilded Sotobas have been placed; these bear the names, in Japanese, of those who have contributed munificently to the erection of the University Museum Buildings. On the smaller Sotobas of bamboo and other woods are written the names of prominent or celebrated dead. These latter Sotobas also convey petitions to Shotoku Taishi on behalf of the departed souls. Pictures of saints, proclamations, and other documents are likewise framed and hang on or above the wainscoting. The frames are all of Asiatic cedar. (Sommerville 1904, 13)

It is not surprising, then, that Sommerville’s guide is a motley collection of ‘ethnographic’ accounts, as part of the imaginary walk into Buddhist religious practices: The Buddhist believes that when one dies the spirit or soul lingers about the dwelling of the family seven times seven days, and then on the forty-ninth day it is supposed to leave the house. On hearing this matter spoken of among some Japanese, the author heard the daughter of Yana, a young Japanese lady, say: ‘Yes, that is really so, for I remember it was the forty-ninth day when my mother’s spirit went out of the house; of course, it lingered for years in the neighbourhood, but we supplied a stone lantern which gave it light at night.’ (Sommerville 1904, 29)

More significantly, the guide is the verbal continuation of Sommerville’s demonstrations with Buddhist robes, for the reader is invited to reconstruct in her imagination a ritual scenery, in which the meaning and functioning of each artefact composing Sommerville’s temple are explained once more. Sommerville’s particular care in choosing certain expressions and words conveys the idea not only of accurately portraying Buddhist rituals but also of transmitting the embodied feelings of worshippers’ religious experience: On commencing the ordinary service the priest, before attending to any other duty, symbolically rids the atmosphere of all bad influences and evil spirits by passing a hossu rapidly through the air, from time to time prostrating himself before Buddha, alternately rising and resuming the most devotional position known or practiced by man. . . . The priest now sits with his feet and legs doubled up under him, his head inclined in a devotional attitude. He sways his body backward and forward, reading prayers from Pali text. . . . One may ask, Why

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Figure. 4.4. Photograph of the author; the glass surface reflects the Rotunda and the researcher in a phenomenological dynamic. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Courtesy of the Penn Museum. The deity was part of Sommerville’s Buddhist Temple: ‘This statue of Fudo, one of the Myo-o (Knowledge Kings), sits in the midst of fire symbolizing invulnerability. Also known as the immovable one, he is a part of a fierce class of protective deities who form an important category in Shingon art. Often depicted holding a lasso and vajra hilted sword, the statue was secured by Maxwell Sommerville from Koyasan Temple in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan’ (Lang 2012).

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does the priest thus continually strike on the wooden drum? . . . Striking the wooden drum in a measure awakens his energies; and at the same time, by penetrating sound of each blow, the devout within a radius of three hundred yards are made aware that Buddha is being interceded for them. . . . Again your attention is called to the earnestness of these holy men during prayers. They become so absorbed that they seem not to be of the world of worshippers about them. One can observe an expression of exaltation on their countenances as they appear to come nearer and nearer to the loved deity whom they are imploring for help. At times a priest becomes so deeply engaged that he has to be called away to repose by the one who has arrived to replace him. It is a service that continues through several hours, to suit the convenience of many worshippers arriving at different times. (Sommerville 1904, 17–18, 20.

Sommerville’s catalogue, although less esoteric than Parks’s invocation to Ganeś, inevitably retains the oxymoron between reification and hybridization proper of ‘material knowledge’. It essentializes the ‘Other’ as something distinct from the historical-political circumstances of the colonial encounter but, at the same time, offers instruments for a personally transformative process to the visitor, what Bouquet and Porto call the ‘imaginative sense on objects’ (2005, 7). These reconstructions are an unstable negotiation between Heideggerian Mitsein (see Casey 2007, 35) and Derridean arkhē (Derrida 1995). Mitsein literally means being-with, and describes the participation, or circuit, of the perceiver with the perceived during perception: By asserting that perception, phenomenologically considered, is inherently participatory, we mean that perception always involves, at its most intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives. Prior to all our verbal reflections, at the level of our spontaneous, sensorial engagement with the world around us, we are all animists. (Abram 1996, 57)

Far from being a naïve form of realism, Sommerville’s Buddhist Temple, as well as Parks’ more esoteric shrine, recall the Mitsein between the perceived and the perceiver, and the difficulty of rendering it in museum spaces. Visiting temples implies an intricate system of interrelations that cannot be easily substituted by an aesthetic contemplation of material artefacts. These relationships are between the human and the nonhuman, the secular and the sacred, and the individual and the collective, as well as the phenomenological processes that question the Cartesian antinomy of mind and body. The latter engage the temple-goers by orienting their bodies towards certain practices whose execution leads to a radical transformation of their Lebenswelten, a metamorphosis that renders religious precepts and concepts operative. An intellectual and philological explanation of the latter, as part of the usual museum communication, could not make visitors understand the worshipper’s perspective of religion, as well as the way in which material artefacts shape that perspective.

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Figures 4.5 and 4.6. Maxwell Sommerville and his Buddhist Temple (in the second image, readers can see Sommerville sitting on the side of the temple with his robe). Courtesy of the Penn Museum, image no. 17463 (4.5) and 174881 (4.6).

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The museum must then enact a hybrid form of space, where a reflective analysis-cum-re-enactment of temple experience is expressed: museum artefacts interact with visitors by simulating temple experience. In my view, this type of museum communication shares affinities with play: as in play (Hamayon 2016), museum reconstructions of religious spaces are at the same time intimately connected with temple and ritual contexts and clearly distinct from them. In other words, the re-enactment of religious experience constitutes on its own a new reality, in which the internal structure of temple interactions is re-elaborated in such a way that the lay visitor can both reflect on worshippers’ engagement with religious artefacts and experiment with what it would be like if she were a temple-goer. Arkhē contains both the principle of the commencement and that of the command; thus the order originated by arkhē is simultaneously a historical, temporal succession and an expression of law (Derrida 1995, 1). In fact, arkhē directly derives from arkheion, that is, the domicile of the superior magistrates or arkhons (ibid., 2). In other words, museums reflect the imposition of collectors’ and curators’ epistemological power. However, in re-enacting both worshippers’ and collectors’ embodied experience, museums are also open to volatile, unpredictable, liminoid affordances and interpretations, stimulated by the phenomenological experience of the single visitor in its individuality (see Bouquet and Porto 2005, 18). To be more precise, along with the cultural and spiritual baggage (Berns 2017b) of visitors – which spans from their beliefs and values to their preconceptions – the encounter with materiality stimulates new imaginative circuits and feelings that are intertwined with visitors’ baggage and, therefore, generate ambiguous responses.

Concluding Remarks As a conclusion to this chapter, I argue that museum practices must be disengaged from the Latourian ‘work of purification’ and inserted within the phenomenological encounter between humans and materials. Curatorial practices must be understood, consequently, as twofold. On the one hand, curators and collectors are not immune from a subjective engagement with religious materials, which can only partially reveal the complexity of materiality without exhausting it. I do not attribute specific reactions or responses to artefacts as a reflection of a ‘cultural milieu’ or a ‘collective identity’. Instead, I want to show readers how a micro-scale analysis of phenomenological engagements can reinstate the complexity of curating, collecting and exhibiting religious things. On the other hand, curators, and to some extent collectors, put their material experiences into perspective, imagining an audience that can respond to different phenomenological logics than theirs.

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Curators and scientists are doing the same thing as the audience: engaging with the world. The main difference is that the former do not usually acknowledge their engagement as such, but instead base their research on the Cartesian divide between res cogitans and res extensa. If we paraphrase Latour, matter is mute and brute, and only humans can understand its internal logic, as the only actors with rationality. Therefore any material engagement and fusion must be banned, ‘purified’ by rationality. However, this process inherently falsifies the nature itself of the colonial encounter. By consulting the diaries of Fanny Parks and the pages of Hendley and Sommerville, we have seen an encounter between different ways of engaging with the same material artefacts by the colonizer and the colonized. Both are sensuously immersed in the world and are in touch with artefacts without intellectual mediation. They incorporate what they have experienced. By doing so, the otherness of materiality within their bodies modifies the subjects’ perceptions and adjusts them to their epistemological backgrounds. Emphasizing the prismatic and contradictory features of material knowledge means, for me, an alternative perspective on the legacies of the colonial past in museums. The case of religious artefacts, which are usually described in the ‘Western’ lexicon of magic as ‘irrational’ (see Clark 2016), is a clear example of a critical consideration of the colonial period. In her well-known chapter for the collection Exhibiting Cultures, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points out what she calls the penetrative gaze, a darker and voyeuristic side of material knowledge. In the Victorian Age, penetrating things usually coincided with a ‘convergence of moral adventure, social exploration, and sensation seeking’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991, 417). The penetrative gaze was enacted by highbrow and ‘respectable’ elements of society at the expense of the poor, the feminine, the mad, the animal and the childish, grasped as reified categories in disciplines such as psychiatry and ethnography. According to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, the penetrative gaze was, significantly, at the centre of the early museum experience. In the latter, the perceptual immersion within the ‘Other’ was evoked by the ‘excision’ of certain distinct features, which were rearranged according to a ‘poetic of detachment’ that worked via ‘environmental displays’ (ibid., 388–89). Indigenous or ‘folk’ people were forced to perform in panoramic and scenographic reconstructions of their ‘original environment’. This voyeuristic need went beyond museum walls to coincide with a particular style of travelling and wandering in search of a sense of wonder (ibid., 410), as well as with the Foucauldian panopticon as enacted in forceful detentions of ‘mad people’ or ‘criminals’. Collecting things and recreating ‘environments’, therefore, responded to a thirst for the theatrical, in which collectors and viewers could find parts of themselves. As Martin (2014, 145) has argued, displaying scenographic assemblages of things collected and ‘penetrated’, in more or less permanent ways,

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or photographing them, meant freezing the logical-historical-memory connections and sensations as established and evoked in the perceptual experience. More than that, this poetic of souvenir symbolized the Self ’s refashioning through contamination and appropriation of the Other. The Self and the collector, to put it differently, entered into a liminal or liminoid state (Crapanzano 2004, 65), where they experienced the world in ways that were not usually part of daily life and the conventional sense. I argue that the collector needs to perpetuate her imaginary transfigurations by a process of familiarization of the Other. As Bal (1994, 105) has shown, the Other must coincide with the totally-other of the Self to reproduce a satisfactory and infinite extension of the Self. In other words, not only is the Other objectified as ‘exotic’ or Orientalistic, but the Self also needs to dominate the Other. Therefore, the collectors’ incorporations of the Other’s material culture must certainly be understood within the unequal and unbalanced set of political forces proper to colonialism. However, domination was not the only aspect of material knowledge. When Emma Martin (2014) describes the meetings between Charles Bell and the Dalai Lama, Tibetan scholars and authorities, for instance, we do not have an abuse of power, but rather a dialogue in which the colonizer and the colonized exchanged their ideas and sensuous interactions with material things. The different Tibetan interlocutors substantially corrected Bell in his perceptual distortions or, I would say, perspectives, thereby allowing the ‘colonized’ to express their agency. This fuzzy and indefinite moment in which colonial judgements were framed or suspended opened up to many creative potentialities, suggesting alternative ways of talking about objects and representing or displaying them. Is this creative face of material knowledge re-elaborated by contemporary curators in their dealing with colonial collections and archives? What kind of alternative ways of seeing and manipulating materials can be suggested to current museology? It is undeniable that temple reconstructions continue to play an important role in museum communication: for instance, the high importance of Sommerville’s temple in the history of the Penn Museum is signalled by its replacement by the installation of a votive altar realized by a Thai artisan. Scholarly literature (Martin 2017; Clark 2016) has questioned the legitimization of religious reconstructions within museums as an Orientalist simplification of the power relationships between colonizer and colonized. Religion seems to be one of the ways through which historical complexity is denied to ‘non-Western culture’, by refashioning it as an exotic and ‘authentic’ culture outside time (Fabian 2014), as will be clear in Chapter 6. As Guha-Thakurta (2007) has argued, however, reconstructions of temples, altars and shrines unravel a much more complicated phenomenon, in which the secular and the sacred, as well as the categories themselves of ‘art’ and ‘religion’, are shifting and negotiated boundaries,

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expressing intersubjective and historical dynamics between the ‘West’, South Asia and Asia. Refashioning South Asian religious statues as ‘works of art’ has often been conceived of as offensive by South Asian communities, whereas religious reconstructions, even if naïve and Orientalist-fashioned, attempt to grasp local understandings and sensitivities. Furthermore, as seen above, this kind of exhibition design is a multilayered practice. It constitutes a virtual reality in which simulation and play are operating because of visitors’ understanding of worshippers’ point of view. At the same time, it could potentially extend religious experience, or conversely offer believers an opportunity to reflect upon their religious habits and creeds. In my view, it is high time that reconstructions of religious sites within museum galleries are decolonized. Rejecting them altogether as Orientalist would mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater, for both source communities and lay visitors perceive them as fundamental processes through which to deal with religious experience. What needs to be done, instead, is to offer reflexive and historical tools through which to avoid an ethnographic present (Fabian 2014) which would present religious renderings as universally true and disengaged from historical-political processes, and to prevent the reification of religious communities. Equally important is restricting material knowledge to its creative aspect, arresting, in other words, the moment of domination and the penetrative gaze that has historically condemned European and American collecting. In the following chapters, by focusing on current reconstructions of religious sites, I account for the curatorial coming to terms with the twofold nature of ‘material knowledge’.

Notes 1. I prefer the word ‘thing’ to ‘object’, as the second term emphasizes a bipolarism between a subject-actor and a passive recipient or object (see Henare et al. 2007). 2. An interesting study on the British literary representations of Indian culture during the British Empire can be found in Torri (2013). 3. In this regard, Appadurai and Breckenridge have defined mela as ‘exhibition-cum-sale’ (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1999, 408). 4. I am using this notion as employed by Casey (2007). 5. In the case of the Kalighat paintings, this might be confirmed by the fact that they are called ‘bazaar paintings’, which were sold to tourists. European travellers in Calcutta during the second half of the nineteenth century started to bring back Kalighat paintings as Indian curiosities or descriptive examples of Indian iconography, rather than as artistic work ( Jain 1999, 10). 6. Some of the objects in the Rotunda raise questions about their legacy, as their acquisition was controversial – as, for instance, in the case of two Chinese horses in porcelain, looted by a Chinese dealer, Mr C. T. Loo, who later collaborated with the Musée Guimet in Paris (Winegrad 1993, 63). The ambiguous circumstances of Loo’s activities

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are even more explicit as regards the Rotunda’s enormous Buddhist wall paintings, purchased in 1926. According to Loo, they were sold by a Buddhist prior in order to repair the temple of which he was in charge. However, in 1965 it was ascertained that the frescos were removed from a ruined fourteenth-century monastery in the Shanxi Province (ibid., 64).

CHAPTER 5

P

Reconstructing the Sacred Temples or Museum Galleries?

In this chapter, I would like to investigate with readers how the dynamics we have observed from colonial literature and Sommerville’s guidebook have evolved over time. In particular, I show how colonial collectors’ phenomenological attraction towards material artefacts has been articulated and how their ‘material knowledge’ has been used in contemporary museum practices. During my fieldwork, I realized how much the reconstructions of altars and shrines – a phenomenon that is often mentioned, by the scholarship and curators themselves, as a tangible expression of curators’ coming to terms with religious force – manifests a continuity with the colonial period. Following my method – discussing fieldwork first and seeing where it leads our thinking – I want to describe two examples of reconstructions I witnessed: on the one hand, a temporary exhibition based on copies of Hindu shrines in the Oriental Museum in Durham, and, on the other, a temporary display on Tibetan Buddhist texts in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

The Oriental Museum of the University of Durham: Simulations and Ambiguities Towards Play The Oriental Museum of the University of Durham was founded in the 1950s by Professor William Thaker (1911–1984), the director of the School of Oriental Studies and a keen promoter of establishing a teaching and research collection for the School. In 1949, the acquisition of the Northumberland Collection, consisting of Egyptian antiquities collected by the fourth Duke of Northumberland, Lord Algernon Percy (1792–1865), prompted the progressive increase of collections through donations and loans. The Oriental Museum is, therefore, the result of a progressive accumulation and stratification of already existing colonial collections, with a strong representation as regards China and ancient Egypt.

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The curator I interviewed observed that it was difficult to organize temporary exhibitions that would engage the county’s local religious communities. The challenge was that most of the museum’s collections, especially those which concern South Asia, consist of colonial specimens, such as anthropometric data and weapons. In addition, since religious artefacts are no longer part of religious ceremonies, and consequently are no longer consumed according to a specific material religion, their display in museum galleries can be interpreted by local communities as lacking respect. Therefore, the decision has been made not to put certain items behind glass: We had a discussion with the Sikh community about the fact that we have this domestic shrine which is the kind of thing that the guru, the book, sits on within your house, but, as the book is regarded as a living entity, my feeling is that it’s probably not appropriate to have it in the case. If you had the book at home then you’d wake up in the morning, and you’d present offerings, and you’d put it in bed at night and turn the lights out and so, therefore, for us to have a book within the case seems to me not terribly culturally sensitive. . . . the members of the Gurdwara we had a discussion with have come back to talk with other members of the Gurdwara about it, and there is no easy solution to things like that and images, again, a photograph, might be a better way to show how a Sikh domestic shrine should look than trying to do a thing that could potentially be uncomfortable for people which is a thing we try to avoid doing, but it is an endless problem for us because much of our collections are religious in nature and there is no right way to do it, I don’t think [pause], I think you have to accept that you are always taking things out of context, so you’ll never be able to keep everyone happy, which is the other issue . . . (Interview with the curator of the Oriental Museum)

Temporary exhibitions, therefore, have the principal aim of expanding the existing collections with new, contemporary artefacts that can be useful in terms of the social inclusion of the county’s different cultural and religious minorities. An example of this was the acquisition of seven portable shrines and a processional palanquin (Figure 5.1) that had already been exhibited in Leicester at the New Walk Museum in 2002. These are part of an itinerant project by the anthropologist and photographer Stephen Huyler. After extensive fieldwork on different religious interactions among Hindus, Jains and Sikhs in India, Huyler inaugurated an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution called ‘Puja: Elements of Hindu Devotion’ in 2000. Subsequently, the initial idea was expanded to include Jain and Sikh rituals, and currently, the exhibition, with the title ‘Meeting God: Elements of Devotion’,1 can be permanently viewed online, with a structure that is identical to the previous exhibitions and which reflects the chapters of Huyler’s (1999) monograph. Huyler’s endeavour presents interesting parallels with the colonial museum practitioners examined earlier in this book. Starting with the assumption that

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Figure 5.1. A processional palanquin at the Oriental Museum. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Image courtesy of the Oriental Museum, Durham University.

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religious icons can be viewed in India only after being adorned, as the worshipper’s contemplation is otherwise considered disrespectful (Huyler 1999, 56), Huyler wants to challenge the traditional treatment of religious icons in ‘Western’ museums. Usually, in the latter, religious artefacts are shown as beautiful pieces of art without ritual paraphernalia, such as garlands of flowers and food. In contrast, Huyler recreates religious altars and sceneries. For instance, in the first exhibition, ‘Puja’, the first gallery is organized around a Shiva linga (abstract phallic image) and Shiva’s vehicle, the bull Nandi. The linga is shown as it would appear during worship with offerings of fruits and flowers, oil lamp, containers and ladle for holy water, burners for incense and camphor, and a bell. At one side are the elaborately dressed and ornamented images of the medieval saint Sundara and his wife, Paravati, who are also shown in an adjacent photograph in their unadorned state as they would ‘normally’ be seen in an art museum. In the installation the images look as they would in a temple – nearly concealed by cloth and garlands. (Bean 1997, 30)

A documentary featuring interviews with Hindus from the Indian and South Asian diaspora in the USA was presented as part of the ‘Puja’ exhibition.2 The interviewees describe their personal relationship with the divine and the centrality of the material artefacts in guiding their religious encounters. More specifically, the assemblage of material artefacts and their composition play a preponderant role in the pu¯ja¯. Being in touch with the deities requires a series of material interdependencies, from the offering of fruits to the lighting of candles and ringing of bells. Certainly, the human organism, where the body and mind cannot easily be detected, for they are equivalent (Ingold 2000), must be included in the assemblage: without touching the religious icons and further connecting with the materials, the pu¯ja¯ cannot be possible. It is precisely the ‘temple effect’ (Davis 1997, 50) derived from this assemblage that defines the entire personal experience of the divine: ‘when you are sitting and watching it, your breath is taken away by the beauty of it all. And that’s what a religious experience is (Hema Murli).’3 The aim of the exhibition ‘Puja’ was to transmit the ‘temple effect’ to ‘Western’ visitors, in a form of re-enactment that colonial museum practitioners had already sought to trigger: museum artefacts could be touched, thus transgressing the official, unwritten rules of the museum experience. ‘Meeting Gods’ has followed ‘Puja’, with even more emphasis placed on the centrality of assemblage in museum communication. Each portable shrine is, in fact, an interactive wooden box, crafted in India, which contains a caption describing a ritual scene taken from Huyler’s fieldwork, as well as ritual paraphernalia, such as bells and little bronze statues of deities. As we have seen, dar-

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sán is characterized by its fluidity: it is debatable what can constitute a mūrtī, namely the material icon which the deity is invited to inhabit (Karapanagiotis 2013). Contemporary ethnography in India has demonstrated that every visual rendering of a deity can potentially be used as a vehicle for darsán: even comic books are considered as imbued with a divine force or teja (Gonda 1969; Tripathi 1978; Brown 1986; McLain 2009). Consequently, the fact that Huyler’s portable shrines contain photos of religious icons during pu¯ja¯ does not minimize the element of the re-enactment of ritual experience: ‘The shrines in this exhibition are recreations of some of those used in different parts of India. The transparencies at the back depict sacred images present in worship. Open the doors yourself to experience what it might be like to visit a shrine in India’ (Figure 5.2).4 Photographs, on the contrary, retain the icons’ religious power, insofar as local communities want to control their possible future usage and information flow: ‘Both the head priest (shown here) and the Maharaja had visions that this process should be allowed to be photographed so that it might be presented in this exhibition, but a request was made that its exact location not be stated’ (ibid.).

Figure 5.2. Particular of a shrine’s drawer at the Oriental Museum. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Image courtesy of the Oriental Museum, Durham University.

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In reviewing my experience of the temporary exhibition at the Oriental Museum, therefore, we must bear in mind Huyler’s heritage. In a certain sense, what I saw was the result of a subsequent rearrangement of Huyler’s assemblage – an assemblage of and within an assemblage, so to speak – that manifests its own life by becoming part of a dialogue with the other collections exhibited. The display of Huyler’s shrines was on the second floor of the museum. It focused on contemporary South Asian and Southeast Asian artefacts and their particular connection not only with the local diaspora but also with the county’s broader community. In particular, the North East Artist Network (NANE), whose works could also be admired on the first floor, contributed to this goal. Korean books and music were to be found alongside the historical collection of the Anglican missionary Cecil Richard Putt (1925–2011), as well as a Japanese Gothic lolita dress. It is telling that even contemporary artefacts were dated according to BCE/ CE notation. I found in this approach a way for the museum not to freeze the past, instead putting the past and present in dialogue. The focus remained, however, on the different religious customs and creeds; thus, along with Japanese martial arts and mangas, there were Buddhist and Shinto family altars, together with the tools used in tea ceremonies. The interactive engagement with the portable shrines reflects the general approach of the museum: to be extremely concise in terms of information and more inclined to emphasize the materiality and visual appeal of the artefacts. Chairs are available to encourage the visitor to spend time looking at museum items at a closer range. In addition, the research storage room has been situated between the exhibition on China and the Egyptian gallery, in an attempt to get the public involved in the museum’s activities. Not only can visitors watch researchers and members of museum staff at work, but they can also book appointments to view the objects in storage. The reconstructions of Hindu shrines were reinforced by several additional tools. The floor was painted with wax kolams (floor decorations) by the museum staff, and the children’s activities on this floor were centred on the reproduction of their patterns. In the corner was a Hindu tree shrine made by a Middlesbrough-based artist. A touchscreen monitor also led the curious to videos taken by the University’s Department of Music, which focused on Hindu religious songs, music and chants. The shrines were displayed in a chain in front of the shrine dedicated to Lakshmi (Figures 5.3 and 5.4). Although the South Asian community in the North East is quite small, its presence, as well as the diversity provided by the University’s students, made the museum decide to dedicate more space to South Asia and to host public events, such as the celebration of Diwali. In this case, pu¯ja¯ towards Lakshmi’s shrine was performed, and storytelling about the Ramayana was provided for

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Figure 5.3. The shrine dedicated to Lakshmi at the Oriental Museum. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Image courtesy of the Oriental Museum, Durham University.

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Figure 5.4. The shrine to Ardhanarishvara at the Oriental Museum. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Image courtesy of the Oriental Museum, Durham University.

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children, as well as space for adults to ask questions about Diwali. Along with the Lakshmi shrine, there was a small section dedicated to the Mughals and another on Indian religions, where each object defined a religious creed. Although the Oriental Museum emphasized the interactive function of the shrines, as already mentioned, during fieldwork I was able to observe a mother warning one of her daughters against touching Lakshmi’s shrine, saying that it was a sacred shrine devoted to a Hindu goddess. I too found myself in a tricky position. The deities’ images in the shrines, except in that of Lakshmi, were flanked by labels placed at their level, thus suggesting that the visitors kneel in order to read them properly (Figure 5.5). Although I correctly understood that the shrines were supposed to be touched, I did not know how to behave. I did not see any label or panel explicitly giving this permission. It was only after I talked with the curator that I opened and touched the shrines on my own (Figures 5.6 and 5.7). I experienced another ambiguous situation while observing a pile of ceramic faces on the third floor, as it was not clear if they were supposed to be touched or not. After my participant observation, the curator told me that the ceramic heads installation was created by an artist as an experiment, with the express purpose of observing whether or not visitors decided to touch the faces. What I experienced, therefore, was the structural contradiction of museums: their phenomenological re-enactment of collectors’ or curators’ experience of religious material artefacts, and the element of aesthetic reverence and detachment on the part of visitors, with the subsequent inhibition and interdiction towards the very form of engagement that they stimulate. The reconstructions were attractive to me and to the little girl, and part of us rightly perceived them as living organisms with which we could enter into dialogue and start a form of exchange. Nevertheless, there was also a powerful fear of carrying out our impulses without official permission from the museum staff. Reflecting upon fieldwork data thereafter, I noticed that this instinctual, visceral inhibition had been overcome by British Buddhist groups (see Chapter 6), who used shrines or altars in museums – usually assembled from existing pieces of the collections in storage – as meditative spaces, thereby confirming other scholars’ findings (Sullivan 2015). It is true that Buddhism is characterized by the pivotal role played by assemblages in defining Buddha’s force (cf. Bentor 2003 with Diemberger et al. 2014; see also Chapter 6 of this book), such that, as Berns (2015) would say, museums emphasize the religious aura of the artefacts displayed. The museum aura can be understood if we examine the case of the temporary exhibition ‘Buddha’s Word’ at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

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Figure 5.5. The shrine dedicated to Kali at the Oriental Museum. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Image courtesy of the Oriental Museum, Durham University.

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Figure 5.6. The shrine to Santoshi-Maa at the Oriental Museum. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Image courtesy of the Oriental Museum, Durham University

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Figure 5.7. Particular of Kali’s shrine at the Oriental Museum. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Image courtesy of the Oriental Museum, Durham University.

‘Buddha’s Word’ and the ‘Cambridge Altar’: The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge was established in 1884, even though the first deposits in the ethnographic collection occurred in 1883 and there was some difference of opinion as to where they should be placed; some said they were purely antiquarian, others said they were part of the Natural History of man and therefore should be placed in the New Museums, with the large

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collection of crania . . . (Passage from the Cambridge University Reporter, 27 November 1883, quoted in Ebin and Swallow 1984, 4)

The museum was, in fact, the union of several different collections in Cambridge colleges; the so-called displays of curiosities from the sixteenth century onwards, which showed eclectic interests spanning from natural history and classical items to ethnological specimens (Elliott and Thomas 2011, 6), as already mentioned in the previous chapter. This blurred area of interest reflected the eclectic nature of the newly born discipline of anthropology. The foremost anthropologists of the university, Haddon, Rivers and Seligman – who were also at various points curators of the museum – were first of all biologists, who applied the scientific method to the study of humankind (Ebin and Swallow 1984, 18) and, thus, took an evolutionary approach. The institutionalization of these collections as a museum was established by the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, founded in 1840, which was seeking to find a place to house its collection (Elliott and Thomas 2011, 6; Ebin and Swallow 1984, 9–10). The efforts of the society coincided, first of all, with those of the Fitzwilliam Museum, which was searching for a space for ‘a teaching collection of casts of classical sculpture’ (Elliott and Thomas 2011, 7). Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon, ex-Cambridge student and colonial governor, who was trying to present his collection on Fiji (1875–80) to the university, was the other donor (ibid.; see also Ebin and Swallow 1984, 10). The different actors involved in the foundation of the museum had different views of ethnological objects, as Sir Edmund Leach described in the foreword to Ebin and Swallow’s volume (1984, 1–2). On the one hand, the members of the antiquarian society collected and analysed the artefacts for their own sake. On the other, scholars such as Haddon and Rivers viewed the artefacts as depositories of a prehistorical past. Gregory Bateson, who made his collection of Sepik River (New Guinea) art in 1929 was almost the first of our collectors to have a clear appreciation, not only that ethnographic objects cannot be understood if they are isolated from their physical and social context but also that social institutions . . . cannot be understood if they are isolated from the material apparatus with which they are normally associated. (Leach 1984, 2)

Each collection, therefore, reflects the curatorial attitudes of the time and the collectors’ subjectivity. A good example is Paul Montague’s collection, some samples of which were exhibited during the period of my fieldwork. Paul Montague (1890–1917) was a student of zoology at the University of Cambridge who made an expedition to New Caledonia in 1913 with his friend, botanist R.H. Compton. Even though the expedition aimed to collect wild specimens, Montague soon became interested in the Kanak culture. He started an ethno-

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logical collection with a particular interest in the so-called magic stones used by the Kanak to ‘manipulate the world around them’. The ethnological collection grew, intending to document the Kanak culture before it disappeared. Indeed, at the time of his collecting, the Kanak started to be converted to Christianity, and missionaries pushed them to throw away objects related to ‘pagan’ rites. This collection had never been exposed or exhibited for a century, but Now, as part of a project called Pacific Presences: Oceanic Art and European Museums, Kanak researchers are visiting Cambridge and reconnecting objects with Montague’s notes, drawings and photographs. Their work adds new layers of interpretation and raises questions about how individuals and communities deal with loss, memory and remembrance. (Museum caption)

As in the case of the Oriental Museum, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is thus a multilayered artefact, since it results from various collections. Currently, these collections are continually reworked in order to connect local communities with visitors and reflect upon anthropological issues, such as intercultural encounter, practices of memorialization and different forms of engagement with materiality. In the words of the museum’s curators, The Museum has become a place in which the issues are energetically debated. The old stereotype of the museum implies a dusty cultural mortuary – in contrast, the art world and artefacts at MAA are very much alive. They are reinvigorated by new questions, they provoke argument and they stimulate all of us to think about the extraordinary range of past and present human experience. (Elliott and Thomas 2011, 14)

The temporary exhibition at the time of my fieldwork, ‘Buddha’s Word: The Life of Books in Tibet and Beyond’, is an example of how past collections are rearranged in such a way that materiality connects source communities’ sensitivities with visitors’ understanding of the religious experience of the former. In this case, the divine word was treated as a material object, and the exhibition tried to establish how Buddhist words are transmitted, received and worshipped. The materiality of books was enucleated from the beginning: ‘In this gallery we explore the book as an artefact, and its relationship to other works of art and technology in Tibet and throughout the Buddhist world’ (‘Buddha’s Word’, label). On the one hand, Buddhist manuscripts were connected with the diffusion of Buddhism and Buddhist religious practices in Asia. ‘Western’ aestheticism subsequently dismembered book covers from the rest of the pages for a better antiquarian contemplation of them. Furthermore, there was a will to link the production of Buddhist books with the University of Cambridge’s history, thereby offering a contextualization of how the different collections of Buddhist manuscripts have been accumulated and rearranged in Cambridge:

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In 1883 Cecil Bendall published the first catalogue of the collection of Sanskrit books in the Cambridge University Library. Many of these had been collected a decade before by Daniel Wright, a doctor living in Nepal. Bendall’s work drew on generations of orientalist scholarship and was until recently the last detailed work on the collection. . . . Beyond acquiring texts for the Library, he was interested in the materiality and the manufacture of Buddhist books. (‘Buddha’s Word’, label)

On the other hand, the exhibition explicitly sought to stress the religious efficacy of Buddhist books and the ways in which worshippers experience them. First of all, the position of the labels, under the shelves, strengthened the objects’ materiality, so that the visitor could contemplate the things displayed before reading the related information; furthermore, some items, such as a seated Buddha, were not protected by showcases. Stimulating the visitors to visually appreciate the exhibited artefacts entailed an opposite operation to that of aesthetic contemplation: visitors were invited to engage with Buddhist books as religious items, thereby with an embodied engagement. Accordingly, the exhibitive space was framed as if it were a religious site: a sacred text was stored over the entrance, blessing those entering the exhibition; this is a common element of a Tibetan Buddhist shrine, as explicitly declared by a label.5 in terms of the current exhibition Buddha’s Word, we have explicitly tried to emphasize that the artefacts on display here are not artefacts of Tibetan art, are not artefacts, you know, they are not simply books or simply sculptures, but they are sacred objects and should be engaged in that way. So entering Buddha’s Word, one passes underneath a . . . Tibetan book high above one’s head as one would in certain Tibetan shrines and, therefore, from the practitioner’s point of view gains the blessing of that book. A lot of people I know do not see that, do not experience it, but it’s there and so, in a sense, what we’re trying to do is to provide the tools but not direct people, if that makes sense. (Interview with the curator of MAA)

Surrounded by temple curtains, the exhibitive space was arranged around an altar created from the assembling of different items of the Cambridge collections, in such a way to reconstruct a Tibetan altar as usually present in Tibet; in this way, a religious space was constituted ex novo in the Museum, hence its name, the ‘Cambridge altar’. A written explanation allowed visitors to understand the criteria of the assemblage, such as the hierarchy between each religious item and, consequently, their different religious meanings and functions. We can consider the exhibition catalogue as an externalization of curators’ material engagement with Tibetan religious materiality. Curators composed the assemblage ‘Cambridge altar’ as an assemblage from their elaboration on the concept of sungten gsung rten. The latter indicates the interdependence between books, images, and relics about, and of, Śakyamuni Buddha. These material artefacts are embodiments of Buddha’s speech, mind and body, their material

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supports (rten) that render Buddha’s presence possible (cf. Diemberger et al. 2014, 47–48 with Bentor 2003). These supports compose a Tibetan Buddhist altar, in which collages and bricolages are essential conceptual metaphors for navigating the display’s structure: This altar was assembled by drawing together different pieces from the existing MAA collection following the advice of Tibetan colleagues and friends, and keeping in mind that often in Tibetan houses and temples there is a real sense of bricolage. Many different arrangements are possible, provided that a few indispensable elements are present, some guidelines of spatial organisation followed and religious affiliation respected. One frequently finds combinations of valuable and finely crafted statues with images that are more basic; highly sought-after items with special qualities or associations and other vessels or accessories that one has readily at hand. The altar in the gallery at MAA is the one that could, and should, be created for this Museum and this exhibition. (Diemberger et al. 2014, 50)

In such a way, both Tibetan altars and the Cambridge altar are the results of the interactions between different artefacts which, in turn, give shape to the religious efficacy, as well as the material embodiment, of Buddha. Scriptures are often placed on altars (choshom) next to images of deities and spiritual masters, stupas, special stones, or anything that has a particular blessing. The resulting assemblage of artefacts is referred to as kusungthugten (supports for body, speech and mind). In bringing together the three aspects of Buddha’s legacy, it is considered the most important part of a shrine. Altars can be installed in homes or temples, and are increasingly common in galleries of Tibetan art in the West. Those in houses and temples often follow a technique of bricolage assembling objects that are readily available, or appropriate, or have particular associations. Many arrangements are possible if a few essential elements are present, guidelines of spatial organisation are followed, and religious affiliation respected. Each assemblage is appropriate to its setting and its users. This altar draws together pieces from the Museum’s collection, following the advice of Tibetan colleagues and friends. (Label, ‘Buddha’s Word’; see also Diemberger et al. 2014, 50)

The Cambridge altar is, therefore, an unusual meta-museum operation. I offer readers my interpretation of the ritual assemblage as an occasional visitor; my remarks and suggestions, as precisely as those that I formulated in Chapter 3 when I talked about the telescope in the Museum der Kulturen, are the written results of my phenomenological engagement with the altar. I tried to spatially understand the connection between the altar and the rest of the exhibition, since I received two opposite stimulations. On the one hand, the exhibition seemed to be a narrative and a material decomposition of Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts, aiming to contextualize the reproduction and diffusion

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of Buddha’s sacred words. On the other, the exhibition design transmitted to me the idea that I was walking around a sacred corner that could be enjoyed by practitioners as well as by those visitors who could potentially be curious about the appearance of a Tibetan Buddhist temple. In composing this book, I realized that the dual nature of ‘Buddha’s Words’ recalls what curators often described as a hybrid space that can be found in European churches: an aesthetic and scientific curiosity accompanied by a ritual usage. In a certain sense, the altar was a way through which to show visitors the eclectic and chaotic Cambridge collections, letting the visitor imagine or fragmentarily grasp the historical dynamics and the intersections of stories and travels that generated the collections themselves. It was also true that the altar invited visitors to consider the museum artefacts as experiments through which Buddhist concepts and religious experiences were re-enacted. The main difference with respect to churches, though, is that the Cambridge altar remained a para-religious disposition: it was the will, idiosyncrasies and imagination of the visitor that could engage with the Cambridge assemblage and re-enact it – mentally or physically – as a ritual performance. My phenomenological confusion about the exhibition and my rumination were somewhat confirmed by the metalogue with the curator. The efficacy of this exhibition drew directly from the fact that not only did the Tibetan community and diaspora identify the space as a respectful display, but ‘Western’ Buddhists also perceived the exhibition as a sacred niche. In Buddha’s Word, again, there is a figure of a seated Buddha . . . from Burma and that is placed in one corner from the gallery and certainly there are regular deposits of coins and other things that can be found and in the Buddha’s uprising palm we know that has been touched occasionally. One of the challenges we had at the very beginning was that I needed to explain to the gallery attendants that that was OK, because, obviously, there is the museum orthodoxy that you should not touch objects and our main altar recreation in that gallery is vulnerable, is fragile, we can’t allow that to be a functioning altar in that sense, and partly that is why is barricaded, there’s a barrier in the way, but it was important to us to include an element of that, because one the main questions I was asked, in developing Buddha’s Word, when I was speaking with members of the public, was ‘Oh, are you a practitioner? Are you a Buddhist practitioner?’ And, of course, ‘No, I’m just a curator, I’m just a researcher’, and so it became very clear to me that our principle source community, our principle stake holders for this exhibition were not necessarily just Tibetans or just Tibetan diaspora, but also Buddhist people interested in that, so I think there is a need to, not only allude to that kind of interaction, but to provide a space for it. So, yes, in that context that’s something that was quite explicit, in other contexts, of course, there are other spaces for religious, spiritual or ritualistic interactions with museum collections in other cultural contexts, such as a Polynesian, Pacific gallery’s interaction with their Taongas and indigenous groups from North America interacting with their

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collections in specific ways and that’s something that we definitely try to support and have to support. It’s our obligation, but also much more public events like the creation of a Mexican day of death altar in a couple of weeks’ time which will be absolutely a public engagement and a sort of community-led creation of a sacred space in the apparently secular space of the museum, so, yes, we are for that. (Interview with the curator of MAA)

Concluding Remarks As we have already seen in the previous chapter, the experience is, historically speaking, at the centre of museums’ goals. There is the need for being immersed in an ‘environmental theatre’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991, 413) – namely a reconstruction or a portion of a cultural phenomenon – while, at the same time, being at a certain spatial-emotional distance in order not to ‘merge’ with the reality observed. This continuity with the past can also be found in the museum scholarship: Nooter-Roberts (1994, 77) has considered museum design as a space created for stimulating the encounter between the visitor and the material artefact, which she terms ‘performance’. Visitors enact the atmosphere of wonder and the evocation of past encounters and manipulations of artefacts. The museum space ‘contains’ their tensions, ‘the energy of the performance’ (ibid., 77). More specifically, visitors select certain features of their memories to construct a verisimilitude, a ‘credible’ narrative, to the extent that can be imagined straight away. There is, therefore, a dialectic between the present experience, visitors’ memories and traces from the ‘original context’, as well as curators’ words and design that produces an ‘intermingled present’ (Müller 1994, 21). According to Nooter-Roberts (2017, 51), the reconstructions of altars, shrines or any other sacred sites are a peculiar form of theatrical experience. For they ‘translate’ the ‘original context’ and make it transferable to bodies that have never been immersed in the cultural coordinates and habitual usages of the artefacts they see. As metamorphic and liminal devices, religious reconstructions are employed as the medium of the encounter between the curatorial staff, the audience and religious practitioners. The museum thus turns, at least temporarily, into an aggregative space, where different cultural perspectives are shared (Parker 2004). Furthermore, these different angles stratify and enrich the consumption of museum displays. On the one hand, practitioners can use the space for their religious goals. On the other, non-practitioners can experience the complex religious phenomenon from a variety of lenses (historical, anthropological, iconographical and phenomenological) within a ‘respectful’ atmosphere (Tythacott 2017, 130). Fieldwork complicates these scholarly assumptions, since curators also utilize reconstructions as a way to make sense of colonial collections, by ‘revital-

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izing’ the scant information of their circumstances of collecting, and to process their own phenomenological experience with religious artefacts within and outside museums. I agree with Durham (2015) that reconstructions are new products resulting from hybridism between different ‘sensorial settings’ where one experiences ‘fragmentary glimpses’ of religious interaction. The sacred in museums is certainly ephemeral, discontinuous and transient, not only because of visitors and their different experiential backgrounds, but also because of their heterogeneous assemblage, with components coming from different sources and being continuously manipulated in other arrangements (Berns 2016). Bouquet and Porto (2005, 7, 18, 22) have, in particular, stressed the unpredictability of museum experience and the fact that artefacts spur ‘volatile’, ‘mutable imaginative senses’ and landscapes of use. In line with these reflections, I push further the challenge to scholarship posed by research. The curator’s conscious decision to create a space of dialogue with Buddhist practitioners echoed what we have already read from the excerpts of Sommerville’s guidebook to his temple in the Penn Museum. However, the emphasis on religious engagement with, and understanding of, Tibetan and Asian material can reveal itself to be hazardous as well. Nor is it automatic that Tibetans or Buddhist practitioners have religious responses in museums, or that they view or perceive Tibetan artefacts as sacred objects. The case of the World Museum in Liverpool, discussed in the next chapter, will examine this issue.

Notes 1. The Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art:https://huntingtonarchive.org/ Exhibitions/meetingGodExhibit.php (accessed 2 May 2018). 2. This is now available online at: https://asia.si.edu/learn/india-shiva-nataraja-lord-ofthe-dance/hindu-belief/video/ (accessed 11 May 2018). 3. https://asia.si.edu/learn/india-shiva-nataraja-lord-of-the-dance/hindu-belief/video/ (accessed 23 September 2020). 4. https://huntingtonarchive.org/Exhibitions/meetingGodExhibit.php (accessed 23 September 2020). 5. ‘The current Samding Dorje Phagimo [the type of Tibetan shrine assembled in the exhibition “Buddha’s Word”], blessing a devotee with a sacred text. Books can also convey blessing on those who pass under them, and are often stored over the entrance to a shrine so that those who enter may be blessed. Visitors passed under a sacred book as they entered this gallery’ (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, museum caption).

CHAPTER 6

P

When Religious Power Is Limiting The World Museum in Liverpool

This chapter focuses on how the curators of the World Museum in Liverpool have coped with its colonial collections during different stages. What I suggest for readers is to consider permanent and temporary exhibitions as open spaces for reflecting on materiality. In other words, curatorial literary descriptions of exhibitions, as well as archival material on recent exhibitions, are a mine of information about curators coming to terms with their ‘material knowledge’ or lack thereof. The pages consulted, together with fieldwork, can open an imaginative and hypothetical area for understanding curatorial conundrums from an emic perspective. In this quasi-simulation of curators’ projects, readers are invited to imagine alternative ways of manipulating divine force in museums, thereby preparing the ground for the final discussion.

The Liverpool Museum: An Overview The Liverpool Museum, currently known as the World Museum, was the first public museum in Liverpool, established in 1853. The influential elite of the city commissioned Thomas John Moore, a member of the Zoological Society of London, to found the museum (Millard 2010). Initially, an Act of Parliament in 1852 allowed the establishment of a public library, a museum and an art gallery space in Liverpool (Tythacott 2011, 136). It was opened on the current location in 1861. With the acquisition of the goldsmith John Mayer’s collection in 1867, which was donated to the township of Liverpool, the Liverpool Museum, from being chiefly a museum of natural history, began to turn into an encyclopaedic institution (ibid.). The botanical, zoological and ethnological specimens were displayed as a natural continuation of wealthy aristocrats’ private zoos and cabinets of curiosities of that time (Millard 2010). The collections’ stratification is reflected in the current refurbishment of the museum, with two levels respectively dedicated to aquatic fauna and archaeo-

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logical artefacts. In contrast, the third level is occupied by the ‘World Cultures’ collections. The permanent exhibition in ‘World Cultures’ is introduced by a video of a local world-famous storyteller and poet, who gives his personal view on the permanent collection in rhymes, while pictures of the artefacts are moving in the background. His anticipation of the gallery space as a ‘mystical journey’ contrasts with the overall rationale of the exhibitive spaces. The permanent gallery itself represents a historical reflection on the colonial encounter and its legacies, with material culture studies scholarship as a methodological framework. Emma Martin confirmed that the artist’s interpretation of the collection does not reflect the curatorial aims, but that for reasons of funding schemes and the overall amount of money spent, his performance has not been deleted from the exhibitive space. The introductory panel to the Asian section of the collection is, indeed, focused on the realization and usage of Asian, and in particular Chinese, material artefacts. Furthermore, the panel investigates how these artefacts arrived in the ‘West’ and came to the museum in the nineteenth century. The role of Liverpool in the British Empire is thus emphasized. Most of the artefacts belonged to Liverpool families who ‘had a connection with maritime trade in Asia in the 19th century’ (World Museum, label). A space in the permanent exhibition is dedicated to the Chinese community of Liverpool, which controlled the trade with Hong Kong and Shanghai after 1834. Each cabinet is named for the ‘Western’ collector who acquired the exhibited objects. In retrospect, I have interpreted the permanent exhibition as a museum translation of what can be found in Thomas’ Entangled Objects (1991): the colonial encounter must be grasped within a complex interrelation between political alliances, cultural systems of value and hybrid appropriations of material artefacts. The ‘natives’ were not passive sources of material goods, but instead actors who strategically incorporated European guns and other items for the development of their internal politics. Museum artefacts, then, constitute liminal materials where the mutual, but distinctly culturally-politically driven inter-exchanges of values, aesthetic regimes and concepts have shaped their surfaces. Liminality was particularly clear in some Asian craft objects, realized in the seventeenth century. These are Asian interpretations of European cultural habits and imagery – for instance a statue of Saint Marie and similar items – followed by Sir Douglas Crawford’s (twentieth-century) collection, which is placed under the label ‘European images of Asia’. Instead of having a mono-directional narrative regarding European projections and fantasies on Asia, the museum thus shows visitors how the colonial meeting was the result of a relational transformation. The theme of the colonial encounter continues in the other sections, respectively dedicated to Oceania, North and South America, and Africa. In particu-

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lar, the Oceania and Africa galleries make the visitor reflect upon the concepts of ‘tribal’ or ‘primitive’ art as ‘Western’ appropriations of non-‘Western’ materiality. Both the galleries focus on how the ‘Western’ ideas of ‘tribal’ or ‘primitive’ art have developed over time: Sculptures taken from Benin by the British in 1897 were bought by European museums. In their realism and skill in casting, they were compared with the art of the European Renaissance. But this did not immediately change 19th-century ideas about West Africa as ‘primitive’ because most scholars explained these qualities as the result of Portuguese or Egyptian influence. Today, royal Edo arts are recognised as indigenous and regarded as a major world art tradition. (World Museum, label)

In the Oceania section the labels are more concerned with the impact that Oceanian art has had on the art market,1 as well as the influences on the Oceanian artistic style resulting from the encounter with the ‘West’.2 In contrast, the African section discusses the colonial legacy of some objects which are usually identified by practitioners as exempla of primitive art. For instance, Edo and Congo artefacts were deeply entrenched in the colonial politics of destruction in favour of the palm oil trade, on the one hand, and with the necessity of imposing the control of local political power, on the other. Collecting was, therefore, a result of the violent practice of dissection of local culture as an expression of colonial power. Here you can see some of the artefacts collected by Reverend John Henry Holmes. Reverend JH Holmes was not able to collect some objects because they were still considered sacred. . . . As one member of the family . . . remarked ‘If we had sold it to you and you had sent it to Beritani (Britain), our totem-ancestor would have known, been angry, and . . . we should all have died. (World Museum, label)

Accordingly, the North American section highlights through the artefacts exhibited the cultural resistance and resurgence of the Native Americans with the intention of not portraying non-‘Western’ populations as being passive in ‘Western’ hands: Native authors are named in this respect. The colonial encounter was, in fact, multilayered and must be analysed through a critical and multi-disciplinary lens, spanning from linguistics to social anthropology: In honour of these traditions, indigenous words are used to emphasise the continuing importance of languages. Native groups are also identified by the terms they choose to use for themselves. (World Museum, label)

Therefore, the final aim of the museum is to make visitors wonder about the local communities that are behind the exhibited artefacts and about how they have negotiated their agency in the colonial encounter, as a final label establishes:

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But that they [the museum objects] speak to you should be a potent reminder of the humanity you share with the men and women that made them. Kwame Anthony Appiah, 1995. (World Museum, label)

However, the gallery’s scope cannot be maintained with the same consistency for each geographic area. For colonial officers or tradespeople collected ethnographic material; therefore, information varies according to the particular roles of the purchasers. For instance, Indian cabinets, presented alongside collections from Burma and Java, have fewer objects than the Tibetan section and give less space to developing the theme of the colonial encounter. The curator explained to me that It is really a matter of pragmatics. The Tibetan collection is bigger, it has the target of the galleries to put together, it had somebody conducting research on them, and the Indian collections are really very poorly documented, so we do not know a great deal about them, which makes it very difficult to display them. In terms of ethnography, we very much rely on the context for the objects, so in terms of the Indian collections we have a lot of arms and armours which were clearly taken and looted during the British colonial period in India, but we know actually very little about the circumstances under which they were collected and, so, often we only know the region they came from, sometimes the label just says India and the documentation is so poor, we do not actually know more than that. (Interview with Emma Martin)

While my overall engagement with the permanent gallery consisted of deciphering the main narrative and scope of the curation through the artefacts selected and the captions, my ‘attentive looking’ (Alpers 1991) drastically turned into embodied confusion when I entered the Tibetan gallery. This exhibitive room aimed at showing the diffusion of Buddhism throughout Asia, but with a particular angle on Tibetan material culture. The curator who realized the display, Louise Tythacott, has claimed that the ‘apparent’ inconsistency of the room with the gallery’s narrative was done on purpose. The curator wanted to challenge the classificatory system of the Liverpool Museum. According to this system, the artefacts are subdivided into departments, such as Antiquity and Ethnology – which in their turn are differentiated into geographical areas (Tythacott 2017, 122). The focus on Buddhist religion was thus a occasion for a transdisciplinary collaboration between different areas of expertise. At the same time, a Buddhist gallery would compose a narrative that is, in certain respects, complementary to material artefacts which were previously dismembered from a coherent material corpus. What we have is a new arrangement of dismembered pieces, what Kirshenblatt-Gimblett would call ‘fragments’ (1991, 388), according to a specific narrative or perspectival grasp of artefacts. I invite readers, then, to carefully understand Tythacott’s ‘poetic of detachment’ (ibid.) and how it has been manipulated throughout time.

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The Buddhist Gallery: A Contradictory Space The gallery has been explicitly designed to reproduce a Tibetan or, more generally, ‘Himalayan’ temple. The room is surrounded by amulets, and the main entrance is flanked by two lions, as is customary in temples in East Asia. The display area, reminiscent of a Tibetan temple, was deliberately intended to be an ‘immersive and emotionally engaging’ space (Marshall 2015, 459). Enclosed by a large sloping wall, based on Himalayan architectural designs, on the outside is a row of small display cases each of which contains a single Buddhist amulet, or gau. The entrance area is flanked by a pair of bronze guardian lions – elevated on plinths and placed in glass cases, they are positioned either side as they would originally have been in a Tibetan temple. The backs of the cases in the gallery are painted burgundy and red, and the low lighting is noticeably darker than in the rest of the World Cultures gallery. Dark brown wooden beams run across the top of the space, evoking the architecture of Buddhist temples in Tibet. The environment has a soft, welcoming feel – the floor is carpeted, rather than the laminated wood in the rest of the Asia gallery. All the deity figures are elevated on plinths, and positioned to be viewed frontally, their backs obscured, as they would have been in the temples. The spatial semiotics thus reinforces the devotional context. (Tythacott 2017, 123)

Tythacott addresses attention, in particular, to two cases: on the one hand, the Mahayana case, and on the other, the Tibetan shrine case and a protective chapel for Tibetan monasteries or gönkhang. The latter is usually accessed through removing a black curtain. The arrangement of the cabinet would evoke this indirect access by creating a small room with darkened walls and low lighting (Tythacott 2017, 129). The other two shrines are the result of negotiation processes between the curatorial goals and the available material. Missionaries and merchants acquired some of the artefacts in the Tibetan collection, and some came from a junior officer of the Younghusband punitive expedition (1903–4), Sergeant J. Heaney, thereby in a context of looting and military offence. The bulk of the Tibetan section, however, is represented by artefacts acquired by Sir Charles Alfred Bell (1870–1945), political officer of Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet from 1908 to 1918, whose collection was donated to the World Museum in 1950 (Martin 2014, 103). The Mahayana case hosts five bronze statues of the Ming dynasty (seventeenth century) from the island of Putuo, in Zhejiang province, which were acquired by the Liverpool Museum after its establishment in the nineteenth century. They are, respectively, the bodhisattva Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion; Wenshu, the bodhisattva of wisdom; Puxian, the bodhisattva for meditative practice and compassion; and the protective deities Guangong, or the god of war, and Weitou, the protector of monasteries (Tythacott 2017, 23–31). The ‘Putuo Five’, as Tythacott names them, were looted by captain

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William Edie in 1840 during the Opium War, and then displayed in the Great Exhibition of London in 1851. In 1854, the German-Jewish diamond dealer Bram Hertz acquired the bronzes and offered them to the goldsmith John Mayer of Liverpool in 1856, who, in turn, displayed them in an exhibition of the Manchester Art Treasures. In 1867, as we have already seen, Mayer’s collection was donated to the town of Liverpool and then stored in the museum. Tythacott comments that the display techniques adopted in the Great Exhibition consciously reconstructed the atmosphere of a shrine. For instance, each statue was displayed according to the hierarchy of the Buddhist pantheon. The resulting ‘composition’ was surrounded by a red background. Tythacott’s design of the Mahayana display has explicitly imitated that of the Great Exhibition. The Tibetan shrine contains parts of the World Museum’s historical collections and parts of the current curatorial intervention. In particular, This ‘shrine’ was a large and imposing case enclosing a series of stepped plinths upon which Tibetan objects were placed. Its sixty-six objects were located according to their original position within a temple, and so, rather than imposing Eurocentric categorisations and Western aesthetic codes on the artefacts, it deliberately echoed the Tibetan classificatory schema. A contemporary sculpted image of the historical Buddha, commissioned from a metalworker in Nepal, was positioned centrally on the top plinth – this had been consecrated and brought into the gallery with its eyes covered in accordance with Nepalese tradition . . . I was concerned to include senses that formed part of the atmosphere of the Buddhist temple and not simply to privilege the visual. (Tythacott 2011, 213)

The cast metal Buddha on display was commissioned from a blacksmith in Nepal. However, the statue was confiscated at the border controls and the interior amulets, used for activating the divine force and thus transforming the statue into a living, supernatural character, were removed from the statue. Given the fact that Nepalese and Tibetan Buddhist communities have considered that gesture to be desacralizing and particularly disrespectful (Reedy 1991, quoted in Tythacott 2017, 127), the Buddhist practitioner who supervised Tythacott, Zara Fleming, reconsecrated the statue in London. Two thangkas are placed beyond Buddha’s statue. These are probably from Charles Bell’s collection. The thirteenth Dalai Lama, who invited Bell to Tibet in 1920–21, transmitted both religious and political messages by donating these thangkas. For instance, Martin (2014, 166–68) has interpreted one of these thangkas, now stored in the V&A, as reinforcing the spiritual and political alliance with India by iconographically referencing Shambala, a northern region of the Himalayas where Indian Buddhist teachings were preserved. In such a way, the Dalai Lama appealed to British officers’ desire to establish a political alliance between British India and Tibet, at the expense of China.

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However, the political and commercial ties are only described at the room’s exit. Thus, the special feeling in the principal room is not mitigated; it seems likely that visitors might focus more on the labels explaining the ritual functions of the objects and the general introductions to the Buddhist religion rather than the political alliances built during the colonial period. The importance played by Charles Bell in the Tibetan collection of the museum is highlighted in the entrance to the gallery, although it is not further developed in the gallery spaces: I understand that many of the objects in the collection were acquired by British Political Officers in the course of their duty in Tibet, many of whom showed great sympathy and friendship with my people. (Letter from His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama to World Museum, 1997, from a museum label)

In such a way, the artefacts’ religious functions and meanings are preponderant compared to the historical circumstances of their acquisition. As we have already seen, circumstances of acquisition are critical elements of interpretation in the rest of the ethnological collection. The exhibition designer intended to challenge the lenses usually adopted in ‘Western’ museums for approaching Tibetan religious materiality, namely their recasting of it as ‘fine arts’ and, consequently, its appreciation from an aesthetic point of view. On the contrary, the Buddhist gallery represents Tibetan phenomenological interaction with religious materiality. According to Tythacott, ‘Rather than imposing ‘Western’ museological classifications on to the objects, therefore, the shrine replicated Buddhist systems of spatial organisation’ (Tythacott 2017, 126). The ‘Buddhist systems of spatial organisation’ must be understood as part of the broader Buddhist reflection on material things: in its different geographical declinations Buddhism has developed a complicated ontology and semiotics (Rambelli 2007, 2013), according to which material artefacts are essential devices for Buddhist worshippers’ meditation and contact with sacred power (Kieschnick 2003, 3–69). In particular, material things are connected to the interrelation between the different manifestations of Buddha’s force or embodiments, firmly rooted in a philosophical system that accounts for the development of dharma in the phenomenal and ultimate world (cf. Makransky 2004 with Lusthaus 2002). It is beyond the purpose of this book to trace a detailed analysis of Buddhist ontology and phenomenology. Suffice it to say that the Tibetan approach to materiality is clearly rooted in the idea that each material thing can be associated with Buddha’s force. The hierarchical relationship among artefacts can bring a specific religious response to worshippers and Buddhist viewers. The Tibetan gallery of the World Museum reflects the Tibetan Buddhist ontological system and, at the same time, follows the ritual of consecration that allows material things to become vehicles and manifestations of Buddha’s power. British Buddhist groups are said to use the space for

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meditation, thereby confirming that this area of the museum and its design reinforces or reconsecrates Buddhist items, as well as following a general trend in the usage of museum spaces by Buddhist groups in the ‘West’ (Sullivan 2015). Nevertheless, it is understandable that Emma Martin is not satisfied with the exhibition design of the Buddhist gallery. On the one hand, she is sceptical regarding whether the audience’s meditative reaction can be effectively sustained by a merging of the sacred with the profane within the gallery. On the other hand, the fact that the historical circumstances of the Buddhist artefacts’ acquisition are sacrificed in favour of a quasi-phenomenological rendition of Tibetan Buddhism can run the risk of simplification and stereotyping of Tibetans as ‘spiritual’: the shrine is quite complicated for me to think about because I don’t think it is a very [pause]. It’s a soulless shrine, to say the least, I think. There is no sense of practice in that shrine; there are no offerings; there are no flowers; there’s no light. You have the music, of course, but that music is used for a particular charm, so a yogi’s dance ceremony and it has not actually anything to do with what you might hear in a temple space. And so, I mean, they are evocations there, it’s evocative, you’ve got the beams obviously, you’ve got the colour at the back of the shrine area, but actually, it’s a very dry representation, I think, of a shrine. And we have seen visitors using it as a meditative space, but we also have to remember that we are a museum, we are not a sacred space, even though we hold objects that were previously used in such a way. And, as I said you before, objects have these many lives when they come to the museum space, but we do respect the sacred life that they had previously and we do that in our storage spaces as well. We also have to acknowledge that we are not a sacred space per se and the more we wish to show the context with which the objects would have been used, you know, the sacred context in this particular case, those objects are no longer offered to every day, they are not prayed to every day, they are not given the rituals that activate them, that make them sacred every day, and they have become museum objects, and the more we do not want to negate, rub out, scrub out that sacred past at all, and that’s why we created the shrine, those objects also have other stories to tell that we do scrub out in order to give this spiritual perception and I find this quite difficult because Tibet is not all just so, it is interesting for me to see that all the spaces in the gallery we had chosen to make the Tibetan space a sacred space when many of those objects were given in diplomatic moments. They were very much part of the colonial encounter between Britain and Tibet and the giver also did not expect them to be seen as sacred objects, the Tibetan giver, that could have been the Dalai Lama, that could have been the Prime Minister of Tibet, but in giving them he was not giving them as sacred objects, but we have chosen to recast them in a sacred light by putting them in that space. So sacredness within the museum space it’s, I think, a quite complex issue, particularly in terms of Tibet, because it has been constantly reconstructed as the sacred and the spiritual within the museum space when the history of the objects tell us something

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very different. . . . As I said to you, the shrine does occasionally bring people in for meditation. We have a number of Tibetan Buddhist groups in the area, mainly made of Westerners, British people, white British people, so not necessarily Asian British or Tibetan British and we have received positive comments about the display as it is used as meditative space. For general visitors, they still have a sense of curiosity, of seeing something they don’t necessarily see anywhere else. There’s occasional admiration for the aesthetic beauty of an object. Did they approach them any differently because we constructed the sacred space? I’ve not seen that, quite frankly. I think you would need to do some evaluative research over there, to stay there for several days to bear this point, to contrast that with what happens in the book house . . . you might get the old persons saying ‘sh, sh’ when they come in. There’s a different atmosphere in that gallery, compared to the book house or the aquarium. Whether they recognise the space as sacred or not, I don’t know, rather they’re doing that’s in the old, normative practice of visiting a museum to be quiet, and that space looks more like a traditional museum space, as opposed to the book house, yeah, I don’t know. . . . I mean, I can only go on with what I’ve seen in the last ten or so years, and I’m not sure that I would say that our general visitor sees people who have vested interests in the material culture that we have, they’d be individuals who do feel contact with the particular object. We have Maori delegations come. There’s been a particular moment of contact with, you know, a particular cloth, or a particular treasure box, but often it’s because there are ancestral links there and whether they want to see those ancestral links as something that it’s sacred or ancestral, or whether we can actually divide those two things up, that’s impossible for me to say, I’m not of that community, so I can’t say. . . . If they were told they enter in a sacred space, then, it might be different, but we don’t say that, anyway. I don’t know, again, if it is the same with St Mungo Museum, which is a museum on religion, with people going there expecting to have a sacred experience because it is a religious museum. We don’t project that to our visitors, really, at any stage. Not obviously anyway. (Interview with Emma Martin)

Martin’s doubts reflect mine, after having acquired some knowledge of East Asian religious materiality. If we consider how temples function in mainland China and Taiwan, for instance, we can see that the activation of a religious icon through worship usually guarantees its maintenance. During my postdoctoral fieldwork, my interlocutors, usually members of the temples’ committees, repeatedly told me that a religious statue without incense, food and flower offerings could progressively lose any efficacious power. Even more importantly, a religious force that is not handled by a ritual specialist and inserted within one’s own private life and household can be hazardous. The fact that each temple has its way of interpreting whether a statue can contain divine power per se or if it must be stimulated by worship and ritual suggests that exhibiting religious statues in museum settings can be a sensitive operation. There are substantial differences between Chinese religion – a mixture of Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism – and Buddhism, in particular Tibetan

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Buddhism. However, my fieldwork has made me question the point of reconsecrating a statue without facilitating or, even more, obstructing its worship within galleries by enclosing it behind a glass case. The exhibitive spaces in Taiwanese temples, as well as the treasure rooms in Japanese ones (Suzuki 2007), can be useful sources of inspiration for museum practitioners. Although the statues and any other ritual paraphernalia are protected by fences or glass cases for conservation reasons, they are exhibited together with offerings. The overall atmosphere is shaped to invite worship or respectful viewing, thereby discouraging the taking of pictures, or other actions that could be reasonable in a museum setting. Japanese temples, therefore, overcome the danger of displaying religious icons through a compromise between preservation and display that keeps their sacred power intact (ibid.). Interestingly enough, Tythacott herself (2017) refers to Suzuki’s article but does not problematize the issue within her exhibition. If we look at Tibetan displays of artefacts (Clark 2016), there is a substantial ambiguity between the sacred and the profane. From a Tibetan perspective, there is no contrast between exhibiting religious icons as works of art or as shrines, since what changes is the attitude of the individual visitor-worshipper. The Tibetan point of view on religious materiality echoes the words of Buddhist practitioners who visited the Museum of World Religions in Taipei with me (Gamberi 2018). For them, it does not make sense to question whether the icon displayed has or does not have divine power: in Buddhism, Buddha’s presence can be everywhere and reveals itself to those who have pure earth and mind. Although the displays were not considered respectful because they mixed very different religious traditions, such as Mahayana, Tantrism and Theravada, the fact of seeing them behind glass was not disrespectful per se or in contradiction with their faith. In my view, and following Clark (2016, 32), Tythacott has responded more to the ‘Western’ need to clarify the ‘original’ context to a non-Buddhist audience, with the intention of then challenging the museum-aesthetic approach, than to a Tibetan or Buddhist request. An aesthetic curatorial intervention would dismember each icon from the shrine’s configuration, in which icons can only function and be worshipped if they are part of a set of deities, which are positioned according to the pantheon’s hierarchy. In contrast, religious artefacts in art galleries are ‘singularised’ (Tythacott 2017, 121). More crucially, the museum idea of admiring the aesthetic features of the artefact would go against the Buddhist ‘visual regime’ (ibid.), according to which the back of each statue is hidden in order to develop a frontal exchange of gazes with the worshipper. Although Tythacott has conceptualized this gallery as a multisensorial space in which practitioners can meditate simultaneously with non-Buddhist visitors, her material manipulation is made in the absence of the Tibetan artefacts’ producers. Therefore, visitors and practitioners, as well as current curators, can project their imaginations onto the artefacts freely, with the risk

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of reproducing, alongside subversive (cf. Shelton 2007, 33 with Wiener 2007) and creative thoughts, preconceived ideas (Thomas 1991, 180) which have no equivalent in the world of the colonized (Wiener 2003, 129–30). In this way, the downside of Tythacott’s endeavour is the production a ‘humble’ and ‘smug Orientalism’ that tries to celebrate cultural differences in the absence of a real dialogue, thereby imposing ‘adjusted Western cultural categories to the East’ (Wang 2018, 5). This ‘weak’ Orientalism was strengthened by the subsequent manipulation of the space due to a change of leadership in the museum. Initially, there was an introductory panel that contextualized the reason for which the curators built the exhibition and the methodology adopted, namely a consultation with Buddhist practitioners (Tythacott 2011, 216). However, the new chief curator after Tythacott dramatically reduced the word count of each caption, with a subsequent simplification of the language used. The result was a ‘disjointed information framework’ (ibid., 217). I was confused the first time I visited the space, and even more so when I acquired more knowledge on Buddhism and East Asian material culture. In particular, I wondered why, for the Mahayana showcase, the ‘religious compound’ (if I may use this terminology) reflected a specific form of Buddhism that developed in China. If Chinese Buddhism represents the more diffuse variation of Mahayana, it cannot be considered necessarily representative of a Buddhist current that has many subcategories and forms. At the same time, the combination of bodhisattvas and deities does not necessarily identify Buddhism only, but is also common in Chinese religion. For this reason, I believe that a better introduction to the curatorial choices could in part help visitors in coping with the overwhelming confusion during their visit to the gallery. Let us now examine other curatorial strategies employed in the World Museum, which can be considered a counterpoint to what Tythacott has tried to convey in the Buddhist gallery.

‘Telling Tales’: A Collecting Project The scant or, conversely, biased information around the acquisition of the World Museum in Liverpool’s colonial collection has led staff to outline projects for a contemporary form of collecting. Such a form of collecting is as far as possible in resonance with local communities, in particular through letting artists usually downplayed as ‘folk’ emerge in the museum scene. In this way, museum staff have consciously followed what was inaugurated by Julia Nicholson, current curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, who in 1988 documented and collected Gujarati ‘folk art’ (in particular textiles) for the New Walk Museum in Leicester. In doing so, Nicholson was able to trace an artistic

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genealogy that renders museum collecting ethically transparent and accessible for research. The operation begun by the World Museum is particularly akin to collaborative and community-based research (Israel et al. 2005). According to this terminology, there is no difference between the researcher and the participants, who now considered to be co-researchers, and negotiate or even establish the conditions and the subject of the research itself. Collecting, therefore, is consonant with the needs of the Indian artist. What she [ Julia Nicholson, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum] has been specifically asked to do, as a project, was not only to collect objects but to collect information that was documentary information, photographic information, samples, information through samples, to give a good picture of what was happening at that moment in terms of crafts in the Gujarat. So, we knew the makers, we knew the families that were making these objects, and we knew, we understood, to some extent, the history of that family and how they worked, how they come to work with those textiles or those ceramics, or those furniture pieces that they were making. So, it was a wonderful collection in terms of how this incredible human context to it and I was talking to Minhas about this because when I came here to Liverpool the Indian collection, as I just said, did not have that context at all and I found it really difficult to understand how to think about that collection and how we could possibly bring that collection, revive that collection for the 21st century . . . . I did not particularly want to collect material that was seen purely as ethnographic. I wanted to show that India was multilayered in its practices and in its artistic practices . . . and there was a whole range of things that were not being collected and displayed in museums in the West at that time. You either went from sort of high profile artists who have been artistically trained and were part of the international art movement, or you went to nameless, faceless musical instruments or clay pots and there was nothing in between to say who are these people who are innovating or doing something interesting with that practice, who were working outside of these two sorts of accepted ways of collecting that the museum tends to work in. . . . I did not want to guide the collecting program as such, I wanted to see from an Indian perspective who was interested into collecting at that time, who were the people who were interested, who were doing something interesting that perhaps we, in Western museums, were not aware of. . . . we also wanted to build a sort of a mini-history, art history, practice history . . . we also wanted to collect from the people who were training the artists we were working with and other artists who were influenced by them, and so we create some kind of lineage there, so we can get away from this ethnographic present . . . somewhere in the present but does not really have any sense of the past or the future or anything else . . . we created . . . some sense of change, development, referencing, historical practices as well and looking into the future in terms of practice. (Interview with Emma Martin)

As can be seen in this excerpt, the curatorial staff of the World Museum wanted with the temporary exhibition ‘Telling Tales: The Art of Indian Sto-

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rytelling’ (May–September 2013) to dismantle the stereotypical idea of ‘folk tradition’ as something unchangeable, which until now museum design has strengthened in visitors’ minds. The aesthetic features of the storytelling scrolls change according to the specific, contemporary needs of their makers, not necessarily linked to a religious motivation or context. The need for a marketable niche has produced, as a result, new techniques and material supports for pats, such as paper instead of fabric, and short and condensed stories instead of long rolling scrolls. The role that they [the patuas] were expected to play fifty years ago, hundred years ago it is now being, you know, radically reworked to something else. . . . I do not think of we asked him [Mantu Chitrakar] about what he sees for the future, but he has obviously made the decision for himself, he has made very clear that he sees his future in terms of producing work for the tourist market. . . . darśan . . . is just not relevant for him anymore . . . He does not prefer scrolls in order that he can take them from village to village to give a performance, his audiences are generally Westerners, and he is making single-registered pieces so that he can sell as tourist art. . . .You could say the same for the Madhubani artists, you know. Their original practice was for the women . . . and that, again, was very much welcoming Krishna and Radha into the room, welcoming Rama and Sita into the room and bringing their presence there to the newly married couple . . . in the 1970s there was a need to completely reformulate that, because people needed to feed themselves and so that practice was taken from the wall, taken back, taken to paper in order for the women to make money during the drought . . . they have to rethink how their practice can be used still to feed their family, to make money and this is the basic thing, and it is not necessarily a question about the removal of the sacred and the replacement with art so much. (Interview with Emma Martin)

Six artists were involved in ‘Telling Tales project’, which laid the ground for the exhibition.3 Some of them – for instance Mantu Chitrakar, who is considered the representative patua for excellence, due also to his collaborations with Tara Books (Flowers and Chitrakar 2010; Arni and Chitrakar 2011; Collodi and Chitrakar 2014) – are perfectly aware of the demand from the art and tourist market, to the extent that they do no longer perceive their activities as related to the ritual and the religious aspects, such as darśan: television has changed things for us – now our traditional audiences the villagers do not have the time or the desire (iccha) for our performance. However, in big cities, there are people who appreciate our performance. So you see now we have to travel really far from your village to find our audience. (Quote taken from the transcribed tapes of the films realized for the exhibition)

The perception of the folk artists as emerging contemporary artists is well attested in the tapes of the films made for the exhibition.4 Each film starts with

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the artist’s biography and the apprenticeship or circumstances which led her to begin the activity and to perceive herself as a valued artist. Subsequently, the artist shows her works and how they are usually created, and concludes with the national and international awards and acknowledgements she has received. It is clear, then, that the aim of these documentaries is on the one hand to trace an artistic lineage of these folk traditions, as in the curator’s words, and on the other, to try to escape from the stereotype of folk art as unknown and to present the folk artists as being rooted in an artistic career. Another interesting aspect to note is the fact that the individual’s artistic propensity, and the beginning of her apprenticeship with a master or a talent scout, are often exceptional events with quasi-magic properties, as in a hagiography. In this material, then, the attempt to define an alternative way to that of the ‘Western’ aesthetic that is not ancillary to the latter is evident. Indian storytellers define their work according to what Christopher Pinney would call ‘Indian magical realism’ (Pinney 1999), in which the marvellous and the real intersect to generate ‘anti-positivist, post-colonial’ narratives and practices. One day, a young man I knew told me what I was doing digging mud when I was such an artist and fine singer. I told him that art would not fill my stomach and I needed to work for my living. I used to live in Chamanpura then and Haku Shah used to come there to meet a Bhopa artist who painted Pābūjī phads.5 I wanted to meet Haku Shah so I asked the artist to introduce me. He refused but I persisted in becoming his friend. After two years, one day, he suddenly turned to me and said he was going to meet Haku Shah, would I like to go along? It was a blistering hot afternoon and I was barefoot – I did not wear shoes then. . . . Haku Shah was shocked to see my feet. . . . I told him I sang and showed him my instrument the sarangi and that I worked as a labourer . . . . He invited all the people in the office to come hear me sing. . . . I asked him what I should draw. He said I should never ask him that question and should draw whatever came to my mind. So I stopped asking him and began thinking of a bhajan (religious song) dedicated to Lord Shiva. Quite automatically, I began translating the song into drawing. Haku Shah was very happy. He then asked if I could draw a story. I did not know what story to do, so I did my own life-story. This was published in Germany. Then Teju and I also worked on a Bollywood film Mirch Masala and some TV serials. Now we sing, and we paint. My whole family paints. (Rajasthani artist, archives related to the exhibition)

If we turn our attention to the exhibition itself, according to its curator, storytelling is what mostly identifies Indian culture (primarily because of the Purana tradition), to the extent that even traditional local dances were performed within the exhibition’s space. Each section identified a Hindu deity, which was described with immediate and catchy adjectives, such as ‘impulsive, lover of sweets, generous, and a great scholar too!’ for Ganeś.6 In addition, each god was represented by some of the folk art traditions. In some cases, as in the pithoro

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paintings, the symbolic importance of horses in the local communities or of the sacred trees gave an authoritative tone. In other cases, such as those of the patuas and Kalighat paintings, these introductory symbols or divinities were not used, and the labels directly described the folk art tradition. An essential feature of the exhibition was the importance given to the traditions’ contemporaneity, their living and vibrant nature. For instance, in the case of the patuas the artistic lineage was emphasized: alongside the scrolls of one of the main patuas from the Naya village, Mantu Chitrakar, a small pat realized by Mantu’s primary school-age daughter, Sonia, was shown. The pats were inside glass frames, and only a small area was shown, with visitors having access to the entire scroll and the story related to its scene via a flip-book placed under the exhibited scrolls. Although there was particular emphasis on contemporary pats, some of them were related to the patuas’ classic themes, such as ‘The Wedding of the Fish’ and ‘Gazi Pir’. 7 Mantu Chitrakar wrote each story contained in the flip-books. In the presentation of the Kalighat paintings, the emphasis was on the social changes which have become of interest to the Kalighat painter, such as the dating websites accessed by Indian women in search of a husband. In addition, each section, using both filmic captions and written labels, focused on the biography of each folk artist, created the overall impression that the exhibition itself was something in between a modern art installation and ethnographic documentation. As can be seen, the temporary exhibition ‘Telling Tales: The Art of Indian Storytelling’ initiated a new methodological approach for collecting in the World Museum. Not only do curators want to enrich the historical collection so as to portray Indian aesthetic regimes in a dynamic and processual way, but the focus is also no longer on an ethnographic portrait of a ‘culture’. By embracing the lesson learned from the Buddhist gallery in the permanent exhibition, Emma Martin is adamant in including more than one perspectival view of religious materiality, including liminal artefacts occupying the space between religious instruments and the artistic expressions of contemporary artists. The circumstances of collecting are particularly crucial in delineating a new scholarly approach to collections that pays equal attention to the semiotic or poetic of exhibition design, as well as to the political and contingent circumstances of acquisition. As we have seen from the previous chapters, acquisition and collecting can be understood mainly as hybrid encounters between different ways of manipulating materiality. * * * Religious materiality is engaged in two opposite ways in the World Museum: on the one hand, we see a re-creation of a religious setting, similar to what we have observed in Chapter 5. On the other hand, with the ‘Telling Tales’ proj-

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ect there is a contingent account of the economic, cultural, social and political evolution of the usages of and techniques employed for religious materiality in current Asian contexts. This chapter can be viewed as the apex of what we have already observed in the previous chapters: materiality has a prismatic nature that requires hybrid, ambiguous and fluid ways of thinking and theorizing. It is high time for a materially led review of theories on materiality.

Notes 1. For instance, in the New Guinea subsection, one label reads: ‘This museum bought most of the pieces in this display from specialist collectors or from Sales Rooms such as Sotheby’s’. 2. ‘The colonisers forced New Irelanders into a money economy. They also introduced metal tools, which meant that carvers could make malagan sculptures more easily. Together with the demand from art collectors overseas, this led to malangans being sold rather than destroyed’ (World Museum, a label). 3. The project was a three-year research and collection campaign in partnership with an Indian cultural organization, which has always focused on the contemporary folk arts and tried to support artistic development, as well as to stimulate and promote the national and international interest in folk arts. The museum gave a funding budget to each artist involved in the project to produce the artefacts, which would be exhibited in the museum itself, while the cultural organization had the task of selecting the artists and recording their activities, both through fieldwork notes and by filming the artists in action. 4. Emma Martin told me that the contents of each film were negotiated between the artist and the cultural organization. 5. It is interesting to note the fact that this bhopa paints par.s, thereby contradicting the literature on the topic, and what I was told by some scholars who have done years of fieldwork among bhopas. 6. Quote taken from a label. 7. ‘The story hints at the uneasy relationship between the zamindar (a landlord of whom the big fish is a symbol) and the small peasant farmer (the smaller fish). In a way, this folk story tells of the struggle between the two without being too critical of the “big fish” who will get you no matter what you do!’ (from the flip-book).

CHAPTER 7

P

For a Reappraisal of Phenomenology A Perspectival Approach to Materiality

As we have seen in the previous three chapters, curators and collectors have been immersed in a ‘material knowledge’ of South Asian or Asian religious artefacts. The particularity of ‘material knowledge’, as mentioned multiple times in this book, is an encroachment between a phenomenological engagement with material forces and the imaginary, conceptual and memorial scenario that accompanies and enriches embodied responses. More importantly, ‘material knowledge’ is also an apprenticeship in which non-curators or noncollectors negotiate, and largely guide, curator-collectors’ material experiences. ‘Material knowledge’, due to its high hybridism and fuzzy logic, demands from us a cognitive effort that prevents us from rationalizing immediately what we see, to the advantage of the processual and the crafted nature of research and writing. In this portrait of European and American museums, and in particular in the reconstructions of religious sites within galleries, what emerges is a multilayered and conflictual field of forces. The traditional triangle of visitors– curators–objects can no longer be assumed to be a consequential chain that starts from curators’ strategies and choices and moves on to visitors’ understandings of curatorial language. More importantly, the passive role of material artefacts in this form of museum communication starts to fall apart: museum artefacts trigger religious respect, sensuous engagement, postsecular contemplation and intellectual reflection at the same time. The prismatic nature of museum things problematizes curatorial strategies, for the choices that curators make in stressing some material features instead of others do not erase the other forms of engagement elicited by exhibited and stored things. The compresence of heterogeneous forces at play explains the unpredictability of museum consumption, which may not coincide with original curatorial plans, and thus questions the idea of the museum as a mortuary place, where the only

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possible action is the remembrance of past, ‘authentic’ habits and scientific dissection of entire ‘cultural systems’: The paradigm that holds the latter criteria [curators’ expertise] as exclusive validation for museums’ attention to objects is coming to the end of its cultural life, and we must develop means of meeting a far wider range of expectations regarding objects and their uses on the part of a variety of publics than has generally been the case in the past. (Gaskell 2003, 160)

Therefore, the perspectival-prismatic, ephemeral and fragmentary nature of the humans–materials–things relationship urges us to formulate a new epistemological framework through which to understand it. This was clear to me in the period immediately after my Ph.D. The scrolls continued to talk to me in different ways: they became a theoretical tool for enlightening some conundrums that I still observed in other research. More significantly, they indicated to me how to revise the methodology I had employed in 2014 and 2015 to give voice to the different responses to religious materiality. In an epistemological and retrospective experiment, I reviewed and criticized the scholarship on the subject of materiality in order to reach a soundboard for those phenomenological voices. After my fieldwork research, I initially attempted to deconstruct anthropocentric assumptions towards materiality that could not respond to what I had experienced in the museums. I adopted the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty as a theoretical framework. This is, in fact, a theorization that could account for the hybridism between the human and the nonhuman and how they reciprocally influence each other. After my doctoral work, I had the opportunity to approach multiple currents of thoughts that had been developing during those years, such as the ontological turn, the new materialisms and others. Those different voices further sharpened my deconstructive attempt. Nevertheless, I was not able to understand why the authors I was reading were particularly critical, if not negative, towards phenomenology, since they looked to me like different attempts to offer an alternative to anthropocentrism. Returning to the basic texts of phenomenology helped me to understand the limits of the abovementioned emerging theories and, at the same time, to formulate a personal approach that I will develop in the conclusions to this book. In my readings on material culture studies and philosophical stances on ontology – understood as the science of being – I identified two approaches: the anthropomorphic and the materialist. Both these scholarly tendencies, in my view, reduce the interplay between the human and the nonhuman to an agentic attribution to the one or the other, without accepting characteristics and potentialities that are implied in the material engagement but do not define human or nonhuman agency in a direct or mechanistic way. This chapter suggests a reappropriation of certain phenomenological assumptions towards the formula-

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tion of a theoretical framework that accounts for the vast array of potentialities of materiality, as well as of the encounter with the human, without ossifying them into two contrasting poles. For the anthropomorphic approach, I take as an example the work of Alfred Gell; for the materialist view I discuss with readers the large umbrella of so-called assemblage thinking, and in particular the new materialisms and Object-Oriented Ontology, since these concentrate and exemplify many characteristics that we can find in several contemporary currents, such as the ontological turn in anthropology.

The Anthropomorphic Approach: Alfred Gell Gell, in his posthumous Art and Agency (1998), realized that material things are important social interlocutors, and that under certain circumstances, be they ritual or ordinary, they are perceived by humans as animated, to the extent that they seem to have an independent life and logic. Gell thus proposes conceiving material entanglements as relationships. By relationships, he intends ‘part of a biographical series entered into at different phases of the life cycle’ (Gell 1998, 11). The roles of subject and object, therefore, are not fixed, but rather perspectival and variable according to a ‘classificatory context’ (ibid., 21–22). Artefacts would take on their social agency through an ‘abduction of agency’, a cognitive operation which establishes a causal connection by starting from a physical thing or index, for instance visible smoke as an index of fire (Gell 1998, 13–15). The index is, thus, simultaneously the result and the means of social agency (ibid., 15), and defines four entities in relation with each other: the index itself; an originator, to whom existence and the properties of the index are attributed; a recipient, concerning whom the index exerts agency; and a prototype, which is represented by the index through abduction (ibid., 27). A primary agent is an entity which starts actions by its own will, whereas a secondary agent is one which does not have its own will, but is fundamental for the formation of the action (ibid., 36): ‘agency is not just “making” but any modality through which something affects something else’ (ibid., 40). An index is, thus, a secondary agent, as it obtains its agency from an external entity and transfers that agency to the recipient, whereas a prototype could be a primary agent, when ‘it is endowed the ability to intend its own appearance’ (ibid., 36–37). The roles of passive and active agents are interchangeable and simultaneous. For instance, the religious statue is an index of godly mediation that exerts agency over worshippers, but it is also an index of these devotees, who, through the practices rotating around the artefact – such as consecration – can manipulate godly intervention, the efficaciousness of which would be otherwise inconsequential (ibid., 40). Gell quotes the reaction of an African mask

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carver interviewed by D’Azevedo as an example of how an object can render its artist a patient. The final product, never visualized as such but rather as a succession of operations during its production, would cause surprise to the artist, who cannot believe that he has generated something that is perceived as alive (ibid., 46). Gell, then, concurs with Guthrie (1993) in identifying an anthropomorphic attitude of humans towards the nonhuman. However, he contests Guthrie’s theory that this attribution of animacy means thinking of things as animate: things are animated without having an animal or biological life. The remarkable feature of animated things lies precisely in the fact that they are not alive even though they appear to be so (Gell 1998, 121–22). The same can be said of human projection on non-living things: the projection entails the transferring of a part of human features to the things, without a complete identification and the subsequent inference that the things are alive or human (ibid., 122). Gell uses the example of giving a heart and human body temperature to a statue. It continues to be a thing, as heart and temperature objectively describe humans but do not qualify their personhood (ibid., 124). In this ambiguous state between a machine – as an assemblage of materials – and that which could resemble the human, the religious statue gains its own autonomy, thereby impacting on the human world and manifesting a supernatural nature. In the attribution of agency to nonhuman things and to other beings – including other humans – the others’ behaviour or characteristics would reflect the human subject’s mental images. The others’ minds – as a congregation of the subject’s images – are believed to be invisible in the intersubjective relation, and hidden, like a homunculus lodged ‘inside the other’s body’ (Gell 1998, 131). Gell calls this theorization ‘internalist’ (ibid., 127). The attribution of intentional psychology to non-living things would contradict the common-sense distinction between living and non-living beings based upon possessing or not possessing intentional psychology (ibid., 131). However, this phenomenon occurs, Gell argues, when subjects add human characteristics to non-living things, which thus reach a verisimilitude with human beings, in particular in the wellrooted idea of a mind encapsulated into a body that represents its physical and phenomenological access (ibid., 132). In this internalist approach, there is thus a structural isomorphy between what ‘we know (from inside) as “consciousness” and the spatial-temporal structures’ where artefacts resulting from projection are situated (Gell 1998, 222). Objects, in this sense, are distributed, namely, they have ‘many spatially separated parts with different micro-histories’ resulting from a multitude of projections (ibid., 221). In this way, social relationships, as well as human agency, are the externalization of a cognitive process in which personhood transcends human biological life to be temporally-spatially diffused and objectified via the indexes (ibid., 222–23, 231–32). Gell’s statement, the idea of a person dis-

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tributed in the environment, resembles Wagner’s (1991) concept of the fractal person, namely the idea that personhood is ‘multiply constituted’ and, hence, is a ‘social microcosmos’ (Strathern 1988, 165), gathering different prismatic aspects. Projection or externalization of human minds follows a temporal stratification that constantly modifies each instant with a reference or influence from past events, to then anticipate how future moments could be. Gell exemplifies this point with Duchamp’s work (Gell 1998, 242–50). His paintings, taken as a whole, testify to the temporal evolution of the artist’s mind. Gell is, in this, directly inspired by Husserl’s retention and protention (Chua and Elliott 2015, 10; see also Gell 1998, 239–51). Suppose we are at B. The temporal landscape at B consists of the now-present perceptual experience of the state of affairs at B plus retentions of A, as A,’ sinking down to the past. A’ is a ‘modification’ of the original A – it is what A looks like from B, i.e. attenuated or diminished, but still present. . . . The fading out of the background of the proximate past as successively weaker retentions (A’->A’’->A’’’. . .) corresponds to the increasing divergence of perceptual judgements entertained at A and judgements entertainable at increasingly distant points in the succession of ‘now’ moments (A’/B, A’’/C, A’’’/D, etc.). But out-ofdate perceptual judgements are still salient because it is only in the light of these divergences between out-of-date beliefs and current beliefs that we can grasp the direction which the events surrounding us are taking, thereby enabling us to form protentions towards the future phases of the current state of affairs. (Gell 2015, 103–4; see also Husserl 1991, 31–32)

In order to make the reader understand Gell’s agency paradigm more clearly, I introduce the example of a child playing with a doll, a well-known case for those who study Alfred Gell (Gell 1998, 129). The doll, exactly as a religious statue or icon would be, is animated: it cries, it wets itself, it gets dressed and undressed. The child is the real person responsible for, and activator of the doll’s acts. Nevertheless, she has the feeling that her toy is alive, full of energy and playful. There is, so to speak, a contract between the child’s will and the doll, its surfaces and details: the child transfers her thoughts and capacities to the doll as she wishes to do so. In other words, it is the child’s projection onto the doll which permits its activation and helps the child in identifying herself with a caring mother – the doll is, in this respect, a secondary agent. This toy is not just the index of maternal care, but is also the mother’s cultural development of caring practices and ideas towards maternity during that specific period of play with that specific doll, in a pattern which is connected to her parents’ past practices of playing and projected onto the possible, future caring of a baby and her playing with her doll. If we consider the case of Asian religious artefacts, in a Gellian perspective, they are animated because human actors (ritual specialists, curators or even

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visitors) project their own intentionalities onto matter to then enact the role of a subject in need of external intervention for progressing in life, materially, theoretically or imaginatively speaking. The conundrum of reconstructions is, then, caused by a clash of projections. The fragmentary and perspectival nature of materiality would only be an anthropological illusion of the same nature as D’Azevedo’s mask: we register each perspective as an ontological transformation rather than a succession of projections onto a neutral surface. Given what we have observed throughout this book, is Gell’s stance convincing? An answer can be given if we consider other authors directly inspired by Gell. An example is Carlo Severi, with his L’object-personne (2017). Severi considers material animation as an effervescent intensification of the human imaginary that projects elements of vitality onto artefacts and images, to the extent that European art history can be viewed as an attempt to attribute vitality to paintings – through what is understood as pittura del vero, literally ‘painting of the living truth’. In other words, Severi wants to disarticulate material animacy from ‘non-Western’ religious artefacts, implicitly decolonizing certain anthropological approaches. At a conference to which I was invited as a speaker, I had the opportunity to listen to Severi’s presentation of the Italian translation of L’objet personne. After my doctoral research and my postdoctoral projects, I reached a complicated and multilayered perspective on materiality: religious artefacts are not necessarily controlled by humans in their projections and can have different and discordant meanings. Therefore, I raised my hand, seeking a debate with Severi. Although Severi partly shares a ‘fractal’ vision of materiality with me, I could not see materiality exclusively as a human-animated product, as an excess of fetishism, as he answered me. The simple fact that a thing is made of metal or paper, for instance, tangibly directs the human imaginary and human actions. In this, I am echoing Latour in his well-known passage on the gun in Pandora’s Hope: ‘the gun acts by virtue of material components irreducible to the social qualities of the gunman. On account of the gun the law-abiding citizen, a good guy, becomes dangerous. . . . Each artefact has its script, its potential to take hold of passers-by and force them to play roles in its story’ (Latour 1999, 176–77). The meeting with Carlo Severi at the conference represented a temporary conclusion of my quest among different scholars and currents of thoughts. My critique of Alfred Gell, already elaborated in my doctoral work, lead me to investigate the materialist approach, as a response to what I perceived as a sophisticated form of anthropocentrism: both Gell, and with him, Severi, have an instrumentalist vision of materiality. Not only does it act in the world because it has been animated by humans, but it also does so to serve their socialcultural and technological needs. Could the materialist approach help scholars in getting rid of these anthropocentric traps? It is appropriate at this point, then, to explore the two branches of the materialist approach – assemblage

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thinking and the new materialisms, on the one hand, and Object-Oriented Ontology, on the other – in order to understand why I decided ultimately to re-evaluate phenomenology.

The Materialist Approach: Deconstructing Assemblages When reading the literature available on scrolls, and subsequently registering the ephemerality of religious behaviours within museum galleries, a parallel was evident to me between the performances of patuas and bhopas and what Birgit Meyer terms ‘religious fabrication’ (Meyer 2012, 24). With this concept, she intends the process in which a sense of the extraordinary is created by transmitting stimulations and using ‘techniques’ (MacDonald 2009, 118) through which the distance between daily life and a force or presence that is not normally experienced as present is annihilated, in such a way that the contact with and realization of this force is immediate. Formulated differently, Meyer starts with the idea that everyone – human and nonhuman – shares with each other the same world of lived experience and that, at the same time, through their reciprocal interdependence produce the world itself. This meaning and world-making is possible through the mediation of the human and the nonhuman, which can be culturally codified and transmitted in order to reproduce the condition of immediacy between what is normally present and what is usually absent (Meyer 2011, 26) – for instance, a computer that types another character instead of the one for which it should be programmed. The religious fabrication of a performance can be understood, according to Meyer (2012), by singling out a ‘sensational form’, namely a ‘configuration’ between religious media, acts, imaginations and bodily sensations within a religious tradition or group that shapes mediation and achieves effects through the performance itself. In less mechanistic terms, Morgan (2016) understands the interdependencies between the human and the nonhuman as embodied in an environing world in which each thing has its affordances or ways through which it relates with other things. If we return to the storytelling performances of the patuas and the bhopas, there is a continuous exchange between them and the audience, who, in the case of the par., comment on the grade of attentiveness towards the sung epic as the bhopa does, or, in the case of the pat, receive some blessing or information about the life of the villages, as well as on international events, such as the attack on the Twin Towers (cf. Kaiser 2012 with Chatterji 2012). We can talk about a triangular regime of agency: the audience and the storyteller, on the one hand, and the scroll, on the other. The scroll, as the deity’s manifestation through darśan, empowers the audience, thus redeeming sins

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and curing illnesses, while the storyteller obtains money and food as offerings. In addition, the scroll defines the cohesion and identity of the communities by instituting an authoritative narration. More importantly, the scroll is not a passive object possessed by the bard or by the audience, but a material thing with its own logic and force, a force that appeals to worshippers and audiences. Experiencing Materiality shares with the exponents of the field of material religion, such as Meyer, this idea of the scroll as not totally exhausted by human perception and having a certain amount of unpredictability that goes beyond human control. However, the crucial element of my argumentation that differentiates it from Meyer’s and that of other scholars in material religion is the important role played by phenomenology. According to these authors, phenomenology would constrain materiality within the skin-deep confines of bodies, whereas things are not just defined by the sensing body (Hazard 2013, 67). In contrast, assemblages would point to the protean and expansive characteristics of the human–nonhuman interplay. Bräunlein (2016) considers assemblage theories to be part of a ‘methodological ludism’ based upon challenging anthropocentric assumptions and working at the borders between subject/object and emic/etic divides. This destruction of anthropocentrism is based upon a certain way of thinking: an assemblage thinking, namely a vitalist approach that is enfolded in the processual and polyvocal making of existence or ‘life forms’, and that analyses the latter’s potentialities (Lancione 2014, 10). According to assemblage thinking, religious reconstructions would cause ritual responses because of the particular disposition of material artefacts and how they are ‘contained’ – a glass case would suggest a sense of physical distance, whereas an open space would push visitors to have a more physical encounter with artefacts. If curators change the composition, the effect will change accordingly. A more sophisticated assemblage thinking also considers the interdependences between humans and things, between things and things, and between things and concepts. This infinite concatenation describes the historical density of certain artefacts that we simply experience and use in a direct, intuitive way. For instance, cereals are the result of an evolution of human agriculture and a genetic adaptation of plants, rather than being just that mixture of tastes that welcomes us to a new day (Hodder 2012). This perspective, however, does not explain why certain people – for instance, me at the Oriental Museum – do not perform or think in the same way in which the assemblage would suggest to do. In other words, assemblage thinking misses the perspectival and conflicting nature of materiality. In addition, assemblage thinking introduces a fundamental dilemma. By looking at the interdependencies between the human and the nonhuman in storytelling performances and museum spaces, it is extremely difficult to disentangle any understanding of it outside the positioning of the sensing and thinking body.

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The so-called new materialisms share with assemblage thinking both its processual nature and its vitalist approach. According to the new materialisms, scrolls would have an immanent vital force, a ‘conatus’ – from Spinoza’s persistent force of each body (Bennett 2010, 5) – an ‘immanent vitality’ as ‘emergent, generative . . . being’ (Coole and Frost 2010, 8), allegedly in line with the Deleuzian idea of becoming. One of the pivotal works of new materialisms is Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010). She adopts Latourian assemblage with a strongly Deleuzian approach, particularly focusing on his concept of absorption, a ‘gathering of elements in a way that both forms a coalition and yet preserves something of the agential impetus of each elements’ (ibid., 35). Bennett uses the example of the deodand in English law from 1200 until 1846, namely the suspension of the categories of human and nonhuman for an ontological promiscuity, henceforth dismissing the notions of subject and object for that of actant, or an operator ‘which, by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage and the fortuity of being in the right place at the right time . . . makes things happen’ (Bennett 2010, 9). In this way, agency, rather than being attributed as a localized property, is distributed across this heterogeneously ontological compound (ibid., 23): the relationships between the human and the nonhuman eventually become porous. Anthropomorphism is thereby adopted by Bennett as a methodological stance by which to discover the agentive distribution and the inherent ‘thingpower’, namely an immanent matter-energy or active impulse shared by anybody, and therefore the similarities or isomorphism across the human and the nonhuman (Bennett 2010, 99). What Bennett intends by anthropomorphism, then, differs substantially from what I have termed the anthropomorphic approach. Whilst the latter views materiality as agentive as far as it is invested with this role by humans, Bennett does not confine vitality and agency to the human sphere: ‘thing-power’ is indefinite and everywhere. By focusing on anthropomorphism, Bennett has rightly singled out a flow which, à la Ingold (2007), unifies and establishes a dialogue between human and nonhuman, living and non-living beings, as well as the porosity of the relationships between the human and the nonhuman, thus decentring human narcissism. Yet, without a relativization and a pragmatic approach towards anthropomorphism, and, consequently, an overlooking of its fundamentally and intrinsically perspectival nature, Bennett paradoxically re-enforces the primacy of the human and human thinking as the only way through which to understand materiality. Can we transcend our perspective and coincide with the ‘thingness’ (Heidegger 1971) of material things, in this case, the scrolls? Can we describe the independence of things without having any kind of bonds with them? I raised similar questions and objections when I encountered ObjectOriented Ontology after being awarded my Ph.D. Inaugurated by the philosopher Graham Harman (2002, 2011), OOO considers humans and nonhumans

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to be entangled together in collectives, such that they cannot be considered separately, but as reciprocally influencing (Bryant 2011, 25). More clearly, Morton talks about hyperobjects, namely things temporally and spatially distributed in a viscous relation with humans, so that they cannot be easily detected without being connected with other objects, as well as humans (Morton 2013, 1). Inspired by Heidegger’s equipmental view of objects – which says that the beingness of the object already exists regardless of any representation made by a consciousness – Harman seeks to overcome phenomenology as spoilt by human interference in the formulation of ontology, in the sense that objects are no longer understood as a function of a perceiving subjectivity. In other words, ‘the “hermeneutic cycle” is not enough, since with this term it is still a question of an ambiguous human predicament, with no insight given into the inner vitality of the jug in and of itself ’ (Harman 2002, 192). Starting with the idea that objects and humans are equally beings or objects, ontology is prior, according to the exponents of OOO, to any form of epistemology: to grasp, think and understand something, the cogito must first exist as an object (Bryant 2011, 63). Each object, insofar as it is interdependent from other objects, translates the others but does not have direct or complete access to them (Bryant 2011, 26), so their content is independent and closed to any external perturbation (see ibid., 71). This closeness coincides with substances, specifically the intimate composite elements that define objects as such, but whose essence or ‘substantiality’, nonetheless, can be defined as unique and un-decomposable (ibid., 74– 75). From an epistemological point of view, then, the substance is paradoxical, since it is its qualities and, at the same time, something ‘radically other’ than its qualities (ibid., 85). To refer to Bryant’s example of a blue coffee mug, we can say that its colour varies according to the type of light and position, but this empirical fact does not impede us from considering it as a blue mug compared to other objects. In a nutshell, substantive qualities are not distortions from an alleged colour, but rather are real expressions, co-presences of substance: ‘The blueness of the mug is not a quality that the mug has but is something that the mug does’ (ibid., 90). In Bryant’s onticology, therefore, the object is not split between its appearances and the void, but rather between their local manifestations and their ‘virtual proper being’ (ibid., 133). Virtual is here redefined as a part of the real and, therefore, as an infinite array of possibilities: The term ‘virtuality’ comes from the Latin virtus, which has connotations of potency and efficacy. As such the virtual, as virtus, refers to power and capacities belonging to an entity. And in order for an entity to have powers or capacities, it must actually exist. (Bryant 2011, 95)

The differences between substances determine a monism that nonetheless does not coincide with a naïve, indistinctive ‘material force’ (Bennett 2004). Each object contributes in specific ways to inter-objective relationships so that

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it constitutes on its own a system or a monad juxtaposed with the environment: ‘This [difference between the system and environment] is not only one of the origins of the operational closure of systems, but is also a condition for the autonomy of systems as individual and independent substances’ (Bryant 2011, 144). In brief, each system relates to environmental perturbations according to its internal structure, instead of being based on input/output relations (ibid., 219). In addition, a selective openness of things to their environment is operating, as well as a selection of the ‘varieties of ways’ in which the structure can be actualized by its system (ibid., 166). Therefore, we have a process of translation between the inner of the system and the outer of the environment (ibid., 185). Consequently, agency cannot be localized in a specific agent, but is rather the result of entanglement between the system and the environment (ibid., 120). If we return to fieldwork, scrolls or any other religious artefacts would have their entropy that is expressed at the outer and can be captured by visitors, researchers and curators’ monads in a certain way and according to their internal logic. None of them, however, is influenced by this occasional exchange of expressions. OOO’s theory does not explain, then, the coexistence of different perspectives and experiences within the same artefact and how these different phenomenological strata affect our way of visiting museums. Even though the exponents of OOO explicitly and critically refer to phenomenology (Harman 2002, 2005; Morton 2013), the systemic approach to the influences between inner and outer tends to render mechanic and disembodied relationships that are necessarily incarnated. With the primacy of ontology over epistemology, this detachment from subjectivity is even reinforced. In my opinion, the knowledge of being cannot be disentangled from being itself or considered as a secondary product of ontological primacy. Differently put, epistemology and ontology are necessarily intertwined, although we acknowledge that being as such exists before any understanding of it: ‘it is our very epistemological limitation which locates us in the Real’ (Žižek 2012, 925). Therefore, I think that instituting ontological primacy is a limited exercise, in the sense that apart from stating the important consequence that being is open to many limitless variations that are selectively chosen by the internal structure of each organism, being can express itself only in relations, otherwise we would have a fixed thing-in-itself. Last but not least, considering substances as irreducible to perturbations downplays the role of subjectivities as agentive actors. In a way, therefore, there is an inescapable transcendental givenness: ‘the Real is not the In-itself of objects beyond our perceptive, it resides in the very “subjective excess” which distorts our access to reality’ (Žižek 2016, 184). Reality cannot be fractured into what is perceived and what is reality as such. On the contrary, in the subjective perspective the essence of substance is already given, as postulated by phenomenology. In asserting this, I deem that certain assumptions of phenomenology must be re-appropriated by social

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scientists in conciliating the downsides of the anthropomorphic and materialist approaches. In my phenomenological reconsideration, I did not include Heidegger, despite my inspiration from his essay ‘The Thing’. After reading his works (Heidegger 1999; 2008) and Levinas’ analysis of his philosophy (Levinas 1996), I realized that his approach has more to do with the ‘self-discovery’ of each being-in-the-world or Dasein than with a scrutiny of the relationships between every being and their reciprocal influences. Given our human limits in accessing materiality, I deem that a ‘self-discovery’, although fundamental in phenomenological reflection – as we will see in this chapter – is not enough for exploring the dynamics between humans and materiality, since we have also the epistemological problem of grasping materiality ‘as it is’. Let us, then, examine phenomenology by interrogating Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s works – especially their latest – in a dialogical way.

Phenomenological Thought: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty Although I had already interacted with Merleau-Ponty and Husserl before starting my fieldwork, the significant methodological change I introduced after fieldwork made me reconsider my different theoretical readings in the light of what Asian artefacts suggested to me in the galleries, in my discussions with curators and in the storage rooms. What I understood was that, on the one hand, materiality and humans are fused and reciprocally influence each other. On the other hand, curators’ and researchers’ understandings of these interactions and influences, as well as the ‘thingness’ (Heidegger 1971) of materiality, can only be partial. As readers will see in this section, I found useful, although limited, theoretical guidance in the two philosophers. I consider Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s thought to be intertwined. Merleau-Ponty starts from the Husserl of the Krisis, in particular from the idea of returning to the things themselves, to focus on the primordial unity between things and subjectivity.1 I therefore put the two in dialogue in this section. In Husserl, perception is what temporally gives the ‘quality of physical thing’: for example, the colour red in itself does not correspond to a specific identity, and is nothing (Husserl 1991, 7), but rather is how an existing thing appears to the perceiver. A red apple, for instance, condenses a network of sensations and fantasies created by its apparition to a hungry student. It certainly exists as an amass of matter, but we cannot infer that what the student perceives – a round, red and lustful apple – coincides with an objective reality. In other words, the spreading out of sensing or its localization in a specific site or material support differs from the determinations of the res extensa (Husserl 1989, 157). What we have, instead, is a ‘flow of consciousness’ (Husserl 1991, 86) or ‘of lived experiences’, that is, perceptions, that express certain specific instants

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of the apple–student engagement which stratify themselves in what can only be defined as a ‘stream’ (Husserl 1989, 98). Each instant of perception in its singularity can only be taken as a perspectival grasp of the apple – namely, an imperfect exploration of the apple that is subjectively, as well as spatially and temporally, limited. In what Merleau-Ponty calls perceptual faith (1968, 30), Self-reflection does not yet intervene, and the equilibrium and reciprocal mimesis between the inner and the outer are instantly accomplished. Merleau-Ponty calls this relationship with the world ‘openness to the world’ – ouverture au monde (ibid., 35). This means that it no longer makes sense to consider each perspective of the world unique and incommensurable, for the world is shared and pre-existent to any thoughts. More clearly, there is a unique ‘system of being’ where the being for itself and the being for another are ‘moments of the same syntax’ (ibid., 83). When we ‘live at [the] level of sensation’, which means without reflections, we are no longer aware of ourselves, we are depersonalized. Consequently, subjectivity is a ‘hybrid notion’, a ‘mixture of in-itself and for-itself ’, inasmuch as, once it is aware of perceiving, it ceases to be part of experience and becomes a reflective or ‘transcendental subject’ and vice versa (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 65). In addition, perception constitutes a pre-personal in its own right: we are born and we die in perception but we cannot know our own beginning and end. There is therefore some ‘primal acquisition which prevents my experience from being clear of itself ’ (ibid., 251). While analytical reflection separates reflection and bodily sensations from things, instituting their ‘absolute existence’ and thereby destroying their ‘internal structure’, phenomenology establishes a link between the things and the body within the ‘thickness’ of perceptual existence (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 237). In this respect, Merleau-Ponty talks about a ‘perceptual field’ (ibid., 251), namely a circuit between organs of sense, things and sensation (see Merleau-Ponty 1963, 9). When some of these elements cease to exist, as in the case of blind people, the perceptual field is structurally modified such that the harmony of the circuit is established through different means, rather than being a mere juxtaposition that varies quantitatively (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 261). To return to my example, the being of the apple, since it is opposed and, at the same time, related to its percipi, it is not given in an absolute way and exhausted by perception (Husserl 2006, 37), which is henceforth ‘inadequate’ (Zahavi 2003, 34). The relation between things and body is an orientation, a sensuous schema continuously modified (Husserl 1989, 40, 61) by space, time and subjective dispositions. Probably, another student in another time and space would perceive the apple differently, as more purple and less lustful. We cannot say that the apple is not the same, but rather than the two students perceive different appearances of the same apple, since students and apple coexist.

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The thing as experienced-thing is then an incomplete portion of this whole or flow of consciousness (Husserl 2006, 12). Husserl proposes a broader sense of the thing-in-itself, not as a ‘particular evidence as a de facto experience’, but rather an array of potentialities ‘grounded in the transcendental Ego’ as a primordial unit with Nature, which, therefore, is not constitutionally and structurally separated (cf. Husserl 1960, 61, 156 with Husserl 1998, 9–10). More clearly, every cogito is placed within an Umwelt, the bodily and precategorical experience of nature, in which body or Lieb is a localization of Ego’s experience (Husserl 2006, 2). The interrelatedness between the Ego and things or Nature is derived by the specific position occupied by the Ego, but ‘yet universal’ (Husserl 1998, 25). The Ego is a ‘substrate of habitualities’, in the sense that each orientation towards things is present while not active or executed (Husserl 1960, 66–67). On the one hand, the Ego is a harmony, a mediation with other experiences – those of the other than I. To return to the example of the apple, each student is conditioned by what her parents consider ‘red’ or ‘purple’, as well as by what society thinks an apple should be, and each compares the apple with other things that can intersect the perceptual flow, such as a red brick that can define more clearly to her what red looks like. There is, therefore, a passage from a monadic to an inter-monadic approach (Husserl 1960, 105, 156) – what Husserl would call an epoché or the bracketing out of experience, an ‘essential changed subjective process’, that is, an alteration of the original orientation of the Ego towards things (Husserl 1973, 21–34). According to Merleau-Ponty, the co-presence of different beings and their perceptions is possible because of a ‘spatial and temporal pulp where the individuals are formed by differentiation’, or flesh (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 114; cf. Merleau-Ponty 2003, 209). Flesh does not coincide with a total projection of the subjectivity to the external world, but rather with a ‘soft’ externalization of subjectivity. The latter shapes the world but is also shaped by it. The flesh of the body is connected with the flesh of the world: it is an openness that conflates any distinction between the subject and the object due to the isomorphism between the perceiver and the perceived (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 276). In other words: there is a fundamental encroachment between the touched and the touching, the seen and the seer; my touching, touched hand is simultaneously a subject and an object (cf. Merleau-Ponty 2005, 367 with Merleau-Ponty 1968, 24–25; 2003, 76). In the flesh, a libidinal logic is operating, inasmuch as desire is an openness to others or a relation of being (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 218): my body is ‘made up’ of the other corporalities, an Einfühlung or penetration (ibid., 210). On the other hand, Ego’s perspectival grasp of the thing is completed and perfected by the future, different points of view of which the previous, subjective perception is an anticipation: in this way, the one-sidedness is overcome (Kochelmans 1994, 21). In Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis,

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Husserl specifies that each perspective is harmonized into a synthesis, a unity of consciousness which is temporally and spatially extended, as each phase is contiguous to the ‘primordial impression’ of the precedent ones (Husserl 2001, 107). The relatedness between temporal perceptions also mirrors the network and reciprocal dependence between things, which is defined by Husserl as an ‘apriori foundation in the Idea of an object’ (Husserl 2000, 4). In this way, the overall duration of this Idea of the thing or its being is fragmented into the single duration of each perspective but, at the same time, is co-present in the single instant (Husserl 1989, 52). In the Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften (Husserl 1970), Husserl tries to come to terms with the ambiguous dichotomy between subject and object, as elaborated in earlier works,2 with the concept of Lebenswelt: each thing, humans included, circumscribes a specific world of appearances that, nonetheless, coexists with other worlds, which intrinsically reveal a latent, common structure. This passage is possible in virtue of a multitude of Seinsgeltungen, namely ontic validities or the being that counts (gelte) for each subjectivity within one world. This co-existence is possible due to the hidden geometry at which each subjectivity can arrive through her own empirical relatedness to the world, something that can be differently phrased as the belongingness of body organs to the percept, and which is maintained in fantasy constructions, since inherent commonality belongs to ‘all experience of bodies’ (ibid., 106). Intersubjective relationships are thus ‘all-encompassing’, an externalization of each subjectivity that is relativized by the dynamics of other Lebenswelten (ibid., 31, 113–14): it is by living with other bodies, a ‘living together’ (ibid., 108) that Ego can enrich her own perspective. The other-than-I participates, in Merleau-Ponty, with the perceptual field of the I in a ‘universality of feeling’ (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 136–37). The perception of the Other, then, is not merely an awakening of ‘ready made thoughts’ on the part of the I, but rather is an experience of estrangement of Self: the latter realizes that there is a shared speaking and thought world with the Other, in which the roles between subject and object are interchangeable. As long as I see the Other as other-than-I, it is also true that the Other sees me as otherthan-her. I therefore hypothesize that since we share this perceptual moment together, the Other must have an internal, reflexive part that might functionsimilarly to mine in or in the same way (ibid., 118; Merleau-Ponty 2005, 474). In this Self-revelation, there is at play a substantial ambiguity between the resistance of the Other to any reduction and a symbiosis between the Other and the Self. I am close to the Other, and the Other can influence my internal structure, as far as I can influence hers. However, as long as the Other cannot grasp my interiority entirely, I cannot have access to the entirety of her internal world (cf. Merleau-Ponty 2005, 362–63). Perception is thus incomplete in itself: there is always a beyond that cannot be exhaustible by our perception

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(ibid., 251). This structural ambiguity is also true for imagination and dreams, which, like any other thing, refer to and can be activated only by experience (ibid., 442).3 The intersubjective harmonization of all the perspectives contains in itself the possibility of epoché, which, in these terms, is the suspension of an ‘objective knowledge of the world’ (Husserl 1970, 135), an analysis of how the subjectivity shapes the world through ‘its concealed internal “method”’ (ibid., 177). The first epoché is from the empirical, the pre-given as experienced by the inner logic of the organism, or a ‘purely psychic experience’, that must be penetrated in its own essence as well (ibid., 249). The second reduction, or psychological reduction, moves from the subjectivity’s perception to the givenness of the things in the world: without perception, things cannot exist as such, or in other words, through our perspective we have a grasp of the world. This is a grasp not in the sense of an appearance that must be unravelled in favour of a thingin-itself, but an aspect of the Lebenswelt of the thing, of its relatedness to the world. Husserl, therefore, talks about a continuous movement across and along the world horizon (ibid., 251). This second reduction is Welt-universal, in the sense that the totality of consciousness coincides with the totality of the world (see ibid., translator’s note). In a way, therefore, epoché is a ‘reorientation’ of the ‘mundane attitude’ (ibid., 258), thereby enriching the historical and subjectively perceptual with new possibilities. The concept of Husserl’s Lebenswelten, like Heidegger’s environing world or Umwelt (Heidegger 1999, 164), echoes some reflections of the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), and in my mind it is not coincidental that Merleau-Ponty explicitly refers to von Uexküll in his sketches contained in the lessons on nature (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 167–78, 209). I propose therefore to examine von Uexküll’s thought for a moment in order to put Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in perspective with my fieldwork.

Von Uexküll or the Umweltforschung When I read von Uexküll’s monumental Theoretische Biologie (1926), I realized that many of his theorizations crucially respond to my personal disappointment with both the anthropomorphic and materialist approaches. Von Uexküll’s standpoint shares with the two approaches the problematic challenge posed by the (apparent) autonomy of materiality or the nonhuman, without, however, explaining it either with an absolute indifference of materiality for the human, or with an overwhelming projection of the latter onto the former. The most original trait of Theoretische Biologie (1926) is its inspiration from Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Agreeing with Kant, von Uexküll argues that reality is subjectively shaped by each perceiver (von Uexküll 1926, xv). In contrast

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with Kant, however, he does not deem that reality is fragmented into relative substances impeding access to an objective world that is transcendentally prior to any perception. First of all, each monad or organism belongs to the same Umwelt. The environment, which can be wholly considered as an organism in itself, is regulated by an ‘extramaterial’ Naturfaktor or life energy, which is unknowable in itself as a Kantian noumenon (cf. von Uexküll 1926, 352 with Brentari 2015, 236). Since Umwelt and organisms constitute a unicum, Naturfaktor is a dynamic flux that differentiates every organism and, at the same time, connects organisms to each other and to the Umwelt. In short, Naturfaktor is the means or measure through which a relationship between the organism and Umwelt is made possible. Given the fact that an environing relationship is intrinsically subjective, Naturfaktor is subjectively oriented. Therefore, instead of a pluralism of essences, von Uexküll proposes a monism in which each subjective perspective is only part of a unique dynamic that must be analysed in its empirical relationships and connections. That which can be known is only the practical forms of engagement. Imagine ourselves when listening to music (von Uexküll 1926, 49). We are so immersed in sound that we dismiss its origins, the fact that it is produced by a specific instrument. We have the impression that sound completely fills our bodily movements. This fusion between ourselves and sound makes us intuitively think that sound’s properties are purely subjective and that music’s specificity in its local expression cannot be easily detected. Our impression would not be the same if music was not attached to us, as for instance when we are reading the score or the mathematical measures of the sound’s pitch without listening to it (ibid., 51). In von Uexküll’s words, ‘The stone lies in the objective observer’s hand as a neutral object, but it is transformed into a meaning-carrier as soon as it enters into a relationship with a subject’ (von Uexküll 1982, 27). Music, then, has specific triggers or potential ‘meaning-carriers’ that are filled with different contents as long as the subjectivity that listens to it changes. We cannot infer, then, as Kant did, that these triggers modify their structure, thereby corrupting music as it is. Rather, each organism functionally uses music’s triggers for its own goals, something that the Estonian biologist calls ‘their particular building plan’ or Bauplan (ibid., 36). Music’s properties, or sense qualities, must thus be grasped as a counterpunctual dynamic between the inner or Innenwelt – music’s structural triggers and Bauplan – and the outer or Umgebung – listeners’ subjective exploration and usage of it – of the bodily interactions that occur in the Umwelt (von Uexküll 1926, 10; cf. Tønnessen 2009, 54). The contrappunto between Innenwelt and Umgebung is not a mimetic relationship: its object does not directly correspond to a specific sensation. Music is an ‘independent sequence of impulses’ (von Uexküll 1926, 115) that becomes an object of subjective perception only when its properties ‘agree’ with those of the perceiving organism (ibid., 81).

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This agreement behaves according to the Bauplan of music and the listener, thereby enriching their respective development (von Uexküll 1982, 36). Umgebung is, therefore, a localized portion of Umwelt that identifies the moment of the contrappunto, whereas Innenwelt stresses the subjective development of each organism implied. If look closely at music, we distinguish between melody and symphony. Melody is the orderly sounding of musical notes one after the other, symphony is their sounding together. When combined, melody and symphony give us harmony (von Uexküll 1926, 29; see also Buchanan 2008, 8). If we apply both the image of melody and the event of listening to looking at, touching, smelling and tasting material things, we become aware that things have triggers or directions towards certain sensuous experiences that ‘sound out’ when they ‘harmonize’ with our internal structure. From our perspective, though, we can only identify what composes the melody: the entirety of the thing we are tasting, listening to or otherwise interacting with cannot be known as such by us. We can therefore say that material things are inherently ambiguous for us: they escape from our deep understanding but, at the same time, identify our intimate structure. It is by experiencing things that we are aware of our true selves. Von Uexküll suggests viewing each one of us and each material thing or organism as being encircled by a soap bubble (von Uexküll 2010, 69).4 We cannot penetrate the bubble, but we can certainly relate with it (Buchanan 2008, 29). The bubble transmits to our bubble certain impulses that reach and shake us internally. We can analyse our internal perturbations, and start to partly deduce what the organism in front of us can see and do regardless of our sensations, how they shape their own Umwelt – which we can consider as the bubble itself. Clearly, this operation on which we embark implies that we are progressively aware of our limits and conditionings. In this way, we decompose experience in its intimate particles until we detect a portion of the organism’s Innenwelt. It is clear, then, that our understanding of other organisms or material things is inherently intersubjective: we work within the borders of our relationship with them. Von Uexküll calls our reflection Umweltforschung (from the German Forschung, or research). The Umweltforschung is characterized by three phases of progressive reduction from the human Umwelt: first of all, we have the human Umwelt, overlapping with the animal; then all the objects not pertinent to the animal are ‘cancelled’; and lastly, the researcher must approach the sensorial, nervous system of the animal or its Innenwelt as expressed in external reality (Brentari 2015, 80). In his proposal for an Umweltforschung, von Uexküll seems to me to dismiss an anthropomorphic approach. Since each element of the larger mosaic that is life equally contributes to the whole homeostasis of forces or Naturfaktor within the Umwelt, each subjective perspective must be considered, taken into account and not conflated.

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What we have with Umweltforschung, together with deconstruction, is a process of translation between Innenwelten. Instead of a juxtaposition that would lead us to say, using the perspectival play of the ontological turn (Viveiros de Castro 2015), that ‘for us blood is blood, for the jaguar it is meat’, we have a negative statement: ‘we, as humans, cannot image that blood is meat and the jaguar cannot imagine that blood is blood’. In other words, we, as humans, cannot claim what is food for the jaguar, we can only guess that from our limits as humans: To say that the Umwelt of the paramecium is an environment with only one type of stimulus does not mean that there is a sole, well defined stimulus (for example only a chemical one), but that the inner world of the paramecium is not able to make any qualitative distinction among nerve stimulations – and therefore its experience is likely unimmaginable for the human subject, who is unable to abolish such distinctions. (Brentari 2015, 81; see also Tønnessen 2015, 11)

A Reappraisal of Phenomenology I concur with Thomas in his surprise on noticing that there are very few works which ‘openly identify themselves as phenomenological’ and which recognize the role and consistency of phenomenology beyond ‘a methodology in which the investigators base their interpretations of a place or object upon their unbridled subjective experience’ (Thomas 2009, 43). Past and current anthropological debates (Derrida 1973, 168; Bourdieu 1977, 168; Archer 2004; Viveiros de Castro 2004, 2015; Latour 2005, 60–61; Henare et al. 2007, 13) have viewed phenomenology as a theory based upon a solipsistic human experience that cannot be transcended and excludes everything which cannot be empirically experienced (Archer 2004, 45). In these negative perspectives of phenomenology, embodiment coincides either with metaphysics or with spiritualization (Viveiros de Castro 2015, 260–61), or becomes a criterion of discrimination against nonhuman, non-living beings, as they cannot actually experience anything (ibid., 263). In contrast with these interpretations sketchily summarized here, Coole (2005, 125) argues that the perceptual is the primary focus of phenomenology inasmuch as it is the ambiguous coexistence of ‘agentive’ expressions emerging ‘within a shared lifeworld’. Following my own interpretation of Coole’s phenomenological remarks, human–nonhuman relationships are not compounds or sums of different agentic capabilities in a ‘distributive’ logic – with each subject’s agentic force representing an isolated trait of the human–nonhuman assemblage responsible for action – but rather unsettling and ‘fuzzy’ hybridizations. In short, it is the relationship itself that is agentive instead of ‘its components’.

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In Merleau-Ponty, the reification proper of a reflection on the Other is part of the same metamorphic process of flesh, a moment of the whole process: the continuous becoming of life and perception is not arrested by reflection upon it. In addition, reflection is subsumed within the logic of the perceptual field: the reflection of the Self is instrumental to the libidinal orientation towards things, for it discovers the inherent ambiguity and interdependence between things and bodies. As long as there is a fluid exchange between the inner and the outer – which are thus interchangeable and ontogenetically transformed – there is no need for transcendentalism, namely the idea that the cause of actions must be found in a self-sufficient and self-explanatory entity that is superior to reality. The significant shift proposed by Merleau-Ponty is, therefore, a unique ontology, that of the being, where the specificities of each subjectivity are not separated entities that must be unravelled from an empirical substratum, but rather can be understood only as interstitial, in relation with a world, an interbeing (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 208, 218). The interstitial quality of religious material artefacts, curators, researchers, past curators and collectors, and visitors would account for the coexistence of contrasting views, as observed in the case of Husserl. More significantly, flesh (chair) and interstitiality describe the ways in which human and nonhuman actors in the museum field are reciprocally influenced and shaped. An example is the phenomenological continuity and the theoretical discontinuity of curators with the colonial inheritance. Both in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh and in Husserl’s Lebenswelten, the role of Umwelt is central: each monad or subjectivity is intersubjectively shaped within a circuit of inter-monadic relationships and forces that determines a form of monism, rather than a binary system constituted by mind and body. Another similarity between Merleau-Ponty and Husserl is the idea of organism as a description of the connections between the inner and the outer: while Merleau-Ponty invokes a biological approach to the ontogenetic dynamics of flesh (2003, 229–35, 259–66), Husserl talks about an ‘organismal conduct’ (1960, 119). In my view, the later Husserl and Merleau-Ponty better capture what I observed in the field: religious artefacts express their own features only by engaging in sensuous relationships with humans. It is from this ambiguous, hybrid connection between subjectivities that we can disclose one of the multiple faces of materiality. Although a limited and spurious grasping – limited because of our positionality, background and perceptual-cognitive abilities, spurious because there is also our bodily-imaginative trace – that portion of materiality is in itself authentic. We can therefore explain the coexistence of different perceptions and how they are reflected, incorporated by religious artefacts. The ambiguity of the interfusion between the perceiver and the perceived is particularly relevant in a critique of the anthropomorphic and the anthro-

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pocentric approach. Ambiguity shows how the perceiver and the perceived reciprocally influence each other and, at the same time, maintain and define their own specificities that cannot be given or graspable in their entirety. On an empirical level, in my view, the ambiguity of phenomenology would allow us to understand why, for instance, a scroll can at the same time be worshipped, aesthetically contemplated or scientifically studied in museum settings. Furthermore, the Umweltforschung of von Uexküll recalls to me what curators normally do. They start from their own phenomenological connection with material artefacts, to then imagine what visitors could be attracted to and what their expectations towards displayed artefacts might be. In such a way, curators attempt to design a museum environment that can potentially welcome disparate forms of engagement. I also argue that the Estonian scientist offers us a ‘moderate’ way between the anthropomorphic and materialistic approaches, questioning the primacy that they respectively give to the human or to materiality with the acknowledgement of the ambiguous interference and contamination of the two, whilst maintaining their specificities.

Notes 1. For a parallel between Merleau-Ponty and the later Husserl, see Coole 2007, 97, 101. 2. The work of Husserl has been contested by several scholars, such as Flood (1999) and Derrida (2008), as it puts itself in the ambiguous position of depending upon reality and, at the same time, transgressing it by claiming the synthetic skills of a pre-existing ‘pure vision’ (Husserl 1999, 43; see also Husserl 1989). Because of this vision, phenomena can be studied and observed as abstracted from the mundane, physical sphere. 3. See also Heidegger when he talks about Dasein’s projection (1999, 168, 277) and being-in-the-world: ‘Self and world belong together in a single entity, the Dasein. Self and world are not two beings, like subject and object, or like I and thou, but self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of beingin-the-world’ (ibid., 297). 4. I intend the terms ‘material thing’ and ‘organism’ as equal. ‘Material things’ simply encompasses the organisms that common sense has usually placed among the organic.

P

Conclusions Returning to Museums

Readers have seen where my interrogation of the scrolls led me. My relationship with them was initially purely imaginative and nourished by literature, and then became concrete in the storage rooms of the museums I visited, or in certain rare exhibitions. Their vision stimulated my intellectual quest within the debate on materiality, instead of leading me to impose theory aprioristically on the ethnographic material. The ‘bites’ of materiality I experienced in the field guided the formulation and articulation of theory, causing me to review what I read and giving me critical instruments for analysing new scholarship. In this retrospective approach to fieldwork, methodology and theory, I suggested that readers change their usual mindset and turn towards a method in which museums are fundamental. Museums can test and provide means for nurturing theoretical statements and understandings of the material world precisely because they immerse curators, researchers and audiences in an experimental field in which they can focus on materiality as it is, in isolation or critical distance from ideas and preconceptions. In this respect, Experiencing Materiality proposes phenomenology as both the theoretical framework under which to understand different engagements with materiality, and also as a metaphor through which to start to see museums in a new light. Phenomenology is the pivotal language for the environing world, where relationships are its syntax elements for portraying Umwelten, to use von Uexküll’s term. A metamorphic usage of phenomenology thus questions readers on whether museums themselves can be part of the environing world, instead of condemning them to their alleged role as depositories of exhausted things.

Reconstructing Sacred Forces: Conundrums and Potentialities This book has shown that curators are far from being censors of the forms of engagement with and knowledge of material artefacts that audiences enact

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within museum galleries. In spite of the historical need for providing ‘institutionalized’ education, curators, even during the colonial period, have had to handle visitors’ responses, and to adjust their curatorial strategies and techniques accordingly. During colonial times, touching and adoring religious artefacts was largely condemned as superstitious. Some collectors and curators, though, deemed immersive exhibitions in which religious behaviour could be re-enacted more effective than static displays and wordy captions in educating the audience. Reconstructions were also in line with the Victorian appeal for the ‘wondrous’ and the ‘sensational’. Most of the time, this attractive force was perpetuated in a condition of inequality between the ‘viewer’ and the ‘native’ or the ‘curios’. In current museums, reconstructions respond to multiple necessities and goals. On the one hand, an immersive atmosphere can communicate philosophical concepts and complex phenomena without reproducing any intellectual disparities between specialists and non-specialists, as was the case in the episode of contrapposto narrated by the curator in the Musée du quai Branly. Experimenting on, or imagining your body practising, certain rituals creates an embodiment through which visitors can deeply know concepts, ideas and religious precepts from the inside. Each visitor thus explores her inner knowledge potentialities instead of adjusting her idiosyncrasies to an imposed elitarian knowledge. This strategy of bodily experimenting collections is particularly useful for collaborating with ‘devotional communities’ (Davis 1997) in the transformation of the museum into a space of social-cultural encounter. At the same time, recreations of ritual sites expand the accuracy of museum descriptions by including particulars that can hardly be articulated in written form. On the other hand, curators themselves work closely with materiality, thereby developing new creative designs and storytelling; furthermore, they can bridge their lack of expertise or knowledge, usually left by previous collectors. However, religious altars and shrines or assemblages of disparate collections are also extremely problematic, as Emma Martin has rightly pointed out while talking about the Buddhist gallery in Liverpool. Religious artefacts were collected during military offences and diplomatic negotiations: they cannot be neutrally handled, and their past manifests itself when ‘devotional communities’ know of their existence in European and American museums. If Martin’s doubts recall the vast literature on the theme of repatriation and ethical concerns in museums (Hauser-Schäublin and Prott 2016; Tythacott and Arvanitis 2016; Turnbull and Pickering 2010), they also remind us that materiality is a complex entity. In other words, artefacts can evoke disparate reactions and ‘talk’ to humans in potentially infinite registers. A scroll, for instance, can bear testimony to a religious practice, but also to a social phenomenon in which painter-storytellers find their artistic voice and raise public attention on specific social issues. Religious artistic, socially en-

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gaged and historical features of the scroll coexist without excluding each other. Restricting scrolls to their ‘religious content’ risks impoverishing the reflexive and creative potentialities of museum exhibits. It is, therefore, necessary to find new ways of thinking and working with materiality.

Returning to Materiality: A ‘Weak Anthropomorphism’ As seen in Chapter 7, anthropomorphic and materialist approaches identify the human and the nonhuman as a complementary couple. In anthropomorphism, once the human ‘attributes’ properties, animacy and agency to materiality, the latter becomes a passive mirror or a black hole. It absorbs without resistance humans’ considerations of the nonhuman. In a materialist view, the human is devalued of its characteristics, becoming ‘an object among objects’. However, even materiality becomes paradoxically neglected by a materialist view. If it is the case that each component of the assemblage adds a peculiar characteristic by gathering with other things in order to produce an effect, it is also true that each part of the assemblage can be interchangeable. Each local materiality, therefore, is not considered in its specificities, thereby devaluing their subjective forms, which are only understood in mechanistic terms. The result is to transform humanity into a negative counterpart of materiality, thereby leaving aside any historical circumstances and processes of the human–nonhuman interaction. In the most radical materialist positions, such as OOO, material engagement is totally suppressed without the acknowledgement of any subjective distortions. More crucially, in anthropomorphism and materialism, the human and the nonhuman as such are not co-present and do not equally forge themselves during perception. The monistic ontology these approaches both claim to have is, in reality, characterized by subjugating the material or the human in unbalanced relationships, where one pole is the passive instrument of the second. Phenomenology seems to break this vicious circle. It proposes an ontological monism that is not based on value terms (with different beings as ‘degradation’ or empty, supporting actors of a ‘superior’ actor) but is rather relational. The human and materiality transform themselves through their reciprocal relationship. Being in a relationship is not determined by an external factor that, thus, shapes their subjectivities. Instead, their subjectivities produce the relationship and are, at the same time, defined by it, in what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘ouvertureau-monde’. Humans, materiality and nonhuman animals are all beings-in-theworld. As such, they tend towards each other as part of their ‘dwelling’ (Ingold 2000) in the world. As in the visual examples used by Merleau-Ponty, being human or being material means being part of the perceptual horizon of the Other and, at the same

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time, viewing things according to our Bauplan or developmental necessities. This being-for-the-Other and being-for-the-Self are co-present and reciprocally influencing: as long as I see the Other seeing me, I am aware of me as seen by the Other, and I can perceive how the Other reacts to my gaze. Knowing the Other is knowing from me, as a being occupying a position in the world, and knowing me. The symbiosis between my gaze and that of the Other, which I feel on me, stimulates my development as a being. I clarify this point for readers by citing a feminist scholar, LichtenbergEttinger (1997). She argues that the uterine mother–foetus relationship constitutes a primary intersubjective background from which the foetus not only develops its own libidinal identity, but also forges an empathetic relationship with the Other. The mother has feelings and expectations towards pregnancy and motherhood, which are shaped by what her mother felt and did. A series of stimulations and substances, such as hormones, translate feelings and projections and are transmitted to the placenta. How the placenta is affected by stimuli and hormones, or a lack thereof, crucially conditions the basic life of the foetus. The foetus shapes her being-in-the-world as a future child from what her mother transmits during pregnancy. At the same time, she can react to the mother’s inputs, for instance by kicking the placenta and, therefore, inducing cramps in her mother’s body and thus modifying her mood. Phenomenological symbiosis is an alliance of different sorts of impulses and feelings whose source of production cannot be identified in any reasonable way. On the other hand, it is also a moment of incorporation of fragments of the Other into ourselves, transforming them in our specific way of sensing and relating to the world. Symbiosis is, therefore, an apotheosis of ambiguity, something that Merleau-Ponty captured with the concept of flesh. We can know the Other only through fragments which are given to us encrusted with our idiosyncrasies. In other words, it is the perspective occupied by our organism, namely our disposition or our perceptual abilities, that creates the condition through which we know the Other by that fragment and not in totality. To return to the example of pregnancy, what is transmitted through the placenta is an impulse that carries a fragmentary vision of the Other’s characteristics: the mother’s nervousness, adrenaline or serotonin. These fragments are further processed by the foetus and encrusted within her projections: I feel tension, therefore she must be tense. She is in this state because I may have done something wrong; she may have this feeling for me as her son or daughter. This trace of the mother in the foetus is further englobed in the born baby’s expression of feelings and approaches towards other female figures she enters into contact with. Females can be nervous, therefore I must be careful in not making them nervous. As a consequence, I suppress certain parts of my character and emphasize others.

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However, both mother and foetus do not know exactly what the other is feeling or the reasons behind her emotive state. Our mother could have been nervous because she has low self-esteem and was not able to imagine herself capable of being a good mother, not because she despised or hated us. We thought she did, however, because we perceived her nervousness and incorporated that fragment in our narrative. If we isolate the nervousness from our projections, we could right now say that she was incredibly nervous at that moment, but we cannot infer the reason for which she was nervous. We could not talk to her during that moment, nor have an idea of her past: she only shares with us her bodily dispositions of that temporal fragment. Materiality tacitly affects our living in similar ways, conditioning certain impulses or needs that we have. A material thing can reveal to us that it is cold, for instance. This coldness can evoke in us a certain emotive state. However, we can say neither that the coldness we perceive provokes the same response in everyone, nor that the thing is defined by coldness and, consequently, can be used in our lives for its coldness only. Since we are in symbiosis with any kind of nonhuman, and we exchange impulses with each other, there is an inescapable anthropomorphism. However, this anthropomorphism cannot be absolute: it is a condition produced by the facticity of our being-in-the-world that is limited and relative. More importantly, our anthropomorphism does not and cannot have the arrogance of knowing the Other in its totality or, conversely, of making it coincide with ourselves. What we have, therefore, is a ‘weak anthropomorphism’ (Gamberi and Zaietta 2018). With this term, I mean the epistemological necessity of projecting ourselves to the Other in order to know and relate to her. This projection is always negotiated and adjusted by the Other’s response: it is our relationship with the Other that regulates and moderates our anthropocentric-egocentric impulses. At the same time, projection does not exhaust the Other and her multiple features, which express themselves in a variety of ways. There is no space, in conclusion, for a willy-nilly ‘attribution’ of the Self to the Other. In this weak anthropomorphism, materiality is thus prismatic. It reflects each time a different face triggered by the fusional touch with a specific subject, creatively and unexpectedly stimulating new properties and sensations along with the perceptual flux. Given the magmatic context in which we come into contact with materiality, it is extremely difficult to capture all its faces at once. As researchers, then, we must start from the micro-interconnections between materiality and humans by deconstructing any forms of essentialization. If it is true that humans cannot reach a polished, definite knowledge of reality, then scholarly categorizations and common-sense assumptions must be humbled as partial faces of that reality. Researchers are thus open to the liminality and fuzziness of materiality. Both guide them to embrace multivocality

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and a processual epistemology that must not be crystallized into mathematical concepts such as that of the assemblage. As Grewcock (2014) has already argued, curators and visitors engage with materiality in ways that cannot be efficaciously captured with standard academic language. I agree with Law and Mol (1995, 289) that materiality is not a ‘stable object’, and each prismatic face that emerges over time is ‘partially connected’ with others, in a similar fashion to a patchwork: materials and socials – and stories too – are like bits of cloth that have been sewn together. It’s to imagine that there are many ways of sewing. It’s to imagine that there are many kinds of thread. It’s to attend to the local links. And it’s to remember that a heap of pieces of cloth can be turned into a whole variety of patchworks. (Law and Mol 1995, 290)

The ambiguity and unpredictability of materiality is, then, an extraordinary creative potential that leads to elaborate descriptions, accounts and statements. An example is represented by the ‘material knowledge’ of the colonial period, where power was temporarily suspended for equal material training. Scholars can thus co-construct with museum practitioners new forms of knowledge and anthropological engagements. They can work with communities, as in the case of the Oriental Museum or the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, but also with school groups, within contexts of social inequality and in other circumstances. Museum-led knowledge can thus serve as a form of thinking in continuous evolution and one which provides an inspirational source for society: a thought that articulates the unexpected without blocking its transformative, and thus potentially revolutionary, capacities.

Deconstructing and Collapsing I remember the feeling I shared with my colleagues during the summer school ‘Discomforting Objects’ (Tubingen, September 2018). We had to organize an exhibition that connected the material artefacts – or pictures of them – that we had chosen from our doctoral and postdoctoral research, which could exemplify and embody conundrums, ethical issues, disturbing pasts, events or themes. Our team had difficulty in thinking about the possible common points shared by each artefact: a planetarium, a Sikh altar in the Museum of World Religions in Taipei, a Tibetan reliquary and a lamp composition. We roughly identified the fact that all the artefacts pointed at the interplay between visibility and invisibility. The planetarium was so in virtue of its technical lenses that can decipher for human eyes what seems only a bright point in the sky. Religious artefacts can evoke a supernatural presence that generally cannot be perceived as coexistent with us, on a phenomenological level. The lamp compo-

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sition, on the other hand, is a material translation of a mental idea, a theoretical hypothesis that must be materially tested in order to prove if it is feasible in the concrete sense of the term. However, we were unsure about the exhibitive translation of our ideas: we all thought that the visible/invisible dynamic was too complex to be efficacious for an exhibit. When we went to the storage rooms of the Ethnological Museum at the University of Tubingen, however, we immersed ourselves in a flow of thoughts. The copiousness of lamps and lights triggered our amazement and surprise. In particular, I was taken aback by a pictorial representation of the Virgin Mary – probably a lithograph – surrounded by a frame of seashells and small lamps. In all its kitschy appearance, the lamp simply showed me the thin line between science and religion: in both, there must be a firm belief, a mental image that cannot be simply projected onto reality. Material affordances, on the contrary, constantly challenge our ideas and shape our flux of thoughts, precisely in the same way as happened to our team. The material evidence talked to us freely, revealing connections and inherent reflections we could not have suspected before. In particular, we came to the conclusion that humanity is naturally disturbed by what cannot be known, what stands in the dark and refuses to be touched, smelt, seen, heard. Human beings can commit the most atrocious actions in their power in the attempt to capture that darkness, or in having, at least, the presumption of grasping some intimate truth. A few days before, we had seen the craniometric specimen, photos and other artefacts collected during the German Empire and the Nazi regime, which still linger in the storage rooms. They condense a traumatic and shameful past that requires an ongoing reflexive discipline in terms of what must be shown and told, and how to narrate this ‘discomforting’ heritage in a constructive way for scientific and civil society. The thirst for knowledge, for seeing ‘clearly’, for ‘enlightenment’, therefore, is a liminal desire, since it puts to the test phenomena that cannot be customarily experienced, thereby running the risk of nourishing a voyeuristic and perverted drive. Colonial pictures of naked adolescents, for instance, responded both to a paedophilic urge and an ‘alleged’ scientific investigation of ‘different bodies’. In the following days, then, we wanted to express that inherent and perturbative ambiguity of knowledge by using different layers of paper and positioning lights in strategic points. Instead of having a clear showcase where visitors could mirror themselves and easily indulge in visual contemplation, the display encouraged them to reflect upon their curiosity: what will happen if I open a paper window and peer inside it? Do I want to switch on the light and know what is behind the paper curtain stick? Am I really ‘enlightened’ if I ‘spy’ the artefacts on display? Can this play of paper and light evoke a presence that we do not suspect from a museum artefact? In our presentation of the display to the rest of the summer school participants, we reconstructed our flow of thoughts

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and the process by which the exhibition concretely acquired its shape. We then asked participants to reflect upon themselves and to engage freely with the showcase, to then discuss with us their thoughts and reflections. Despite being very rudimentary and certainly not perfect, the exhibition for the summer school, in retrospect, summarizes what curators regularly go through during their work. We cannot say that they simply give form to their thoughts. Instead, they are driven to a flux where ideas and material affordances intermingle. It is the flux itself that renders curatorial practices meaningful as cultural statements and invitations to reflect upon society and phenomena. The problem I was able to examine during fieldwork, however, is that curators’ flux of thoughts and materiality is rarely shown to visitors unless they are researchers embarked on a doctoral project or the writing up of academic output. What I am trying to argue is that museum experiences would be enriched incredibly if curators included their creative process in exhibitions permanently, rather than for special occasions or only during the exhibit’s inauguration. The same point can be made for archives and storage rooms. Visitors should observe and participate in curators’ material engagement, in doing so realizing how complex and stratified collecting and working with materiality is. Although permanent visits to archives and storage rooms cannot be feasible due to conservation issues, I argue that museums should adopt measures for guaranteeing and extending hands-on moments, similarly to what I have seen at the Oriental Museum. More specifically, hands-on visits and temporary exhibitions focused on one or more aspects of the museum collections and archives. On the other hand, curatorial ‘retelling’ to visitors contribute to offering a multi-perspectival view of materiality. These methods thus show visitors that there is no single way to think about or approach materiality. An example of a multi-perspectival exhibition is ‘Perspectives: Angles on African Art’, as described by Vogel (1991). In this exhibition, each co-curator wrote captions and selected artefacts according to their opinion on the conceptual term of ‘African art’. They thus demonstrated to visitors that what is displayed is the result of subjective positionalities. Experiencing Materiality has shown that Vogel’s perspectival approach should be included in permanent exhibitions. In essence, it must become an ‘attitude’ of museums, recreating a debate with visitors and analysing the archival information according to the notion of multivocality. On the one hand, colonial pasts must be problematized and used as a reflection on present times, instead of being condemned in their totality. On the other, thinking that religious materiality can still impact on or challenge humans suggests that museums are inherently spaces of knowledge and experimentation, where material artefacts, with their prismatic richness, consistently produces a ‘research surplus’ (Bjerregaard 2019: Chapter 6). Therefore, I concur with Bjerregaard that museums and curatorial practices should perturb

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assumptions and standard conceptualizations of the world. In other words, museums should be centres of ‘collapsology’, namely ‘a process where our conceptual knowledge is shattered, and we are asked to construct a new set of relations, a new meaningful order by activating an aesthetic approach’ (ibid.). Deconstructing materiality, namely deconstructing its prismatic nature and human–material engagement, is crucial for creating new attitudes and ways of knowing within museums. Let us start from there.

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Appendix to the Pictures

This appendix fully describes the collection of Indian storytelling scrolls at the Kulttuurien museo, the best-documented and most complete of all the collections I analysed in the course of my fieldwork except that of the World Museum. Because this collection is quite recent, it does not have to contend with any lack of information inherited from past collectors. The collection is not exhibited, however, as the Kulttuurien museo has no proper space. Instead, space must be negotiated with other cultural institutions in Helsinki. The pictures I took during fieldwork accompany this account. The museum has a par. (Figures A.1 and A.2) and two separate collections of pats. The par. was donated by Oppi Untrachtin, an American who emigrated to Finland because of his marriage. Untrachtin did much fieldwork in India, and the majority of his collection went to New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum. There is no record of when it was collected and photographed. The first collection of pats consists of four scrolls, painted at the beginning of the 2000s and purchased by Prof. Lina Fruzzetti and Prof. Ákos Östör for an exhibition put on in Helsinki in 2005. Two of the scrolls were made in a handicraft centre in Bishnupur. The second collection comprises five scrolls from the Midnapur District, which were commissioned by a handicraft centre based in Kolkata. These scrolls were sold to the museum by Mr Rajaditya Bandyopadhyay, who also provided the information for their cataloguing, in 1996. The curator contacted the two professors during my fieldwork because she did not have expertise on Bengali scrolls. The information I acquired, then, was a collage of the museum’s archival information and some information provided to the curator by the two professors, which came from a web database of Prof. Östör’s university.1 The first pat shown in this book is based on some episodes taken from the poem Chandi Mangal Kavya by Kabikankana Mukundaram (Figures A.3 and A.4). The main character is Sripati tai Srimata, the rich son of a merchant. Sripatai was searching for his father, who was kept as a prisoner in Sri Lanka by the king Salabanille because he did not manage to show the king the goddess Chandi. Sripatai convinced Salabanille that Kalidahassa Srimata was the place of the goddess Chandi, where she sat on a lotus, swallowing and burping out

Appendix ⧫ 159

elephants. As a reward, the king allowed Sripatai to marry his daughter and released Sripatai’s father. The pat propagandizes in favour of Chandi: the goddess, in her competition with Shiva, coincides with Durga. The last scroll, from Mednapore, is a chaksudan pat, a reproduction of the jadu patuas’ works (Figure A.5).

Appendix Illustrations

Figure A.1. Pābūji (on the black mare) defeats Ravana. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Courtesy of The National Museum of Finland.

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Figure A.2. Particular of a par.. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Courtesy of The National Museum of Finland.

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Figure A.3. Goddess Chandi sitting in her lotus in the company of a little Ganeś while receiving the visit of Sripati tai Srimata. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Courtesy of The National Museum of Finland.

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Figure A.4. Goddess Chandi in her form of Durga; Ganeś in the bottom left and Sripati tai Srimata in the bottom right. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Courtesy of The National Museum of Finland.

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Figure A.5. Particular of a chaksudan pat. Photograph by Valentina Gamberi. Courtesy of The National Museum of Finland.

Note 1. This can be accessed at http://naya.research.wesleyan.edu (accessed 26 August 2020).

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P Index

agency, 3, 5, 16, 18, 18n1, 78, 90, 114, 129–32, 134, 136, 138, 151 Amar Chitra Katha, 22 ambiguity, 3, 13, 17, 22, 33, 45, 53, 66, 121, 142–43, 147–48, 152, 154–55 animacy, 131, 133, 151 anthropocentrism, 129, 133, 135 anthropomorphism, 3, 136, 151, 153 weak anthropomorphism, 17, 151, 153 Appadurai, Arjun, 5, 13–14, 19, 33–34, 91n3 arkhē, 86, 88 artefact, artefacts, 6, 10–12, 17, 18n1, 18n2, 19, 32, 37, 39, 42–43, 49, 52–53, 55–58, 66, 70–71, 79, 80, 82, 84, 88–89, 94, 98, 101, 105–106, 108, 110, 111, 113–18, 121, 126, 127n1, 130–33, 138, 148, 150, 154–56 Asian artefact, artefacts, 79, 128, 132, 139 Buddhist artefacts, 82, 119 exhibited artefact, artefacts, 32, 34, 57, 107, 114 Indian artefact, artefacts, 59 material artefacts, 5–7, 10–11, 12–13, 16–17–18–19, 34, 37, 41, 46, 50, 57, 63, 67, 70, 72, 86, 93, 96, 101, 107, 110, 113, 115, 118, 128, 135, 147–49, 154, 156 multilayered artefact, artefacts, 106 museum artefact, artefacts, 4, 7, 13, 36–38, 48, 57, 79, 96, 109, 113, 128, 155 religious artefact, artefacts, 4, 11, 14, 32, 38, 41, 45, 47, 49––51, 54–55, 59, 66–67, 70, 73, 77, 79, 89, 94, 96, 111, 121, 128, 132–133, 138, 147, 150, 154 ritual artefact, 18

South Asian artefacts, 61, 66, 67, 80, 98, 128 Southeast Asian artefact, artefacts, 98 Tibetan Buddhist artefact, artefacts, 15 Tibetan artefacts, 111, 121 assemblage, assemblages, 7, 15–16, 54, 78, 82, 89, 96, 98, 101, 107–109, 111, 130–31, 133–36, 146, 150–51, 154 assemblage thinking, 135–36 aura, 32, 74, 101 being-in-the-world, 72, 139, 148n3, 152–53 Bell, Charles Alfred, Sir, 15, 72, 90, 116–18 Bengal, Bengali, 3, 12, 21, 22, 25–28, 158 West Bengal, 1, 4 Bhakti, 25 27 bhopa, bhopas, 21, 22, 28, 29, 30, 31, 35n7, 45, 46, 54, 125, 127n5, 134 Bihar, 21, 68 biographical approach, 13, 20, 48, 70 bodhisattva, bodhisattvas, 45, 116, 122 Boner, Alice, 62, 68n11 Buddha, 101, 107–108, 117–19, 121 ‘Buddha’s Word’ exhibition, 101, 104, 106–109, 111n5 Buddhism, 27, 44, 62, 81, 82, 101, 106, 115, 118, 120–22 Chinese Buddhism, 122 Mahayana, 116–117, 121–22 Theravada Buddhism, 60 Tibetan Buddhism (see Tibetan) Bühler, Alfred, 54, 64 (the) Cambridge altar, 104, 107–109 The Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 105 Chandarvo, 64 Chandi (goddess), fig a.3, fig. a.4, 158–59

180 ⧫ Index China, 93, 98, 117, 122 and Taiwan, 120 Chitrakar, Mantu, 12, 124, 126 colonialism, 6, 12, 90 (the) colonizer, colonizers, 72, 73, 74, 77, 89, 90 (the) colonized, 72, 73–74, 77, 89–90, 122 community of practice, 7 contact zone, 56 contamination, 17, 25, 90, 148 curios, 71, 76–77–78, 156 Dalai Lama, 15, 72, 90, 117–19 Darśan, 12, 21–25, 28, 32–34, 38, 59–60, 66–67, 97, 124, 134 Devanārāyan., 29–31, 35n10 Diwali, 98, 101 Durham, fig. 5.1–5.7, 15, 93, 111 embodied, 2, 8, 16, 20, 49, 67, 70, 73, 84, 88, 107, 115, 128, 134 disembodied, 138 embodiment, embodiments, 3, 12, 24, 60, 70, 107–108, 118, 146, 150 enlightenment, 12, 70 entanglement, 33, 130, 138 ethnocentric, 59, 67 Factish, 15, 69 Faivre, Jean-Baptiste, 58, 67n5 fetish, 14–15, 18n1, 69–70 fetishism, 133 material fetishism, 14 Finland, 44, 158 Fisher, Eberhard and Barbara, 64 flesh. See Merleau-Ponty folk, 34n2, 59, 89, 122 deities, 27 god, 31 hero, 29 story, 127n7 tradition, 124–125 folk art, arts, 1, 16, 122, 125–26, 127n3 folk art traditions, 125–26 folk artists, 124–26 folk paintings, 58 Fruzzetti, Lina, 26, 158 Ganeś (god), fig a.4, 52, 78, 79, 86, 125, 161fig a.3, 162

Ganges, 77, 78 Gell, Alfred, 5, 16, 18n1, 70, 130–33 Gellian perspective, 132 Great Exhibition of London, 117 gsunten gsung rten, 106 Gujarat, 21, 64, 122 Harrison Rotunda, fig 4.1, fig. 4.3, 82 Heidegger, Martin, 2–4, 11, 139 blue jug, 2 Dasein, 139 Dasein’s projection, 148n3 environing world, 143 equipmental view of objects, 137 Heideggerrian method, 12 image, 19 Mitsein, 86 ‘thingness’, 139 Umwelt, 143 Helsinki, 9, 11, 42, 158 Hendley, Thomas, 14, 74–77, 89 Husserl, Edmund, 143, 147 contested, 148n2 Ego, 141 epoché, 141, 143 flow of consciousness, 139, 141 Krisis, 139, 142 Lebenswelt, Lebenswelten, 86, 142–143, 147 lived experience, 139 and Merleau-Ponty, 139, 143, 147, 148n1 perception, 139 perspective, 142 retention and protention, 132 thing-in-itself, 141 Umwelt, 141 Huyler, Stephen, 94, 96–97, 98 Ingold, Tim, 1, 2, 5, 6, 136, 151 and thing (see thing) Islam, 22, 25–27, 43–44, 70 Jainism, 27, 74 Jain, Jains, 26, 94 Jadu-patua, jadu-patuas, 27–28, 58, 61, 159 James, William, 16, 50 Kali (goddess), fig. 5.4, fig. 5.7, 68n8 Kalighat (paintings, pictures, painters), 26–27, 80, 91n5, 126

Index ⧫ 181 Kavad, 21, 34n1, 58 Kolkata, 26, 32, 34, 158 Kopytoff, Igor, 13–14, 19–20, 34, 48, 70 Kulttuurien museo, 9, 11, 42, 158 Lahore Museum, 33, 70 Lakshmi (goddess), fig. 5.3 Lakhsmi(’s) shrine, 98, 101 Latour, Bruno, 14–15–16, 69–70, 88–89, 133 Latourian assemblage, 136 work of purification, 8, 14–15, 69–70, 88 Leicester, 94, 122 Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Bracha, 152 Liminal, liminality, 47, 48, 49, 110, 113, 126, 153, 155 liminal, liminoid state, 90 Liverpool, 9, 15, 18n2, 28, 111–13, 115–18, 122–23, 150 Local communities, 5, 10, 43–44–45, 48, 54–55, 57, 94, 97, 106, 114, 122, 126 London, 7, 8, 77, 112, 117 Loo, Mr. C.T., 91n6 Mahabharata, 65 Martin, Emma, 15–16–17, 18n2, 28, 72, 89, 90, 113, 115, 117, 119, 120, 123–24, 126, 150 and Bell, Charles, 72, 90 material knowledge, 15, 71–72–73, 76, 86, 89–91, 93, 112, 128, 154 materiality, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 31–32, 34, 37, 41, 47, 49, 51–52, 54, 57, 66, 69, 70–71, 88–89, 98, 106–107, 112, 126–27, 129–30, 133, 135–36, 139, 143, 147–51, 153–54, 156 accessing materiality, 139 access to materiality, 10 approaching materiality, 10 approaches to materiality, 16, 118 anthropocentric approaches to materiality, 12 Asian materiality, 16 deconstructing materiality, 157 definition of materiality, 10 dilemma around materiality, 10, 18 encounter with, 88 experiences of materiality, 10

Experiencing Materiality, 4, 5, 9, 18–19, 135, 149, 156 human-materiality encounter, 41 humans and materiality, 139, 151, 153 and hylomorphism, 5, 6 Indian materiality, 53 inexhaustibility and ineffability of, 17 knowledge of, 17 materiality and the human, 17 materiality in museums, 16–17, 50 materiality’s affordances, 17 and materials, 5 non-Western materiality, 114 perspectival nature of, 5, 133 perspectival view of, 156 perspectival approach, 128 prismatic nature of, 127 religious materiality, 10, 11, 13, 16, 23, 32, 36, 56, 66, 107, 118, 120–21, 126–27, 129, 156 South Asian materiality, 66, 67 theories on materiality, 10 thingness of materiality, 139 material material culture, 4–5, 14–15, 55, 57, 62, 73, 79, 90, 115, 120, 122 material culture studies, 4, 10, 113, 129 material engagement, 5, 6, 14, 70, 75, 105, 149 material knowledge (see Martin, Emma) material religion, x, 39–40, 77, 94, 135 material thing, things, 16, 72, 75, 79, 90, 118, 135–36, 145, 148n4, 153 material things as intensive relations, 3 material world, 56 materialist approach, 16, 17, 133, 134, 139, 143, 151 matter, 1–3, 5, 17, 29, 42, 84, 89, 133, 136, 139 mediation, 89, 130, 134, 141 medium, 4, 41, 110 ‘Meeting God’ exhibition, 94, 96. See also Huyler, Stephen mela, melas, 73, 74, 75, 77, 91n3 membrane, membranes, 41, 57 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 129, 139, 147 co-presence, 141 flesh (chair), 24, 141, 147, 152 and Husserl, 139, 147, 148n1 perceptual faith, 140

182 ⧫ Index perceptual field, 140, 142 phenomenology, 143 ontology of being, 147 openness to the world, 140 ouverture au monde, 151 reification, 147 and Uexküll, 143 metalogue, 11, 13, 36, 109 metamorphic, 70, 110, 147, 149 metamorphically, 75 Meyer, Birgit, 134–35 Millot, Jacques, 58 Mithila paintings, 58 Montague, Paul, 105–106 Mughal, Mughal Empire, Mughals, 26–27, 66, 73, 101 multivocality, 153, 156 Mūrti, 24, 97 Musée des Arts Africaines et Oceanians, 58 Musée de l’Homme, 57–58 Musée du Quai Branly, 9, 57–58, 60, 67, 150 Musée Guimet, 58, 67n3, 91n6 Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (of the University of Cambridge), 9, 15, 93, 101, 104, 106 Museum of Colonies, 58 Museum-as-method, 9 museumification, 13, 32, 48, 51, 56 museum spirit, 73–74 Muslim, 25–26, 28, 31, 44, 70 National Museum of Finland, 11, fig. A.1–A.5 Naya (village), 126 New Caledonia, 105 New materialisms, 5, 16, 129–30, 134, 136 New Museology, 5, 6, 51 New Walk Museum, 94 Nicholson, Julia, 122–123 (the) nonhuman, 1, 3–4, 7, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 25, 34, 69, 89, 129, 131, 134, 135, 136, 143, 151 human–nonhuman relationship, 13, 146 human–nonhuman interaction, 151 nonhumans, 136 ‘non-West’ or ‘East’, 70, 90, 113 ‘non-Western’, 4, 14, 59, 62–63, 70, 90, 114, 133

Northumberland Duke, 93 (see under Percy, Algernon) Northumberland Collection, 93 object, objects, 6, 7, 8, 18n1, 19–20, 23, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40–42, 45, 47–48, 52, 55–56, 58–60, 61–63, 69, 71, 74, 79, 82, 86, 90, 91nn1,6, 98, 101–11, 113, 114, 115, 117–20, 123, 128–31, 135–37, 138, 141–46, 148n3, 151, 154 boundary object, 8 hyperobject, 137 objectified, 38, 89, 131 objectifying, 37 Object-Oriented-Ontology, 5, 16, 130, 134, 136 ontogenetic, 40, 72, 77, 147 ontology, 57, 118, 129, 137–38, 147, 151 ontological, 3, 17, 118, 133, 136, 138, 151 ontologically, 17 Ontological turn, 129, 130, 146 OOO, 136, 137, 138, 151. See under Object-Oriented-Ontology organism, 1, 6, 11, 16, 41, 57, 96, 101, 138, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148nn1,4, 152 organismal, 6 organismal conduct, 6, 147 (see also Husserl) (the) Oriental Museum (of the University of Durham), fig 5.1–5.7, 9, 15, 93–94, 98, 101, 106, 135, 154, 156 Orientalism, 12, 73. See also Said Orientalist, 90–91 weak Orientalism, 122 original context, 19–20, 31, 36–37, 41, 59, 110, 121 original environment, 66, 89 osmotic, 57 Östör, Ákos, 26, 158 Other (the), 8, 10, 14, 53, 56–57, 69, 72, 86, 89–90, 142, 147, 151–53 being-for-the-Other, 152 Pābūjī, fig A.1, 29–31, 35n10, 53, 125 par.vār.os, 31 Sāyls, 31 Painter-storytellers, 1, 16, 150 Parks, Fanny, 14, 74–78, 86, 89 Parks’s altar, 77–78, 86 (shrine)

Index ⧫ 183 Parks’s museum things, 79 Par.s, Par., 4, 12, 19, 22, 28–31, 35nn7,9–10, 45–46, 53–54, 64, 123n5, 127n5 pat, pats, 1, 4, 12, 19, 22, 25, 27–28, 58, 124, 126, 134, 158–159 chaksudan pat, 58, 159, 163 patua, patuas, 22, 25–29, 34nn2,4, 35n5, 58, 61, 124, 126, 134, 159 penetrative gaze, 89 Penn Museum, fig 4.1, fig 4.2, fig4.3, fig4.4, fig 4.5 and 4.6, 9, 14, 79–81, 90, 111 Penn University, 8, 81 Percy, Algernon, 93 perspectival, 5, 10, 16, 17, 18, 115, 126, 128–30, 133, 135–36, 140–41, 146, 156 multi-perspectival, 156 perspective, perspectives, 5–7, 9–10, 16–17, 18n1, 38, 41, 49, 52, 56–57, 66, 69–70, 73, 86, 88, 89–90, 110, 113, 121–23, 132–33, 135–36, 138, 140, 142–46, 152 phenomenology, 4, 10, 16, 79, 118, 129, 134–35, 137, 138, 139–40, 146, 148–49, 151 of Husserl (see Husserl) Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, 139, 143 of Merleau-Ponty (see Merleau-Ponty) phenomenology of vision, 23 phenomenological, 8, 14–17, 39–40, 49, 51, 57, 59, 60, 66–67, 70, 72, 78, 85, fig. 4.4, 88, 93, 109–11, 119, 129, 131, 138–139, 146–48, 152, 154 phenomenological act of seeing, 62 phenomenological approach, 16–17 phenomenological encounter, 14–15, 42, 54, 88 phenomenological engagement, 17, 37, 43, 66, 88, 108, 129 phenomenological experience, 11, 38–39, 59, 67, 73, 88 phenomenological method, 10 phenomenological process, 10, 86 phenomenological re-enactment, 101 phenomenological regimes, 70, 73–74, 76 phenomenological response, 54 phenomenological sensations, 8 phenomenological training, 72 phenomenological understanding, 14, 67

phenomenologically, 57 phenomenologically experience, 51, 111 phenomenologically perspectival view, 17 Philadelphia, 9, 82 pilgrimage, 21, 33, 77 Pithoro, 21–22, 125 Pitt Rivers Museum, 122–23 Plato, 23, 71 positionality, 17, 67, 157 Possehl, Gregory, 80 Prasad ,40 prismatic, 8, 41, 56, 70, 89, 127–29, 132, 153–54, 156–57 projection, projections, 3, 13, 15–17, 19, 57, 113, 131–33, 141, 143, 148n3, 152–53 pūjā, 21, 24, 38, 40, 46, 78 ‘Puja’ exhibition, 94, 96 Purana, 60, 125 Pushkar (lake), 30 Putt, Cecil Richard, 98 Rama (god), 31, 124 Ramayana, 21, 34n2, 61, 65, 91 Rajasthan, 4, 21, 29, 58, 64, 67n6, 125 Rasa, 52–53, 66 Ravana (evil), fig. A.1, 31 reconstruction, reconstructions, 14, 15, 68n11, 79, 97, 109, 150 re-enactment, 51, 71, 78–79, 88, 96–97, 101 religious communities, 49, 51, 91, 94 religious museum, 120 Rietberg Museum, 9, 13, 40–41, 61–64, 66–67, 68n11, 71, 73 Rivers, Pitt, 105 roshiani, 34 sacred, 13, 15, 20, 22–23, 27, 29–30, 36–37, 39, 41, 43, 45–46, 48–50, 56, 60, 62, 64, 66, 71, 78–79, 82, 86, 90, 97, 101, 107, 109–11, 111n5, 114, 119, 120–21, 124, 126, 149 sacred power, 13, 41, 70, 118–19, 121 sacred force, 13–14, 56 sacredness, 3, 29–30, 37, 40, 41, 43, 45, 47, 51, 56, 119 Said, Edward, 12 Śakyamuni Buddha, 107 Sanskrit, 23–24, 26, 60, 107 Santhal, 61

184 ⧫ Index Scott, Alexander, 80 scroll, 1, 3–5, 9–14, 19–22, 25–32, 34, 36, 45–46, 51, 53, 54, 58, 61, 66, 124, 126, 129, 134–36, 138, 148–51, 158–59 Sebald, 8 Self (the), 8, 57, 72, 73, 90, 140, 142, 147, 148n3, 152–53 being-for-the-Self, 152 Seligman, Arthur, 105 Severi, Carlo, 1, 18n1, 133 Shiva (god), 25, 40, 62, 125, 159 Shiva Nataraja, 14, 63 Shiva linga, 96 Sikh, 94, 154 (the) Smithsonian Institution, 94 Sommerville, Maxwell, viii, 14, 80, 82, 83–87, 89, 93, 111 Sommerville’s Buddhist Temple, 15, 79–82, 84–87, 90 South East Asia, 58 Southeast Asian, 98 St Mungo Museum, 120 storytelling, 3, 10, 20, 21, 44, 74, 98, 126, 134–135, 150. See also scrolls Tantrism, 27, 121 Tara Books, 22, 124 teja, tejas, 24, 97 ‘Telling Tales’ exhibition, 122–24, 126 Thaker, William (Professor), 93 thing, things, 2–9, 17, 19–20, 47, 59, 69, 77–78, 89, 91n1, 129, 131, 133–37, 139–140–43, 147, 151–53 and affordances, 134 animated things, 131 charismatic aura of things, 74 crafter, 2 collecting things, 89 displayed things, 107 exhausted things, 149 exhibited things, 47, 55–56, 128 exhibiting religious things, 88 experienced-thing, 141 and holy, 49 ‘humility of things’, 2 and Ingold, 5 material thing, things (see material) museum thing, things, 20, 79, 128 nonhuman things, 3, 131 non-living things, 131

physical thing, 130, 139 religious things, 70 sacred things, 48 seen things, 49 selective openness of things, 138 stored things, 128 things as animate, 131 things on display, 57 thing-in-itself, 138, 141, 143 thingness, 2, 136, 139 thing-power, 136 Tibet, 16, 106–107, 116–19 Tibetan Tibetan altar, altars, 107–108 Tibetan and Asian material, 111 Tibetan approach to materiality, 118 Tibetan art, 107–108 Tibetan artefacts, 111, 121 Tibetan artists, 17 Tibetan book, 107 Tibetan British, 120 Tibetan Buddhism, 17, 119–21 Tibetan Buddhist altar, 108 Tibetan Buddhist artefacts, 15 Tibetan Buddhist communities, 117 Tibetan Buddhist groups, 120 Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts, 108 Tibetan Buddhist temple, 109 Tibetan Buddhist texts, 93 Tibetan Buddhist shrine, 107 Tibetan classificatory schema, 117 Tibetan collection, 15, 72, 115–16, 118 Tibetan community and diaspora, 109 Tibetan diaspora, 109 Tibetan displays of artefacts, 121 Tibetan etiquette, 72 Tibetan gallery, 118 Tibetan giver, 119 Tibetan houses and temples, 108 Tibetan interlocutors, 90 Tibetan material culture, 115 Tibetan monasteries, 116 Tibetan objects, 60, 117 Tibetan or Buddhist request, 121 Tibetan perspective, 121 Tibetan phenomenological interaction, 118 Tibetan point of view, 121 Tibetan religious materiality, 107, 118 Tibetan reliquary, 154

Index ⧫ 185 Tibetan scholars, 90 Tibetan section, 115–16 Tibetan shrine, shrines, 15, 107, 111n5, 116–17 Tibetan space, 119 Tibetan temple, 116 Tibetan way of communicating, 72 Tibetan, Tibetans, 16–17, 108–109, 111, 119 Treviso, 51, 66 Tubingen, 154, 155 Tythacott, Louise, 115–18, 121–22 Umwelt, Umwelten, 141, 143–47, 149. See under von Uexküll and Husserl and Lebenswelt, 147 Umweltforschung (see von Uexküll) (the) University of Cambridge, 9, 15, 95, 101, 104–106 University of Durham, 9, 93 V&A, 117. See also Victoria and Albert Museum Victoria and Albert Museum, 9, 158 Vitalist approach, 135–36 Vogel, Susanne, 156 Volkerkundenmuseum, 9 Von der Heydt, Heduard (baron), 61–62 Von Uexküll, Jakob, 16, 143–45 Bauplan, 144–145, 152 biologist, 16, 143

Estonian biologist, 143 Innenwelt, Innenwelten, 144–145–146 and Kant, 143 and Merleau-Ponty, 143 and monism, 144 Naturfaktor, 144–145 Umgebung, 144–45 Umwelt, Umwelten (see Umwelt, Umwelten) Umweltforschung, 143–46, 148 Theoretische Biologie, 143 Waurá, 55–56, 66 ‘West’, 12, 70, 113–14, 119 ‘Western’, 12, 32–33, 48, 57, 73, 75–76, 79, 89, 96, 106, 109, 113–14, 118, 121, 125 wonder, 14, 65, 71, 82 atmosphere of, 110 houses of wonder, 75 a sense of, 59, 89 Wonder House, 33 work of purification, purification. See Latour World Museum, 9, 15–17, 18n2, 28, 111–23, 126, 158 Wunderkammern, 70–72 Younghusband expedition, 116 Zurich, 9, 43, 61, 68n1