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.
Showing posts with label Chapter 3. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chapter 3. Show all posts
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Introduction to Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion, eds. Simon Coleman & John Eade (Routledge 2004).
The authors note the conventionality of place-centered approaches to pilgrimages and assert that "just as we broaden our ethnographic gaze to take in more than the central shrine, so we attempt to widen the theoretical location of studies of 'sacred travel'" (3) For Coleman and Eade, emphasizing place so strongly has led to the eclipse of movement, a theme they privilege in their efforts to revitalize pilgrimage as an analytical (and not just ethnographic) category. As they hasten to admit, "we are not denying the importance of place in ethnography" (emphasis added); not surprisingly then, their discussion leaves unexplored the potential of fresh theorizations of place to invigorate the study of pilgrimage. One of the consequences of the authors' failure to include a rethinking of place within their project of "reframing pilgrimage" is the resealing up of some of the very theoretical "dead ends" they seek to unblock. An example of this comes when Coleman and Eade discuss how studies of pilgrimage might contribute to understandings of globalization. Tellingly, their illustrations stress the emergence of various pilgrimages as sites for the reassertion of localism and particularism, as if accepting what the folk model of globalization implies-- namely that the embodied forms of travel involved in specific sites of pilgrimage could a priori have no bearing on the constitution of supralocal or "global" formations.
In all fairness, however, Coleman and Eade do engage with cultural geographers such as Urry and Crang, if not around "place" and "place-making" then in regard to their analytical approaches in distinguishing various forms of "mobility" and "co-presence," both analytically and within the "semantic fields" of pilgrimages themselves. This part of their discussion is worth revisiting when I revise Chapter 3.
Distancing themselves from Turner's characterization of pilgrimage as a "liminoid" phenomenon that generates "social encounters without hierarchical constraints", the authors cite Tremlett's (2003) observation that "both Victor Turner and Mircea Eliade can be seen as 'romanticist' in their attempt to secure for religion an 'ineffable inner space of realm' that can stand as a critique of modernity and its values". All in all, the authors sharply reject the tendency to view pilgrimages as activities "divorced from daily life" (ibid).
Tremlett's "romanticist" critique mirrors Partha Chatterjee's notion of the how Indian nationalists posited an inner, spiritual Indianness within the shell of external Westernization. Both examples may suggest ways of elaborating on Filipino intellectuals' search for the inner uncolonized self, either in Chapter 3 or in Chapter 5.
First, is the positing of an inneffable inner space or realm (here yet another reference point is William James) of a piece with the disembedding of religion from the rest of social life? I think so, although they're not exactly the same thing.
Filipino intellectuals who look to Mt. Banahaw to deal with historical baggage on a personal as well as societal level are perhaps looking for a kind of religious ethos that infuses every aspect of social life and is sumultaneously Filipino. In their everyday lives as modern Catholics, spirituality is important but compartmentalized (to the inner ineffable self and to personal religious observance and charity). It is as modern Catholics that they find the ideal of an embedded spirituality deeply appealing. And it is as creolized postcolonials that they are stirred by visions of autochonous Filipino religion. Their journeys to Banahaw give them a taste of what things might be like if spirituality were embedded in every moment of one's life and if the sutures stitching and separating the precolonial past and the postcolonial present were to vanish.
Many of the travelers I know to fall in this category are more than a little reflexive about this fantasy. The knew the ahistoricity of their longing and understood the incommensurability of the contemporary folk religious milieu with the autochthonous past. Indeed, they embrace that incommensurability, which makes it possible to be modern Catholic compatible and to make practical gestures towards spirits, as well as to cherish shadowy identifications with precolonial babaylan and the ma-aram, the latter mediated through key informants like Mama Rose and Nanay Isabel.
The authors note the conventionality of place-centered approaches to pilgrimages and assert that "just as we broaden our ethnographic gaze to take in more than the central shrine, so we attempt to widen the theoretical location of studies of 'sacred travel'" (3) For Coleman and Eade, emphasizing place so strongly has led to the eclipse of movement, a theme they privilege in their efforts to revitalize pilgrimage as an analytical (and not just ethnographic) category. As they hasten to admit, "we are not denying the importance of place in ethnography" (emphasis added); not surprisingly then, their discussion leaves unexplored the potential of fresh theorizations of place to invigorate the study of pilgrimage. One of the consequences of the authors' failure to include a rethinking of place within their project of "reframing pilgrimage" is the resealing up of some of the very theoretical "dead ends" they seek to unblock. An example of this comes when Coleman and Eade discuss how studies of pilgrimage might contribute to understandings of globalization. Tellingly, their illustrations stress the emergence of various pilgrimages as sites for the reassertion of localism and particularism, as if accepting what the folk model of globalization implies-- namely that the embodied forms of travel involved in specific sites of pilgrimage could a priori have no bearing on the constitution of supralocal or "global" formations.
In all fairness, however, Coleman and Eade do engage with cultural geographers such as Urry and Crang, if not around "place" and "place-making" then in regard to their analytical approaches in distinguishing various forms of "mobility" and "co-presence," both analytically and within the "semantic fields" of pilgrimages themselves. This part of their discussion is worth revisiting when I revise Chapter 3.
Distancing themselves from Turner's characterization of pilgrimage as a "liminoid" phenomenon that generates "social encounters without hierarchical constraints", the authors cite Tremlett's (2003) observation that "both Victor Turner and Mircea Eliade can be seen as 'romanticist' in their attempt to secure for religion an 'ineffable inner space of realm' that can stand as a critique of modernity and its values". All in all, the authors sharply reject the tendency to view pilgrimages as activities "divorced from daily life" (ibid).
Tremlett's "romanticist" critique mirrors Partha Chatterjee's notion of the how Indian nationalists posited an inner, spiritual Indianness within the shell of external Westernization. Both examples may suggest ways of elaborating on Filipino intellectuals' search for the inner uncolonized self, either in Chapter 3 or in Chapter 5.
First, is the positing of an inneffable inner space or realm (here yet another reference point is William James) of a piece with the disembedding of religion from the rest of social life? I think so, although they're not exactly the same thing.
Filipino intellectuals who look to Mt. Banahaw to deal with historical baggage on a personal as well as societal level are perhaps looking for a kind of religious ethos that infuses every aspect of social life and is sumultaneously Filipino. In their everyday lives as modern Catholics, spirituality is important but compartmentalized (to the inner ineffable self and to personal religious observance and charity). It is as modern Catholics that they find the ideal of an embedded spirituality deeply appealing. And it is as creolized postcolonials that they are stirred by visions of autochonous Filipino religion. Their journeys to Banahaw give them a taste of what things might be like if spirituality were embedded in every moment of one's life and if the sutures stitching and separating the precolonial past and the postcolonial present were to vanish.
Many of the travelers I know to fall in this category are more than a little reflexive about this fantasy. The knew the ahistoricity of their longing and understood the incommensurability of the contemporary folk religious milieu with the autochthonous past. Indeed, they embrace that incommensurability, which makes it possible to be modern Catholic compatible and to make practical gestures towards spirits, as well as to cherish shadowy identifications with precolonial babaylan and the ma-aram, the latter mediated through key informants like Mama Rose and Nanay Isabel.
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