Ideas Gleaned from Talks

Over the past few weeks, I've attended three talks where I discovered important resonances with my own book project: Kyonosuke Hirai, "Materializing Knowledge: palm-leaf manuscript-Making Making in Northern Thailand, (Mar 19), Amita Baviskar, "Cows, Cars and Cycle-rickshaws: The Politics of Nature on the Streets of Delhi, India," and the introduction to Catherine Becker's book manuscript in progress on Andhra Buddhist sites (South Asia Workshop, April 1). While the three projects connect in quite different ways with my own material, I think it is interesting that they are all about material objects, materiality, and aesthetic sensibilities. It is exactly these dimensions of Mt. Banahaw that I feel is currently missing from my manuscript, and I would really like to develop these themes in my final revisions.

Catherine Becker's work about the interpretation of Amravati and other Andhra Buddhist sites in art history textbooks as well as their packaging in A.P. tourism brochures has the closest links to my own work. Her project situates AP's Buddhist sites in a number of "frames" -- art historical discussions, ritual (Amravati hosted a consecration ceremony officiated by the Dalai Lama in 2006, in which Tibetans in exile came to stand in for India's "absent" Buddhist community), tourism promotion, regional development (Buddhism is part of a "river of knowledge" that flows through history into the present-day identity of the state as an IT hub), etc. Successive "enframings" of the same site provide the narrative arc of Catherine's book project, much as successive and simultaneous "enframings" of Mt. Banahaw provide the narrative arc of my own. Particularly helpful here is the idea of the reliquary as "creating" the relic-- without it, all one has is a heap of dust. (In order to make the concept of "enframing" more salient in my book, I need to figure out how it relates to the other concept that I think of as central, namely "scale." Is one subordinate to the other in my argument? Something that Bilal said strikes me as relevant here, namely that every actor who engages with Amravati does not construct a "frame" out of whole cloth; rather, some of these frames are already in play and brochure writers (and others) have to maneouver within them. That is very much how I think about "scale-making" by actors related to Mt. Banahaw-- as a form of imaginative work/practice which is also constrained by hegemonic ideas of the "local," "regional," and global" as nested levels of social reality.

Another dimension of Catherine's project struck a powerful chord of recognition in me. One (nicely elaborated by Ananya Vajpeyi in her comments) had to do with the various absences at the heart of Amravati (of living Buddhist tradition, of evidence about the construction, purpose and uses of the site in history)-- all of which are in some way made productive by the work of enframing. This is done in part through discursive means. (Here I thought of the "cracks in the parchment curtain" trope-- the notion that metropolitan Filipinos come to Mt. Banahaw to see the absence of something and in that absence they find presence.) Aside from discourse however, the emptiness at the heart of the site itself is also made productive through semiotic work and practices-- signage, markings, etc. During the consecreation ritual at Amravati, relics were brought in to fill-- but also to highlight-- the emptiness of the stupa. (It reminded me of how pilgrims bring in prints of Catholic saints or or Mary and juxtapose them with a natural shrine, and also of the erection of concrete tablets with the Ten Commandments, etc. in the forest.) I need to think more about the semiotic work done by the uses of space and the materiality of the pwestos, specifically for my chapter on pilgrimage.