Laurel Kendall

Beautiful and efficacious statues: magic, commodities, agency and the production of sacred objects in popular religion in vietnam

ABSTRACT In his provocative rethink of the anthropology of art, Alfred Gell offers the radical suggestion that people commonly abduct agency—acts of thought, will or intention—to things and suggests that the relationship between people and things be studied in the manner that anthropologists analyze other kinds of human relationships. In Gells terms, the relationship between people and temple images, as sacred objects, follows the “the rules laid down for idols as co-present others.” We will explore how one such a relationship fares in the accelerated market economy of Vietnam where workshops have rationalized the production of “idols,” wooden temple statues, making them more like commodities and where a global market in Asian antiquities encourages theft. Tim Ingold critiques studies of “agency” and “materiality” for too often ignoring the tangible materials and methods of production, but we suggest that in the marketplace for sacred objects, attention to both object agency and artisanal process can be mutually enriching. To do this, we first describe how popular religion in Vietnam renders statues as animated, sacred and agentive and how devotees experience and describe statue agency in and through their own relationships with divine images. We then show how production methods are implicated in the creation of agentive images and consider how these understandings and processes have and have not been compromised since the opening and acceleration of the market from the late 1980s. We argue that a sophisticated market permits a hierarchy of value and a range of consumer choice in the production and consumption of sacred objects.

Goddess with a Picasso face: Art markets, collectors and sacred things in the circulation of Korean shaman paintings

In the well-known story of how ‘primitive art’ came to be recognized as such, things once regarded as sacred or empowered circulate as art collected for reasons far removed from their original intention. In the case of Korean shaman paintings, the authors interpret this process as a kind of ‘purification’ in Bruno Latour’s sense, a translation and transformation of old practices (paintings as the seats of gods) into things that are deployed in acceptably modern ways (paintings as art commodities). The authors recognize, also following Latour, that this is necessarily an incomplete and unstable process. Their discussion assumes two parallel purifications, a discursive purification that recuperates the paintings as art market commodities and a more literal purification by shamans when, in particular circumstances, they deem it appropriate to release paintings to the art market. The authors are concerned with both thickening and broadening the discussion of art market circulation: thickening, by showing how, within a particular history in a particular place, at some distance from Paris or New York, things once sacred came to be revalued as ‘art’. They broaden the discussion by setting it among collectors and dealers in South Korea and thus outside the familiar dichotomy of the West and the rest that has heretofore organized discussions of the commodification and circulation of once sacred goods. A seemingly familiar story about art markets and the social life of things unfolds within the unfamiliar context of an alternative or Other modernity.

What is an animated image? Korean shaman paintings as objects of ambiguity

Building on a crossdisciplinary interest in how religion works materially, we examine the triangulated relationship between Korean shamans (mansin), the paintings of gods that hang in their shrines, and the animating presences that empower both mansin and paintings, drawing inspiration from Alfred Gell’s notion of “object agency.” The gods who inspire a mansin to manifest them in ritual and who animate the paintings in her shrine perform inspiration (of the shaman) and animation (of the paintings) in analogous and complementary ways through relationships that are variable, contingent, and often ambiguous. By contrast, the Buddha images that also inhabit the mansin’s shrine are a different kind of animated thing. Our study argues for more fine-grained discussions of numinous paraphernalia and the ways that the efficacy of sacred objects and bodies is realized (or not). We also offer a caution against the presumptions of generalizing terminologies such as “animated images” where different images might be qualitatively different kinds of animated thing, even within the same lived religious world.

So Close to the Canon, but . . . : Of Franz Boas, C. C. Vinton, and Some Korean Things

This article complicates two commonsense assumptions about early American anthropology as a professionalizing discipline. The first is that Asia in general and Korea in particular were peripheral to the projects and players that we have come to regard as canonical. The second is that a professionalizing anthropology eschewed the amateur ethnographic work of missionaries. C. C. Vinton’s collecting efforts in early twentieth-century Korea complicate the origin story of our discipline. It would be difficult to find a more canonical figure than Franz Boas, usually regarded as the founding father of American anthropology. Less known are Boas’s efforts to establish an anthropology of Asia with New York City as a scholarly hub. As I have described elsewhere, Boas’s Asia project emphasized China. But it did not stop there; Korea was very much on his screen when he recruited Vinton to collect for the American Museum of Natural History. Boas’s attempts to systematically enlist missionaries have been described by Erin Hasinoff; apart from Vinton, they were largely unsuccessful. Vinton’s story offers an intersection between two failed and now largely forgotten projects and a relatively successful collecting venture by a particular missionary who worked in Korea under Boas’s direction.

Who Miniaturises China? Treaty Port Souvenirs from Ningbo

Miniature carved wooden figurines from Ningbo were consumed by missionaries, travellers, and occasional museum collectors. Inexpensive, small, lightweight, portable, and well crafted, they were ideal treaty port souvenirs. Miniatures portraying scenes of bucolic rural life, unrelenting toil, or grisly torture replicate scenes also widely circulated in treaty port art and in early photographs of China. As such, these miniatures can easily be interpreted as satisfying an Orientalist appetite for an exoticised China. While not incorrect, this interpretation is limited. In this chapter, Shi and Kendall restore some agency to the carvers themselves, first, in accounting for older woodcarving techniques that were creatively adapted to the production of free-standing miniatures and, second, in adapting images from a Chinese visual imaginary that predated the treaty ports.

Making Spirits, Making Art, Nat Carving and Contemporary Painting in Pre-Transition Myanmar (Burma)

ABSTRACT Embodiment, materiality, and technology intersect in the production of sacred images where tools, media, and intangible studio protocols inform the production of efficacious things. In Myanmar nat spirits appear in the bodies of costumed spirit mediums and in the intimately tended statues that adorn their altars. Prior to the recent democratic transition, nats appeared as the subjects of paintings, sometimes offering sociopolitical commentaries. This article explores the resonances between technologies of nat making in workshops that produce images for mediums and the techniques deployed by contemporary artists who have made nats the subjects of their paintings. In the Burmese religious world view, nats are lesser entities than the Buddha; their troubled histories of injustice account for their continuing agency as spirits in the human world. Appropriately, nat images are cruder than Buddha images; carvers are less likely to use precious wood or to observe Buddhist precepts and aesthetic guidelines while carving. A similar sense of the unrefined, unsettled nat is conveyed through the daring representational techniques and liberties of artists. We argue that connections between media, technique, and object agency can have resonance when sacred subjects are deployed in secular art.

Korean Shamanism: The Cultural Paradox (review)

awaited ending to the Korean War. The United States must also move toward a nuclear-free Korea by working closely with its allies Japan and South Korea as well as with its partners China and Russia. In Harrison’s estimation, North Korea is quite ready to strike a grand bargain with the United States to stop its ambitious program of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, if the price is right. Whether North Korea is pursuing nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip, in exchange for a U.S. guarantee of the survival and independence of the regime, or as a deterrence to assure its defense and survival, however, cannot be settled once and for all. What matters in the international politics and diplomacy of the Korean endgame in the future, however, is more than a display of good will or morally praiseworthy gestures. Motives of good intentions, means of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems, the consequences of both failed and successful interactions in the Korean truce talks at Panmunjom, and historical memories of North Korea’s ill-behavior of kidnapping, terrorism, the Pueblo seizure, and so forth in the preceding half-century all seem to matter and count in the long run in terms of either making or breaking the fragile process of Korea’s endgame. Harrison’s book is a pioneering work in Korean studies.

Things Japanese: Something old, something new

Bernstein, Gail Lee. Harukos World: A Japanese Farm Woman and Her Community. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983. xvii + 199 pp. including maps, photographs.

An Ainu approach to symbolic structures and healing techniques

15.00 cloth. Lebra, Takie Sugiyama. Japanese Women: Constraint and Fulfillment. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984. xi + 315 pp. including notes, references, glossary, index.

Korean Shamans and the Spirits of Capitalism

18.95 cloth. Smith, Robert J. Japanese Society: Tradition, Self and the Social Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. xii + 176 pp. including notes, bibliography, author (and subject indices.