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asian visual and material culture in context

jan mrázek | morgan pitelka | editors

What’s the Use of Art?

What’s the Use of Art?

asian visual and material culture in context

jan mrázek and morgan pitelka, editors University of Hawai‘i Press | Honolulu

© 2008 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 13 12 11 10 09 08 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data What’s the use of art? : Asian visual and material culture in context / Jan Mrázek and Morgan Pitelka, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3063-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Art objects, Asian. 2. Material culture — Asia. 3. Antiques — Asia. I. Mrázek, Jan. II. Pitelka, Morgan. NK1037.W43 2008 709.5 — dc22 2007031696 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by April Leidig-Higgins Printed by Edwards Brothers

dedication Jan Mrázek dedicates this book to his daughter Helena Mrázková, who was born around the time this book was conceived, and who is now her father’s favorite artist. Morgan Pitelka dedicates this book to his sons Ravi Carpen Pitelka and Luca Carpen Pitelka, without whom the experience of editing this book would have been much poorer (and much faster).

contents Acknowledgments ix introduction | morgan pitelka

Wrapping and Unwrapping Art 1

Functions one | robert decaroli

From the Living Rock: Understanding Figural Representation in Early South Asia 21 two | louise allison cort

Disposable but Indispensable: The Earthenware Vessel as Vehicle of Meaning in Japan 46 three | richard h. davis

From the Wedding Chamber to the Museum: Relocating the Ritual Arts of Madhubani 77 four | janet hoskins

In the Realm of the Indigo Queen: Dyeing, Exchange Magic, and the Elusive Tourist Dollar on Sumba 100

Movements five | james l. hevia

Plunder, Markets, and Museums: The Biographies of Chinese Imperial Objects in Europe and North America 129

six | cynthea j. bogel

Situating Moving Objects: A Sino-Japanese Catalogue of Imported Items, 800 CE to the Present 142

Memories seven | ashley thompson

Angkor Revisited: The State of Statuary 179 eight | lene pedersen

An Ancestral Keris, Balinese Kingship, and a Modern Presidency 214 nine | kaja m. mcgowan

Raw Ingredients and Deposit Boxes in Balinese Sanctuaries: A Congruence of Obsessions 238 conclusion | jan mrázek

Ways of Experiencing Art: Art History, Television, and Javanese Wayang 272 Contributors 305 Index 309

acknowledgments

This volume originated in 2001 in discussion of a possible panel proposal to the Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies. Jan Mrázek conceived of the idea of bringing together art historians, anthropologists, and historians of different parts of Asia to examine the relationship between the function and the objectification of art. He invited Morgan Pitelka to join him in organizing an anthology of essays, and together they recruited contributors through personal connections, professional organizations, and online discussion lists. Initially, the editors posed the question “what’s the use of art?” to potential authors as a starting point in their thinking about the role of context in artistic production and consumption in local Asian contexts. The fruitful responses of contributors and the insightful comments of the University of Hawai‘i Press’s external readers led to further conversations among the contributors and editors and ultimately to refinement of the themes of the volume. This was a slow and painstaking process that required a great deal of patience. The editors offer their thanks to the authors for their commitment to the project, to the external readers for their careful and constructive criticism, and to Patricia Crosby of the University of Hawai‘i Press for her unflagging support. We also offer our thanks to our teachers, to artists, performers, and other informants, to museums and universities that have supported us, and to the community of scholars who continue to work to expand our understanding of art’s role in the world.

introduction | morgan pitelka

Wrapping and Unwrapping Art Art cannot be a utilitarian act. Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) Art begins where function ends. Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)

Wrapping Art Tea bowls, perhaps the most beloved objects in Japanese tea culture, are carefully wrapped to honor them and shield them from the everyday world.1 A Raku tea bowl dating to the late sixteenth century, for example, might be stored within a pouch (often made of imported fabric) that both robes the piece in an appropriately dignified manner and protects it. The bowl in its pouch would be contained in turn within a handmade, fitted wooden box, the lid of which often bears a signed, calligraphic inscription on the underside recording the poetic name of the tea bowl, the maker or place of origin, and the pedigree of ownership. If the inscription was by a famous tea master, elite warrior, or other influential collector of tea ceramics, then the lid would be protected by a piece of paper and the box itself would be carefully wrapped in cloth or paper and then cosseted within yet another fitted box, which would of course bear another signed, calligraphic inscription on the lid. The bowl and its box within a box would then be robed in a knotted wrapping cloth ( furoshiki) or fitted bag. Raku tea bowls are usually displayed in museums or pictured in catalogues without their wrapping, as if our understanding derived entirely from the objects themselves. It is, however, these strata of value — a kind of stratigraphy of meaning deposited in sedimentary fashion through centuries of use, circulation, and objectification — that determine not only identification but the experience of encountering the bowls themselves. Each of these layers of wrapping adds to the historical narrative and value of the protected bowl. The significative precipice that separates the bowl from its layers of wrapping is,

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however, rarely acknowledged by tea practitioners, collectors, or art historians. Any bowl could of course be substituted for the object originally intended to reside within. Connoisseurship of early Raku tea bowls in Japan is based on an outrageous fiction: that the stylistic categories that derive, in their totality, from the interwoven, intertextual field of box inscriptions provide reliable information about extant objects. This intellectual divide between object and wrapping serves as a useful metaphor for the gap between modern art history’s objectification of art works as autonomously knowable things of universal beauty and the more complex tale of the cultural context of their production and use. The layers of wrapping around a Japanese tea bowl are parallel to the layers of discourse and subsequent meaning heaped upon objects labeled “art.” For centuries art world institutions have trained collectors, connoisseurs, and students of culture to believe that in order for something to be art it should be naturally and instinctively open to the interpretation and enjoyment of the educated museum visitor; only in the last decades of the twentieth century were the class-based and colonial underpinnings of this discourse questioned. The contributors to What’s the Use of Art attempt to wrap and unwrap the notion of the art object. In particular, this volume explores the roles of function, movement, and memory in the scholarly and popular constitution of art. Its aim is to complicate the limitations placed on cultural products as art or not-art by resituating things in cultural context. Although the ten case studies that follow all come from Asia, the themes of the volume extend beyond this one region of our increasingly interconnected yet still highly stratified world. Rather than narrate a history of Asian art, this book attempts to frame discussions of art in light of the globalization of European regimes of cultural value, the widespread and continuing plundering of objects from and by disenfranchised communities, and the unregulated circulation of art and information in the burgeoning global marketplace. This volume thus builds upon a growing art historical, anthropological, and historical literature that argues that “art” is far from a natural category of human endeavor, but instead represents a historically specific idea and practice emerging in Europe from the Enlightenment and its aftermath. The notion of art had of course existed before then and in other parts of the world, but not with the specific characteristics that continue to frame discussions about culture today. The eighteenth century, in particular, witnessed the radical and unprecedented bifurcation of the artist, as the genius who produces things of beauty, from the skilled artisan or craftsman who produces useful objects.2 Concomitant to this was a split in the understanding of the work produced.

Introduction | 3

The craft object came to be seen as mundane and meaningless. Although rarely articulated directly, usefulness was equated with a lack of artistic value. The art object, on the other hand, came to be understood as a work of autonomous power and “embodied meaning.”3 The “metaphysical essence”4 of true art was not dependent on historical or cultural factors but was self-contained and universal. Art objects could and should be collected in art museums precisely because their meaning lay not in their context, but in some inner essence. Conversely, objects that depended upon their functions or contexts for meaning did not belong in a museum and consequently did not qualify as art.5 The ten chapters that follow problematize this still prevalent notion by exploring the contexts — what one commentator has called the “lost worlds”6 — of art works produced in different parts of Asia, with particular emphasis on Indonesia, Japan, and South Asia. These are worlds that are not usually reproduced in galleries or exhibitions, and thus it may seem that we attempt herein to reveal the authentic, historically and culturally appropriate apprehension of Asian art. Instead, these chapters will address the central question posed by the title of the book: what is the use of art? How were works that might be understood today as art objects experienced, handled, perceived, categorized, and conceptualized by the people who produced and used them? What do art historians, collectors, and museum goers miss when things are removed from their contexts? And more broadly, how have the ways of experiencing, thinking about, and handling art changed through history? Case studies from South, East, and Southeast Asia such as those collected here can help us to answer some of these questions because of these regions’ diverse experiences of colonialism and modernity, and perhaps more saliently, the urgent sense of practitioners and scholars that modern definitions of art are deeply inadequate when considering local forms of cultural production, such as Javanese wayang shadow puppet theater or the Japanese tea ceremony. The chapters that follow are diverse in method and content and certainly do not represent a single vision of art or a monolithic approach to studying Asia. Nonetheless, several interconnected themes emerge, though they resonate in different ways in each chapter. What follows is less a summary of the contents of the book than a preliminary exploration of how the book’s themes connect to issues in the fields of art history, anthropology, and Asian Studies broadly conceived. This represents one attempt to navigate these chapters by wrapping them in a layer of interpretation, inspiring readers, it is hoped, to engage with the chapters, the art they illuminate, and most importantly, the network of relationships and values that they introduce.

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Functions: Art and Agency The epigraphs by Benedetto Croce, an influential Italian philosopher and scholar of Hegel from the early twentieth century, and Sir Herbert Read, one of the most prominent British art critics of the same period, are good examples of the hostility to consideration of function that was widespread in popular and scholarly discourse until relatively recently. Histories of art tended to focus on the autonomous power of objects and the details of the biographies of artists. It was only in the last several decades of the twentieth century that the field of art history began to grapple with the role of context in the production and consumption of art. Michael Baxandall, for example, in his pioneering Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (1972), expressed this purpose with the opening line of his introduction: “A fifteenthcentury painting is the deposit of a social relationship.”7 Baxandall used socioeconomic terms such as “client” and “customer” rather than expressions that mask the production of art for money. Likewise, the artist and art critic John Berger, in his popular monograph and BBC program Ways of Seeing (1973), argued for a politicized, socioeconomically informed method of looking at and studying art.8 Perhaps the most influential art historian to map a method of studying the social history of art was T. J. Clark, who in 1973 published The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustav Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851. In the first chapter of Image of the People, Clark criticizes the connoisseurial method that dominated the field as “barren,” positing instead that art objects have transformative power that emerges from the positions of artists in society and their reactions to the world around them.9 In the study of Asia, scholars of religion and religious art were among the first to overcome the discursive boundaries of the art object by synthesizing approaches to religious practice with the traditional art historical interest in iconography. In her 1981 study Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, for example, Diana Eck argues that art works associated with Hindu worship in India do not merely symbolize a deity as an object of devotion, but embody the god as a seeing entity. Worshippers attempt to “see” (darsan) the god during a puja or other ritual of worship and honor, but also hope to be seen by the deity, who is open-eyed and alert. The sacred image represents a notion of connectedness that defies Judeo-Christian notions of dualism; a statue of Krishna, for example, might be woken, bathed, dressed, presented with fruit and flowers, prayed to, and put to bed at night. Throughout this process, the statue is understood to be a seeing manifestation of the god, a small part of a universal

Introduction | 5

whole, not a simple symbol; synecdoche rather than metonymy. Many of the chapters in this volume address the agency of art. Robert DeCaroli, for example, in his chapter on figural representation in early South Asia, traces early attitudes toward statues of spirit deities. The agency of the image emerged, in part, from the Vedic understanding of ritual practices and objects as having cosmic effects through a process of real rather than metaphorical substitution. Priests become gods, sacrificers offer up themselves, and images of spirit deities “have the ability to look back.” One of the most articulate commentators on the role of context and function in the study of art is Stanley O’Connor, who in a 1983 essay asked a series of questions that raise, in some ways, the key issues explored in this volume: Is it possible that those who inhabit a world shaped by industrial technology, a literate, largely secular, world, reasoned about in very rigorous forms of logic, can come to the immediacies of experience demanded by art works in the same way as those whose lives have such an utterly different shape? . . . Are we encapsulated in cultures that are forever getting in the way when we encounter those things that matter deeply to others?10 After comparing Indonesian appreciation of ancient Southeast Asian ceramics with assumptions about value made by Western connoisseurs, O’Connor concludes that social customs rather than “an affective response to privileged objects” determine aesthetic attitudes. O’Connor’s work encourages us to consider the interplay between local uses for art, which shift constantly in subtle ways, and the scholarly need for an object that is passively open to interpretation and ownership. For Jan Mrázek, writing in this volume on art history’s apprehension of wayang, or Javanese shadow puppet theater, lack of attention to the use of an art work results in, and is analogous to, effacement of the diverse ways of experiencing wayang in everyday life. In an insightful hermeneutic reversal, Mrázek objectifies two powerful, modern technologies of seeing — television and art history — to answer the question “What’s the use of art?” Art history’s insistence on the formal beauty and autonomous value of objectified art, like modern television’s telescopic and seemingly authentic vision of wayang performances, “annihilates experienced physical distance and place.” The resulting objects are static, while the wayang that Mrázek invokes is vibrantly alive and thus resistant to imprisonment in a display case or on the pages of a textbook. Kaja McGowan’s chapter on Balinese monuments and shrines points to another structural problem in art history’s (and the art market’s) insistence on uni-

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versal and therefore transferable beauty: a culture’s most valuable art works might not be easily removed from the place of their manufacture and use. In Bali, ephemeral sculptures “hold meanings as sheer potential,” and the deposit boxes in shrines that will eventually contain them are built less to last than to serve as vehicles for “ascending souls and descending deities.” Removing the works in the deposit boxes, like aestheticizing wayang puppets outside of the context of their use in performances, emerges in these chapters as a particularly disturbing kind of destruction. Louise Cort’s chapter on unglazed earthenware in Japan raises the specter of a very different sort of destruction, namely the disappearance of an art form that is not recognized (or easily objectified) by the modern epistemology of art. Because the unglazed earthenware vessel’s meaning emerges from its function, it has none of the nonfunctional characteristics of an art object: “The very traits of porosity, redness, fragility, and brevity of lifespan that keep earthenware outside the commercial art market constitute its significance and suitability to its defined ritual role.” More is at stake here than the absence of a particular tradition from museum displays or textbook narratives. Cort estimates that the production methods she encountered in the 1970s, which had already faded considerably from the activity of previous decades, are now “lost practices.” The chapters in this volume by Richard Davis and Janet Hoskins can be fruitfully read alongside Cort’s piece to see how successful commodification of a ritual object can lead to very different outcomes and even benefits, of a sort, for the production community. Davis’s chapter examines wedding chamber paintings from Madhubani, India, and their successful reinvention as folk art. Changes in the signification of art works of course resulted in changing status and means for artists, and some Madhubani painters acquired national status. Janet Hoskins’ chapter on a textile producer in Sumba, Indonesia, represents a particularly sharp contrast with Cort’s narrative of a fading tradition, instead illuminating “new ways in which the occult powers of cloth are realized in the modern world of commerce.” Hoskins, citing Alfred Gell, reminds us that “an object is art on the basis of what it does, not what it is,” an argument she pursues in a vivid sketch of Marta Mete, widow of the last local raja and an active cloth producer, and the community that surrounds her. She narrates Marta’s entrepreneurial activities and the whispered accusations of witchcraft they inspire, revealing a close connection between art and Sumbanese ambivalence about changes in commerce and gender roles. In late twentiethcentury Japan, social transformations blunted the efficacy of unglazed ceramics as agents of social interaction, while in late twentieth-century Sumba, ob-

Introduction | 7

jects such as Marta’s crab-decorated sarungs continued to “embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency.”

Movements: Plunder, Circulation, and Recontextualization The role of movement in what Igor Kopytoff called the “social lives” of art objects is another theme in this volume. Like art’s instrumentality, the complicated travels by which objects came to reside within museums and private collections in the great cities of Europe and North America are still often ignored in the modern discourse about art. In fact, the development of colonial power and connoisseurial knowledge, both of which are built upon the practice of discrimination, are closely linked. The authority of the European artist or critic to differentiate between good and bad art was not unconnected to his power to objectify and appropriate cultural materials by relocating them to the metropole. Richard Davis explores this theme in the context of Indian art in his 1997 book Lives of Indian Images. He is particularly interested in the implications of contextual shifts for interpretation and value. Museums such as the British Museum or the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., highlight the (ostensibly) embedded aesthetic qualities of a work, while a different set of criteria is considered more important in the ritual context of a temple: “iconographic correctness, completeness, ritual animation, and divine presence.”11 Davis explains how in the early medieval period, images were seized by rival kings during war, an appropriation of both the political capital and the sacred significance of the material culture of a conquered people. Hindu images were also targeted for destruction by some Muslim conquerors who recognized the political significance of temples and their images. Attempts by Hindu elites to restore or return removed or destroyed images likewise resulted in a profound recontextualization: “particular icons . . . gained a status still greater than they had enjoyed previously.”12 With the arrival of the British in South Asia, a new episode in the lives of Indian “art objects” emerged as colonial adventurers, conquerors, and collectors began amassing collections of beautiful and exotic Indian things and shipping them back to England. In his conclusion, Davis argues that the details in the “lives” of Indian images amount to changes in identity. Rather than focus only on the circumstances surrounding the “birth” of an image, we can profitably consider the object’s encounters with different communities of viewers and users who bring new interpretive lenses — new types of wrapping — to bear on its value. A similar process occurred in the 1860 looting of objects from the Summer Palace of the Qing emperor. James Hevia’s chapter in this volume ex-

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amines this event and the biographies of the looted objects as they traveled from China to Europe. More than any other chapter, his demonstrates “just how heavily mediated and ideologically saturated were the practices associated with plunder and circulation.” He also makes clear that the movement of art out of Asia is not necessarily a simple process of decontextualization; rather, looters, auctioneers, and new owners can be interpreted as new communities of users who recontextualize the works in distinct ways. He brings the biography of these art works full circle by looking at the recent trend of private repatriation of objects identified by auction houses as having “Imperial Sale” provenances. McGowan’s chapter also raises the issue of circularity, though in the very different context of local Balinese reactions to looting. “As the pillaging of shrines continues unabated, it is possible to discern ever-shifting codes of connoisseurship and criticism as a global market must, often unwittingly, accept Balinese ancestral adaptations to repeated loss. In a perverse way, looters, like tricksters, are forcing the Balinese to strengthen their beliefs while continually seeking new strategies for shrine construction.” The chapters by Hevia and McGowan illustrate that foregrounding colonial and postcolonial contexts need not replicate Orientalist notions of passive, victimized Asian cultures or active, empowered “Western” collectors. Circulation and recontextualization are also primary themes in Cynthea Bogel’s piece on objects brought back to Japan from China by the Buddhist monk Kūkai in the ninth century. This chapter details the varied transformations in meaning that Buddhist works underwent in their transmission from China to Japan, including “a treasured icon or object, a major or inclusive ritual form (locus or agency), a topography of conceptual modes of thought, the source of prestige and legitimacy, a form of religious inheritance, a cultural sign, or the basis for artistic innovation and copies.” One possible reading of her work is that Buddhism itself must be re-evaluated not as a purely textual tradition or a teacher-centered movement, but as a set of religious practices anchored to an active, transportable body of material culture. Even texts become art works with a particularly powerful materiality, such as the Catalogue (mokuroku) and its copies that are today housed, like many of these objects, in a temple. “The practitioner, viewer, or reader is simultaneously an actor and spectator as the Catalogue changes in successive readings, in part because the imported items have a life outside the text. Meaning can be bent in many ways, depending on its frame. The isolation of many Catalogue items from individual use or ritual deployment by the temples that now own them, in order to preserve them, does not silence their history even as it alters their meaning, precisely because of their multivalent power and historical significance.”

Introduction | 9

Memories: Art, Nostalgia, and the Nation Art works — both when displayed in local or national museums and when removed to distant collections — frequently provoke feelings of nostalgia among viewers, ostensibly for aesthetic reasons but perhaps more accurately because they seem naturally to fit into narratives of glorious pasts contrasted to impure or dissatisfactory presents. These mythohistories, or what Marilyn Ivy has referred to as phantasms of modernity (“the strangeness of that which is most familiar”13), incorporate art works as nonfunctional and immobile objects, static points on a map of the past rather than active entities swimming in a stream of events and meanings. Cultural products that have been objectified and robbed of context prompt people to “remember” what they should already know about their collective past, so that a museum’s Esoteric Buddhist statue, for example, lacking any explanation of its role in ritual, becomes a reminder of the “timeless” Japanese love of undecorated wood. As Stefan Tanaka remarks, “Just as the museum is historical but displays artifacts as if it is presenting history, thereby occluding its historicity, the nation-state has managed to replace its historicity with various objects that present the chronology of a national history as if it is natural.”14 Ashley Thompson examines the nation’s museumification of its past — “the protection of the heritage as investment for the future” — as manifested historically in the Cambodian king’s creation and preservation of royal statuary as embodied dharma. Art functions not only as a political tool of the monarch, in Thompson’s analysis, but also as a vehicle for the dissemination of the particular religious and political world view of the king. The implications for conventional art historical approaches to mapping changes in Angkorian statuary are significant: “each period style had always in some way been a portrait of the reigning king.” Thompson then applies these insights to contemporary Cambodia, where “[t]he ancient statue is a site of memory in contemporary Cambodia, a remainder or a return, a quid pro quo, something here — but whose being somehow escapes us — in the place of something else which is no longer.” She reads conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia over access to Angkor Wat as struggles over political power and identity formation: “[W]hat form will the modern nation take?” Thompson’s conclusion is unsettling but global in its significance. “Recent events may not be reassuring, but they do continue to ensure an important role for art.” The keris, a kind of ceremonial dagger, plays many functions in Balinese society. Lene Pedersen’s chapter in this volume looks at one type, the heirloom keris, noting that “as it is passed on through generations and centuries, [it]

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can become a ‘history object.’ Such an object not only represents; it is conflated with the ancestors and both embodies and generates collective history and identity.” Like the objects Kūkai brought back from China, the keris in Pedersen’s narrative is connected to the accumulation of authority over time. She focuses on the history of kingly appropriation of the keris as a symbol of royal power, and the recent reiteration of this practice during Megawati Sukarnoputri’s assumption of the presidency of Indonesia after the fall of Suharto. Pedersen demonstrates that the power of the keris — a ritual object that stands in for both memories of past kingly authority and the hope for stable government in the future — derives not from any modern notion of material authenticity but rather from how people behave toward it. Megawati’s ceremonial use of the keris and the resulting acceptance in the community of both the keris and Megawati produces a kind of circular legitimacy. The object is authentic because it is used: “Drawn upon once again to activate, legitimate, and infuse local hierarchy and state power, the events also infused the keris with renewed life.” The strangeness of the familiar can also emerge in particularly transformative contexts, as in the Balinese commemorative shrines, funerary monuments, and posthumous stone statues analyzed by McGowan, works that become meaningful through ritual activation. These architectural and sculptural objects function both as sites of remembering and as intersections through which spiritual and sacrificial movement takes place. McGowan reminds us that constructions such as shrines “are not isolable structures, but serve as points of familial contact between worlds, repositories or way stations on proliferating cyclical journeys.” Bogel’s analysis of the material culture brought back from China by Kūkai contrasts sharply with the heterogeneous practices described by McGowan, emphasizing instead the institutional utility of memorialization as a form of historical preservation with legitimating effects. “Sectarian Shingon Esoteric scholars are engaged in historical preservation to an extreme. By this I mean that the very idea of an Esoteric history began with Kūkai and his disciples and continued (with increasing intensity) through generations of Shingon priests. The maintenance of Esoteric history is critical to their purpose.” This in turn bears comparison with Hevia’s invocation of the 1997 “Never Forget National Humiliation” monument erected by the Communist government in China on the occasion of the recession of Hong Kong. There, the looting of the Summer Palace is memorialized as an appeal to strengthen the national body against further encroachments. “[T]he representations of lost objects rest near drawings of the destroyed architecture of the past, reminding a new

Introduction | 11

generation of the humiliations that accompany technological and economic ‘backwardness.’ ” And so we return, with memories of art in objectified form leading almost inexorably back to a naturalized chronology of the nation. These are not simply historical issues of interest to scholars, but contemporary problems that resonate in discussions of global differentials in power and the morality of the international art market. Jan Mrázek’s comments on the activities of the French author, critic, and “collector” André Malraux in Southeast Asia are particularly instructive as an ending to this preliminary wrapping and unwrapping of art. I will quote from him at length to remind us of the histories and contexts that are all too often forgotten or hidden but that the study of multiple histories will help us to remember: Much of Southeast Asian art that we see in museums has come there in the way described by Malraux in the Royal Way. It was in some manner “rescued” from its place and often cut out from a larger whole, in a process often sanctioned by the “civilized world” and in the name of art and Man. . . . And of course, the “rescuing” of Southeast Asian art — from widespread cutting of sculpture at Angkor to fulfill the orders of the aesthetically oriented rich of this world, to stealing heirlooms and ancestral figures in Indonesia — continues on a large scale today. The moral argument that this amounts to “saving” art objects from the difficult world and their irresponsible owners who cannot appreciate them anyway is still popular with collectors and museums.

Unwrapping Art To conclude, I would like to animate some of the themes touched upon above by comparing the historiographical and connoisseurial treatment of two Japanese tea bowls that have lived quite different social lives since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 transformed cultural production in Japan. One bowl is in a private collection in Japan, where it has served as one of the icons of art historical and connoisseurial discourse about tea ceramics for more than a century, based considerably on its profusion of wrapping. The second bowl was sold to a Western collector named Charles Lang Freer in the late nineteenth century and was taken to Washington, D.C., where it lost its wrapping and has rested in storage for most of the twentieth century. The difference in value between these two works is revealing. One is officially included in the prestigious canon of objects recognized as masterpieces by the Japanese government, while the other is mostly unknown inside and outside of Japan.

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Ōguro, Designated an Important Cultural Property ( jūyō bunkazai)

Perhaps the most famous Raku ceramic in Japan is a black tea bowl named Ōguro, which translates literally as “big black.” The bowl is fairly small, easily held in the cupped hand of a tea practitioner at 8.5 centimeters (3.35 inches) in height and 11.5 centimeters (4.53 inches) in width at the rim. The shape is that of a half-cylinder, with slightly concave walls that are not quite symmetrical and an uneven lip. The glaze that covers the entire piece (except for a small area on the bottom of the foot-ring) has the appearance of black, weathered iron, with a slight patina of rust and occasional bumps and craters. The hip of the bowl curves softly to the rough and highly textured foot-ring. The clay, visible on one quarter of the foot-ring, is a deep, sonorous red, indicating a high iron content. Particularly notable is the complete lack of the decorative flamboyance common in other “rustic” tea ceramics such as yellow Seto wares, black Seto wares, Shino wares, Oribe wares, and imported Korean wares. Ōguro seems to represent an example of reverse horror vacui, with the decorative deficit functioning as an intentional aesthetic statement. The construction of the tea bowl is also unusual when considered in the broader context of East Asian ceramic production of the sixteenth century. The potter did not throw this piece on a wheel, but hand-built and handcarved it.15 The potter formed a thick slab of clay into a rough bowl shape, allowed it to dry to leather hardness, then scraped and carved the walls of the bowl with an assortment of metal tools.16 The potter deliberately left the walls and base of the bowl fairly thick to provide structural integrity. Next, the potter glazed the tea bowl, using a solution containing a lead frit (a fluxing agent that lowers the melting temperature of the mix) and ground Kamo River stone.17 The potter fired the piece, most likely in an indoor kiln (uchigama) with a single chamber, fueled with charcoal and capable of holding only one or two tea bowls at a time.18 A tea bowl fired in such a kiln is referred to as “low temperature,” because it has not been subjected to temperatures roughly exceeding 1000 degrees centigrade (1832 degrees Fahrenheit). The fired clay is porous and rough, and the glaze is only partially vitrified.19 When the glaze on the tea bowl was molten, making it glow red with heat, the potter removed it from the kiln using a pair of iron tongs and allowed it to cool rapidly in the open air or in an isolation chamber. Many black Raku tea bowls bear tong marks on the interior and/or exterior of the main wall.20 So Ōguro appears to have been made entirely by hand and fired in a simple updraft kiln at low temperature. This mode of production was less efficient

Introduction | 13

than making pots using a potter’s wheel and firing them to high temperature in a large climbing kiln, but it seems that the resulting wares fulfilled two particular needs in the community of tea practitioners. First, bowls like Ōguro were pleasant to hold even when containing hot liquid. Because they are less vitrified, low temperature ceramics conduct less heat than high temperature wares. Second, the very inefficiency of the hand-building and hand-carving process forced the potter to constantly manipulate the bowl in his hands. This meant that the potter was unusually sensitive to how the bowl would fit and feel in the palms of a tea practitioner. Even today, many tea practitioners claim that Raku tea bowls produce the most pleasant tactile sensation of any tea ceramic. What is most impressive about Ōguro, however, is the pedigree inscribed in its layers of wrapping. The inscription on the lid of its innermost, lacquered box is attributed to the iconic tea master Sen no Rikyū’s great grandson and the founder of the Omotesenke school of tea, Sen Kōshin Sōsa (1613–1672). He wrote the following: “Ōguro. Owned by Rikyū. Transmitted through Shōan, Sōtan, and Gotō Shōsai to Sōsa, (cipher).”21 In other words, Rikyū passed Ōguro to his adopted son Sen Shōan (1546–1614), who then passed it to his son Sen Sōtan (1578–1658). Sōtan in turn gave, or perhaps sold, the bowl to his wealthy disciple Gotō Shōsai (d. 1680), who in turn passed it on to Kōshin. Kōshin’s cipher (kaō: a stylized signature) on this inscription appears to be authentic. Kōshin’s tea diaries, which are reliable and were only recently made public, record Gotō Shōsai’s owning and using of Ōguro, which suggests that the box inscription is legitimate. The lacquered inner box is protected by a second wooden box that encloses it. The inscription on the lid, attributed on the basis of its calligraphy to Kōshin’s adopted son Sen Sōsa V. Zuiryūsai (1660–1701), is modest and less informative, reading only “Rikyū Ōguro tea bowl,” with no cipher or signature.22 These inscriptions, of course, lend Ōguro its value and authority in the field of Japanese tea ceramics. But how do we know that the tea bowl I have described is the bowl about which these comments were written? Freer Object F1902.52

The Freer Gallery of Art in the Smithsonian Institution has more than two thousand examples of East Asian ceramics in its collection, not including shards. More than nine hundred of these are attributed to Japanese manufacture; the majority were acquired by the museum’s founder, Detroit-based industrialist Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919). Freer formed his collection of

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Japanese ceramics in a period spanning four decades, both during his own travels to Japan in 1895, 1907, 1909, and 1910, and through the offices of dealers in Japan, Boston, New York, and Paris. By taking advantage of the social, economic, and cultural trends of the Meiji period (1868–1912), during which pre-Meiji arts and crafts were sold at remarkably low prices, and by making use of the significant monetary resources at his disposal, Freer was able to acquire one of the most extensive collections of Asian art in the Western world. By the turn of the century, Freer’s collection was large enough to cause him worry about its future. In 1902 the historian Charles Moore suggested that Freer consider contributing his collection to the Smithsonian Institution, and within two years Freer had decided in favor of the donation. After two additional years of negotiation, which included the personal intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt in favor of accepting Freer’s gift, the Smithsonian regents approved the proposed donation to the growing complex on the National Mall. Freer’s collection was to have its own building connected to the National Museum (“the Washington Building,” as Freer modestly referred to the future Freer Gallery of Art), a site it has occupied since opening to the public in May of 1923.23 One of these pieces, Freer object 1902.52, is a black tea bowl attributed by its vendor to Chōjirō. Freer purchased the bowl for $70 in 1902 from the dealer Bunkio Matsuki, 24 who “insists that it is a genuine specimen of Chojiro’s work.”25 The walls of this low cylindrical bowl are fairly straight and regular, and the glaze is thick and evenly applied. The bowl appears well-used, with red, rust-like patina reminiscent of that found on Ōguro, as well as black lacquer repairs that have turned brown with age. Although the bowl is similar in construction and modeling to famous tea bowls attributed to Chōjiro such as Ōguro, it has been the source of conflicting opinions. Edward Sylvester Morse, who advised Freer on his ceramics and helped him decide which objects to include in the Smithsonian gift and which to give away or sell, commented to Freer early on that he was “doubtful about its genuineness.”26 Later, he remarked, “Raku? Yes, it may be an unsigned piece of no consequence.” In 1957, the ceramic scholar Koyama Fujio observed “Chojiro, first [head of the] Raku [workshop].” In 1984, a tea practitioner and connoisseur remarked that “the sculptural treatment of the base and foot is not like other Chojiro bowls I have handled. The rim is thin, whereas the base is thick. Could this be the work of Sokei, Jokei, or even Nonko?” In 1987, Raku Kichizaemon XV commented: A group of bowls of this sort exists for which precise identification is very difficult since it depends upon clarification of the identities of the various

Introduction | 15

people working at the Raku workshop during its formative years. These bowls may be “of the Chōjirō era” — or they may be completely separate from the orthodox Raku lineage. . . . The base of this bowl does not have the Chōjirō touch. The bowl (which like all pieces in the Freer collection cannot be lent to other museums) is not included in the canon of Chōjirō bowls recognized by the community of tea practitioners. The gap between these two pieces, then, exposes one major rupture in the connoisseurial epistemology of modern Japan. The primary distinction between Ōguro and Freer object F1902.52 is not stylistic or material, but contextual: one is protected by its wrapping while the other has lost its boxes. The claim that Ōguro is a product of Chōjirō made for the tea master Sen no Rikyū rests entirely on the narrative of the box inscriptions. As Kichizaemon acknowledged in his comments and as recent archaeological evidence has demonstrated, Chōjirō was only one of a number of potters producing Raku ceramics in the late sixteenth century.27 Furthermore, commissioning, producing, and distributing reproductions (utsushi) of tea ceramics was quite common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Japan.28 What evidence, then, links this bowl called “Ōguro” to its box inscription? The collector of Raku ceramics, of course, would argue that anyone who has examined enough authentic Chōjirō pieces could instantly recognize what Kichizaemon calls “the Chōjirō touch.” The very notion of the intuitive connoisseurship of Raku ceramics, however, is a product of post-Enlightenment notions of art adopted in Japan in the late nineteenth century. Connoisseurs of this period constructed a discernible, individualistic Chōjirō style through study of objects identified as Chōjirō products by their box inscriptions. The logic is thus entirely circular; objects lacking boxes tend not to display “the Chōjirō touch” because the very definition of Chōjirō’s style emerges from study of objects wrapped in powerful but not necessarily reliable attributions. Without considering the context of the production and consumption of Raku ceramics, and particularly the way in which they functioned both as bearers of symbolic meaning and as vessels used for drinking tea, our assumptions about their beauty, value, and meaning as “art objects” are at the very least not the last word. Rather, the differential treatment of these works indicates that the very truth and authenticity of these objects as art, which tends to be taken for granted, can in fact be changed or even lost.

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Notes 1. Several anthropologists have previously employed the metaphor of wrapping to analyze Japan, and these texts have influenced my own attempts to grapple with the shifting meanings of Japanese material culture. In the introductory essay to the anthology Unwrapping Japan: Society and Culture in Anthropological Perspective, ed. Eyal Ben-Ari, Brian Moeran, and James Valentine (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), Moeran argues that the notion of “wrapping” can be thought of as a euphemism for discourse on the one hand and as a pun on “rapping” on the other. Moeran and the other authors in the volume contend that wrapping helps us to understand how cultures present themselves for internal and outside consumption. This concept is complicated by Joy Hendry (who was also a contributor to Unwrapping Japan) in her Wrapping Culture: Politeness, Presentation and Power in Japan and Other Societies (Clarendon Press, 1993). She argues that wrapping represents “basic underlying principles” of refinement that reproduce certain structures of power and social systems in the culture and communication of everyday life (171). Louise Allison Cort also foregrounds the role of the box and other forms of wrapping in “Looking at White Dew,” The Studio Potter 10, vol. 2 (1985). 2. Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (The University of Chicago Press, 2001). 3. Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton University Press, 1997). 4. Shiner, The Invention of Art, 225. 5. I do not emphasize the role of the museum in this historical process as a straw man for the anthology, and certainly do not intend to single out curators for criticism. Like institutions such as universities, libraries, and opera houses, museums are imperfect. The complex pressures that constrain many museums might include profit-minded and number-conscious administrators, politicized boards and oversight committees, mission statements that demand both enlightenment and entertainment for increasingly diverse populations of visitors, and collections of objects with contested histories and complicated needs. More important than these limitations, though, is the way in which innovative curators, exhibition designers, and collectors increasingly strive to challenge the very definitions of art that have dominated the field for so long. This book is possible, in part, because of their efforts. 6. Philip Fisher, following Heidegger, discusses this notion in Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (Oxford University Press, 1991), 10. 7. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford University Press, 1972, 1988), 1. 8. See, for example, Berger's essay “Frederick Antal: A Personal Tribute,” Burlington Magazine 96/617 (1954): 259–260. 9. T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1973), 12–13. 10. Stanley J. O’Connor, “Art Critics, Connoisseurs, and Collectors in the South-

Introduction | 17

east Asian Rain Forest: A Study in Cross-Cultural Art Theory,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14, vol. 2 (September 1983): 400–401. 11. Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton University Press, 1997), 23. 12. Davis, Lives of Indian Images, 115. 13. Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23. 14. Stefan Tanaka, New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton University Press, 2004), 169. 15. Hand-building and hand-carving of the walls and base is seen on some tea bowls from the Seto/Mino kilns in the early seventeenth century, perhaps extending back into the late sixteenth century. Black Seto tea bowls, in particular, tend to show marks of scraping and carving. Such tea bowls were either thrown entirely on the wheel or coiled and then thrown on a flat base. Alteration through carving or scraping took place after the piece was removed from the wheel. See Louise Allison Cort, Seto and Mino Ceramics (Smithsonian Institution, 1992), 89–90; and Itō Yoshiaki, “Momoyama jidai ni okeru futatsu no kuro: kuro Raku to Setu guro ni tsuite,” MUSEUM 520 (7, 1994): 4–19. 16. See Richard Wilson, Inside Japanese Ceramics: A Primer of Materials, Techniques, and Traditions (Weatherhill, 1995), 56–58, for a description and illustrations of this process. 17. See Raku Kichizaemon, “Rakuyaki no gihō,” Raku chawan no 400 nen–dentō tosōzō (Suntory Bijutsukan, Heisei 10), 54–55. Also, Wilson, Inside Japanese Ceramics, 131–132. 18. Today two types of kilns are found in the Raku workshop: those used to fire red Raku ceramics and those used to fire black Raku ceramics. The latter have a bellows, which increases the temperature of the firing and results in the glossy, shiny quality of black Raku glazes. It is not known when this innovation occurred. See the sketch of a black Raku kiln in Hayashiya Seizō, Akanuma Taka, and Raku Kichizaemon, Raku: A Dynasty of Japanese Ceramists (Maison de la Culture du Japon a Paris, 1997). 19. Such ceramics are referred to as nanshitsu or “soft quality” in Japanese, but I prefer the term “low temperature.” Vitrification refers to the chemical transformation that occurs when a substance melts, reaching a liquid state like that of glass, at high temperature. 20. Black Seto tea bowls were also removed from the kiln when red-hot using tongs, to ensure that the iron in solution in the glaze did not crystallize and turn brown. See Wilson, Inside Japanese Ceramics, 160–161. 21. Raku Bijutsukan, Chōjirō (Raku Bijutsukan, 1988), 10. 22. Raku Bijutsukan, Chōjirō, 10. 23. See Thomas Lawton and Linda Merrill, Freer: A Legacy of Art (Freer Gallery, 1993). 24. Voucher no. 20, March 1902, Freer Papers. 25. Folder sheet, F1902.52, Freer Gallery of Art. 26. This and the following comments come from the folder sheet for object F1902.52, Freer Gallery of Art.

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27. See chapter one of Morgan Pitelka, Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practitioners in Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005) for more information. 28. Morgan Pitelka, “Back to the Fundamentals: ‘Reproducing’ Rikyū and Chōjirō in Japanese Tea Culture,” in The Culture of Copying in Japan: Critical and Historical Perspectives, ed. Rupert Cox (Routledge, 2007).

Functions

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From the Living Rock Understanding Figural Representation in Early South Asia

It has become a commonly accepted truth that the meanings attributed to objects are not inherent to the objects themselves. Rather, the meanings that are associated with any item or work of human creation are the result of cultural and historical processes through which that significance has been constructed. Even those special objects that are identified as works of art are by no means exempt from this process. The designation “art” often carries with it certain connotations of use and function that stem from culturally specific (primarily the post-Renaissance West) notions of exhibition and status. As such, a work of “art” is generally intended to function as an object of display that reflects favorably upon the individual or institution that claims possession of it. Ideally, this ownership often reveals something about the status, wealth, and importance of the owner or owners. Furthermore, within this system the renown of the object’s creator can frequently add considerable weight to these favorable associations, particularly if the artist happens to be well-known and respected. Although it may seem unusual to highlight this functional aspect of Western art, it is important to recognize this as one of the primary hegemonic frameworks into which objects from around the world and across time have been made to participate through the establishment of museums and art markets. In fact, to define this system as simply “Western” is to fail to recognize that artists and collectors from around the world now actively participate in this method of understanding and valuing art. With the rise of the global art market, it becomes easy to forget that not all objects now designated as “art” had similar motives underlying their creation, despite their shared current function as commodities. To make such an assumption about the origins of objects is to ignore the complex history of human interaction with material culture. If we assume all artists participated in only one, very particular way of

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understanding their creations, we artificially limit our own ability to appreciate the historical meanings associated with these objects and neglect to ask the questions that bring us closer to understanding the importance they held in their original contexts. However, this realization makes certain demands of the art historian. It becomes vital to try and recognize the limits of one’s own cultural perspective when examining the material record of the past. This is particularly true in a context like that of early South Asia where, despite a vast and vibrant literary tradition, historical accounts and daily records are relatively rare. In the absence of consistent historical record keeping, it is particularly challenging to link most early Indian texts to a specific place or time, and great care is required when gleaning historical references from texts whose function is not primarily historical in nature. Due in part to the challenges posed by the textual tradition, there has been a tendency in some of the earliest scholarship on Indian art to discuss objects apart from their historical contexts. This type of scholarship tends to be exceptionally ungrounded and at times serves as little more than a screen onto which authors have projected their own biases and concerns. Perhaps the clearest example of this is James Fergusson’s 1868 text Tree and Serpent Worship: Illustrations of Mythology and Art in India.1 This text, which is ostensibly a discussion of the sculpture at the Buddhist monasteries of Sāñcī and Amarāvatī, devolves into a wide-ranging evaluation of human civilization based largely on racial determinism. As part of this analysis, Fergusson identifies representations of serpents within religious contexts as an explicit indication of social decline, regardless of the setting. In this case, Fergusson’s own Protestant background, which associates serpents with corruption, is projected onto all cultures without questioning the meanings associated with snakes in each specific society, region, or historical period. Similar types of issues also plague the early, and unfortunately influential, scholarship on figural sculpture in India. But before undertaking a discussion of the historiography, a little background on South Asian figural representations is required.

Imperial Views: History and Historiography of the Earliest Images Although South Asia has an extremely long history with an impressive and complex material record, evidence from the earliest periods reveals no examples of large-scale, anthropomorphic, sculptural representations. Although there are some well-known examples of figural representations from the ancient South Asian civilizations that developed along the Indus River (2300–

From the Living Rock | 23

1700 BCE), these images are invariably quite modest in scale. The majority of the Indus images are small terra-cotta sculptures that depict women wearing elaborate headdresses and jewelry. The largest image found to date is made of stone, however, and this well-known figure of a so-called “priest king” stands only nineteen centimeters (7.5 inches) in height. The real lacuna in the presence of figural imagery coincides with what scholars often refer to as the Vedic Period (1500–450 BCE). This time seems to have been one of great transition in South Asia, with the decline of habitations around the Indus River and the eventual emergence of large population centers in the Ganges Basin. Yet from these centuries there is little evidence of anything one might consider sculpture. Many suggestions have been put forth explaining this gap in the material record, from the possibility of widespread transition toward a nomadic lifestyle to the use of materials that decay more readily than ceramic and stone. Regardless of the reasons, this break in the material record was puzzling to early European scholars of Indian history who felt the need to address what they saw as a conspicuous absence. The first extant examples of large-scale sculptural imagery in South Asia date to the third or second centuries BCE and primarily come in the form of freestanding representations of minor deities. The images from sites like Besnagar, Parkham, Pāt aliputra (Patna), Mathurā, and Dīdargañj are excel˙ lent examples of this sculptural type and demonstrate the typical upright posture and frontal gaze associated with these earliest images (fig. 1.1). Most of these works were found in relatively isolated locations associated with a nearby urban center or village. Likewise, most of the works are approximately life size with the exception of the Besnagar image, which is well over three meters (9.8 feet) in height (fig. 1.2). The types of beings that are portrayed in these sculptures hold a position somewhere between the status of deities (devas) and the ranks of the ghosts (bhūta, preta), but at times share the natures of both. Although these categories of beings are sometimes referred to as demigods or minor deities, I prefer to use the term “spirit-deities” because of their fluid associations with both ancestors and gods. But regardless of the English term we use to collectively refer to these types of divinities, the Sanskrit literature refers to these beings by a great variety of names depending on their appearance and capabilities. Yaksa, devatā, rāksasa, nāga, and gandharva are just a few of the designations ˙ ˙ used to reference specific types of spirit-deities. However, despite any differences among them, all of these beings are associated with regional devotion and local religious practices that were seen as central to the procurement of nonsoteriological concerns like wealth, health, and fertility. Although freestanding images of spirit-deities are the earliest examples of

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Figure 1.1. (Left) Yaksī. Dīdārgañj. Ca. third century BCE. Patna Museum. ˙ Figure 1.2. (Right) Yaksa. Besnagar. Ca. 100 BCE. Archaeological Museum Vidiśā. ˙

large-scale figural sculpture in South Asia, from roughly the same time period (second century BCE) we can find evidence of the first stone Buddhist monastic complexes. Notably, the decorations on these first monasteries are, once again, figural representations of spirit-deities. Only instead of being found in isolated examples, the images are clustered around the doorways and exterior railings, where they function as guardians of the Buddhist sacred space. Many examples of these images can be found at sites like Bhārhut, Sāñcī, Bhājā, and Pitalkhorā as well as at almost every other early Buddhist monastery in South Asia. If there were any doubts about the identification of these images as spiritdeities, the site of Bhārhut fortunately bears inscriptions that identify each of the images by name (fig. 1.3). In short, the earliest corpus of prominent figural

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Figure 1.3. Ajakālako Yakkha. Bhārhut. Ca. second century BCE. Indian Museum Kolkata.

imagery in South Asia emerges after the third century BCE and, no matter the context, is almost exclusively made up of spirit-deities associated with popular religious practice. Returning to the historiography, it becomes apparent that the European scholars of the colonial period had a tendency to read this evidence in two contradictory but equally pejorative ways. The first group can be typified by scholars like John Marshall (1876–1958), who identified the gradual emergence of sculptural images as a religious decline into idolatry, a fall from rationalism into emotionalism. This “decay” was linked to notions of an idealized, intellectual Buddhism that was said to have declined into “base” forms of worship due to the demands of the unlettered public. Marshall writes:

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From being an ethical philosophy with an ‘idealised nihilism’ as its goal — a philosophy which appealed mainly to the educated few — it had developed into a popular, cosmopolitan faith for the masses, in which emotionalism was already to a large extent taking the place of abstract reasoning, and idolatry, mysticism and superstition were probably almost as prominent as in contemporary Hinduism.2 This tendency to tell Indian history in terms of decline was part of a larger process intended to justify the British colonial presence in India and to promote their self-justification as a civilizing force. In this schema, the presence of large-scale sculptural images found in religious contexts was indicative of a shift in practice toward what the British identified as “idolatry” and a move into irrational forms of worship. This shift was then linked to current Hindu practices, which were singled out as the culmination of this downward trend. Such negative associations were part of a long-standing critique directed at Hinduism, which had already come under fire from European missionaries and others with colonial interests. Yet Marshall was by no means the originator of this mode for discussing Indian sculpture and religion. He was merely voicing long-standing views on Indian sculpture that had been present in Europe for quite some time. Partha Mitter has demonstrated that as early as the 1500s European accounts of India were replete with tales that made claims of idolatry and paganism in regard to Indian forms of religious expression.3 Such tales continued to spread through the seventeenth century, and even though such assertions were generally considered archaic by Marshall’s time, the impact of these inherited notions clearly continued to exert influence. In fact, the damage done by these assertions was significant enough to prompt a defense from scholars like Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), who was Marshall’s contemporary. Specifically, Coomaraswamy attempted to point out the problems inherent in judging one culture by the standards of another. For example, he begins his 1934 essay on the “Origin and Use of Images in India” by stating: Few who condemn idolatry, or make its suppression a purpose of missionary activity, have ever seriously envisaged the actual use of images, in historical or psychological perspective, or surmised a possible significance in the fact that the vast majority of men of all races and in all ages, including the present, Protestants, Hebrews and Musalmans being the chief exceptions, have made use of more or less anthropomorphic images as aids to devotion.4

From the Living Rock | 27

Although Coomaraswamy is on the defensive, he broadens the implications involved in critiquing the Indian sculptural tradition by pointing out the similarities between Indian practices and those of other cultures and times. According to his argument, if sculptural images in an Indian context are indicative of decline then the same must be true for the majority of human civilization. But, despite the cleverness of his argument, Coomaraswamy devotes relatively little effort to refuting claims of idolatry in Indian history. By this time, most people in academic circles had begun to consider such assertions much less compelling and legitimate than they had a few decades earlier. If anything, Marshall’s comments about idolatry represent the final echoes of that characterization of Indian art before it gave way to a contradictory, but equally problematic, new mode for imagining the South Asian sculptural tradition. This new idea was first proposed at the beginning to the twentieth century and gradually gained prominence over the following decades. This new shift in the discussion of South Asian sculpture, which rejected or ignored any claims of Indian idolatry, can be seen in the writing of Alfred Foucher (1865–1952). He writes: [T]he fact remains that Buddhism did not develop, like Christianity, in a world long infected by the worship of images. . . . We do not find that the Vedic texts breathe a word about it [idolatry]: and their silence is explained precisely by the fact that the idea had not even presented itself to the Indian mind.5 So what begins as a seeming defense of Indian art quickly becomes another derogatory characterization of the “Indian mind.” In Foucher’s system, the Indian population is portrayed as an entirely passive people to whom the idea of figural representation is, quite literally, a foreign idea. Namely, Foucher credits the Greek communities in Bactria as being the originators of the earliest Buddha images and, by extension, as having prompted the entire Indian sculptural tradition. Although Foucher allows for a certain amount of “fetishism” prior to Greek influence, he ultimately sees the high tradition of Indian sculpture as stemming from Greek origins.6 Once again it is Ananda Coomaraswamy who confronts these notions in an attempt to defend Indian artistic traditions from the allegation that they are simply derivative of Greek creativity. Although he is willing to concede Western influence on some regional versions of Buddhist sculpture, he makes a point of stressing that these are Indian religious systems that are being expressed in distinctly Indian ways.

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Can we postulate a Roman yogī, seated on a lotus throne, and with hands in the dhyāni mudrā [meditation gesture]. . . . The seated Buddha, as we have already suggested on a priori grounds, can only be of Indian origin; and this being so, it will be seen how great an exaggeration is involved in speaking of the “Greek Origin of the Image of Buddha.”7 Yet by even needing to address these conceptions of Indian art, Coomaraswamy and like-minded academics have inadvertently embedded these supposed issues further into the scholarly debate. Ironically, in so doing they themselves have at times been influenced by the very ideas they were working to refute. For instance, Coomaraswamy still felt it necessary to devalue the inclusion of spirit-deity images at Buddhist sites and links their presence to a decline in “true” Buddhist practice. Although Coomaraswamy at times remarks that the addition of spirit-deities to Buddhist sites indicates a triumph for Buddhism, he also consistently denigrates the role of sculpture at Buddhist monasteries and blames their presence on the uneducated masses.8 The Buddha thus conceived . . . became the object of a cult that was regarded as approachable by worship. In all this we see not merely an internal development of metaphysics, but also the influence of the lay community: for a majority of men, and still more the majority of women, have always been more ready to worship than to know.9 Despite his efforts to defend the Indian artistic tradition, even Coomaraswamy is drawn into seeing the presence of sculpture as a sign of decay or, at best, as an unfortunate development. Rather than seeing the emergence of sculpted guardians as a healthy indication that Buddhism was thriving and attracting large numbers of donors from all walks of life, these images are consistently read as signs of decline. Yet when this influential notion of religious decline is examined, we can see that it is largely grounded in a subjective, European preference for the earliest schools of Buddhist thought and was ultimately rooted in spurious claims of social and religious decay promoted during a period of imperial expansion.

Narrative Insights: Image, Metaphor, and Text Clearly, these issues are both highly problematic and deeply ingrained in the discussion surrounding Indian figural representation. It is also evident that in both of the positions discussed above the organizing principles attributed

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to Indian art are, in fact, Western in origin and say nothing about how the indigenous populations viewed such images. At the center of both theories are the concerns of colonialism, which sought to justify the British imperial presence in South Asia by painting an image of Indian culture and society as having declined from an age of past grandeur. Although the two positions (exemplified by the writing of Marshall and Foucher) may disagree with each other on the specifics, both ultimately put forth theories that undermine the importance and quality of the Indian sculptural tradition. Furthermore, they both do so by importing concerns and criticisms about Western art into India rather than by looking at indigenous discussions. Even though historical records are hard to come by, there is no shortage of literary and philosophic texts that touch on aspects of life in South Asia. Two passages associated with the Buddhist literary tradition seem well worth citing here. The first is from a text, which dates to between the second century BCE and the third century CE, known as The Questions of King Milinda (Milindapahña).10 In this text a king named Milinda seeks out the accomplished Buddhist monk Nāgasena to ask him a series of philosophical questions. The name Milinda has been convincingly argued to be the Sanskrit version of the Greek name Menander as well as a possible reference to a Bactrian Greek king of the same name.11 This potential historical connection helps situate the text both chronologically and geographically and underscores the complexities involved in cultural diffusion. Over the course of the narrative the king asks the monk questions on a variety of topics, which Nāgasena answers so masterfully that the king enthusiastically accepts Buddhism and in his old age actually chooses to renounce his kingship to become a monk himself. At one point in the text, the king tries to trap Nāgasena by asking him how a Buddhist text, the Jātaka, could include stories in which trees speak while also maintaining that trees were unconscious things. He asks, Now if, Nāgasena, a tree is an unconscious thing, it must be false that the Aspen tree spoke to Bhāradvāja. But if it is true, it must be false to say that a tree is unconscious. This too is a double-edged problem now put to you, and you have to solve it.12 Nāgasena confirms that trees are indeed unconscious but goes on to point out that the word “tree” is also sometimes used to reference the spirit-deity, or yaksa, that dwells within the tree. Therefore, it is not the tree itself that is ˙ speaking but rather it is the spirit-deity that has come to reside within that physical form.13 Although it may not be readily apparent what this passage has to do with statues, it does inform us that the devotional acts performed

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at tree shrines were not focused on the veneration of the trees themselves but rather honored the spirit-deities that could be accessed through them. In his response Nāgasena is making an important distinction between the object and the spiritual force to which it provides access. A second passage helps to make this point more directly. In the Divyāvadāna (lit. “divine achievements”), which dates to around the second century, the great monk Upagupta regrets that he was born so long after the Buddha’s death. He wishes he could compliment his appreciation of the Buddha’s “dharma body” (dharmakāya) with an understanding of his physical form (rūpakāya). Although the literature addressing the nature of the Buddha’s various bodies eventually develops into a complex philosophic system, at this early stage the dharmakāya is usually understood to refer to the Buddha’s teachings and the rūpakāya to his physical form. To accomplish his aims, Upagupta seeks out the well-known and recently converted spirit-deity named Māra, who was famous for his contentious interactions with the Buddha. Once Upagupta finds Māra, he instructs the spirit to take the form of the Buddha so that he may further his understanding. However, Māra is reluctant to do so because he fears that if Upagupta bows to honor the Buddha’s image he will be physically hurt by the monk’s devotion. If you show even a little reverence towards me . . . I will be consumed by fire, O mighty one. Do I have the power to endure the prostration of one whose passions are gone [a monk]?14 Upagupta accedes to Māra’s request, but when Māra does eventually assume the Buddha’s form (as well as those of his disciples) Upagupta begins to prostrate himself on the ground “thinking that this image was the Buddha.”15 Although this devotion does not cause him pain, Māra is troubled by this show of respect and immediately begs the monk to stop. Māra is puzzled by the actions of the monk and asks for an explanation. Upagupta responds by saying that his actions were not a violation of their agreement because, Of course I know that the Best of Speakers [the Buddha] is gone altogether to extinction [nirvāna]. . . . Even so, when I see his figure which is ˙ pleasing to the eye, I bow down before the sage. But I do not revere you!16 Upagupta goes on to explain, Just as men bow down to clay images of the gods, knowing that what they worship is the god and not the clay, so I, seeing you here wearing the form

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of the Lord of the World bowed down to you, conscious of the Sugata [Buddha] but not conscious of Mara.17 This passage is significant for a number of reasons. First, the use of images is never called into question; rather it is the use of Buddha images that seems to be the topic of concern. Secondly, in defense of his actions Upagupta takes it for granted that his audience is well aware of how images function within acts of devotion. He makes reference to the use of images in worship in order to clarify his point about the difference between the actual object of devotion and that which is depicted. In this case, Māra is not hurt because he, just like the clay image, is not the ultimate focus of devotion. It is also worth noting that both of the passages cited here seem to disarm the accusations of idolatry that so preoccupied the early European authors. However, if the question of image worship is so clearly addressed in the Indian literature, one might ask why this issue became so central to the earliest scholarship on South Asian art. In fact, these concerns about idolatry can be linked to long-standing European Christian debates about the appropriateness of images within religious contexts. In the nineteenth century this issue was still an important point of contention for European Catholics and Protestants, who disagreed over the inclusion of sculpture within religious contexts. And, although similar debates entered India along with Islam in the eighth century, they were not a major concern prior to that.18 This is not to say that the early South Asian literature is free of debate. As we will see, there is in fact plenty of discussion about images, particularly concerning images of the Buddha himself, but the concerns of the early Indian authors are significantly different from those emphasized in the colonial literature on idolatry. It is revealing, therefore, that this issue is the one highlighted by the early European scholars in their discussions of Indian sculpture. We can ask similar questions about Foucher’s argument promoting Greek culture as the source of the Indian sculptural tradition. Just as concerns about idolatry can be linked to European origins, the same can be said about the identification of Greek civilization as the root of all grand artistic traditions. The emulation of Greco-Roman culture and the study of the Classics were extremely prevalent in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In many ways the English, through the rise of Neoclassicism, had identified themselves as the inheritors of ancient Greek ideals and traditions. However, there is no similar occurrence in the literary traditions of India; there is no indigenous source that identifies the Greeks as having been a grandly influential society worthy of emulation. While it is true that South Asian cultures, par-

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ticularly in the northwest of the subcontinent, had contact with Greek communities and these contacts assuredly produced some important exchanges of ideas and practices, there is never an identification of Greeks as being the source for widespread cultural influence. If anything, texts like the Milindapahña, in which a Bactrian Greek king converts to Buddhism after turning to an Indian monk for advice, suggest the reverse. In short, the early European theories about the nature of the Indian sculptural tradition say much more about European concerns in the nineteenth century than they do about the history of South Asian art.

Eyes of Stone: Images and Agency Once these ethnocentric limitations embedded in the early scholarship are identified, the way is open to ask new questions. What did the Indians themselves write about figural images? How might we best recover the indigenous views on such sculpture? What function did these early works serve? And how did the communities to whom they were displayed understand their significance? The South Asian literary sources contain several tales that give us some idea about the way figural images were understood and used. While many of these accounts contain miraculous events that may make the use of these stories as historical sources problematic, they do give us a good idea of the way people understood images. At the very least, they provide an indigenous record about the sorts of things that were considered possible. For example, the Antagada-dasāo, a first- or second-century BCE Jain text, ˙ contains the story of an unfortunate garland maker named Ajjunae.19 Every morning Ajjunae would pay his respects to the yaksa Moggarapāni by bring˙ ˙ ing offerings to its huge, iron-mace-wielding statue. However, one day while Ajjunae and his wife were making offerings they were beset by bandits who tied up Ajjunae and raped his wife. As this horrible event is taking place, Ajjunae has serious doubts that the yaksa really exists and finds it reprehensible ˙ that the Moggarapāni would allow such terrible things to take place in his ˙ grove without intervening. At this point the yaksa possesses Ajjunae, granting ˙ him great strength and driving him into a homicidal rage. The garland maker breaks his bonds, lifts the statue’s giant mace, and proceeds to kill the bandits. Unfortunately the power of the yaksa overwhelms Ajjunae with a blind rage ˙ and he goes on to kill his wife. Even after this, the possession does not end, and on each successive day he kills seven more victims. This terror continues until a Jain ascetic manages to hold Ajjunae at bay with his gaze and succeeds

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in driving the bloodthirsty spirit from his body. At this point Ajjunae deeply regrets his actions, becomes a Jain monk, and willingly bears the abuse of his victims’ families.20 Clearly this tale cannot be taken as a model of historical accuracy nor was it ever intended to be used as such. Its primary purpose is to demonstrate the power of Jain beliefs in overcoming dangerous passions, capricious spiritdeities, and an escalating pattern of violence. However, it also contains several relevant insights into the ways images were used. Just as in the tales cited above, the statue and the spirit-deity it represents share a complicated manner of interaction. While the statue is clearly not identical with the yaksa, as is ˙ demonstrated by the fact that Moggarapāni leaves the image to possess the ˙ unfortunate garland maker, it is also clear that under normal circumstances the yaksa can be addressed and contacted through the image itself. There is ˙ an inherent association between the image and that which is represented. Through that connection the human and the supernatural can interact. Another Jain tale, this one from The Lives of the Jain Elders (Sthavirāvalīcarita), relates the story of a yaksa statue that could be used to verify the ˙ truth.21 In this story an adulteress named Dargilā has her virtue challenged by her father-in-law. In order to overcome the accusation she agrees to take an oath and pass through the legs of the yaksa Śobhana. According to custom no ˙ person who takes a false oath can safely pass through the legs of this particular yaksa’s statue. Cleverly, Dargilā instructs her lover to dress as a madman and ˙ wait next to the statue. As Dargilā approaches the image, the lover, by prior arrangement, publicly embraces her and then runs off. After this, Dargilā steps forward and vows that, aside from her husband and the madman, she has been embraced by no man. Because her oath was technically true, she perplexes the yaksa and passes safely between the statue’s legs, thereby thwarting the ˙ accusations. In Dargilā’s tale the yaksa interacts with the community through the statue ˙ itself. In a sense the spirit becomes the force that animates the image and crushes anyone who would lie while under oath. While many of the story’s details may be difficult to accept as anything but fictional, it does suggest that images were seen as an efficacious way of verifying the truth. Even in the tale of Moggarapāni cited above, the yaksa image is referred to as “truth-telling.” It is ˙ ˙ possible, therefore, that the process of swearing in front of an image may have been an act of special significance due, at least in part, to the fact that images and the beings they represent were granted a certain measure of agency. There is a passage from a Tamil text known as the Manimekhalai that pro˙ vides a detailed account of the relationship between an image and its resident

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spirit-deity. The text itself dates to either the second or the sixth century CE and even though this text was most likely written later than the previously recounted examples, it has many features in common with those other tales.22 In this text the young and accomplished Buddhist nun Manimekhalai is flee˙ ing the unwanted attention of a local prince and seeks refuge behind a gate in the city’s sanctuary. There she encounters a spirit-deity who resides within an image carved onto a pillar. She addresses the spirit as “the genie that resides in this place who, without ever lying, unveils things hidden” and, true to her expectations, the spirit proceeds to tell Manimekhalai about her past lives and ˙ advises her on how to remain safe. The spirit goes on to say, I also wish to explain to you, since it surprises you, why figures painted in a fresco or images modeled in clay or sculpted in stone or wood, should sometimes have the power to speak.23 The spirit of the pillar tells how skilled craftsmen can, “with masterly calculations,” fashion images of the gods and thereby trap heavenly powers. The text goes on to say that The divinities thus represented are present in the images. This is why the perspicacious know that through these images one can communicate with the divinities they represent.24 This passage not only confirms, once again, that images were frequently credited with having the power to discern the truth, it also provides a remarkably detailed account of the relationship between images and the divinities they represent. In this case there is an inherent connection between an image and the subject it depicts, a link between the representation and the represented. Furthermore, through the copy one can gain access to the original even if it is normally intangible, as in the case of gods. The Chinese pilgrim Faxian, who traveled in India in the early fifth century, relates a tale in which this same inherent link between the copy and the original is attributed to an image of the Buddha himself. According to the legend, while the Buddha was in heaven preaching to his deceased mother and the gods, King Prasenajit grew eager to see the Buddha again. So he commissioned his artists to carve an image of wood and had it placed in the monastery. When the real Buddha returned, the image “immediately left its place, and came forth to meet him.”25 After this greeting, the Buddha instructed the image to return to the monastery, where it would serve as a pattern for his followers after he was gone. Significantly, the image in this story is revealed to be capable of a great deal of independent action even though it is the copy of a

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living person. The image is granted a place of honor within the monastic complex in which it resides even after the original Buddha departs.26 Furthermore, the Buddha designates the statue as his proxy, so that in his absence it might serve as an accurate model for all later representations and as an appropriate focus of meditation.

In the Eyes of the Law: Images, Legal Codes, and Ritual All the evidence considered so far has been gleaned from literary and religious sources, which may lead us to question how much these texts reflect actual practice. Fortunately, there is another body of literature that by its very nature reflects actual, or at least ideal, practice. I am speaking of texts that dictate legal and political behavior. The first of these texts I would like to consider is the Arthaśāstra, which is a primer for kings that provides advice on governance and administration. There is some debate over the precise date of the text, but most scholars believe it was written either in the third century BCE or later in the fifth to sixth centuries CE by authors trying to add antiquity to the text by using the names of earlier ministers.27 But regardless of its date, this text provides advice on a wide range of topics and has at its core a rather ruthless and frequently underhanded practicality. This is not a text that is overtly beholden to any religious tradition and therefore provides an excellent glimpse into a worldly view of South Asian society. Among the more devious suggestions offered to a prince who finds himself with an empty treasury is the possibility of getting money from people by faking a miracle. Specifically, the text proposes that agents of the state trick money out of people by faking the presence of a dangerous spirit-deity. In order to do this, the text suggests the use of a tree that is blooming out of season as an excuse for a profitable festival or to have agents dressed as holy men offer to ward off a dangerous tree spirit for a price.28 Similar tactics can also be used against one’s enemies as a way of terrifying an opponent. By means of an underground passage, agents are directed to enter hollow images of deities and from that location to make proclamations of doom that will drive an enemy to surrender.29 As a way to draw out an enemy king, the text prescribes that agents arrange to make an image bleed or to speak from trees so that the rival ruler will leave the safety of his palace to participate in the expiatory rites and thereby render himself vulnerable.30 The context for these passages is remarkably different from those of the previous examples taken from Jain and Buddhist literary sources; however,

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the Arthaśāstra passages help to confirm the association between images and the supernatural. Even though the text suggests the faking of miraculous occurrences involving images, these tactics would, logically, not be effective if the general populace did not deem them to be possible. Furthermore, even the authors of the Arthaśāstra seem to accept such events as possibilities because the text also contains advice on what to do if real evil spirits begin to plague one’s kingdom. In fact, one of the few groups to whom the king is advised to show respect are those who are “experts in the practice of magic and holy ascetics capable of counteracting divine calamities” brought on by angered spirit-deities.31 The benefit of dealing with prescriptive texts is that we can be reasonably certain of the author’s intentions. That is to say, if the purpose of a text is to provide sound advice to a king, it is unlikely that the author would include options that were based on intentionally fanciful or fictional information. The same advantages can be noted in reference to the Buddhist Vinaya texts, which are, essentially, the legal codes dictating monastic behavior. The Vinaya Pitaka ˙ of the Sarvāstivādin school contains a rule dictating that monasteries present a small portion of their food to a yaksī known as Hārītī. In the narrative that ˙ accompanies and helps to justify the rule, we are told of the conversion of this dangerous spirit-deity by the Buddha.32 According to the text, Hārītī was devastating the capital of Magadha by devouring all of the children (“devouring” is here most likely a reference to disease). In order to make her stop, the Buddha hides the youngest of her five hundred children under his begging bowl and does not reveal it until Hārītī begins to understand the pain she has been causing others. At this point the Buddha preaches to the spirit-deity and convinces her to become a devotee of Buddhist ethics. Hārītī agrees to give up the practice of harming people and in return the Buddha promises that she will be given sustenance from a portion of all the food donated to the Buddhist monastic community. The importance of this arrangement is confirmed by the fact that the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Yijing (c. 670 CE) mentions seeing images of Hārītī in the porches and dining areas of several monastic residences.33 In this case each image explicitly provides access to the goddess and serves as a conduit for offerings intended to ensure her continued guardianship and good graces. In all the examples cited above, both literary and legal, there is a consistent tendency to credit images with a certain amount of agency, and they are portrayed as innately forging a binding connection between the representation and that which is depicted. However, this sympathetic association between the original and its copy really should not surprise us. Even by the Buddha’s

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time, this idea had been at the core of Vedic ritual practice for centuries. Within many Vedic ceremonies the sacrificer is made identical to the oblation and thereby ritually offers himself to the gods. The Vedas abound with similar associations because it is exactly this sort of substitution that makes it possible for ritual actions, performed locally, to be seen as having cosmic consequences. Within the ritual context, the prototype or pramā is linked to its counterpart or pratimā and they are made equivalent by virtue of a connection known as bandhu or nidāna. It is this principle of nidāna that is central to the performance of rituals and is ultimately seen as what makes them efficacious. For instance, the priest called the āgnīdhra is said to actually become the fire god Agni during the ritual through the property of nidāna. Likewise, the priest is ˙ able to expel demons by simply flinging grass out of the sacrificial grounds because, through the principle of nidāna, the demons and the grass are equated within the ritual context.34 In both instances a powerful association is forged between what Coomaraswamy refers to as the “exemplar” and the “image.”35 Significantly the most common Sanskrit term for a sculptural image is “pratimā,” the same word that is used in Vedic contexts to reference the counterpart or stand-in used during the course of the ritual. In fact, the term “pratimā” can technically be used in reference to an image made of stone, clay, paint, or any other media, as well as to reflections in a mirror. That the same term is used in referring to both ritual substitution and figural representations helps to clarify the profound nature of the relationship between the copy and the original. Just as one object may be equated with another within the ritual context, so too the image and the exemplar share a connection that goes well beyond symbolism. According to Brian K. Smith, within the Vedic context The various counterparts and images are neither identical to nor wholly distinguished from either their (vertical) prototypes or their (horizontal) formal siblings . . . their particular appropriateness locates them.36 In this system each copy is in some sense an identifiable substitution for the original, but because it is merely an emanation it lacks the completeness of the exemplar. At the same time, however, these copies share an inherent connection with the original that enables them to have potency within the proper context.37 With this in mind, it is also worth noting that the Sanskrit word “devatā” can be used in reference to both minor deities and statues. The language is identical no matter if one is referencing the deity or the copy. Taken collectively, these semiotic examples help to clarify the intimate link that images had

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with the subjects they were intended to depict. And, given the profound nature of these associations, we can begin to make some salient observations about both the presence and the absence of images in early South Asian contexts.

Seeing the Buddha: The Example of the Buddha Image As was noted earlier, the first examples of large figural images in South Asia are constituted almost exclusively of representations of spirit-deities. Notably absent from this corpus, prior to the second century, are almost any examples of sculpture intended to represent specific human subjects. The only clear exceptions to this absence of portraiture can be found at the first-century BCE site of Nanaghat. This site is located along the major route that connected the Sātavāhana capital city of Paithan to the port cities of the coast and contains the remnants of statues depicting the royal family. The site, which was commissioned by the widowed queen Nayanikā, contained images of Simuka Sātavāhana (the founder of the dynasty), King Sātakarni, his wife (Queen ˙ Nayanikā herself), three princes, and a general. While no more than the ankles of any of these statues are now extant, the inscriptions labeling their portraits still remain.38 It seems clear, however, that this cave site was intended as a funerary memorial extolling the great accomplishments of the royal family. Furthermore, the fact that one such site exists raises the question of why we do not see more. In short, the existence of Nanaghat demonstrates that the possibility of portraiture existed as a form of commemoration in South Asia and implies that the vast majority of rulers actively chose not to avail themselves of this form of memorialization. In the absence of explicit records, we are left to speculate as to why this might be, but given the associations between images and exemplars, it is possible that most rulers were unwilling to open themselves to that kind of vulnerability outside of ritual contexts. Furthermore, the fact that most images are associated with spirit-deities, who are in some cases clearly deceased ancestors, may have given portraiture a distinctly funerary tone that was associated with local cult practices rather than with living kings. Considering how problematic the use of images seems to have been for royalty, how much more so must it have been in relation to the Buddha himself? A visible negotiation over the use of images is played out in the material record created by the Buddhist community. After the initial phase in which images of spirit-deities make up the vast majority of the decoration at Buddhist sites, we begin to see more and more representations of narrative scenes depicting moments from the life of the Buddha. However, prior to the late

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Figure 1.4. Attack of Māra. Sāñcī Stūpa 1. North gate. Ca. first century BCE–first century CE.

first century CE these scenes contain no actual representations of the Buddha himself. Even though the rest of the scene might be depicted in full, the figure of the Buddha is simply indicated by an absence or an appropriate symbol, such as a footprint. In an example taken from the north gate of the Great Stūpa at Sāñcī, there is a scene depicting the Buddha’s temptation by Māra prior to his enlightenment (fig. 1.4). Even though all the other players in the narrative are represented, the Buddha is never actually depicted in the scene; instead his presence is simply indicated by the empty bench under the tree on the left hand side of the relief. That the artists went to such lengths to avoid depicting the Buddha gives us some idea of the importance associated with images and indicates that they must have had strong reasons for choosing not to represent him. Because the Buddhist literature is frustratingly silent in regard to these “aniconic” works, it is difficult to be certain what these compelling reasons might be. However, if we consider the previously identified implications associated with the creation and use of images in early South Asia, we can certainly make a few educated deductions. Given the common association between images and spirit-deities in the first few centuries BCE, it seems likely that any image of a deceased individual might be read as having funerary implications. There are many tales that indi-

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cate that specific spirit-deities came into being after having lived as a human. For example, in the Mahābhārata, fallen warriors are said to join the ranks of the yaksas while in another part of the same text we are told of a king who ˙ was born as a nāga as a result of kicking a Brahman.39 The yaksa Sūciloma ˙ was born as a spirit-deity as a result of acting inappropriately while he was a human and a lay follower of the Buddha Kassapa.40 Even the great yaksī Hārītī ˙ was born into her present state as a result of a spiteful wish made against her co-wife in a previous life as a human.41 We also know that images of this yaksī ˙ were created when people sought to appease her anger. In this example, images were required as a means of placating the dangerous dead. Since Buddhism was a new religious institution, there may have been concerns that any image of the recently deceased Buddha would be read as being just another image of an ancestral spirit. In fact we see this struggle for selfdefinition within some of the earliest extant Buddhist literature. Among the writing contained on the Gandhāran Buddhist Fragments, which date to the early first century CE and are the oldest surviving Buddhist texts, there is a passage in which a Brahman questions the Buddha about his identity. The Brahman, Dhona, meets the Buddha and proceeds to ask him if he is a deva, ˙ a gandharva, a yakkha, or a man. The Buddha answers “no” to each of these options and finally states “I am a Buddha, brahman, a Buddha.”42 In this passage the Buddha is defining himself as something new and altogether different from the options listed by the Brahman. Therefore, when we appreciate the novelty of the Buddhist tradition and recognize the deep ties that figural imagery had to practices associated with spirit religions, the reluctance to commission images of the Buddha becomes more readily understandable. The same concerns can be raised in reference to the concept of nirvāna, ˙ which, although notoriously difficult to define, is at its core both final and permanent. By recognizing all the implications involved in the creation of an image and all the profound ties that were believed to exist between the copy and the exemplar, any representation of the Buddha may have been seen as a denial of nirvāna’s finality. If the making of a copy in some way captures the es˙ sence of the original or, at least, forms a binding connection between the two, such images might lessen the totality of the Buddha’s escape from the cycle of rebirth. Yet whatever the precise reasons for this lack of images, things began to change by the second century. It is during this time that we begin to see, on all fronts, a shift toward the use of images within a wide variety of contexts. With the rise to power of the Kusāna Dynasty, the appearance of royal portraits ˙ ˙ becomes more common both in the form of stone sculpture as well as on coins

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Figure 1.5. Kanis ka. Ca. first century CE.˙ Mathura Museum.

(fig. 1.5). This acceptance of images as a means of expressing royal power may be due in part to the fact that the Kusāna were originally Central Asian in ori˙ ˙ gin and did not share the same cultural understanding of images traditionally found within the subcontinent. However, during this time the use of images becomes more apparent in indigenously South Asian contexts as well. It is roughly at this same time that Bhasa wrote his play titled “Pratimā ” or “The Statue,” which prominently features the use of royal images in a South Indian setting associated with the Iksvāku court.43 And it is undoubtedly more than ˙ a coincidence that during these same decades at the start of the second century we also see the first images of the Buddha. Several factors contributed to the appearance of Buddha images at this time, and the changing cultural climate may have played a major role in this development. However, it is unlikely that any amount of acceptance by the general population would have induced this change in practice had there not also been a desire for new images within the monastic community itself. Gregory Schopen has demonstrated that the earliest identifiable patrons of Buddha

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images were in fact members of the monastic order. It was these individuals who both commissioned and distributed the earliest works.44 Likewise, the second-century Divyāvadāna tale of Upagupta that was cited earlier presents a clear situation in which a monk longs to look upon the Buddha. However, for all the reasons already stated, it had not been customary to create images of the Buddha. Yet in the narrative, Upagupta addresses this concern and provides an important clue as to why the appearance of Buddha images may have eventually become acceptable. Specifically, Upagupta never states that he wishes to meet the Buddha himself; rather he states that he wishes to view the Buddha’s rūpakāya, his physical body. Just as the Buddha’s teachings, or dharmakāya (dharma body), still exist after the nirvāna and make up only a portion of the total individual who ˙ was the Buddha, so too a representation of the rūpakāya would constitute one, very transitory, aspect of the individual who escaped the cycle of rebirth. This distinction may seem like splitting hairs, but it cleverly escapes deeply problematic issues that would have prevented the easy incorporation of images into Buddhist contexts. What was required was the inventing of a new way of understanding images that eased the relationship between the original and the copy so as to allow images while not undermining the finality of nirvāna. ˙ The rūpakāya comes to be understood as the physical manifestation of all the accumulated positive karma the Buddha had earned during his countless previous lives and, therefore, came to be seen as an appropriate focus of meditation and veneration. Upagupta’s refutation of Māra gives voice to this new rationale and stands as an important defense of the use of images within Buddhist contexts. John Strong has commented on this scene by stating: What is made of — clay, wood, metal or, in this case, Māra — is not the Buddha; but it itself comes to re-present the Buddha in a way that is obviously religiously real. . . . What he grasps, however, is not the total Buddha, but only one aspect of him, his rūpakāya. And this he now has to put together with his vision of the dharmakāya which, as enlightened arhat, he has already achieved.45 By defending Upagupta’s actions, the authors of the Divyāvadāna were championing the use of Buddha images as a form of worship and provided the philosophical justification that made such practices possible. Even though the two-body theory finessed the earlier meanings attributed to images, it did not, however, undermine the importance of images or many of the qualities normally associated with them. Representations of the Bud-

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dha were, and are, considered worthy of deep respect because of their unique connection to the Buddha, and just as miraculous powers were attributed to images of spirit-deities, the same is true for many images of the Buddha as well. It has been demonstrated that in medieval India images of the Buddha were understood as being active residents of the monasteries in which they were located. In fact, these statues were actually identified as legal entities who had the right to own property and accept any gifts donated to the Buddha.46 These images were considered far more than just decoration and were treated like honored residents of the monastic complex. Yet, as we have seen, such qualities in a statue were nothing new. The emergence of Buddha images is just one part in a long history of figural representation in South Asia. And, while the cultural understanding of images shifted and changed over the centuries, at no point in their early history were these images ever understood as mere objects. Images were never simply passive decorations; these works shared an inherent and profound connection to the subjects they represented and as such were consistently credited with actively playing a role in the events that occurred around them. Yet in order to appreciate this significance, we must first be willing to set aside preconceived notions about what an image is and recognize that in some cases statues have the ability to look back.

Notes 1. James Fergusson, Tree and Serpent Worship: or Illustrations of Mythology and Art in India in the 1st and 4th Centuries before Christ from the Sculptures of the Buddhist Topes at Sanchi and Amaravati (1868, reprinted Indological Bookhouse, 1971). 2. Sir John Marshall and Alfred Foucher, The Monuments of Sāñchī (1940, reprinted Swati Publications, 1982), 152-153. 3. Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (University of Chicago Press, 1977), 25–27, 73–77. 4. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art (1934, reprinted Dover Publications, 1956), 155. 5. Alfred Foucher, Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology (1917, reprinted Asian Educational Services, 1994), 8–9. 6. Foucher, Beginnings, 8–9. 7. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Śiva: Essays on Indian Art and Culture (1924, reprinted Dover Publication, 1985), 53–54. 8. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Śiva, 47. He states that the presence of deities as guardians at Buddhist sites “reflects the essential victory of Buddhism.” 9. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Śiva, 49. 10. T. W. Rhys Davids trans., The Questions of King Milinda (Milindapañha) Sacred

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Books of the East, vol. 35 (1890, reprinted Motilal Banarsidass, 1992), xiv, xxii–xxiii, xxv. In the introduction, Rhys Davids places the text between this range of dates based on the idea that the text had to be written after the time of the Bactrian king Menander in the second century BCE and prior to the writing of Ambattha Sutta in which the ˙˙ author, Buddhaghosa, cites passages from the Milindapañha. 11. Rhys Davids, Milinda, xix–xxv. 12. Rhys Davids, Milinda, 241. 13. Rhys Davids, Milinda, 241–242. 14. Divyāvadāna. XXVI. The quotation cited here was taken from an identical passage in John Strong’s translation of the Aśokāvadāna. John S. Strong, The Legend of King Aśoka: A Study and Translation of the Aśokāvadāna (Princeton University Press, 1983), 192. 15. Strong, The Legend of King Aśoka, 195. 16. Strong, The Legend of King Aśoka, 195 17. Strong, The Legend of King Aśoka, 196. 18. The only possible exception of which I am aware is one passage in the Cula Vagga of the Vinaya Pitaka that forbids the portrayal of human or animal figures on mon˙ astery walls and stipulates that vegetal designs should be used instead. I. B. Horner, trans., The Book of Discipline (Vinaya-Pitaka), vol. 6 (Pali Text Society, 1997), 213. ˙ 19. For information on the date of the text, see Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Yaksas: ˙ Essays in the Water Cosmology, ed. P. Schroeder, New Edition (Oxford University Press, 1993), 71 n12. 20. L. D. Barnett, trans., The Antagada-dasāo and Anuttarovavāiya-dasāo, Oriental ˙ ˙ Translation Fund vol. XVII (Royal Asiatic Society, 1907), 85–90. 21. Henacandra, The Lives of the Jain Elders (Sthavirāvalīcarita), trans. R.C.C. Fynes. (Oxford University Press, 1998), 75, canto 2, 530–542. 22. For information on the sixth-century date, see Paula Richman, Women, Branch Stories and Religious Rhetoric in a Tamil Buddhist Text (Syracuse University Press, 1988), 7; for the second-century date, see the introduction to Merchant-Prince Shattan, Manimekhalai (The Dancer with the Magic Bowl), trans. A. Danielou (New Directions, 1989), xvi–xvii. 23. Shattan, Manimekhalai, 90–91. 24. Shattan, Manimekhalai, 91. 25. Fa-Hien, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, trans. L. Legge (1886, reprinted Dover Publications, 1965), 56–57. 26. For more information on the rights and honors granted to Buddha images, see Gregory Schopen, Bones, Stones and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 258–289. 27. Kautilya, Arthaśāstra, trans. R. P. Kangle, 3 vols., second ed. (1969, reprinted Motilal Banarsidass, 1992), III. 57–115. 28. Kautilya, Arthaśāstra, II. 299. 5.2.39–44. 29. Kautilya, Arthaśāstra, II. 474. 13.1.3–6.

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30. Kautilya, Arthaśāstra, II. 478–479. 13.2.21–37. 31. Kautilya, Arthaśāstra, II. 264.4.3.40–44. 32. Ram Nath Misra, The Yaksha Cult and Iconography (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1979), 74; for a complete discussion, see N. Peri, “Hārītī, la Mere-deDemons,” Bulletin de l’Ecole francaise d’Extreme-Orient 17, vol. 3 (1917): 1–15. 33. I-tsing, A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practiced in India and the Maylay Archipelago AD 671-695, trans. J. Takakusu (1896, reprinted Asian Educational Services, 1966), 37. 34. Brian K. Smith, Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual and Religion (Oxford University Press, 1989). For the discussion on pratimā and pramā, see 73–74 and for the examples, see 79. 35. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “Vedic Exemplarism,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 1 (1936): 50. 36. Smith, Reflections, 77. 37. Smith, Reflections, 74–75. 38. Vidya Dehejia, Early Buddhist Rock Temples: A Chronological Study (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), 19. 39. For the yaksa tale, see Mahābhārata, 18.4.18; 5.22; for the nāga story, see ˙ Mahābhārata, 3.178. 29–45. See also Misra, The Yaksha Cult and Iconography, 28. 40. K. R. Norman, trans., The Group of Discourses (Sutta-Nipāta) 1:44 (London Pali Text Society, 1984), 46–47. 41. For a summary of the Vinaya Pitaka material, see Misra, The Yaksha Cult and ˙ Iconography, 74. 42. Richard Salomon, Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhāra: The British Library Kharostī Fragments (University of Washington Press, 1999), 25–26. An almost identi˙˙ cal tale can be found in the An˙guttara Nikāya. 2.37–39. 43. Bhasa, The Statue: Bhasa’s Pratima, trans. S. Janaki (Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute, 1978). 44. Schopen, Bones, 238–257. 45. Strong, The Legend of King Aśoka, 108. 46. Schopen, Bones, 258–278.

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Disposable but Indispensable The Earthenware Vessel as Vehicle of Meaning in Japan

This chapter will draw upon fieldwork experiences in Japan in the 1970s to articulate an alternative definition of the meaning of ceramics in Japan — as unglazed, unadorned, disposable vessels central to concepts of personal, community, and national well-being. It was while researching historical Japanese stoneware (one of the sorts of Japanese ceramics usually understood as culturally important) that I stumbled upon the enduring yet nearly invisible significance of earthenware, as components of ritual cycles and protective performances associated with shrines and temples.1 I also found that these surviving ritual usages paralleled the vestiges of the once-commonplace use of earthenware dishes, cups, and cooking vessels in domestic settings. The scripted beginnings and endings of ritual earthenware objects were of particular significance; the shrine-sponsored communities of potters who made the vessels observed purificatory procedures at the start of their work, and the vessels once used were intentionally destroyed or otherwise removed from the cycle of use. Their meaning lay in their single use as a pure container or conveyor of food or messages to the deities. My interest in Japan’s earthenware traditions was stimulated by a visit to India, where no historical stoneware tradition exists to mask the role of earthenware in both domestic and ritual settings. Use of earthenware in India is governed by concepts of ritual purity surrounding the consumption of food and drink.2 Since a Brahman — a person at the pinnacle of social ranking — may not dine from utensils previously used by someone of lower caste, disposable earthenware plates and cups assure the requisite purity in public settings ranging from wedding feasts to railway-station tea stalls. These same concepts underlie the once-only use of new earthenware pots for the preparation, presentation, and distribution of temple food offerings. In Japan,

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I learned, similar concepts still dictated the use of earthenware offering vessels in sacred settings, as they once had for special secular occasions, before stoneware and porcelain vessels became widely available. The vignettes that will be presented here are retrieved from field notes I compiled while living in Kyoto from 1976 to 1979.3 Since I have not been able to return to the same settings while preparing this chapter, I am unable to vouch for the present conditions, but I suspect that some of these descriptions may now constitute records of lost practices. Already in the 1970s the diminishing number of people making earthenware, whether as a hereditary occupation associated with a shrine or as a family-based commercial operation, was forcing changes in vessel usage and in interpretation of the strictures against reuse. Earthenware vessels for food offerings were saved and reused whenever possible, and washable porcelain was becoming an acceptable substitute. (These same changes have taken place in India since the 1990s.) My field trips studied both sides of the meaning of earthenware — both its use and its production. At the imperially associated Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto, I observed the offerings prepared for ritual events that made use of a repertory of earthenware vessels of anachronistic shapes that had not been part of daily life for many centuries. At a sequence of annual events at the populist Mibu Temple in downtown Kyoto, I saw how a once-commonplace earthenware kitchen tool, the parching pan (hōraku), made its first entrance into the cycle as a vehicle for inscribed prayers, then a second entrance — and spectacular exit — as a key prop in a theatrical enactment of a Buddhist moral tale. These examples seemed to represent the two essential categories of earthenware usage in ritual and will be discussed as such. Along with observing these and other events, I went in search of the producers of the wares, finding them (or traces of them) characteristically in quiet peripheral villages or small towns, far away from the sites of public use of their products. Often the makers worked at such a distance (physically or socially) that they had never seen their pots in use. I will present the stories of these makers as a variant of “the artist’s biography.”

The Hidden History of Historical Earthenware in Japan Ceramics — of certain kinds — have come to be recognized as one of Japan’s great art forms. Japan’s historical ceramic heritage, including both unglazed stoneware and glazed stoneware and porcelain, is the subject of scholarly study, collecting, exhibition, and publication inside and outside Japan. The elaborately sculpted prehistoric earthenware vessels of the Middle Jōmon period

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(circa 1500 BCE) have also acquired status as art objects. Japanese owners of such antique vessels, intent upon preserving them, follow time-honored methods of storage, documentation, and repair. Meanwhile, thousands of living potters make new vessels for an eager audience. While some still train through apprenticeships at workshops in reinvigorated regional ceramic-producing towns (whose distinctive clays and glazes are widely recognized), many now graduate from art schools and operate urban studios. They show their work at galleries within leading department store chains, in national competitive or invitational exhibitions, and in independent galleries, and they also appear internationally. Through the government program to support intangible cultural properties, several dozen potters have been honored with the title “Living National Treasure,” a term that has gained worldwide currency. Both antique and contemporary ceramic vessels play conspicuous roles as art works within the allied art forms of ikebana, the tea ceremony, and fine cuisine. In these contexts, as both scholars and connoisseurs emphasize, the aesthetic appreciation of Japanese ceramics is integral to and inseparable from their use. This notion of an art object characterized both by intrinsic qualities of material and manufacture and by a dynamic role within a process or performance also applies, however, to Japanese earthenware, even though earthenware remains virtually invisible within the fields of activity just described (with the occasional exception of cuisine and the tea ceremony). The contemporary earthenware of Japan is the antithesis in virtually every sense of the glamorous stoneware and porcelain. The soft, unglazed red or buff-colored vessels are made in unheralded workshops that represent vestiges of fading small-scale production centers. Their makers learned their skills from their elders, usually parents or relatives, and their job is not innovation but the perpetuation of established forms. Their work is never signed or singled out for display. Yet, as with a stoneware tea bowl or porcelain vase, the full range of meanings of such vessels is actualized through their use. Use of the types of earthenware vessels to be explored here — dishes, bowls, ewers, parching pans — was once universal in Japanese households and kitchens, but it now survives as though powerfully concentrated in certain ritual roles associated with the presentation of food offerings to the indigenous gods (kami) and in rites conducted to ward off evil (yakuyoke). Central to both functions is a concept of purity inherent in the just-fired, unadorned clay vessel. Moreover, the destruction of the vessel once it has been used (and used only once) is required. The aesthetic aspect of these vessels is more difficult to articulate since they lack the texts associated with the connoisseurship of tea-ceremony utensils. Yet the tea ceremony’s incorporation into its utensil repertory and architectural

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forms of such materials as unglazed stoneware, freshly sliced green bamboo, unpeeled logs and branches, unlacquered wood, and plain white paper suggests a relationship to — a borrowing from — the aesthetic domain to which the unglazed earthenware vessel belongs, where objects are shaped by the minimal intervention necessary to transform raw material into useful form. The art historian Tsuji Nobuo has suggested, moreover, that such materials represent not poverty, as usually interpreted, but an ancient Japanese notion of luxury.4 From methodologies of anthropology and ethnography, Tsuji has borrowed the conceptual pairing of hare (public; ceremonial; immaculate) and ke (personal; everyday; polluted) to express this view. Exceptional occasions designated by the term hare included festivals (matsuri, associated with shrines of kami), weddings (prescribed by shrine ritual), and hospitality prepared for entertaining distinguished visitors, including emperors and ruling warriors. Such occasions are defined by their grounding counterpart of the mundane or ke. Tsuji points out that in the everyday environment of ke, things were used over and over again, and carefully, so as to prolong their useful lives as much as possible. It was in the extraordinary environment of hare that objects were used just once — for example, that earthenware dishes and cups (kawarake) used as tableware for banquets were discarded after that single use. By this measure, the antique glazed Chinese tea bowl carefully used and reused, even mended with gilt lacquer, represents an extension (or elevation) of ke, whereas the bare earthenware dish, used once then tossed, embodies the extravagance of hare. It is possible to measure the moment when the ancient definition of luxury identified by Tsuji was replaced by the one generally accepted in modern Japan. The transformation took place within the realm of the warrior-rulers of the Kamakura (1185–1392) and Muromachi (1392–1573) periods. Documents such as the Kundaikan sōchōki, compiled in the late fifteenth century as a handbook for classification and display of Chinese art works, demonstrate the warrior elite’s intense focus on ownership of imported Chinese ceramics. The standards for the material manifestation of power articulated in Muromachi listings of valued goods were inherited by prosperous merchants of the Edo period (1615–1868), industrialists of the Meiji period (1868–1912), and twentieth-century museums that enshrine those heirloom collections. Yet traces of a continuation of the older definition of luxury can be read in archaeological discoveries such as the finds of shallow saucer-like cups (kawarake) lined with gold leaf reported from medieval castle sites.5 Warriors, in particular, were consumers of earthenware, especially as cups for sake. Archaeology has also revealed a substrate of everyday earthenware usage

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in medieval and early modern Japan of astonishing thickness and extent. Archaeologists began paying attention to historical earthenware only recently, but they found that its very abundance enabled them to distinguish regional types and formulate chronological sequences, to the extent that one archaeologist has characterized earthenware as the “measuring stick” for excavated sites. Now an earthenware research group holds annual symposia, and a dictionary of earthenware has been published.6 At the height of collectors’ passion for medieval stoneware in the 1970s, ceramic archaeologist Narasaki Shōichi cautioned that stoneware could not be understood in isolation but had to be studied as one of a quartet of complementary classes of ceramics that also included imported Chinese wares, Japanese glazed wares made in Seto and Mino, and earthenware.7 The relative proportions of these four groups in archaeological sites are startling. At medieval sites within the boundaries of modern Takatsuki City, between Kyoto and Osaka, earthenware typically constitutes 90 percent of the finds, while unglazed gray stoneware makes up 5.5 percent, ceramics from Japanese regional kilns 2 percent, and Chinese ceramics just 1.5 percent.8 Even in the sites of nobles’ residences that adjoined the Kyoto imperial palace between 1585 and 1870, earthenware dishes (kawarake) constituted the greatest percentage of ceramic wares through the eighteenth century.9 Most makers of medieval and early modern earthenware descended from indigenous earthenware makers called “clay masters” (haji), a term that distinguished them from immigrant potters making unglazed hard pottery (suemono, “pottery goods” or Sue ware), who arrived from the Korean peninsula beginning in the late fourth century. In contrast to the makers of wheel-thrown Sue ware, which was fired to near-stoneware temperatures in tunnel-shaped kilns, makers of earthenware used hand-forming methods and open-topped updraft kilns to make cooking vessels and containers as well as sculptural forms (haniwa, “earthenware ring,” referring to the basic cylindrical form) that were positioned on tomb mounds. Even after the custom of building such tombs disappeared, communities of earthenware makers continued producing utilitarian vessels known as hajiki (“vessels of the clay masters”). Certain groups of such potters, in their most central role, supplied the imperial court and associated shrines, the institutions that conserved the hare practice of using (just once) earthenware vessels, even after Sue ware or, eventually, glazed ceramics became commonplace in secular settings. Aspects of earthenware usage in the court are suggested by annual rituals and celebrations preserved in the Reizei noble house — as in the offering of delicacies from the mountains and the sea on large kawarake dishes at Tanabata (lunar seventh day, seventh

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month).10 Similar arrangements of earthenware vessels holding offerings appear in scenes within narrative handscrolls painted by artists serving the court and the nobility.11 The Kyoto ceramic designer Ōgata Kenzan (1663–1743) probably evoked court usage in his popular sets of kawarake-shaped stoneware saucers with painted decoration.12 Earthenware makers also provided many types of utilitarian vessels used by the general populace. Widespread distribution of such potters is indicated by the Tenshō era (1573–1592) cadastral survey of Tosa Province, which recorded more than sixty places producing earthenware (doki).13 Edo-period warrior rulers’ support of stoneware and porcelain production within their domains is well-known, but they also maintained communities of earthenware makers, allotting them land and stipends in return for providing regular allotments of earthenware.14 Access to the earthenware required for ancestral shrines, weddings, and other purposes was clearly a mark of power and responsible stewardship of the domain. None other than the warrior leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598) is credited with rewarding various earthenware makers for distinguished craftsmanship, according to genealogies compiled by the potters’ descendants (although genealogy making was widespread among crafts workshops in the seventeenth century, and such documents cannot necessarily be trusted).15 The late sixteenth century, when Hideyoshi allegedly granted his rewards, was an era of bold experimentation in the tea ceremony; certain everyday Japanese earthenware shapes were incorporated into the tea utensil repertory, such as parching pans (hōraku) used as charcoal containers, at the same time as Southeast Asian earthenware cooking pots were adapted as freshwater jars or wastewater jars.16 Descendants of the earthenware makers honored by Hideyoshi literally “polished” their unglazed products by burnishing to make more refined braziers, hand warmers, and charcoal basins suitable for use in tea rooms and reception rooms. These desirable wares were stamped with the “brand name” of their maker or place of manufacture, and the compilation of genealogies was probably integral to the brand-development process.17 Hideyoshi’s appreciation for earthenware as recorded in these genealogies is less well-known than — but probably not unrelated to — his legendary role in praising as “first under heaven” a potter in the Kyoto workshop that made earthenware tea-ceremony wares known as Raku (see Pitelka’s introduction to this volume). The rise of Raku ware to iconic status within the tea-ceremony realm has overshadowed its close relationship to humbler forms of earthenware.18 Later generations of the Raku workshop provided the professional tea schools with glazed, seal-impressed, pedigreed reinterpretations of rustic

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earthenware shapes, including the parching pan and a small round jar called tsubo-tsubo. The prototype tsubo-tsubo was sold to worshippers at Fushimi Inari, a major shrine in southeast Kyoto, on the first calendrical “horse” day (hatsu-uma) in the lunar new year. Purchasers filled jars with earth collected within the shrine precincts and buried them on their property as a prayer for prosperity.19 Made in glazed Raku ware (or porcelain), the tsubo-tsubo form became a container for an appetizer during the tea-ceremony meal. The auspicious shape became a decorative motif on lacquer or ceramic tea utensils and even the informal crest of the Omotesenke tea school. In this manner, the records and memories of a multitude of local or regional centers for Edo-period earthenware production have been overshadowed by the modern focus on stoneware and porcelain, but they are there if one looks. According to folklorist Kanzaki Noritake’s research, specialized earthenware production continued through the late 1950s in communities scattered throughout the country. Products encompassed rice-cooking pots, kettles, parching pans, charcoal braziers (hibachi), portable charcoal-burning stoves, mosquito-coil holders, lidded jars for saving charcoal embers, well curbs, water pipes, and votive figures.20

Earthenware for Food Offerings My first encounter with the use of earthenware in modern Japan came during the New Year season of 1968, when I joined my Japanese roommate on a pilgrimage to Ise Grand Shrine. With other pilgrims, we lined up to partake of a warm, sweet, mildly alcoholic rice-based beverage called amazake. Shrine priests wearing white robes and tall black hats dispensed the drink into earthenware saucers from roughly shaped earthenware ewers. When I asked the priest who served me about the archaic-looking serving vessel, he kindly gave me an empty one, which I still have (fig. 2.1). (Later I realized it would have been discarded anyway.) It is not surprising that ritual earthenware usage survives at Ise Grand Shrine, the center of the cult of the sun goddess, Amaterasu, ancestress of the imperial lineage of Japan. Earthenware vessels are required for the food offerings (mike) that are prepared morning and evening in the building known as the “pure fire hall” (Inbi or Imibi Yaden, within the Outer Shrine precincts, so-called because the cooking fire is rekindled each morning using a stringand-axle device) and presented in the Mikeden, located in the northeast corner of the Outer Shrine. The unchanging core offerings of water, rice, and salt are supplemented by minie, fresh seasonal foods from the fields and the sea. The raw materials are produced in rice paddies, fields, and seaside workshops

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Figure 2.1. Earthenware ewer for sake. Ise Grand Shrine. Made at Ise Grand Shrine earthenware workshop, circa 1967. Collection of Louise Cort.

operated for the shrine, and salt and sake are prepared in buildings within the sacred precincts.21 The chief event of the annual ritual calendar is the harvest festival, Kanname-sai, in the lunar ninth month (now fixed as October 15–16), when newly harvested rice and other first fruits are presented.22 The shrine maintains a workshop to produce the earthenware required for the offerings. As of 1979, when I visited the workshop, the vessels made included: sanzun-doki, “three-sun earthenware,” dish 9.09 cm (3.58 in.) in diameter (the traditional linear measure of sun is equivalent to 3.03 cm [1.19 in.]) yonsun, “four sun,” 12.12 cm (4.77 in.) dish rokusun, “six sun,” 18.18 cm (7.16 in.) dish suiwan, bowl for water haidai, pedestal-footed cup stand for serving sake sakatsubo, spouted ewer for serving sake hashioki, footed stand for chopsticks

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According to written sources, the daily offerings are placed in a rectangular footed tray made of unlacquered wood. The first offering to be placed, at the center back of the tray (closest to the deity as offered), is a pedestal-footed earthenware saucer with upturned sides, which serves as a stand for a pair of plain wooden chopsticks. Next are added three dishes of steamed rice, each mounded over a fresh leaf on an earthenware saucer. In the center of the tray is placed a row of dishes containing vegetables, a fresh or dried whole fish, dried bonito, and dried seaweed respectively. Along the near edge of the tray are placed a dish of uncut fruit, a dish of salt, and a footed bowl of water. Lastly, three shallow cups on separate footed stands are placed at the back of the tray near the chopsticks. They are filled with sake from a spouted jar as the deity is invited to eat.23 For Kanname-sai and for other major festivals in June and December, oval cakes of pounded sticky rice (mochi) are offered in stacks on earthenware dishes. The written sources describe metal kettles for cooking rice and boiling salt water. A triangular earthenware salt jar (shiotsubo) is used for roasting salt in a wood-fired oven in order to provide hard cakes.24 Otherwise, according to Kanzaki, earthenware cooking vessels were eliminated from the Ise cooking process by reforms at the start of the Meiji period.25 Although I was never able to see the process of offering at Ise Grand Shrine, I was fortunate to witness offering arrangements (after the conclusion of the rituals) at Kamigamo Shrine in northern Kyoto, through the kindness of the shrine official who supervised them, Fujiki Yasuharu.26 Established in the sixth century, Kamigamo Shrine received the direct patronage of the imperial court throughout the centuries when the emperor resided in Kyoto. The shrine is still the focal point of one of Kyoto’s great annual festivals, the Aoi Matsuri of mid-May. Its spacious precincts alongside the Kamo River house a radiant landscape of red-painted wooden buildings and green forest. During our first meeting, Mr. Fujiki explained that more than seventy annual festivals took place at the shrine, each requiring a distinctive combination of earthenware offering vessels. Formerly all earthenware vessels were used just once, then buried in unmarked sites on the sacred hillside above the shrine. The steady supply of earthenware was made for the shrine by potters in the village of Hataeda, to the east of the shrine, and as a youth Mr. Fujiki went by bicycle to collect newly fired vessels. With the decline of imperial patronage, pottery production had waned in Hataeda, and Mr. Fujiki contracted a commercial potter in Kyoto to make the required dishes in earthenware or unglazed porcelain.

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Mr. Fujiki showed me a reference set of earthenware vessels made by Hataeda potters in the 1960s. He pointed out that different types of dishes bore designs or textures that served to distinguish their uses. This distinction was important since by 1977 the shrine was saving and reusing dishes whenever possible in order to avoid the cost of replacing them. Shapes in the sample set included: sando doki, dish with ring incised in the center. The term do was the equivalent of sun, and this dish came in twelve sizes ranging from one do to twelve do in diameter, although sando (9.09 cm. [3.58 in.]) was the common size and the generic term. kōroke, a small, plain dish used for offering pyramids of salt. takatsuki, a dish on a pedestal stand with wide foot of the same diameter as the dish. The stand was used alone for offering rice. When fitted with a second dish of the same diameter, it was used for offering sake. nunome doki, a dish imprinted with the coarse texture of hemp cloth. Formerly there were two other variations of this type of dish, one imprinted half with hemp and half with cotton, the other half-and-half with cotton and silk. Such dishes were used for offering vinegared foods. sasame doki and susuki doki, dish imprinted with two leaves, either of sasa (bamboo grass) or of susuki (pampas grass), lying parallel but facing in opposite directions. yatsukasa, a dish with a domed center, used to offer whole fish; the dome created a natural curve in the fish’s body. bon doki (“tray earthenware”) or ohachi (“serving bowl”), a shallow bowl with an attached footrim. I failed to record the use of this vessel. Mr. Fujiki emphasized that these names were the terms used in the shrine. Hataeda potters and courtiers each had used different names for the same shapes. He also stressed that he knew of many other shapes of earthenware whose uses had been forgotten. The form of the offerings depended on where the presentation was made. Three locations in the main shrine building were designated for offerings: a narrow stand inside the door, invisible to the public (naijin); a table outside the door (gejin); and at the base of the steps leading up to the door (niwazumi shinsen). For naijin offerings, materials were left in their natural form. For gejin, they were cut into auspicious shapes; for example, white radish was cut into the shape of sacred paper strips (heishi). For the New Year offerings, rect-

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angles of fish were stacked on sasame doki, while triangles of fish were placed on nunome doki. Steamed rice was molded into various shapes, such as hand drums or cedar trees, that summoned the gods (yorishiro). Of all the festivals I observed at Kamigamo Shrine, the harvest festival or Niiname-sai, which took place on November 23, 1977, made the most extensive use of earthenware offering dishes. (Other festivals used fewer earthenware vessels and combined them with containers made of other materials, including fresh leaves, white paper, and lacquered wood.) On this occasion, the offerings for the main shrine were placed on round red-lacquered wooden trays resting on two parallel braces, shaped like lids for rice-cooking kettles. This was a palace shape used only at Kamigamo Shrine, by imperial decree. Offerings for associated shrines of other deities were placed in square coffers made of unlacquered wood, and one coffer was also prepared for the main shrine. In order of presentation, the trays for the main shrine held: Raw new rice (one dish each of unhusked and husked rice), together with a pair of metal chopsticks resting on a rectangular metal stand; undistilled thick sake (shiroki) in two flasks, with two dishes for offering (fig. 2.2); pounded sticky-rice cakes (mochi) decorated with three red beans; a whole ocean fish (red snapper) on a large dish, decorated with kombu seaweed and a branch of evergreen sakaki leaves; a whole river fish (carp) presented in the same manner; a whole mountain fowl (“pheasant,” replaced by quail, more easily available) on a large dish; a whole ocean bird (wild duck) on a large dish; a dish bearing commercial packages of dried seaweed; trimmed but uncut vegetables (“sweet greens,” including daikon radish, carrots, green peppers, and cucumbers, and “hot greens,” represented by ginger and wasabi root); whole fruit (apples and mikan oranges), together with a small lidded jar of water, offered with its lid inverted, and a dish of salt.

Earthenware to Ward Off Evil Conveying a wish to ward off evil is the second essential role of earthenware in modern ritual usage. This role is illustrated by a simple rite I undertook on a hot afternoon in July 1982 during a return visit to Kyoto, when I drove with my friends Richard and Kōji to the mountaintop temple of Jingoji, north of

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Figure 2.2. Unglazed porcelain sake flasks and earthenware kawarake on red-lacquered wooden stand, from the offerings made for Niiname-sai. Kamigamo Shrine, Kyoto, November 1977. Photograph by Louise Cort.

the city. Our goal was to participate in a ritual associated with this venerable Shingon-sect temple (also discussed by Bogel with regard to its Buddhist paintings). From a woman vendor at the temple entrance, we bought stacks of four small kawarake, paying 100 yen (about one dollar) per set (fig. 2.3). The mold-formed dishes (about 7.0 cm. [2.76 in.] in diameter) bore the motto “ward off evil” (yakuyoke). Kōji, who had been there before and knew what to do, walked to the railing that marked the edge of a steep precipice above the forested gorge. He paused to make a silent wish, then sailed the four dishes one after another over the treetops. They plummeted down into the forest. The vendor told us that the power of the ward became active when the dishes broke upon hitting the ground. “But now,” she added, “people consider it just play.” She informed us that these dishes had been made by Kyoto commercial (“not first-rank”) potters. While living in Kyoto, I observed a far more complex use of earthenware for warding off evil at Mibu Temple, although the principle was the same. Within the sacred precincts of a religious institution, an everyday earthenware vessel was dedicated as the vehicle for a wish for well-being and protection against evil, which came into effect when the vessel was smashed and destroyed. At Mibu Temple, a centuries-old center of popular Buddhism, an earthenware parching pan (hōraku in the Kyoto-Osaka region, hōroku in eastern Japan)

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Figure 2.3. Kawarake for sale for a ritual to ward off evil. Jingoji, Kyoto, July 1982. Photograph by Louise Cort.

played this role through its clever integration into two major events in the annual calendar: the Setsubun pilgrimage in February and the April performance of the drama form known as Mibu kyōgen, a repertory of humorous skits couching moralistic messages. A shallow vessel with slightly concave base and thick rim, ranging in diameter from 25 to 66 centimeters (10 to 26 inches), the parching pan was shaped to fit over a circular opening in the clay-plastered wood-burning stove (kamado) once standard in every kitchen. The handy vessel was used to parch or dry-roast foodstuffs such as beans, grains, tea, sesame seeds, sweet potatoes, dried fish, or sliced dried mochi (to make the crackers called arare).27 Once sold by street peddlers, the parching pan became a standard item at pottery shops and hardware stores. Its cheap availability even made it a component of traditional games, such as the contest to break a stack of pans placed on one’s opponent’s head.28

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In addition to these traits formerly common to all earthenware — easily breakable but easily replaced — the parching pan’s broad, gently domed shape led to its being inscribed with the wish it was meant to convey. In that sense, its use at Mibu Temple during Setsubun was a survival of the once-widespread custom of writing propitiatory messages on absorbent earthenware with brush and ink, exemplified by the inscriptions and human faces drawn on cooking pots excavated from the eighth-century Heijo Palace site in Nara.29 Setsubun, now observed on February 3, was the last day of midwinter cold on the lunar calendar. As the start of a new season, it was a day for purifying the household with rituals to ward off evil and drive off pestilential vapors. A dried sardine tied to a sprig of sacred sakaki was hung in the doorway to keep out evil by the strong smell. The master of the house threw dried beans (parched in a hōraku) into all corners of the rooms while shouting “Good fortune inside! Devils outside!”30 Mibu Temple has long been known as a place to pray for protection against pestilence. On Setsubun devotees bought parching pans, inscribed the genders and ages of all household members, and deposited the pans to be dedicated by the temple priests. On February 3, 1977, the narrow streets leading to Mibu Temple, situated in an old downtown Kyoto neighborhood, were crowded with people heading toward the temple. The streets skirting the temple walls were lined with stalls selling the usual souvenirs of festival days, including candied ginger, sevenspice mixture, masks, and toys, as well as conspicuous quantities of parching pans, piled bottom-up in tall stacks of three sizes, ranging in natural color from red to golden-brown. More stalls selling parching pans clustered inside the gate, along the stone-paved pathway leading to the main temple building (fig. 2.4). Behind each stall, men were dipping brushes into bowls of black ink and quickly inscribing the convex backs of the vessels with messages reading “ward off evil,” “great chanting of the Buddha’s name; ward off evil” (dainenbutsu yakuyoke), or “safety within the household; ward off evil” (kanai anzen yakuyoke). On the concave front they brushed the word “offering” (honō). Women wearing aprons over thick winter clothing greeted customers and explained the prices for the three sizes (400, 500 or 600 yen). They handed a brush to the purchaser or took dictation to add an inscription beneath “offering” (fig. 2.5). The inscription listed the gender, cyclical year of birth (from the Asian twelve-year cycle), and calendar age of all household members in descending order. At the foot of the steps leading to the temple’s main hall, a booth festooned with white cloth printed with the temple crest was labeled “Receptionist for parching pans.” Pilgrims gave their inscribed pans — with a fifty-yen coin as

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Figure 2.4. Stalls selling hōraku. Mibu Temple, Kyoto, Setsubun (February 3), 1977. Photograph by Louise Cort. Figure 2.5. Salesperson watches as customer inscribes message on inside of hōraku. Mibu Temple, Kyoto, Setsubun (February 3), 1977. Photograph by Louise Cort.

handling fee — to one of the men at the booth. Then they climbed the steep steps to offer incense and ring the bell before the altar. The piles of plates, once dedicated by the prayers of the temple priests, had to be properly disposed of. That requirement was satisfied within the annual April performances of Mibu kyōgen. The plays took place on a special roofed stage that was separated by a deep pit from the stands where the audience sat. Each afternoon’s schedule included an assortment from the repertory of thirty

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Figure 2.6. During Mibu kyōgen play Hōrakuwari, old woman arranges hōraku for sale. Mibu Temple, Kyoto, April 1976. Photograph by Louise Cort.

plays, but Hōrakuwari (Breaking the parching pan) was always performed first. There were three characters: an official, an old woman selling parching pans, and a man selling toy drums. The occasion was a periodic market. The official erected a notice to the effect that the first vendor to set up shop would be exempt from the market tax. The toy-drum seller arrived before dawn, but finding no one else around he lay down for a nap. Meanwhile, the parching-pan seller arrived and exchanged the drum marking the man’s place with her earthenware pan. The drum seller awoke and protested vigorously, but the official broke up the quarrel and the drum-seller exited. The old woman proceeded to set up shop — bringing out stack after stack of parching pans and placing them along the top of the waist-high railing at the front of the stage (fig. 2.6). Suddenly the furious drum vendor rushed back on stage. Before the old woman could stop him, he dashed along the railing, sweeping the piles of pots off the railing to fall with load crashes into the pit below. Thus the old woman learned her lesson about greed and deception. This dramatic moment concluded the cycle of the inscribed parching pans offered at Setsubun, but the broken pieces had an additional and separate meaning as magic charms against the contamination of well water. After the performance many audience members made their way down to the pit to collect fragments. The question remained — I neglected to ask — of what became of the sherds in the pit.

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Earthenware Makers The offering rituals, festivals, and dramas just described constituted the public face of earthenware. Far more obscure was the process whereby the earthenware vessels were made. In Kyoto, as we have seen, the communities of earthenware producers serving the imperial palace and associated shrines had been replaced in makeshift fashion by hired commercial potters. Unlike the celebrated public persona of studio potters, notably “Living National Treasures,” earthenware potters operated in obscurity and anonymity. Yet, in their quiet, modest workrooms, they preserved processes that had roots in technology far older than that of Japan’s glazed stoneware or porcelain, just as they recalled economic relationships, based on honor and obligation, of a different quality from those of the open market. Visiting the pottery workshop that served Ise Grand Shrine (Ise Jingū doki chōseisho) required permission from the shrine administrative office. On January 21, 1979, I called on the workshop, located in Mino Village, now incorporated into Meiwa Town, in Taki County, Mie Prefecture. From the nearest train station, I boarded a bus that traveled along a rural road. From the appointed stop, I walked back to a grove of dark green cedar trees. A sign posted on an unpainted board fence announced that the fence enclosed both Totsuka Shrine (to which the grove belonged) and the pottery workshop. Two bicycles leaned against the gate. Inside, within a large open yard, stood an old-fashioned one-story building made of weathered wooden siding and whitewashed plaster. In the yard, low wooden rails supported boards holding pots in various stages of preparation, their gray color indicating that they were freshly made, not yet fired. Beyond the edge of the building was a sweeping view of bare brown rice fields and distant hills mottled by shadows of moving clouds. There were no sounds except for the wind and a continuous noise like soft patting. I turned and saw, under the building’s broad eaves, two women and a man at work. The patting sound was made by one woman shaping clay between her palms into small saucer forms. The building’s south-facing glass doors were open to admit midday sunlight; inside, another man and a woman, both seated on the wooden floor behind low tables, worked at turntables. Their round, weathered faces were those of farmers. These were the Ise potters. After greeting them and explaining my purpose, I sat down to watch the two women working under the eaves. The old woman, wearing an apron over an everyday kimono, prepared the clay and made preliminary forms for saucers — breaking off a chunk of clay from a large ball, picking out any stones, rolling

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the clay on a small board into a thick coil, slicing the coil into even segments, and flattening each segment against the board into a disk. She piled the disks in stacks of five. The middle-aged woman, who had short hair and was dressed in slacks, took a disk in the palm of her left hand and shaped it into a saucer by patting the center with the fingers of her right hand, then patting the edges with the heel of that hand. She explained that these dishes were called sanzundoki. She lined them up on a long board — three across, seventeen down. The man seated nearby used a strip of banding iron to trim the edges. The simplicity and speed of the process reminded me of learning, a few weeks earlier, how to shape New Year’s cakes of freshly-made mochi. The two women worked harmoniously, and I was not surprised to learn that they were mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. The younger woman explained that she had started making earthenware twenty-five years earlier, after her marriage. She had begun by making sanzun-doki, then the larger saucer shapes (yonsun and rokusun), and finally had mastered the difficult vessel shapes: the bowl (suiwan), the cup stand (haidai), and the sake-serving ewer (sakatsubo). When I asked how these shapes were used in the shrine rituals, however, I was astonished to hear that the potters did not know: they had never seen them in use and had never been told how they were used. In addition to these standard shapes, they occasionally made special shapes, such as the fifteen hundred clay disks in two sizes (called ama no hiraga, “flat tiles [saucers] for heaven”), to be placed under the great foundation pillars during the cyclical ritual moving and rebuilding of the shrine buildings that had taken place most recently in 1973.31 The potters had heard that the disks helped prevent the pillars from rotting. Inside, the woman working at a turntable was finishing sanzun-doki made earlier that morning. Holding a dish in her left palm, she polished it with the back of a worn clamshell. Then, resting it on the turntable, she smoothed it with a moistened chamois. With forty-five years’ experience, her hands moved almost faster than I could see, quickly filling a board with sixty finished pieces. She explained that she was hurrying to complete her work so she could go home to help with a newborn grandchild. These potters worked only on Saturdays and Sundays, and only during the quiet season for farming from October until February, with a few days in June if necessary. All lived close enough to walk home for lunch. The shrine had asked them to do the work, and they were paid by the piece (probably calculated by the standardized number of vessels per board). “It took time to practice before this work became money,” commented the daughter-in-law.

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These five potters had once been part of a group of thirteen. “No young people want to learn this work,” the woman explained matter-of-factly. “It’s too cold, and it’s not exciting to them.” They explained that with their numbers reduced, they continued to make the same repertory of forms but in smaller quantities. They hinted that the shrine rewashed the offering vessels and used them over again. Finally I watched the man make the sake-serving ewer — the vessel shape I had received during my New Year’s visit to Ise Grand Shrine. He formed a flat base and placed it on the turntable. He attached a coil of clay as a ring the same diameter as the base and smoothed the edges of the base up around it. He added two more rings, then smoothed the stack upwards with a bamboo blade to form the vessel wall. He shaped a spout by rolling a half-disk of clay around a chopstick, then used his little finger to punch a hole in the wall, where he attached the spout. He added another coil to make the rim (fig. 2.7). He used the bamboo blade to seal the seams between coils, then smoothed the vessel surface with a damp chamois. Along the rear wall of the room stood bamboo baskets holding stacks of dried but unfired saucers and stands. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pieces were there. Racks attached to the rear wall held boards filled with unfired sake-serving ewers. Soon there would be enough wares for a firing in one of the two cylindrical updraft kilns that stood in the yard. The potters usually fired at the end of each month, using dried pine branches as fuel with rice straw added at the end.32 Five big stoneware jars with wooden lids held the clay. Most forms were made with roof-tile clay, dark gray and stoney, that was dug in a nearby village. This clay could be used for all forms that were simply patted into shape. For the sake-serving ewers, they added plastic red clay. The best clay used to come from under the rice paddies, but those fields were being plowed by machine and the clay was too soft and impure. As we were talking, a young man suddenly arrived, announcing himself as a photographer from a Tokyo travel magazine. Out of a paper bag he pulled sets of white garments, supplied by the shrine office, and urged the potters to put them on so that his photographs would look “authentic.” Patiently the potters washed their hands, changed into the white cotton jackets and trousers, and posed. The young man took his photographs quickly, then rushed away. One of the women explained that until the Pacific war potters had indeed worn such robes. Moreover, before beginning work they had bathed in a special bathroom at the workshop to purify themselves. (These procedures paralleled the procedures of Ise priests preparing to make ritual offerings.33) Now they bathed at

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Figure 2.7. Potter makes rim of sake ewer. Ise Grand Shrine earthenware workshop, January 1979. Photograph by Louise Cort.

home and wore their ordinary clothing to work. Until the workshop had been built some fifty years earlier, all the potters had worked in their own homes. The potters expressed pride and satisfaction in their work. One said, “This really depends completely on the skill in our hands” (Koko no honto no tekagen hitotsu). Another laughed, “We are Living National Treasures!” The potters’ descriptions of procedures in earlier days were confirmed in an article documenting a visit made to the workshop in December 1937 by Muneta Katsumi.34 Muneta saw “ten or so” men and women dressed in white in the workshop, which had been built a year earlier. In addition to the products I saw being made in 1979, he recorded parching pans and large kettles. Muneta reported an oral tradition that the shrine’s earthenware had been supplied by a hereditary group living in Mino Province (modern Gifu Prefecture) until the period of civil war in the sixteenth century. The group of some three hundred people provided both “earthenware” (hajiki) and “pottery” (tōki, formed on the potter’s wheel). In 1591 twelve teams of potters from villages within Taki County were appointed to make all of the earthenware required by the shrine. This system continued until 1873, when Mino Village, which had a good supply of suitable clay, was assigned full responsibility for making the earthenware.

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Like Ise Grand Shrine, the imperial palace and shrines within Kyoto once were served by dedicated communities of potters. Historically, the centers of earthenware production for Kyoto were located in villages on the outskirts of the city: Fukakusa to the southeast (near Fushimi, and the source of tsubotsubo), Saga to the west, and Hataeda to the north. A vendor of Fukakusa kawarake appears in a document dated to 1214; indeed, “Fukakusa” became a synonym in Kyoto for kawarake.35 Names of many different shapes of “Fukakusa” appear in a record kept by a noble between 1118 and 1121.36 “Saga earthenware” is mentioned in a document of the Ōei era (1394–1428).37 Hataeda tradition holds that their ancestors moved from Saga in search of better clay during the Ōnin era (1467–1469).38 A government document of the Kyōho era (1716–1736) listed 150 households of earthenware makers in Fukakusa, nine households and forty-nine workers in Saga, and forty households and one hundred workers in Hataeda.39 All three communities provided special earthenware to nearby shrines and to the imperial palace at the same time as they also sold wares in the open market. Hataeda’s land belonged to the imperial palace during the Edo period, and the villagers appeared formally in court twice a year to present their earthenware tribute.40 In return, the potters were accorded the status of samurai and permitted to use surnames. Perhaps because of its association with a city famed for quality craftsmanship, the earthenware production of Kyoto had a more public, if still muted, aspect than that of Ise. Records of official interest in how earthenware was made include retired emperor Reigen’s witnessing of a demonstration of earthenware production and firing by five Hataeda women during a visit to the Shūgakuin villa.41 A Western journalist described women possibly from Hataeda at the 1873 Kyoto Exhibition: In a small outbuilding near to the entrance, a miniature pottery has been set up. The sides of the workshop are open; on the right are four or five women engaged in making saucers of a very coarse description. A potter’s wheel is near them, but this they are independent of; for each rounded and shaped the dabs of clay upon the bent elbow of her left arm covered with a cotton sleeve.42 Sometime after moving to Kyoto in 1914, the potter Kawai Kanjirō went to Hataeda to observe the process of making kawarake. In the early 1930s he recorded his memory in an essay for Kōgei (Craft) magazine: Within the dim interior of one of the homes in this village of thatchroofed houses backed up against a hill, I found an old woman classically

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“like a withered autumn leaf”. . . . The old woman was dressed in the old-fashioned style of this area, with a cloth loop twisted in a figure-eight around her shoulders to hold her kimono sleeves out of her way. Lined up before her were a lump of clay about the size of a melon, a bamboo spatula the length of a wisteria seed-pod, a piece of white cloth, and a noodle bowl full of water, together with a round wooden board like a kettle lid without a handle, about seven sun [21.2 cm or 8.35 in.] across. . . . The old woman wrapped her right arm with a white cotton gauntlet that reached past her elbow. She adjusted her posture. To begin, she folded the piece of white cloth meticulously, wrapped it around the bamboo blade, and set that aside. Next she rolled a small ball of clay, placed it in her left palm, and used her right hand to flatten it like a rice cracker. She patted and revolved the clay disk in her left palm against the point of her cloth-covered right elbow, rotating it to the left as though she were making a cake of mochi, and the disk took the form of a shallow bowl. With her right hand, she moistened the round wooden kettle lid with water and substituted it for her elbow, pressing the bowl of clay in her left palm against it while revolving the sticky clay bowl to the left. By this means the thick clay disk became steadily thinner and opened out in a circle that filled her palm, growing into a slippery dish. . . . [T]he old woman took the cloth-wrapped bamboo blade in her right hand with the point downward, as though she were grasping a dagger, and she pointed it at the inside of the dish with her thumb bracing the blade tip. As she again spun the dish two or three times to the left, the blade inscribed a circle in the center, and the dish was complete. . . . When the bride and groom exchange their three dishes of sake before the altar of the deities, these dishes are absolutely essential.43 In the late 1950s, American ceramic technology specialist Herbert Sanders observed this same process.44 American potter Richard Peeler recorded the process on film in 1966.45 By June 1976, however, when I sought to visit a potter in Hataeda (now part of Iwakura Kino Town), I learned that one of the last two women who made pots had died that spring. The other described the process but would not show me because a photographer sent by a Kyoto publisher had left her some money, and I was not able to match the amount. I did speak with the son of another potter, Fujimoto Tadao, a white-haired man who appeared to be in his seventies or early eighties. He listed the types of wares his mother had made, and I also saw samples in a collection kept in the village shrine:46

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kojū (“small stack”), a plain dish 7.5 cm. (2.95 in.) in diameter, with no markings ōjū (“large stack”), a dish about 8.0 cm (3.15 in.) in diameter, with a ring inscribed in the center sando, a larger ring-inscribed dish, about 10 cm (3.94 in.) in diameter godo, a ring-inscribed dish 16 cm (6.3 in.) in diameter jūdo, a ring-inscribed dish 33 cm (13 in.) in diameter (names not recorded), two sizes of pedestal-foot plate, diameters 10 cm (3.94 in.) and 19 cm (7.48 in.) shiotsubo (“salt jar”), a small dish with the edge pinched up in six places to form a cup with wavy rim; bisque-fired, then filled with salt and fired again to roast it. Some of these names, including kojū, were recorded by a visitor to Hataeda in 1682, who learned that another term for this small dish was ichido.47 That writer stated that the terms sando and so forth related to rituals of drinking sake. He mentioned an even smaller dish called hina (“doll,” suggesting an association with the miniature dishes used with the display of court dolls for Hina Matsuri). The sando seemingly corresponded with the sanzun-doki of Kamigamo Shrine. At the Hataeda village shrine, locally made kawarake served as oil lamps, arrayed on two wooden shelves near the entrance. I recorded my impression: “Handmade: lifting them is like touching the fragile hand of an old woman.” In contrast to the dozens of households in Hataeda that once made earthenware, the many hundreds of parching pans dedicated in Mibu Temple at Setsubun and destroyed during the presentation of Mibu kyōgen were made by just one family. After Mibu kyōgen in 1976, a temple priest explained that the potters who supplied them were losing interest in the business. Concerned about its future supply, the temple had hired a young Kyoto potter to experiment with using mechanical means to replicate more quickly. The key was the strong thick rim, which enabled the thin-based pan to be stacked high. Meanwhile, the vessels were still made in a family-run workshop in the town of Takahama, south of Nagoya. I went to Takahama on February 19, 1977, soon after Setsubun. From the local train I could see the inlet from Mikawa Bay, the water transport access that had enabled the area to develop a ceramics industry based on roof tiles. From the station a short walk down a quiet street led to the workshop. Under a gray tile roof, the one-story rectangular building was faced with horizontal

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Figure 2.8. Hōraku in clay molds dry in yard of Sugiura Kamekichi workshop, Takahama, February 1977. Photograph by Louise Cort.

boards of weathered wood. A raised vegetable bed took up much of the front yard; leaning along its edges and against the wall of the building were rows of earthenware parching pans drying in clay molds (fig. 2.8). I stooped to enter the sliding, glass-windowed door. The interior was dark; the walls were blackened with soot from a fire, made of wood splints set in an empty kerosene can, that had burned all winter to take the chill off the room. Sugiura Masaichi, age sixty, and his wife Nobuko were the fourth generation to operate this shop, which still went by the business name of Nobuko’s father, Sugiura Kamekichi. Their son, who worked for a company in a larger town nearby, had no interest in continuing the business. Nobuko’s elderly parents tended the vegetable patch, ran errands, and slept in the workshop at night to keep watch. Masaichi was an adopted son. He had taken up the earthenware business in 1947 after returning from wartime service, including two years in Siberia as a prisoner of war. Several other workshops had also started up around then, but his was the only one still operating. According to research by Namba Yōzō, earthenware parching pan production in Takahama had begun as a spin-off of production in Hirakata, between Kyoto and Osaka, which in turn had begun in the early nineteenth century

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Figure 2.9. Sugiura Masaichi rolls slice of clay from stack in preparation for making hōraku. Sugiura Kamekichi workshop, Takahama, February 1977. Photograph by Louise Cort.

with the introduction of technology from Fukakusa.48 According to Namba, the technology in Takahama reflected Edo-period developments in Fukakusa technology, notably the use of a mold to shape the slightly domed base and the addition of the thick rim by hand. Thus Mibu Temple’s connection to Takahama may have represented a continuation of older ties with Fukakusa potters. The annual Mibu Temple order was the largest that the Sugiura workshop received. (They also supplied earthenware parching pans to restaurants.) They began work to fill it in late June, as soon as the rainy season ended. For Setsubun in 1977 they had sent some ten thousand pieces to the temple. The workshop made four sizes, all described by the traditional measuring units of shaku (30.3 cm or 11.93 in.) and sun. From largest to smallest, they were termed “shaku three,” “shaku,” “8 sun,” and “6 sun.” The smallest size was nicknamed mame or “miniature.” The clay, dug nearby, was the same clay used for flowerpots and ornamental roof tiles. Upon receiving a big mound of clay, the Sugiuras put it through a pug mill, then covered it with plastic for storage. Each morning they further

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Figure 2.10. Sugiura Nobuko attaches rim to hōraku formed in clay mold. Sugiura Kamekichi workshop, Takahama, February 1977. Photograph by Louise Cort.

processed enough clay for the day’s work, creating a tall cylinder that they cut into thin, even slices. The husband and wife worked standing at two wheels near the table on which the clay cylinder stood. Fixed to the wheel heads with nails were bentwood rings (made originally as frames for sieves) that served as bases for fired clay molds, in the shape of parching pans but larger and slightly thicker, on which the new pieces were formed. (The larger size allowed for shrinkage during drying to the desired size, which then shrank further during firing.) The forming process began by rolling a slice of clay off the stack (fig. 2.9), unrolling it onto a square of cloth on the table, and scraping it with a wooden rib. A clay mold had already been centered in the wooden ring on the wheel, and the clay disk was lifted with the cloth and inverted into the mold, then scraped and smoothed into place. A coil of clay was added around the edge to form the rim (fig. 2.10). Mr. Sugiura explained that joining the thick rim to the thin base was the trickiest part of the process. A Y-shaped natural branch with a wire stretched across the Y was used to trim the rim. A pointed tool loosened the edge of the rim from the mold. The mold with the finished pan

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still in place was set to dry on a shelf. At intervals, Mrs. Sugiura took a group of pieces in their molds outside to dry in the sun or went out to rotate the drying vessels in the molds or to bring the dried pieces back inside. Adjacent to the workshop were two updraft kilns of different sizes, one for large sizes of parching pans, the other for smaller. They were built as square chambers using coarse clay, with tiles used for the floor and the roof. Firings, fed with narrow splits of scrap wood, began at 5 A.M. and finished around 1 P.M. The kiln reached a temperature between 800 and 900 degrees Celsius (judging by eye, without cones) (1472 to 1652 degrees Fahrenheit). In the course of my visit, the Sugiuras told me they had never gone to Kyoto to visit Mibu Temple for Setsubun. After my visit, I sent them photographs of themselves as well as of the Setsubun events at Mibu Temple in which their earthenware pieces figured so prominently. They wrote a note of thanks. “Our whole family looked at those photographs and talked a lot about Setsubun at Mibu Temple. We will do our best to continue making parching pans that everyone will use with pleasure.”

Conclusion The earthenware production and use that continued in the late 1970s represented a mere remnant of the activity that had once flourished throughout Japan but had been eclipsed gradually, over centuries, by the availability of imported, then domestically made stoneware and porcelain, by lacquered wood, by cast iron for cooking, by transformations in the structure of the manufacturing economy and the wage scale, and by modifications of religious strictures. A brief look at the archaeological and documentary evidence suggests a great richness of evidence for the meaning of earthenware that remains to be explored. The few shrines that continue to use earthenware offering vessels seemingly preserve archaistic forms of tableware and votive vessels that were once commonplace in everyday life. It seems reasonable to agree with Kanzaki Noritake that shrines make offerings to ancestral spirits using vessel shapes familiar to those ancestors. But there is no way to return to the perception of these vessels once held by their users. Were they, in the earliest instances, seen as “beautiful”? Did their users marvel at the transformation of raw clay, through a few minimal gestures of human hands and the power of controlled fire, into eloquent forms? It is impossible to recover through archaeological finds — broken and stained by use and burial — the fresh beauty of just-fired earthenware clay, with its palette of beige, gold, and red and its faint fragrance of smoke. Thus, with the rare excep-

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tions of a few vessels used in the tea ceremony, historical earthenware has not become part of museum collections and entered the realm of “art” as defined by those institutions and their visitors.49 The very traits of porosity, redness, fragility, and brevity of lifespan that keep earthenware outside the commercial art market constitute its significance and suitability to its defined ritual role. These traits amount to the physical embodiment of a concept of purity. This significance is made potent through the very process that defiles, destroys, or requires destruction of the vessel. Thus (like the hidden wedding chambers once prepared by women artists of Mithila, as discussed by Davis) the beauty of the earthenware vessel is visible principally to the witness of the production process or the ritual use. It is experienced by the ritual participant who brushes an inscription on a parching pan or sends an earthenware saucer hurtling into space along with a private prayer.

Notes 1. I would like to acknowledge the guidance of folklorist Kanzaki Noritake, through conversations and shared fieldwork, in revealing the significance of earthenware in Japan. 2. See Gaya Charan Tripathi, “The Idea of Purity and its Importance in Hinduism,” in Religion and Society in Eastern India, ed. G. C. Tripathi and Hermann Kulke, pp. 237–259 (Bhubaneshwar and New Delhi: The Eschmann Memorial Fund with Manohar, 1994). On the relationship of purity to pottery usage, see Louise Allison Cort, “The Role of the Potter in South Asia,” in Making Things in South Asia: The Role of Artist and Craftsman, ed. Michael W. Meister, pp. 165–174, Proceedings of the South Asia Seminar IV (Philadelphia: Department of South Asia Regional Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 1989). 3. During 1979–1981, with a grant from the Indo-U.S. Fellowship program, I studied the production and use of earthenware associated with the Jagannatha Temple in Puri, Orissa. Those findings are summarized in Louise Allison Cort, “Temple Potters of Puri,” Res 7/8 (Spring/Autumn 1984): pp. 33–43, and a monograph is in preparation. 4. Tsuji made this comment at the symposium held at Japan Society Gallery, New York, on October 19, 2002, in conjunction with the exhibition Kazari: Decoration and Display in Japan, 15th-19th Centuries. See Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, ed., Kazari: Decoration and Display in Japan, 15th-19th Centuries (London and New York: British Museum and Japan Society, 2002). 5. At Tone (also known as Odashima) Castle in Yamagata Prefecture, gilt clay dishes were uncovered together with Chinese celadon, white porcelain, and blue-andwhite porcelain. Tōyō Tōji Gakkai kaiho [Newsletter of the Oriental Ceramic Society, Japan] 36 (1998), p. 2. At Yonezawa Castle, they were found in association with Shino ware and Chinese blue-and-white in a sixteenth-century layer. Tōyō Tōji Gakkai kaiho [Newsletter of the Oriental Ceramic Society, Japan] 53 (2004), p. 2.

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6. The research association for Japanese medieval earthenware (Nihon chūsei doki kenkyūkai) began meeting annually in 1971. Ōkawa Hiroshi et al., Nihon doki jiten [Dictionary of Japanese earthenware] (Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 1996). 7. Narasaki Shōichi, Seto, Bizen, Suzu [Seto ware, Bizen ware, Suzu ware], Bukku obu bukkusu Nihon no bijutsu [Book of books arts of Japan] 43 (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1976), pp. 126–128. 8. The last 1 percent consists of “other” wares. Hashimoto Hisakazu, “Kinai no chūseiyō — gaki” [Medieval ceramics in the Kinai district — tile ware], in Mitsuoka Tadanari et al., Kinai II [Kinai II], Nihon yakimono shūsei 7 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1981), p. 93. 9. Nagata Shin’ichi, interview with author, Kyoto, July 9, 2004. See also Kyoto-shi Maizō Bunkazai Kenkyūjo, Heiankyō Sakyōku Kitabe Shibō [Heiankyō Sakyōku Kitabe Shibō], 3 vols. (Kyoto: Kyoto-shi Maizō Bunkazai Kenkyūjo, 2004). 10. Reizeike Shiguretei Bunkō and NHK, eds., Reizeike no shihō ten [Treasures of the Reizei family] (Tokyo: NHK, 1999), p. 48. 11. Representations of earthenware in paintings are cited in Kanzaki Noritake, “Utsuwa” o kurau: Nihonjin to shokuji no bunka [Eating “utensils”: the Japanese and the culture of meals], NHK bukkusu 757 (Tokyo: Nihon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai, 1996), passim. 12. Rousmaniere, Kazari: Decoration and Display in Japan, 15th-19th Centuries, no. 68. 13. Maruyama Kazuo, “Tosa no yakimono” [Pottery in Tosa Province], in Ōuchi Yūtoku et al., Shikoku [Shikoku], Nihon yakimono shūsei 10, pp. 118–119 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1981). 14. Nagatake Takeshi, “Fukuoka no yakimono” [Pottery in Fukuoka Prefecture], in Aihara Hidetsugu et al., Kyūshū II Okinawa [Kyūshū II Okinawa], Nihon yakimono shūsei 12, pp. 103–104 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1981). 15. The founder of the community of potters making Kamachi ware for the Yanagawa domain in Chikugo Province (modern Fukuoka Prefecture) was said to have received an appointment as dokishi (“earthenware master”) from Hideyoshi in 1592. Nagatake, “Fukuoka no yakimono” [Pottery in Fukuoka Prefecture], pp. 103–104. The founder of the earthenware-producing community of Handa within modern Sakai City was said to have received the “first under heaven” designation from Hideyoshi together with a square seal to mark his wares. Funaki Kayoko, “Osaka-Nara no yakimono” [Ceramics of Osaka and Nara], in Mitsuoka Tadanari et al., Kinai II [Kinai II], Nihon yakimono shūsei 7, p. 108 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1981). 16. See Nezu Bijutsukan, ed., Namban, shimamono — nankai seirai no chatō (Namban and Shimamono — Exported Southeast-Asian ceramics for Japan, 16th-17th century) (Tokyo: Nezu Bijutsukan, 1993); and Chadō Shiryōkan, ed., Wabicha ga tsutaeta meiki — Tōnan Ajia no chadōgu [Famous utensils passed down within the wabi tea ceremony — tea utensils from Southeast Asia] (Kyoto: Chadō Shiryōkan, 2002). As an exception to the rule that earthenware vessels are not “collected” in Japan, the archiving function of tea-ceremony collections has preserved in nearly pristine condition a number of earthenware vessels made in Southeast Asia and brought to Japan

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through trade in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Their size and roundbased shape indicate a clear relationship to cooking pots made in present-day mainland Southeast Asia. 17. Mitsuoka, Kinai II, plates 119–121 (Minato ware), 127 (Handa ware), 148–150 (Unka ware). 18. Two recent studies have pointed out the technical resemblances between Raku ware and kawarake or hōraku. Yuba Tadanori, “The Origins of Raku in Kyoto,” Taoci 3 (Oriental Ceramic Society of France, December 2003): pp. 9–11; Namba Yōzō, “Raku chawan no seiritsu to hōraku” [Hōraku and the origins of the Raku tea bowl], Ninkan fuōramu [Human and environmental forum] no. 12 (March 2002): pp. 54–55. The means by which the Raku workshop distinguished and perpetuated itself is discussed in Morgan Pitelka, Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practitioners in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005). 19. Horiuchi Kanshō, “Dosei kotsubo to chanoyu no ‘tsubo-tsubo’ [Earthenware jarlets and tea ceremony tsubo-tsubo], Rifureretto Kyōto [Leaflet Kyoto] no. 98 (February 1997): pp. 23–24. I am thankful to Andrew Hare for clarification of the role of the tsubo-tsubo in the tea-ceremony meal. 20. Kanzaki, “Utsuwa” o kurau: Nihonjin to shokuji no bunka, p. 119. Some of these wares are illustrated in Kanzaki Noritake, Kurashi no naka no yakimono [Ceramics in everyday life], Nihonjin no seikatsu to bunka [Japanese life style and culture] 4 (Tokyo: Gyōsei, 1982), pp. 61, 100–101, 108, 110, 112. 21. Suzuki Shōichi, “Kami no osonae suru tabemono” [Foods offered to the gods], in Ise Jingū (Ise Grand Shrine), Nihonjin no tame no Nihon saihakken [Rediscovery of Japan for the Japanese people] 1, pp. 249–264 (Tokyo: Asahiya Shuppan, 1973). Preparation and offering procedures are detailed on pp. 254–258; a diagram of the arrangement of the daily offerings is shown on p. 258. 22. Robert S. Ellwood, “Harvest and Renewal at the Grand Shrine of Ise,” Numen XV (1961): pp. 165–190; Suzuki Shōichi, “Kami no osonae suru tabemono,” pp. 253– 254. 23. Suzuki, “Kami no osonae suru tabemono,” pp. 254–258. The offerings are shown in the photograph, p. 253 (after completion of offering ritual). 24. Suzuki, “Kami no osonae suru tabemono,” pp. 256 and photograph showing triangular salt jars arrayed on top of clay stove. 25. Kanzaki Noritake, personal communication, 1979. Elsewhere, isolated examples remain of the use of earthenware cooking vessels in shrine rituals. See Kanzaki Noritake, Kurashi no naka no yakimono, pp. 164–166. 26. Sadly, Mr. Fujiki was killed during Aoi Matsuri in 1979 by a kick from a horse. Here I wish to record my profound gratitude to him for generously sharing information and giving me access to the ritual offerings used in several key festivals. 27. Kanzaki Noritake, Daidokoro yōgu wa kataru [Stories that kitchen utensils tell] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1984), pp. 113–118. 28. Shinmura Izuru, ed., Kōjien (Tokyo; Iwanami Shoten, 1976), 2026. 29. Tatsumi Junichirō, Majinai no sekai II [The world of incantations II], Nihon no bijutsu no. 361 (Tokyo: Shibundo, 1996).

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30. Kawaguchi Kenji, Ikeda Takashi, and Ikeda Masahiro, Nenjū gyōji girei jiten [Dictionary of annual observances and etiquette], Tokyo Bijutsu Sensho 19 (Tokyo: Tokyo Bijutsu, 1978), p. 47. The Setsubun custom was brought to Japan from Ming China during the Muromachi period, although its origins are much older. 31. On the pillars and the dishes, see Ellwood, “Harvest and Renewal at the Grand Shrine of Ise,” p. 169 n. 8. 32. In July 2004, I discussed the pottery workshop with Yano Ken’ichi, a retired head priest of Ise Shrine. He reported that the kilns were now fired with oil and produced harder earthenware that did not break so easily. As a result the shrine tended to reuse vessels for about a week of rituals before discarding them. “When the sake sinks into the soft clay of the kawarake, it is being drunk by the deity,” Mr. Yano explained. “Now it is not so easy for the deity to receive sake.” 33. Ellwood, “Harvest and Renewal at the Grand Shrine of Ise,” pp. 172–173. 34. Muneta Katsumi, “Uniyō ni tsuite” [Concerning Uni ware], Yakimono shumi 4, 8 (August 1938): pp. 10–15. 35. Tōhokuin shokunin utaawase. See Nakanodō Kazunobu, Kyōto yōgeishi [History of the ceramic arts in Kyoto] (Kyoto: Tankōsha, 1984), p. 23. 36. Shitsumandokoroshō. See Nakanodō, Kyōto yōgeishi, pp. 25–27. 37. Teijun ōrai. See Nakanodō, Kyōto yōgeishi, p. 28. 38. Nakanodō, Kyōto yōgeishi, p. 29. 39. Hayashiya Tatsusaburō, Kinsei no tenkai [Developments of the early modern period], Kyoto no rekishi 5 (Kyoto: Gakugei Shorin, 1972), p. 568. 40. Nakanodō, Kyōto yōgeishi, p. 30. 41. Nakanodō, Kyōto yōgeishi, p. 30. 42. The Far East, March 17, 1873, p. 238. My thanks go to Christine Guth for this reference. 43. Kawai Kanjirō, Tōgi shimatsu (Tokyo: Bunka Shuppankyoku, 1981), pp. 7–9. 44. Herbert H. Sanders, The World of Japanese Ceramics (Tokyo and Palo Alto: Kodansha International, 1967), pp. 101–102, 105. 45. “Potters of Japan,” part 1, Ceramic Art Films, 1966, now on deposit at the Human Studies Film Archive, Smithsonian Institution. I am grateful to Marj Peeler for sending me an “elbow pot” that her husband acquired when filming in Kyoto. 46. A set of samples made for the imperial palace in 1852 by Hataeda potter Sawaragi Marudayu was acquired from the potter’s descendants in 1991 by the Kyoto National Museum. Namba Yōzō, personal communication, April 6, 1999. 47. Nakanodō, Kyōto yōgeishi, pp. 30–31. 48. Namba Yōzō, personal communication, April 6, 1999. 49. A rare exception to the absence of kawarake in museum collections is the pair of plates, measuring 8.5 and 12.5 cm (3.35 and 4.92 in.) respectively, acquired by Edward Sylvester Morse and now in the Morse collection in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Edward S. Morse, Catalogue of the Morse Collection of Japanese Pottery (Boston: Riverside Press, 1901), no. 3941. Morse dated the dishes to 1870, but they bear a label attached by Morse’s supplier and mentor, the Japanese antiquarian Ninagawa Noritane, dated Meiji 10 (1877) and noting that the dishes were made “40 years ago,” or circa 1837.

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From the Wedding Chamber to the Museum Relocating the Ritual Arts of Madhubani

The first original works of South Asian art I ever purchased were three small greeting cards, painted by hand on rough textured paper. I was a graduate student in Toronto on a tight budget in the mid 1970s, and the cards cost only $2.00 Canadian each. They came from the Maithili region of Bihar, the gift shop proprietor told me, and were examples of an ancient tradition of painting among village women there. One depicted a female with four arms, her face in profile with one huge eye in the center, and billows of bright wavy patterned fabric. A second showed a five-headed figure — the five grinning moon-like faces spread out horizontally across the picture — standing atop a three-headed being, who had another face mysteriously on his or her midsection. In all three, the spaces around the principal subjects were filled with a profusion of colorful leaves, flowers, stylized birds, wriggling snakes, and other less determinate shapes. Multicolor fish-like shapes and belts of small triangles formed borders around the figures. I had no clue what these small paintings were about, but I loved them for their bright, suggestive, lively, exotic qualities. Rather than send the cards, I framed them and hung them in my apartment. I still keep them hanging over my desk.1 I was not the only one to find this type of Indian painting fascinating. I soon began to see examples of “Madhubani painting” (as it was most often called, after the district headquarters of the area) appearing on book covers and in exhibitions. UNESCO came out with a collection of Madhubani Christmas cards, and paintings in larger formats appeared for sale in museum gift shops. In the “Festival of India,” a series of exhibitions and performances throughout the United States in 1984–1985, not only were Madhubani paintings on display at the University of Oregon and other sites, but the Madhubani women artists themselves came as living exhibitions in one of the events, “Aditi, Arts of India.”2 When I traveled to India in the 1980s, I discovered more examples

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of Madhubani painting on the walls of five-star urban hotels. In Bombay and Delhi, I was told, chic women were wearing “Madhubani saris” with unique hand-painted designs on them. I learned that the prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, had even invited a woman from Madhubani to paint the walls of her residence in Delhi. Observers characterized this genre of paintings, like other genres of “folk art,” with terms like “timeless,” “primordial,” “anonymous,” “pure,” and “authentic.” The first book-length work on Madhubani painting, Yves Vequaud’s L’art du Mithila (1977), opens: “For three thousand years, perhaps, the women of Mithila — and only the women — have painted the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, in the form of prayer. It is no exaggeration to affirm that the art of Mithila is the expression of the most authentic Indian civilization.”3 The collectivity of Madhubani women painters are asked to represent a still larger collectivity, the “authentic Indian civilization.” And in Vequaud’s romantic projection, this ancient civilization is, in its pure form, a thoroughly religious one. Far from the towns and cities, and far from the route the hippies follow from Patna to Kathmandu, in some hamlets counting often more than three thousand inhabitants, the traditions remain pure, and as always the women cover their huts with mural paintings, and design on various surfaces works of symbols, magical and complex, on the occasions of marriages and of the innumerable religious festivals that make each Hindu year a holy year.4 To preserve the purity and anonymity of the village artists, Vequaud chooses not to identify painters by name, “so that the beauty and meaning of the paintings and the fame of the artists shall not be confused.”5 As I subsequently learned, however, the timeless tradition of Madhubani painting portrayed by Vequaud and others turns out to have been, in crucial respects, quite a new one. Vequaud correctly notes that the original purpose of this style of painting was to decorate the interior walls of domestic “wedding chambers” (kohbar ghar) for the edification and pleasure of newly married couples. As a form of domestic decorative art integral to key life-cycle rituals in the Madhubani area, this tradition was at least several decades old, if not the three millennia Vequaud grants it. But only in the late 1960s did the women of Madhubani begin to paint their designs on paper and other transportable media, as commodities for an art market beyond Mithila. It was this innovation that made the local, rural style of domestic painting available as a form of folk art for my consumption and appreciation in Toronto a few years later.

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This transformation in Madhubani painting raises several questions I wish to explore in this chapter. What are the conditions within which local decorative traditions, intended solely for domestic viewing, become accessible to a broader audience of art viewers and collectors? What kinds of changes does this bring about in the formal characteristics of the painting and in the meanings ascribed to it? More significantly, how does this transformation affect the lives of the people who produce it? What happens to the community, to the artisans, and to the art when a tradition of ritual painting meant for the inner walls of wedding chambers in village Bihar is relocated as a genre of folk art for display on the walls of museums in urban India and the West? What is lost, and what might be gained?

Ceremonial Painting in Madhubani Throughout the twentieth century, women of the two upper castes in the Madhubani area, Maithil Brahmans and Kayasthas, have practiced a unique style of painting, primarily tied to domestic religious observances.6 Scholars have postulated that their practices are much older. J. C. Mathur, for one, sought to trace the women’s arts back to Vedic sacrificial patterns and ceremonial designs, which would make them some three thousand years old.7 We have seen that Vequaud repeated this surmise, as have others. However, since the women practiced an ephemeral and private form of painting, no substantial evidence of the painting dates from much before the 1930s, when W. G. Archer made the first study of Madhubani painting. Consequently, claims of great antiquity and timelessness here must remain speculative. Following local customs, the women of Madhubani produced designs for various occasions. For life-cycle rites they would outline auspicious geometrical designs, called aripan, on smooth floors and courtyards. (Floor designs are common to many regions of India, under different names. In Gujarat they are rangoli, in Bengal alpana, and in Tamilnadu kolam.8) Exposed to the wear of feet and the elements, these designs were occasion-specific and deliberately ephemeral, much like the Japanese earthenware objects described by Louise Cort in chapter two. For the annual festival of Durga the women would fill the walls beside the kitchen door with images of the goddess. They painted the shrines of their family deities, usually kept in the kitchen. The women, however, devoted their greatest artistic efforts to the painting of the kohbar ghar, the wedding chamber within each family compound. From the perspective of these women, marriage transforms a girl from a virgin (kanya) into an auspicious and productive wife of a living husband (suhag), and therefore this

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ritual is crucial to the continuation and prosperity of the family and caste community.9 The ceremony of marriage in the Madhubani area, observes Carolyn Henning Brown, is actually a “synthesis of rituals.”10 There are two main ritual sites during the ceremony. One is the thatch and bamboo pavilion connected with a sacred fire, where male Brahman priests conduct Sanskritic rites that derive from ancient Vedic and Dharmasastra texts. The other is the wedding chamber, where the women of the family conduct rites for the bride and groom invoking the goddess Gauri and other deities. The wedding chamber is painted afresh before the wedding, and at the start of the marriage ceremony a priest consecrates the chamber and invokes the deities there. When the bridegroom arrives at the bride’s home, he is ushered into the wedding chamber for a ceremonial identification of the bride. After the Sanskritic marriage rites revolving around the sacred fire, the most formal part of the wedding, the bride and groom move back into the wedding chamber, where they worship Gauri every morning. The newlyweds are expected to spend the first three nights in the wedding chamber abstaining from sexual intercourse. During the fourth day a special ceremony is held, and that night the couple consummates the marriage and completes the transformation of virgin to productive wife. The next day the bride travels with the groom to his family home, and there they observe a similar round of ceremonies in the wedding chamber of the groom’s home. Preparation of the chamber for its important role in the wedding celebration involves all the women of the household.11 Sometimes experienced women from other families join in. Men play no role in this. The process is collective, though a hierarchy of skill and experience is observed. The most expert woman marks out the main designs. Others supplement those primary figures with embellishments and ornamental motifs, while still others fill in the colors. Younger girls hold the pots of paint and prepare the brushes. The materials are simple. The mud walls, plastered with cow dung, are prepared with whitewash, then covered with rice paste. In the early twentieth century, the women prepared their colors from local minerals and clays and also, according to Pupul Jayakar, from local plants and roots: yellow came from the turmeric root, orange from palasa flower, green from bilva leaves, and so on.12 By mid-century, however, Madhubani artists were taking advantage of chemical pigments manufactured in Calcutta, available as “powder paints” in the local bazaar. They continue to use the same brushes as in previous decades. Bamboo slivers serve to mark the sharp black outlines, while rags tied around sticks are used to apply colors in blocked areas. To begin the painting, the women artists locate the center of the central

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(eastern) wall of the wedding chamber, and mark it with a vermillion dot. They understand this spot to be the emanating center of the entire composition. As the artist Ganga Devi puts it, the dot is “like the kernel from which the lotus plant sprouts and gradually proliferates, to finally take over the entire pond.”13 From this center the design spreads outwards toward the periphery of the available space, in what Jyotindra Jain terms a “centrifugal” method of composition. The most striking design, called the kohbar, occupies a central position on the main wall.14 This complex, abstract-looking motif is based on the lotus plant, with its stem, roots, and leaves forming an intricate symmetrical composition. The kohbar is identified with the bride herself, and with the pious hope that the bride will be as fecund as the proliferating lotus. Surrounding the central kohbar swim and fly numerous other creatures of pond and sky — fish, turtles, snakes, bees, parrots, and others. The sun and moon float above the kohbar to lend their auspicious presence. Frequently, a dense thatch grove of bamboo occupies an area to the viewer’s right of the kohbar motif. “Bamboo,” observes one of the painters, “grows fast and frequent; just like that we want the marriage to grow.”15 Sasthi, the presiding deity of childbirth, is often represented. Along the lower parts of the wall the bride and groom also appear. They are shown being carried in wedding palanquins or offering worship to the goddess Gauri. The entire available space is filled with vivid, proliferating life forms because, as Jyotindra Jain remarks, “emptiness would be tantamount to infecundity.”16 Along the other walls, images of the gods and goddesses appear. Prominent are four Naina-yogins (“eye-goddesses,” perhaps identified with Kamakhya), who occupy the four corners of the chamber, and who will play an important role in the marriage rites held inside the wedding chamber. Many other deities join them, often in conjugal pairs like Shiva and Gauri, and Rama and Sita. The painting of these divine figures adheres to a fixed sequence of composition, notes Mani Shekhar Singh, with the head drawn first, then upper body and arms, lower body and legs, and lastly the eyes.17 The ritualized painting procedure fits with their religious function, for during the wedding ceremonies the gods themselves are invoked into these paintings, and confer on the marriage their special blessings. Observers of Madhubani painting have often commented on the striking contrast between the material poverty of the rural surroundings and the bright colorful pulsating world created within the wedding chamber. The anthropologist Carolyn Henning Brown, who did her first fieldwork there in 1979–1980, evoked her initiation into a Maithili wedding chamber.

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The poverty of the village hardly prepared me for the splendor that greeted me as I ducked into the thatched mud hut of my first kohbar ghar. I stepped into a world of pale geometrical fantasy, every wall covered with exquisite white patterning on the beige mud surfaces of the hut. The only light coming through a single unframed window of vertical bamboo bars added an incongruous sense of imprisonment or protected isolation, which intensified the fantastical quality of the small room.18 Looking “fantastical” does not mean this world in the wedding chamber is separate from reality. In the place where the daughter of the household becomes a productive wife, the women of the household create a painted world that evokes, and perhaps invokes, the fertility of a plenteous natural and divine world, and then they situate the new bride and groom within it. As Brown notes, the women’s art of the wedding chamber is reflexive: “women construct metaphors for imaging their own nature.”19 In imaging female nature as one of abundance and fecundity, they glorify it and seek to implant it, as powerfully as they are able with all their artistic skill and ceremony, within the new life of the bride as productive wife.

W. G. Archer’s Encounter This was the state of painting practices, as far as anyone can tell, in the early 1930s in the Madhubani region. No outside observer had ever seen or written about this local decorative tradition. The great Bihar earthquake of January 1934, however, set in motion a chain of events that would significantly alter that. Madhubani was at the epicenter of this devastating natural calamity, and the destruction was tremendous. The British subdivisional officer for the Madhubani area was a young officer in the Indian Civil Service, William G. Archer. By no means the conservative, aloof, condescending British saheeb of colonial stereotype, Archer had been active in left-wing student groups and an avid student of contemporary post-Impressionist art at Cambridge in the late 1920s. He arrived in India in 1931 with the idea that he could contribute to Indian independence through humane administration, and as a colonial official he involved himself actively in the lives of the Indian peasants and tribals in his subdivision. He took a particular interest in the arts and culture of rural Bihar. When disaster struck, it was his responsibility as subdivisional officer to inspect the damage and help draw up plans for relief. In his autobiography, Archer points out that he had visited every part of

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the Madhubani subdivision prior to the earthquake, but there were places that had remained hidden to his official British male gaze. With the earthquake, houses with mud walls had been damaged but in most cases not completely flattened. I could see beyond the courtyards into some of the inner rooms, and what I saw in the house of a Maithil Brahmin took my breath away. In normal times I would never have seen them since the rooms were private and intimate. But now they stood exposed and with astonished eyes, I saw that the walls were covered with brilliantly painted murals.20 Thanks to the quake, Archer was enjoying a unique opportunity to see into the wedding chamber of a Brahman home, the most sequestered part of any Maithili dwelling. The decorative paintings of the inner walls immediately seized his attention, and he saw in the gay insouciance of the faces an echo of “the fanciful contortions of a Klee or Miro.” Others brought to mind Picasso in their “savage forcefulness.” Indeed, it was the seeming modernity of these traditional paintings of Indian peasant women that most struck Archer. “I had seen nothing,” he writes, “which so instinctively took for granted the assumptions of modern European art.”21 With no attempt to render “natural appearances,” the paintings all sought “to project a forceful idea of a subject rather than a factual record.” For an hour or more, the colonial official forgot about the earthquake and his duties. In the midst of the devastation, the wedding chamber paintings evoked in Archer a sense of connectedness across vastly different cultural worlds. It gave me a new vision of Mithila. I felt myself modern. I liked modern art. They were medieval in attitude. I was stridently contemporary. They were products of pre-industrial India. I was a product of sophisticated England. Yet in these murals we somehow electrically met. . . . But whether deliberate or accidental, the art was there and it made us one. I had never felt myself so much a Maithil as on that day when faced with shattered walls, I saw the beauty on the mud.22 Responsibilities soon beckoned, however, and Archer was not able to follow up immediately on his curiosity about this discovery. A few years later, though, in a new post as provincial census superintendent in 1940, he did find the opportunity to investigate this folk art form. With the assistance of several local male informants, Archer made a broader survey of Madhubani painting. His informants even arranged for him to enter

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some of the wedding chambers, ordinarily inaccessible to males other than the bridegroom. Archer took photographs of wall paintings in situ and collected examples of paper aide-memoires that some of the female artists kept for visual reference. A few more years later, when he had returned to England after Indian independence, Archer wrote up his findings for an article on “Maithil Painting,” which appeared in the 1949 issue of Marg, a journal devoted to Indian arts. How is it that we classify one thing we see as “art” and deny the label to something else? Certainly our own predispositions and preconceptions enter into this act of classification. Most likely another British colonial official in earthquake-ravaged Madhubani in 1934 would not have given the strange designs on inner house walls a second glance, or would have dismissed them summarily as crude or primitive. But with an eye trained through an earlier interest in post-Impressionist European art movements, Archer saw something “advanced” and seemingly modernist in the paintings of these peasant women. The category “primitive” had crossed over, for Archer as for earlier modernist artists like Picasso, from the realm of the rude and backward to that of the elemental and forceful.23 Archer’s encounter with Madhubani wedding chamber painting did not directly affect local practices, but it did leave some traces for the outside world, some hints of the existence of the tradition. The photographs and aidememoires he collected eventually found their way to the Indian Office Library in London.24 More significantly, Archer’s 1949 article in Marg laid the groundwork for the subsequent transformation of Madhubani painting.

Pupul Jayakar’s Intervention The next important figure in the transformation of Madhubani painting is Pupul Jayakar. Jayakar came from an elite, cosmopolitan Indian family. Her father was a senior officer in the Indian Civil Service and a friend of Motilal Nehru, a leader in the Indian National Congress. As a young woman, Pupul Jayakar became friends with Indira Gandhi, daughter of prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and later prime minister in her own right. Jayakar wrote short stories and was a follower of the philosopher J. Krishnamurti.25 Her most abiding interest, however, and the area of her greatest impact, lay in Indian handloom textiles and handicrafts. In 1950 Nehru invited Jayakar to study the handloom sector of the economy and come up with a plan to launch a viable industry. She subsequently served as chair of the All India Handloom Board and the Handlooms and Handicrafts Export Corporation.

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Jayakar read Archer’s article in Marg, and in 1956 she decided to visit Madhubani and see for herself. She wrote asking Archer, then at the Victoria and Albert Museum, for advice on what to see and where to see it. However, she was disappointed with what she found in Mithila. The village walls were blank, and inexpensive, mass-produced calendar prints hung where paintings once would have been. “The bleak dust of poverty had sapped away the will and the energy needed to ornament the home,” she wrote.26 The tribulations of the region increased significantly in 1966 and 1967, when a terrible drought hit Bihar. Usually in times of drought in Mithila, the government provided relief work for the local people, such as breaking up stones for road construction, in exchange for food donations. It was grueling labor. Government officials sought ways to give women lighter forms of useful labor. Then chair of the All Indian Handicrafts Board, Jayakar recalled Archer’s article, and suggested an experimental scheme to provide alternative work for the women.27 Supply paper to the women artists of Madhubani, she proposed, and encourage them to paint their traditional designs on this portable, marketable medium. The Handicrafts Board would arrange to have them collected and sold in Delhi and other urban centers, with the proceeds going to the famine relief fund. An office was set up in Patna, the scheme was put into operation, and soon enough “Madhubani paintings” were making their way off the mud walls and into the craft shops and galleries of Delhi and Bombay, and soon enough those of London and Toronto as well. The famine relief project was a great success commercially and also had beneficial effects beyond the economic ones in the Madhubani area. Jayakar writes in The Earthen Drum of the altered moral landscape when she visited in May 1968, after the scheme had been underway for five months. The landscape of Bihar through which I travelled was harsh, grey, cracked and desolate, and the heat remorseless. The dust and sun, the absence of water, and disappearance of green from the landscape left a monstrous tonal uniformity. The need for the worship of fertility and water, of tree and sap became understandable. Entering the villages of Madhubani, . . . the landscape altered. There were a few dust heavy trees, a total absence of running water but the courtyards of the huts were freshly plastered and colours flowed in streams from doorways. Old women, young women, girls, were bent over paper, painting with bamboo twigs and rags. The colours deep earth red, pink, yellow, black were laid out in little bowls on trays of sikki grass. In the paintings I had seen at the commencement of the project, the line of drawings was hesitant. Years of abstinence, of

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poverty, of dreary monotony had clogged the stream; eye and hand had to be freed of the years of sterility. But within five months the situation had changed. A sense of pride and joy had already permeated and transformed the women of Mithila. There was visible a simple dignity, a poise and a supreme self-assurance.28 The initial success opened the way for further experiments in promoting and marketing the art works of the Madhubani women. Jayakar arranged for some of the women to come to Delhi to produce paintings on the spot. One was commissioned to decorate the coffee bar of the Akbar Hotel with murals. Another was asked to decorate the home of the prime minister. Some took up residence at the Craft Museum, where they painted and sold to tourists.29 A few years later, Jayakar served as chair of the Indian Advisory Committee for the Festivals of India, held in the United Kingdom in 1982 and the United States in 1984 and 1985. For the festival, Madhubani painters came to the United States, along with many other Indian folk artists and artisans, as living exhibitions. As an urban Indian enthusiast of Indian folk art and handicrafts who also had a cosmopolitan perspective, Jayakar envisioned a new set of productive and exchange relations for the women artists of Madhubani, where the villagers would produce a new type of art commodity for an urban audience. Her position was similar to that of Marta Meta, the “indigo queen” of Sumba described by Janet Hoskins in chapter four: a woman of the elite able to act as mediator between the worlds of village women artisans and that of the urban art market. As a well-connected official with friends in the highest of Indian places, Jayakar was able to put her scheme into effect and to patronize Madhubani painting as a form of famine relief and local development instigated by state intervention.

Madhubani Paintings on Wall and Paper Jayakar’s intervention during the drought was a transformative event in Madhubani village culture, and it is worth pausing to consider some of the changes this set in motion. Understandably, in light of her catalytic role, Jayakar portrays these changes in salutary, even triumphalist terms. Through timely governmental assistance, the women artists of Madhubani were able to gain economic self-sufficiency and self-respect. Meanwhile, cosmopolitan art lovers were able to discover another ancient, authentic form of folk art. A critic might equally see the same transformation in terms of commoditization of

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a ritual art form, commercial exploitation of peasant artisans, and Western appropriation of the indigenous to ameliorate its own sense of alienation. Evidence could no doubt be found to support both views, but neither gets at all the far-reaching and subtle shifts that have occurred in the shift from wedding chamber wall to marketable paper in everything from the materials used for painting to the horizon of life expectations among the artists themselves. With the introduction of paper painting for market, the setting and purpose of the work has been altered in several fundamental respects.30 In painting a chamber for the wedding ceremony, Madhubani women artists create a work that is ephemeral, immobile, and meant for a very limited audience of bride, groom, and female participants in the marriage rites. The composition is closely linked to a ritual occasion, and the themes and contents of the composition, as we have seen, revolve around that ceremonial purpose. Just as the wedding formalities are limited in duration, the wedding chamber paintings themselves need not last beyond the event. One observer notes that the lower portions of wedding chamber compositions often fade away within weeks on account of mopping. Permanence here is not a necessary value. Painting on paper was not entirely new to the Madhubani area when Jayakar had it introduced in the late 1960s. Local women had earlier produced aide-memoires on paper, meant to serve as compositional reminders of motifs and patterns. But painting on paper for sale was new. For market, paintings need to be transportable and durable, and paper serves this purpose well. Paper also offers a smoother surface than the plaster walls of the wedding chamber, which allows the artists to exercise greater control over their design. Lines may be sharper and more intricate. Market paintings are delinked from any ritual setting, and their audience is distant, anonymous, and unlimited. Rather than painting to instruct and entertain a daughter of the household, whom they know well, the artists must now produce designs to delight an audience of urban consumers entirely outside their social world. Like the “art wayang” shadow puppets developed by Javanese artists (as Jan Mrázek describes them), these paintings intended for market no longer need be ritually functional, but they do need to be “visually pretty.” As a painting field, the wedding chamber consists of wall surfaces extending to corners, leading to more walls. It is an intimate, enclosed, encompassing space. The artists work outward from a central dot on the main wall, in a centrifugal manner, filling first the main wall then the lateral walls with a great panoply of divine and human figures, animals, swirling plant life, and other decorative motifs. The resulting composition may be seen as a single complex work consisting of many parts, painted by many hands, that surrounds its

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small audience within the wedding chamber. Paper offers a different painting field: a single surface with edges that serve as definitive endpoints for any composition. The painting must fit within the parameters established by the paper. As Manu Shekhar Singh shows, on paper the Madhubani artists continue to follow their general “inside-out” practice of starting from a center. However, they also acknowledge and emphasize the limits of the paper surface by first drawing a framing border around the edge, and only then composing within the enclosed space, from the center outwards.31 The artist Urmila Jha explains: “[I]t is very important to write the border because without it the painting would look scattered.”32 As in wedding chamber painting, it is still important to fill the pictorial space with lively form. However, without the enclosing walls of the chamber, a painted border design is required to contain the motifs and separate them from that which is outside. In a wedding chamber composition, the gods assemble as a collectivity to bring their auspicious presence and blessings to the newlyweds. They appear as participants in a ritual occasion, and in the course of the ceremony they are invoked into their painted representations. Madhubani paper paintings of the Hindu gods detach them from the ceremony, and most often from one another. The gods now appear as discrete individuals, each available on a separate sheet of paper, Shiva on one, Durga riding her lion on another, and Krishna with his flute on a third. They begin also to emerge as the subjects of their own mythical actions. One would never depict Krishna raising Mount Govardhana within the wedding chamber wedding assembly, but such narrative themes become prevalent in individual paper compositions. Generally speaking, there is no intention of invoking gods into Madhubani market paintings. When I bought my greeting card paintings in Toronto I never considered the possibility that these goddesses might be ritually enlivened as icons of worship, and I would wager that the deities have never been invoked in the coffee shop of the Akbar Hotel. The cosmopolitan consumers of painted deities from Madhubani value them for their decorative and aesthetic rather than their ritual properties. And the deities must take their places among a much more heterogeneous crowd on Western museum walls or in the homes of purchasers than they would in a wedding chamber. My three Madhubani goddesses, for instance, share a wall with a kalamkari cloth painting from southern India depicting a deity riding a rooster, a small fearsome demon mask from Bali, a golden tassel from my Ph.D. graduation ceremony, and a brown paper bag decorated by my son when he was in kindergarten. Each wedding chamber composition is in a certain sense unique, though

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each draws upon a limited set of themes and motifs that have been transmitted from mother to daughter among the women artists. The ceremonial purpose of the painting determines its contents and constrains the possibilities for individual innovation. Painting on paper may serve its own end, rather than that of a ritual. As several observers have pointed out, some of the women painters viewed this primarily in quantitative terms. The more paintings they produced, the more they could try to sell. However, for a few other Madhubani painters the release from ritual subject matter brought a sense of liberation. They discovered the freedom to explore and experiment with new themes, to push the Madhubani style in unforeseen directions, often to wonderful effect. Yet forces other than custom may also determine the artist’s choice of contents. The market poses its own demands. If paintings of Krishna holding up a mountain prove popular in Delhi galleries, and others of the kohbar lotus design fail to sell, the feedback from these consumer preferences reaches back to the artists in their villages. The new system of production also introduces new distinctions among the women. In the wedding chamber, we have seen, painting is basically a collective process, with contributions from many women according to their ages and abilities. This is not to say that in tradition all artists are equal. Those women with the greatest knowledge of designs and skill in executing them are certainly recognized and admired, and they take leading roles in laying out the wedding chamber compositions. Yet many others also contribute. Madhubani paper paintings, by contrast, are essentially individual compositions, where a single artist completes a work from beginning to end. Soon after Jayakar’s scheme was set in motion, several of the more adept artists began to sign their names on paintings. “It was individual work,” Jayakar comments on this development, “recognisable by style and character.”33 Painting for the everdemanding market, rather than for the occasional wedding, allows the artists to practice their craft continuously and thereby to develop more distinctive artistic identities. Signed works may vitiate the romantic “timeless anonymity” valued by observers like Vequaud, but they also represent a step toward the discursive practices of art history. The most adept artists also became eligible for new rewards. Dealers and discerning urban consumers will pay more for the more “original” paintings by the better-known Madhubani artists. Government awards follow. In 1974, one outstanding Madhubani artist was cited by national officials as best craftsperson of the year. Others have received other high awards such as the Padmashree, given by the president of India to those who have made distinguished

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contributions in their fields of endeavor. Some have been selected for special commissions, such as painting Delhi hotel murals and decorating the prime minister’s home, and for travel abroad to exhibitions and festivals. Of course, with the new differentiated system of rewards and profits comes other, less wholesome, developments, such as competition, jealousy, deception, and exploitation. It is no coincidence that males now enter into this previously all-female field of activity. However, women continue to dominate the field. In fact, observes Carolyn Henning Brown, the majority of women who work as salaried painters at the Madhubani center are widows.34 In rural Bihari society, the woman who is widowed — no longer a productive wife — would ordinarily enter a position of low status. Painting has provided a meaningful and remunerative activity for women cut off from ordinary avenues of female self-fulfillment.

Ganga Devi’s Career The transformation in Madhubani painting had its most profound repercussions in the individual lives of the women artists. While most of these lives remain unrecorded, we are fortunate to have the fascinating biographical account of one Madhubani master, Ganga Devi of Chatara village.35 As the author Jyotindra Jain points out in his preface, this is not a common thing for a “folk artist.” It is customary for art-historians to trace the evolution of the work of individual artists who belong to mainstream modern art. On the other hand, the creative expression of rural and tribal artists has always been seen by most of them as a product of ethnic collectivity whose authenticity lies in the remoteness of time and space.36 Jain portrays Ganga Devi not as an anonymous folk artisan, but as a creative individual strongly grounded in the traditional visual language of Madhubani painting, who “ventured out into narrative and autobiographical work” beyond anything previously found in that tradition, and in the process invented “a new pictorial vocabulary.”37 In my final section I would like to retrace her life and work, following Jain’s excellent account, as it illustrates many of the shifts discussed in this chapter. Ganga Devi was born around 1928 in Chatara village, Madhubani district, in a Kayastha family. Her father was a well-to-do landowner, and her mother was admired in the Chatara area for her skill in kohbar painting. At the age of fifteen, Ganga Devi was married to a husband whose family was poorer and

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less cultivated than her own. “Women in that locality could not paint anything,” she recalled.38 The marriage deteriorated when, after eight or ten years, Ganga Devi gave birth to a child who died immediately after delivery, and then she had no more children. Within Bihari rural culture, a primary task of the productive wife is to produce offspring, and Ganga Devi was not accomplishing this all-important task. Meanwhile, her husband’s younger brothers married and their wives succeeded in producing children. Ganga Devi’s status in the joint household shrank to the point where a sister-in-law persuaded her husband to marry a second wife. In rural Bihar this is not altogether uncommon. Ganga Devi reluctantly accepted this humiliating new reality, and bravely insisted on attending her husband’s second wedding ceremony. What happened then, however, went beyond what even she could accept. While she was forced to watch powerlessly, her husband and co-wife entered her room, broke open her private trunk, and stole her few prized belongings, among which were materials for painting a kohbar for her brother’s son’s wedding. This incident was a turning point in her life. Ganga Devi describes it this way: “My eyes got shut, the world was shut off, there was darkness all around. I felt as if I had arrived in hell.”39 She considered ritual suicide and made a pilgrimage to a holy place on the Ganges, where she undertook the vow of a month-long fast. At this point of despair, she made a decision. She would make her own way in the world, with her own hands. She left her husband’s home and looked up a friend from her own village, Shakti Devi, who had established herself as a painter. Shakti Devi supplied her with paper and would buy back Ganga Devi’s paintings for one, three, or five rupees. She did not allow Ganga Devi to sign her paintings. “Along with her own work,” recalls Ganga Devi, “Shakti Devi supplied buyers with paintings bought from other artists. She sold them in Delhi and Patna, and retained the whole amount for herself.”40 During this early period in the marketing of Madhubani paintings, Shakti Devi had set herself up as a supplier to urban buyers and took artistic credit, as well as monetary profits, for the work of other, less shrewd artists. Ganga Devi comments that she never received from Shakti Devi even a hundred rupees for all her paintings. Humiliated, impoverished, and exploited, Ganga Devi’s situation began to change in the early 1970s. At this time, the Ministry of Textiles set up a “Madhubani Office” to expedite the production of paintings and supplied many of the local artists with 1,500 rupees for paper and supplies. Ganga Devi was one of the chosen recipients. At about the same time, writer Yves Vequaud became involved as a patron and dealer in Madhubani painting. He first vis-

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ited the area in 1970, and he met Shakti Devi during this initial trip. Shakti Devi became one of his suppliers. After several more visits, Vequaud returned with a photographer in March 1973 and then with a crew in November 1973 for several months to make a film on the women artists of Mithila. During this 1973–1974 stay, Shakti Devi brought a batch of paintings to sell Vequaud. One in the batch, recalls Vequaud, was “really beautiful,” and he asked Shakti Devi if she were its artist. She answered that she was. Later, though, Vequaud noticed a signature on the back that had been scratched out. He confronted Shakti Devi the next day, and she was forced to admit that it was not her work, but rather that of Ganga Devi. Vequaud arranged to visit Ganga Devi at her home, and he gave her more painting supplies as well as a white pullover and a blanket. Through Vequaud, Ganga Devi began to gain recognition as an outstanding practitioner of Madhubani painting. Vequaud and a member of his film crew subsequently told Pupul Jayakar and Indira Gandhi about her. In 1976 Ganga Devi received a National Award for Master Craftspersons. When she learned of this award, she recalls, she went to Shakti Devi to touch her feet in gratitude for helping her get started in paper painting. But Shakti Devi would not look at her and went away in anger. Later she jealously berated Ganga Devi, “When will I get the National Award?” Despite her past exploitation, Ganga Devi put in a good word about her with “Jayakarji,” and Shakti Devi eventually got her award. With recognition came further commissions, awards, and travel opportunities. She was asked to paint a major opus on “The Cycle of Life” for the Festival of India in London. She traveled to the United States for the Festival of India there in 1985 and later made two trips to Japan. She received the Padmashree, one of India’s highest awards. Yet in her own account of her life, she continued to recall the pain of family humiliations. Once I told my husband: “We should keep contact otherwise the bastiwallas [neighbors] will think badly of you.” But he said: “I married a second time because I did not like you. I will not let you live here.” His younger brother kept me in his house; I worked there. But everyone in the basti advised me not to work so hard. They said I should go to Chatara and live there comfortably with my brothers. I said: “Even if I have to beg, I will live here. By living here I suffer pain, but only in pain will God appear to me. In my brother’s house there is wealth and comfort. In comfort I will forget God. I will stay here.”41 Suffering clearly has religious value, to Ganga Devi’s mind. It also shaped her art, as Jyotindra Jain astutely observes. Her harrowing experiences sharpened

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her perception and led her periodically to retreat in self-protection to a world of pictorial imagination. “Her chaotic life and the ordered and harmonious world of her painting were organically related,” writes Jain. “Her inner turmoil led her to create a world of harmony and beauty in her work.”42 The Festival of India brought many Indian folk artists and artisans to the United States to demonstrate their skills and sell their products to an American audience. While American tourists gazed at these living exemplars of “indigenous Indian crafts,” the Indian artists enjoyed the opportunity to gaze back at what Ganga Devi described as a “completely different world.” For most of them this remarkable experience found no significant echo in their art. They continued to work firmly within inherited traditions, as Jain points out, “if anything infused with a greater element of primitivism to enhance their appeal abroad.”43 Like them, Ganga Devi had not previously done any painting drawn from her own life experiences, but now she was inspired to produce an “American Series” of paintings. She adapted her Madhubani style to envision themes never before portrayed in Madhubani: the Washington Monument, a Disneyland roller coaster, and the like. The result has a quality of the fantastic, writes Jain, “as though an American frame painted on a transparent celluloid sheet had been superimposed upon a distant Mithila landscape.”44 Yet they are grounded in perspicacious observation. In one part of the Washington Monument composition, for example, a disembodied hand holding a rectangular green bill emerges from a lone window in a blank brick cubicle. “In America,” comments the artist, “often you do not have a direct contact with the people. Mostly, a hand comes out of a counter or a window, takes away your money and after awhile comes out again to hand you your ticket. You do not see the person; you deal with the hand.”45 Ganga Devi’s trip to the United States and her paintings based on experiences and observations there mark another watershed in her artistic career. Other series of works drawing upon her personal life followed: a pilgrimage to Badrinath, her visits to Japan, and, most moving of all, a “Cancer Series” narrating her experiences as a cancer patient.46 Once again, it appears that suffering supplied a catalyst to Ganga Devi’s art, and the ordering process of artistic composition enabled her to confront her afflictions and to gain some measure of solace. These personal paintings complete a striking trajectory in the artistic career of this traditional Madhubani artist. Her journey from the tradition-bound, inherited, collective painting practised in the kohbar wall-paintings of her teenage days, through the increasingly innovative and individual expression apparent in the Rama-

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yana series and The Cycle of Life begins to come full circle in her “American Series”: here departure from tradition attains a climax of sorts at the level of theme and imagery, while stylistic certitude continues to prevail in the drawing and conceptualisation of figures and images.47 Ganga Devi’s journey was made possible by Archer’s chance viewing of wedding chamber walls after an earthquake and Jayakar’s famine-relief scheme that made Madhubani paintings available to a wider cosmopolitan world. Like other Mithila women, she lived through this shift from painting on wedding chamber walls for special occasions to the sustained painting on paper for a market of distant consumers. More than any of the others, however, she pursued the experimental possibilities of this new artistic situation to produce a unique oeuvre of Madhubani paintings that explore subjects that could never appear on the walls of a rural wedding chamber, but do fit nicely on the walls of museums in urban India, Japan, and the United States.

Concluding Questions This story of the metamorphosis in the art of the Madhubani area is unique in its details, but finds parallels in many other shifts in South Asia and in other parts of the world, wherever attractive local or folk arts have been refashioned for a broader cosmopolitan audience. A similar transformation has occurred in the domestic painting of the women of the Warli tribe in Maharashtra.48 In this volume, the closest parallel may be seen in the textile arts of Sumba, Indonesia, as described by Janet Hoskins. In all these cases, the incorporation of local art forms in an international art market eager for the “authentic” — as embodied in commodities supposed to be the products of ancient indigenous craft traditions — brings about significant alterations in the formal qualities of the works and disruptions in the social organization of local art practices. Are these changes good or bad? Is there any way of making a moral reckoning? Undoubtedly much is lost. For the Madhubani deities painted on the village wedding chambers to greet and bless newlyweds, they lose their context, presence, and even their identities by the time they reach a consumer like me, buying them as greeting cards in a Toronto gift shop. But isn’t something gained as well, if not for the deities then perhaps for the women who make them manifest? W. G. Archer presents his chance encounter with Madhubani domestic painting, in the midst of a natural disaster, as a discovery of a surprisingly “modernist” art form on village walls, enabling him to feel fleetingly an iden-

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tity with the locals. Pupul Jayakar, not surprisingly considering her catalytic role, portrays the changes brought about through her intervention as entirely positive, engendering a renewed “sense of pride and joy” within the villagers. Jyotindra Jain’s account of Ganga Devi’s remarkable and complicated life narrates a more nuanced story that recognizes personal suffering and commercial exploitation as well as innovation and artistic triumph. With Madhubani art now marketed more widely than ever through Internet sites, other observers are not always so sanguine. Kailash Mishra, a folklorist affiliated with the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in Delhi, decries what he sees as the deterioration in the art. The commercialization has caused serious harm to this art. The women and men are learning this art from the markets in towns and metropolitan cities. The trainers themselves do not know the essence and aesthetic beauty of this folk art and they teach their students in utter ignorance. . . . The themes and designs of the paintings are, now, in most of the cases decided by the buyers. The buyer-centric approach has caused serious threat to the originality of colour, design, motif, and sensitivity of this great art form.49 Mishra goes on to call upon researchers, nongovernmental organizations, folk artists, and all concerned to work together to retain this original form of art. But is his critique not based on its own projection, much like that of Vequaud, of a timeless village tradition that can only be lost, never altered? The transformation of Madhubani painting raises serious questions about the social and cultural impact of the “artification” of an essentially ritual art form when it is diverted from ritual to commercial ends. Do the women of Madhubani still produce aripan designs? Do they decorate wedding chamber walls for weddings? How have the old marriage practices changed? Are the gods still invoked into their images, to bless the newlyweds? Or have the pressures to produce paper commodities, and the rewards to be gained, made wedding chamber decoration seem profitless and old-fashioned? How is the production of paintings on paper organized? What kinds of networks are involved in the commerce of Madhubani art? Who operates them, and who gains the profits? How has the commercial success of this predominantly female activity in Madhubani affected relations between the sexes? How do the artists view their own work? Do they view it as the mechanical reproduction of marketable commodities, or as creation of distinctive works of art? How do the artists distinguish among themselves? What kinds of aesthetic criteria do they use in discussing their paintings?

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I end with these questions as the possible starting point for a historically informed ethnographic study of the ongoing transformation of the ritual arts of Madhubani.50

Notes 1. I presented an early version of this chapter at a seminar on “Indian Art and Performance: Effects of the World Market, Past and Present,” organized by Stewart Gordon and the Independent Scholars of South Asia, at Madison, Wisconsin, in October 1998. I would like to thank Jyotindra Jain for discussing the history of Madhubani painting with me in December 2001. I am also grateful for the short-term travel fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies that enabled me to pursue work on this topic in India. 2. Carolyn Henning Brown, “Contested Meanings: Tantra and the Poetics of Mithila Art,” American Ethnologist 23 (1996): 717–737, 719–720 gives a more complete list of the relocations of Madhubani painting. On Madhubani arts in the Festival of India, see Carolyn Henning Brown, “The Women Painters of Mithila,” in Festival of India in the United States, 155–161 (Harry N. Abrams, 1985); and Smithsonian Institution, Aditi: The Living Arts of India (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 18–19. 3. Yves Vequaud, L’art du Mithila (Les Presses de la Connaissance, 1977), 11. 4. Vequaud, L’art du Mithila, 16. 5. Vequaud, L’art du Mithila, 31. Vequaud was a buyer and distributor of Madhubani paintings as well as a promoter of them in print and film. Thus he played a significant role in the transformation of Madhubani art, even as he proclaimed and celebrated its anonymity and unchanging character. See J. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression in Mithila Painting (Mapin Publishing, 1997), 15–16. 6. The two castes exhibit several major differences in style. See M. Archer, Indian Popular Painting in the India Office Library (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1977), 88–89, for a concise account of these variations. For purposes of this chapter, however, the caste differences in painting style will not be a concern. 7. J. C. Mathur, “Domestic Arts of Mithila,” Marg 22 (December 1966): 44–46. 8. Smithsonian Institution, Aditi. The most complete studies of this practice, based on kolam in Tamilnadu, are the dissertation of Vijaya Nagarajan, “Hosting the Divine: The Kolam as Ritual, Art, and Ecology in Tamil Nadu, India” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1999), and her forthcoming book, Drawing Down Desires: Women, Ritual and Art in Southern India (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 9. Brown, “Contested Meanings,” 727. 10. Brown, “The Women Painters of Mithila,” 155. My brief summary of Mithila marriage practices here is based primarily on Brown, “Contested Meanings,” and Jain, Ganga Devi, Tradition and Expression, 36–49. 11. Accounts of the techniques of Madhubani painting include W. B. Archer, “Maithil Painting,” Marg 3, no. 3 (1947): 24–33; P. Jayakar, The Earthen Drum: An Introduction to the Ritual Arts of Rural India (National Museum, n.d.), 90–116; Archer,

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Indian Popular Painting, 85–104; Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression; and M. S. Singh, “A Journey into Pictorial Space: Poetics of Frame and Field in Maithil Painting,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 34 (2000): 409–442. Joe Elder and the Center for South Asia at the University of Wisconsin produced a useful documentary on “Mithila Painters: Five Village Artists from Madhubani, India” (1994), featuring interviews and discussion of painting techniques. Also valuable are the websites by Carolyn Brown Heinz, “The Maithil Brahmans: An Online Ethnography,” (1999) and Gene Thursby “Madhubani Painting,” (1996). 12. Jayakar’s supposition, however, may point to an intriguing case of a new practice being introduced by painters to accord with the romantic projection of an important patron, namely Jayakar. Jyotindra Jain observed that plant pigments have no lightfastness, and more likely minerals and clays were primary sources of coloring. Jain postulates that Jayakar’s enthusiasm for the idea of flower and leaf pigments encouraged the women artists to adopt this practice and cite it as a traditional one (Jain, personal communication, 2002). 13. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 54. 14. A complete kohbar composition, painted by the eminent Kayastha artist Ganga Devi at the Crafts Museum in New Delhi, is shown in Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 37. 15. Brown, “Contested Meanings,” 727. 16. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 54. 17. Singh, “A Journey into Pictorial Space,” 417. 18. Brown, “The Women Painters of Mithila,” 156. 19. Brown, “Contested Meanings,” 729. 20. W. Archer and M. Archer, India Served and Observed (BACSA, 1994), 54. 21. Archer and Archer, India Served, 54. 22. Archer and Archer, India Served, 56–58. 23. On the role of the “primitive” in the modern art of the early twentieth century, see W. Rubin, “Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction,” in ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, ed. W. Rubin (Museum of Modern Art, 1984); and James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Harvard University Press, 1988). For a brief discussion of the taxonomic shift by which ancient Indian religious sculpture was refigured as “art,” see R. H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton University Press, 1997), 143–185. Archer played an important role as one of the first Western proponents of Indian “tribal” arts. See especially Archer’s seminal work, The Vertical Man: A Study in Primitive Indian Sculpture (George Allen & Unwin, 1947). After his return from India, Archer served as keeper of the Indian Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum. 24. Archer, Indian Popular Painting, 85–104. 25. There is no full account of Jayakar’s life, but some useful information may be found in her seventieth-year festschrift, L. Chandra and J. Jain, eds., Dimensions of Indian Art: Pupul Jayakar Seventy (Agam Kala Prakashan, 1986). Jayakar subsequently

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wrote biographies of both Indira Gandhi and Krishnamurti drawing on her personal friendships with them. 26. Jayakar, The Earthen Drum, 92. 27. Accounts of the paper-painting scheme may be found in Archer, Indian Popular Painting, and Jayakar, The Earthen Drum. Rajiv Gandhi stated that the idea originated with his mother, Indira Gandhi (Jyotindra Jain, personal communication, 2001). Considering the friendship between Indira and Jayakar, it is difficult to determine who hatched the scheme first. Undoubtedly, though, the active support of the prime minister was crucial to getting the project underway. 28. Jayakar, The Earthen Drum, 92. 29. On the Craft Museum, a fascinating institution in itself, see J. Jain and A. Aggarwala, National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum (Mapin Publishing, 1989); and P. Greenough, “Nation, Economy, and Tradition Displayed: The Indian Crafts Museum, New Delhi,” in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. C. A. Breckenridge, 216–248 (University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 30. For this section the most useful source has been Singh, “A Journey into Pictorial Space,” a sensitive treatment of many formal aspects of Madhubani painting, juxtaposing wall and paper modes. Also of value is Brown, “Contested Meanings,” which traces and contests interpretations of Madhubani iconography in terms of Tantric religious ideas. 31. Singh, “A Journey into Pictorial Space,” 421–422. 32. Singh, “A Journey into Pictorial Space,” 423. 33. Jayakar, The Earthen Drum, 92. 34. Brown, “Contested Meanings,” 732. 35. Jyotindra Jain was senior director of the Crafts Museum in Delhi from 1984 to 2001, and in this role he knew Ganga Devi well, as she stayed for extended periods at the museum. Jain’s account is based on conversations with Ganga Devi over five years, from 1986 to her death in 1991. 36. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 10. 37. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 10. 38. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 12. 39. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 14. 40. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 14. 41. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 18. 42. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 15. 43. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 114. 44. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 114. 45. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 114. 46. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 119–125, with illustrations. As Jain notes, Ganga Devi repeatedly portrays herself as subject in this series. “This may perhaps be the only example of autobiographical paintings done by any artist belonging to the tribal or rural traditions of India” (119). 47. Jain, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression, 117.

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48. See Y. Dalmia, The Painted World of the Warlis: Art and Ritual of the Warli Tribes of Maharashtra (Lalit Kala Academi, 1988) for a general overview; and Y. Dalmia, “Jivya Soma Mashe: A Sense of Self,” in Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India, ed. J. Jain, 35–46 (Crafts Museum, 1998), for a brief account of one (male) Warli master. 49. K. K. Mishra, “Mithila Paintings: Past, Present and Future.” Web publication by Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi. 50. Since completing this chapter, I have learned of a recent catalogue for a fine exhibition of Mithila art at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, which addresses some of these issues. Please see D. Szanton and M. Bakshi, Mithila Painting: The Evolution of an Art Form (Ethnic Arts Foundation, 2007). Readers are also referred to the website of the Ethnic Art Foundation, www.mithilapainting.org.

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In the Realm of the Indigo Queen Dyeing, Exchange Magic, and the Elusive Tourist Dollar on Sumba

Textiles are one of the most developed art forms in eastern Indonesia, but they are also deeply enmeshed in traditional culture — steeped in ideas of mystical powers, poisons, and witchcraft, as well as healing, midwifery, and ancestral blessings. On Sumba, an island between Bali and Timor at the southeast edge of the archipelago, the craft of indigo dyeing is one of the “blue arts,” related to herbalism, abortion, and the managing of female sexuality and reproduction.1 The occult powers of “tradition” are often opposed to the supposedly “rational” new forms of power of modernity. I argue that at least on Sumba, the opposite is true: ideas of supernatural influence and magic are employed as strategies for understanding modern changes, new forms of inequality, and gendered shifts in agency. Textile production has long been a female cult of secrets from which men are excluded, and it has been used for the discipline and control of the sexual behavior of younger women by their seniors. In the last two decades, the increasing commercialization of textile production for a tourist market has upset some of these gendered divisions and created new fears and resentments as well as new financial opportunities. Women have emerged as textile entrepreneurs in ways that threaten to transform parts of the domestic economy, and their access to money is incorporated into “traditional” images of “spirit wives” and/or “demonic patronesses.” How do dark rumors of supernatural influence affect everyday relations in the daylight world? I explore these themes in relation to the life of a single woman, Marta Mete, without a doubt the most successful textile entrepreneur in Kodi, the domain at the island’s western tip, and someone occasionally referred to as the “indigo queen” (Rato kanabu) of the realm. The youngest wife of the last colonial raja, she was the teenage bride of a man almost sixty. Now a forceful woman of about sixty herself, she is seen by some women as an

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aristocratic spokeswoman and leader and by others as a schemer and poisoner who used her magical powers (mangu marapu) to dupe the old raja and gain control of his vast household. While many studies of art and artists have stressed the biographical dimension of artistic expression, the field of textiles is one where there are few signed works of art, and the distinctive craftsmanship and personal touches of each cloth’s creator are usually obscured by the anonymity of the marketplace. Jill Forshee’s recent study of textile production in East Sumba is innovative in its attempt to show the meanings that are hidden “between the folds” of cloth, interpreting each design as in some way revealing the personality of its creator.2 This chapter is an effort to follow in the same direction, looking at a cloth producer as someone who has not only crafted her own “biographical objects” but has also struggled to market them successfully in the uncertain world of the new twenty-first century. In earlier writings about Kodi textiles, I focused on the motifs of men’s cloths, which are the largest and most prestigious and the ones most obviously filled with symbolic meaning.3 The most valuable men’s cloth depicts a reticulated python, whose scaled skin is represented in an apparently geometrical motif that stretches the full length of several meters of cloth (hanggi kraha kaboko). Women’s sarungs have smaller motifs, and the cloth that Marta Mete is most adept at producing — one with an indigo-striped body and a crab design at the borders (lawo gundu pa wolo) — is more modest and apparently unassuming. But the crab is itself a potent symbol of female cunning, craftiness, sexual power, and (as I will argue) economic assertiveness. Her story will help us understand new ways in which the occult powers of cloth are realized in the modern world of commerce. The ways textiles are used by their creators relate not only to this volume’s theme of the utility of art objects in context, but also to Alfred Gell’s provocative exploration of their agency.4 Gell argues that an object acts as an agent when the artist’s skill is so great that the viewer simply cannot comprehend it and is therefore captivated by the image. This notion of captivation asserts that an object is art on the basis of what it does, not what it is. Gell’s approach allows him to sidestep the problematic distinction between Western and non-Western art and to present a theory about the efficacy of an object’s appearance — about cross-cultural visuality, in other words — rather than specifically about art. Objects which are often treated as material culture or crafts rather than art (like textiles, betel bags, etc.) therefore deserve equal attention, since their making is a “particularly salient feature of their agency.”5 Anthropological theories of art objects, Gell notes, have to be primarily

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concerned with social relations over the time frame of biographies. By rejecting the linguistic analogies of semiotic theories (the different “languages of art” or forms of “indigenous aesthetics”) and insisting that art is about doing things, Gell argues that art can be part of a system of social action, focused on how people act through objects by distributing parts of their personhood into things. These things have agency because they produce effects: they cause us to feel happy, angry, fearful, or lustful. They have an impact, and we as artists produce them as ways of distributing elements of our own efficacy in the form of things. Art objects use formal complexity and a technical virtuosity to create “a certain cognitive indecipherability” that may tantalize and frustrate the viewer in trying to recognize wholes and parts, continuity and discontinuity, synchrony and succession.6 He analyzes involuted designs intended to entrance and ward off dangerous spirits, tattoos and shields in Polynesia, and idols that are animated in a variety of ways and able to bestow fertility, sickness, cures, or misfortunes. I will come back to this argument at the end, trying to show how apparently cryptic textile designs in Kodi are full of hidden biographical significance.

Indigo Dyeing, Female Bleeding, and the Occult Kodi cloth is distinctive on the island of Sumba because it makes the most extensive use of indigo dyes in both men’s and women’s textiles.7 The famous men’s cloths of East Sumba have large pictorial panels that are dyed in mixtures of indigo and rust (for aristocrats) or indigo and white (for commoners). Women’s tubular sarungs in East Sumba are primarily mud-dyed in black and often ornamented with a stripe design and inset embroidery with a supplementary warp technique. In Kodi, in contrast, the man’s cloth is an indigo plaid (hanggi gyundul), with occasional border designs, while the woman’s sarung has apparently geometrical motifs that refer to the goods exchanged in bridewealth (buffalo eyes, horses’ tails, gold omega pendants). These designs can be spread across the surface of the cloth or concentrated along the borders, with a gundu stripe pattern crossing the body horizontally. In the past quarter-century, more recent designs that include stripes of commercial colors in floating weave (lambeleko) and supplementary weft embroidery (pahumbi) on a black background have also become popular for women’s wear.8 Commercial threads and dyes are frequently used, but the most prestigious cloths remain those dyed with indigo — especially ones with the time-consuming ikat designs. Indigo is associated with a cult of secrets managed by older women, who in

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Figure 4.1. An older woman dips the threads in the indigo mixture, 1985. Photo by Laura Whitney.

addition to being dye specialists are also often involved in herbalism, reproductive medicine, and abortion (fig. 4.1). These links exist because some of the same ingredients are used to control the “bleeding” of cloth and the bleeding of women, and so dyeing is part of a folk tradition that also dabbles in menstrual regulation and fertility control. There are three terms to describe indigo at different stages, much as we have three separate words for grapes, wine, and raisins. The indigo plant, collected along the coastline at the beginning of the rainy season, is called kanabu. The fermented dye, which ranges from pale brown to pale green before it oxidizes in the sun as the threads dry, is called nggilingo. And the finished color of indigo, which is a deeply saturated dark blue, is called moro or sometimes moro mete (blue black). Moro is a color term that covers both blue and green and also has the literal meaning of “raw” or “unprocessed.” It is also the term used for medicines, both local herbal preparations (moro kodi) and imported chemical ones (moro dawa). Indigo dyeing is seen as kind of medicine that involves knowledge of the complex interactions of a series of ingredients — indigo leaves, rice, straw, wildflower roots, and stems of a number of coastal plants — and the precise

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Figure 4.2. The elements of the indigo dye mixture, labeled in Kodi, 1988.

combination of these elements is determined by each craftswoman, who tastes, feels, smells, and examines her materials at each stage of the process (fig. 4.2). The best traditional dyers have their own techniques and materials, which become guarded secrets passed on only to a single designated successor. Like medieval alchemists, indigo dyers are also believed to harbor secrets about poisons, special potions, and the roots used to induce menstruation and stanch bleeding after childbirth. This knowledge is sometimes said to border that of witches, who are called “people who handle blue substances” (tou morongo). Witchcraft in Kodi is passed down the matriline (walla) and is a particular characteristic of people of very low rank whose ancestors were slaves. Their resentment is said to create a kind of poison in their bodies that has to be “let out,” so it is extremely dangerous to accept food in the household of a witch family. Matrilines are strictly exogamous and are based on relationships of blood, while patrilines order the transmission of property and ritual office. Witch women are reputed to be especially beautiful and alluring, but men are afraid to marry them because their dabbling in love magic, herbalism, and poisons makes them master manipulators of their vulnerable spouses. Indigo dye is believed to be dangerous to all men and to women of reproductive age. For this reason, the dye shack (kareka nggilingo) is always located in a remote spot and is not visible from Kodi garden hamlets or ancestral villages (much like the menstrual huts I once frequented in the Seram, the Mo-

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luccas). Men are not allowed to approach the dye shack, nor can anyone approach the shack carrying freshly slaughtered meat or with a bleeding wound or sore. Indigo dyers explained that this was because the “dead black blood” of indigo (ruto mate) is threatened by the flow of fresh red blood (ruto rara). For the same reason, menstruating women may not approach the dye shack. For pregnant women, whose blood has “collected” into a fetus (manuho) the threat works in the opposite direction: Their wombs are vulnerable to contact with indigo fluids. The sight of the churning, dark liquids in the dye bath is believed to provoke a miscarriage, and it is believed that a woman’s pregnancy can be damaged by secretly slipping indigo dye into her coffee.9 Kodi theories of reproduction are worked out through a metaphoric parallel with the process of fermentation involved in indigo dyeing: The cloth “child” is created in the womb-like pot and brought to life by the addition of lime — made from crushed seashells or baked limestone — as the “quickener” or the “husband” of the reddish mud bath, which “brings the indigo to life,” as a fetus is a blood clot (manuho) “brought to life” by an infusion of semen. Female blood provides the flesh of the newly formed child, and the “flowering” (walla) of female blood lines determines personality and vulnerability to disease. The male contribution of sperm provides the structure of the body, the hard skeleton on which the flesh is arrayed, and will also form the more enduring ancestral identity (ndewa). Once women stop bleeding on a monthly basis, they can manipulate the “blue powers” of witchcraft and indigo with less risk, so they can dare to combine dangerous substances in new ways that may both help and hurt others. The most regular dyers often have blue arms and hands (both from tattoos and from handling the dyes), so they wear the insignia of their craft proudly and publicly. Indigo designs are also imprinted upon the skin through the process of tattooing. As soon as a girl begins to menstruate, she may get her first tattoos as a badge of sexual maturity, usually the same motifs (cassava leaves, crabs, butterflies, etc.) that she wears on her sarungs. The forearms are the first area to be tattooed, followed by the calves (of a young woman who has married and had a child). Elaborate tattoos are painful, but they are appreciated as a sign of reproductive achievement — and also a source of great erotic speculation. The special designs hidden high on the upper thighs, where no one but the husband is supposed to see them, are the ones that provoke the most aesthetic attention and care in execution. Tattoo designs applied to the skin might well have been a form of body ornamentation once found all over Indonesia. Anthony Reid notes that although there is no historical record of tattooing on Java, the word batik is

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the most common word for tattoo in the eastern Indonesia and Philippine languages, and “both in its motifs and in is ritual functions the Javanese batik evoked the tattooing of other peoples.”10 The primary functions he identifies are as a talisman and status marker, since powerful beasts and esoteric patterns could confer special powers such as invulnerability on the body. For a young man on Sumba, the marks might be associated with success in headhunting, while for a woman they suggest aristocratic rank and secret erotic powers.11

Historical Shifts in Textile Production While the associations between indigo dyeing and witchcraft appear to go back far in ancestral tradition, cloth production on Sumba has always been part of a complex regional system (fig. 4.3). Indigo dyeing is concentrated at the eastern and western tips of the island, in coastal regions where indigo plants grow well. Coastal dwellers traded indigo and dyed threads with the people of the interior, who had a longer rainy season and better year-round food production. Regional trade involved coastal dwellers bringing cloth, lime, and salt to the interior, where they would exchange them for tubers, corn, vegetables, and chickens. When the first Dutch administrators and missionaries came to the island, they reported that the people of the interior wore only plain black cloth or white cloths with decorated borders, while ikat was produced only in Kodi and in the eastern domains of Kapunduk, Rindi, Kaliurang, and Pau.12 A taboo on tying threads and dyeing them was enforced for the domains of Napu, Anakalang, Memboro, Wanukaka, Laura, Loli, and Wewewa.13 Today, however, virtually all Sumbanese women and girls learn how to weave and tie threads into designs even though imported, Western-style clothing is readily available at even the most remote rural markets. Hand-woven sarungs and loincloths are necessary for ceremonial dress and traditional exchanges, and it seems that local production has never been stronger. The introduction of new materials and designs has influenced local fashions to create a series of new looks that have developed in the past four decades. Kodi produces the greatest variety of different cloths on the island of Sumba,14 but until recently, tourist dollars have gone almost exclusively to the larger, more representational cloths of East Sumba. Collectors I have spoken to and websites that sell cloths have occasionally included one or two identified as kain kodi, but rarely any from other parts of West Sumba. Tourists who travel to the island, even if they stay in the new luxury resorts at Nihiwatu or Newa Sumba (both located in West Sumba), are generally more interested in the representational cloths of the eastern part of the island. Recent fashions

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Figure 4.3. Winding dyed threads on the veranda.

for supplementary weft (pa humbi) and floating weave (lambeleko) are almost exclusively for the domestic market, and since they are time-consuming, they can fetch high prices. Most of them are done entirely with commercial threads and use bright, store-bought threads, although in Kodi the bright colors are always against a dark background (fig. 4.4) — unlike the gaudy new combinations now seen in Loli and Wewewa, which were not traditional textileproducing areas. Concerns of quality and speed of production also enter into the distinction between time-consuming traditional crafts and speedier commercial production. The Muslim village in Kodi, Pero, is the site of the highest recorded commercial production of cloth in the province of Nusa Tenggara Timur.15 In 1982, a study of communities that relied on weaving for their income recorded that the six hundred inhabitants of Pero produced eight thousand cloths a year, or about 100 to 120 per household. But in Pero, cloth is produced in a secular atmosphere, without using traditional indigo or sacrificing a piglet to the indigo spirit, and Pero cloths are of such poor quality that they are usually not appropriate for ceremonial exchanges within Kodi. They are purchased, however, to fulfill minor ceremonial obligations and as gestures of mourning at a funeral.

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Figure 4.4. Marta Mete setting up the threads on her loom.

In the 1980s, a local textile cooperative was established in Kodi under the leadership of Marta Mete, the fifth and youngest wife of Hermanus Rangga Horo, the last Dutch appointed raja in the area (fig. 4.5). She worked in collaboration with her co-wife, Mama Lina, the raja’s fourth wife, and about half a dozen other women in the Bondo Kodi area. Marta Mete traveled to Java and Bali to exhibit Kodi textiles at fabric shows, and she was in contact with merchants who were trying to develop new markets in tribal art shops for clothing designers of ikat fabric backpacks, jackets, and purses and for an emerging number of backpacker tourists who traveled into Kodi villages to buy textiles directly from the villagers who produce them. The modest boom in tourism in the 1990s16 greatly increased the amount of cash flowing into remote villages, but it also increased the tensions and conflicts surrounding commercial activity.

Marta Mete: A Personality Expressed in Textile Design Marta Mete had been one of my finest informants during the first period of my fieldwork (1978–1981), when her husband was still alive and she was the

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Figure 4.5. Marta Mete sitting with her husband behind her house.

favored wife in a household made up of more than fifty people. Raja Horo had had five wives, but two of them had left him, so three were currently living in his compound. He had four children from his first wife, nine from his second, five from his third, seven from his fourth, and four from his fifth. When I first met him in 1979, sixteen children were still living at home with his three resident wives in a series of small thatched bungalows behind a single larger wooden house with a corrugated iron roof. The eldest wife, Mina Notoloksono (her father had been Javanese), had her own room in the main house, while the others lived with their children in the thatched bungalows but came to spend the night with Raja Horo on a rotation system. Raja Horo told me that he tried to be fair to all his wives, but he allowed Marta Mete to control his finances and all the important paperwork because she was the best educated and most competent. She was also the most outgoing of his wives and the most socially assured. She reached out to me, inviting me to accompany her to remote locations to visit the finest indigo dyers in their secluded shacks and explaining much of the process and its symbolic meanings. She was very lively and articulate, but also practically minded and not tremendously interested in the more esoteric aspects of indigo lore. She wanted to learn how to make cloths that would have a modern appeal to foreign visitors,17 and she was also very interested in looking at catalogues of older cloth with designs that could be copied or reinterpreted.

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While the eldest wife did not participate in textile production, both Marta Mete and Korilina, the fourth wife, were very active cloth designers. They invested in store-bought thread and looms and recruited younger women to work with them in a cash-based production system. On market days, young women from the villages would come in to the household to pick up freshly dyed threads strung onto a loom, and they would take them home to weave them. With this system of divided labor, a cloth was “made up of cash” even before it was finished: The work of tying the threads to create an ikat pattern could be valued at 5,000 rupiah, dyeing the threads in the indigo bath would be 8,000 rupiah, weaving the threads on a backstrap loom would be 4,000 rupiah.18 Weaving is the most time-consuming of these stages (taking from two weeks to a month of labor), while tying in the design rarely takes more than a week and dyeing takes just four or five days once the bath is prepared. Marta specialized in designing ikat sarungs (lawo pawolo) and indigo men’s loincloths (hanggi gyundu). In the years I was able to observe her, most of them had a striped or plaid main body (what the Sumbanese call gundu) and a decorative border (fig. 4.6). Kodi women’s cloth contains apparently geometrical designs that are named, indicating their symbolic resonances. As I have argued earlier,19 many of the items are bridewealth components — parts of the animals (kiku ndara, the horse’s tail, kaloro kari, the buffalo’s rope) or gold (hamoli rara, gold pendant) exchanged by women for a counterpayment of cloth. For this reason, the cloths could be seen as “decorative receipts” that record the receipt of livestock by allowing the new bride to wear their icons spread across her hips and thighs as she dances in her new village. Other elements represent female sexuality (the butterfly, kabebo) or productive activity (kadanga kaloro, the rope winder). Marta was particularly fond of a swastikalike pattern identified as a crab (karapako). The crab is emblematic of occult female powers, since it is an animal that curls its claws inwards and conceals its weapons until the moment it attacks. “The crab is not aggressive initially. It is only after it has observed someone or something that it moves to grab them,” I was told, explaining that this was a feminine technique of controlled observation followed by a surreptitious assault. “Men are like bulls. They charge in front of everyone. But women are more like crabs. They sit hidden in the dark corners and wait for their opportunity to grab what they need.” Crabs were also associated with female acquisitiveness and calculation — a skill that came to be linked to bookkeeping and money management. When Marta was managing the Horo household, even as the most junior wife, she had books and records of all the debts and all the loans that had been made. She had custody of all the financial documents,

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Figure 4.6. Marta Mete unwinding the thread.

and thus all the family secrets. Her co-wives were seen as not capable of this level of organization. “At that time,” one of her daughters-in-law later said to me, “she was the one in control, but the others were like crabs, waiting under the rocks. They knew the old raja would die, and then they could move in and attack.” The crab can be an emblem of female sexuality, but also of female treachery. I realized during my first fieldwork that there was resentment of Marta Mete, but I had no idea how deeply it ran or how much her co-wives were simply waiting for their husband’s death to exact their revenge. I returned to Sumba in 1984 and 1985, when Raja Horo was still alive but ailing, and stayed in the Horo home for periods of several months each time. When I was a guest, I was given a bedroom adjacent to that of the senior wife, but close enough to overhear conversations in the other rooms. Raja Horo had come to call me his “long lost daughter, the one born across the seas and over the land who finally returned to him.” He told me that when I married I should have my husband come and bring buffalo and horses as bridewealth to his house, since he considered me part of his extended family. In those final visits, however, it was clear that he realized he was near the end of his life, and he was concerned about how his widows (one in her sixties, the other two in their

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forties) would fare. He asked each of them to promise him that she would not remarry, and he said to me that he hoped his investments in the education of a number of his sons would provide adequate support to their mothers. Three months after I left him in August 1985, I received word that the old raja had died at the age of eighty-four, and a huge traditional funeral was planned. In 1986, I returned to Sumba with my husband, but the old raja was not there to receive the bridewealth. I stayed in the house still occupied by his widows, but it was clear that the power dynamic had shifted. Now that the old raja was no longer there, the other wives who had been less successful at controlling him but had produced more children began to claim more authority within the household. Indonesian law allows a man to take up to five wives (the number prescribed by Islam), but only one wife can be officially registered to receive the pension given to all civil servants. Mina Notoloksono, the second wife and eldest one to survive her husband, was designated as the “official widow,” and therefore had control of the only monthly salary in the household. Once Raja Horo died, his pension was halved — a major blow to a household still supporting twelve children in school. The determinant of a woman’s continuing power in the household shifted from her influence over their shared husband to the network that she could summon among her children, especially those already grown and collecting salaries. The eldest wife, known in the family as “Mama Tua” (“oldest mother”), had two sons who had finished high school and were employed as civil servants, and two daughters who were schoolteachers. Mama Lina, the fourth wife, had three sons who were employed (fig. 4.7), while Marta Mete had just one. Her youngest son was only twelve when his father died and still had many years of schooling ahead of him. She also had one daughter, a recent high school graduate who later became the first Kodi girl to finish college, who was living at home and hoping to find funds to further her education.20 After the old raja’s death, the official head of the family was his oldest son, Samuel Horo, who was a retired attorney in Jakarta and had not visited the family for more than twenty years. He had his own serious health problems and in fact died just a few years later. His younger brother, the second son from the raja’s first marriage, John Horo, was the village headman of a remote administrative ward, where he lived with two of his three wives, also maintaining a household in the district capital of Bondokodi for another wife and all the children who attended secondary school. He came to assume leadership of the family and clashed immediately with Marta by taking control of a truck the family had purchased to build a large tombstone for Raja Horo’s grave in his ancestral village.

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Figure 4.7. Mama Lina (Marta Mete’s co-wife number four) with threads dyed in the crab pattern on a loom.

Ownership of a truck was a rarity for Sumbanese, since most vehicles on the island were owned by Chinese merchants who hired them out for public transportation and also used them to haul supplies for building projects contracted with the government. Only four other trucks were owned by Kodi families in the 1980s, but since official vehicles had been given to the local administrators and the doctor, the prestige of owning a motor vehicle was immense. When the truck was initially purchased in 1983, Marta had carried out the negotiations, meeting with the Chinese merchants and working out the terms of the loan at a local bank. Her eldest son, Niko, became the first driver of the truck, and used it not only for the work on the gravesite but also as public transportation to help pay back the massive loan. But her control of this most public and most splendid possession was always criticized. Once the old raja was gone, the truck was “requisitioned” by other family members who wanted to use it for construction projects of their own and were

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not concerned about earning money to keep up the loan payments. While Marta had signed the loan documents (secured by the pension paid out to her husband), she had no access to the pension now paid only to the oldest wife, and bank officials came to serve loan default documents against her for debts that had been assumed for the household as a whole. Police were called in to mediate a squabble about finances in one of the region’s most prominent families. The truck itself was taken back by the bank, and conditions were established for a series of repayments over a ten-year period. Marta decided to move out of the compound behind the raja’s old house, and with the assistance of her son purchased a small lot of land where she built her own thatched hut with a dirt floor. The funds for the textile cooperative were placed in other hands so they would not be taken by jealous family members, but there was so much bad blood that the oldest wife asked one of her sons to move in with his seven children to occupy the old raja’s house and assert that it really belonged to her. The situation I found on my return to the field in 2000 was astounding. The family homestead, where I had stayed for several months in 1984, 1986, and 1988, was now occupied by a separate family. Marta was said to have “poisoned the family with money” and was no longer even sharing a kitchen with her former co-wives. I also heard from the wife of one of Mina Notoloksono’s sons that he believed that Marta had tried to poison his mother, first trying to damage her fertility with “blue medicines” that could cause miscarriages and then with other occult preparations that afflicted her with anemia and weaknesses of the blood. Paradoxically, this same woman also told me she had received “an inheritance” of medicines to keep her own husband faithful and to discourage him from the polygamous unions that were almost a trademark of the Horo family. This medicine was “clean medicine” (moro hinggiro), not like the “darker medicines” (moro mete, literally “black medicines” — supposedly passed down the matriline of those, like Marta, who had the word “black” in their names).21 Disruptions in the Horo household were also linked to wider national processes in Indonesia, which caused an abrupt decline in cash incomes and rising unemployment among educated city dwellers. The fiscal crisis in 1997 came at the same time as an ecological crisis (El Niño) that produced drought and famine in 1998 and a political crisis when Suharto finally resigned after more than three decades of autocratic rule. The reformasi era began with a sudden burst of democratic freedoms and a new openness in all the media. Sumba suddenly exploded with new political parties and movements, but inflation spiraled out of control and many government jobs were cut. Agriculture began

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to recover its earlier place as the center of the local economy. Paradoxically, this had the effect of revitalizing traditional activities at the same time that the rewards of education and commerce were no longer so evident. High school graduates were not able to get the jobs in government offices that they wished, so they returned to the villages and became active in new political and social groups, as well as helping to mount ceremonial feasts. The dislocations of the fall of Suharto plunged urban Indonesia into a depression, but in remote areas they had the effect of enhancing traditional lifestyles and agricultural subsistence. With inflation rampant, the prices for coffee, coconuts, and cocoa rose, providing better markets for small-scale farmers with a few cash crops. Fewer cattle and buffalo were shipped to Java for the feast of the Islamic New Year, and more were eaten on the island at feasts dedicated to the ancestors. “You live better in the villages than in the towns now,” many people concluded, and Marta soon found her stay-at-home son the dynamic leader of a new political party, while the other one with a college education struggled to survive in the regency capital of Waingapu. Still full of life and enthusiasm, Marta decided to travel to Java in August 2000 to visit her daughter and explore new possibilities for textile marketing. She wanted to work with someone who had a store in Jakarta and would commission Sumba textiles to be recycled into patchwork garments. She left with bags full of older textiles (valued for their true colors and textures, even if they had a rip or tear) as well as a few splendid examples of her own craftsmanship in traditional indigo. “I will leave these old gossips behind and find my own way,” she assured me.

Sex in the Marketplace: Money and Its Temptations Textiles on Sumba are both clothing and the currency of traditional ceremonial exchange: Many fine folded cloths must be presented at each marriage as part of a counterpayment for a bridewealth paid in horses, buffalo, and gold, and at each funeral as a sign of mourning and later also a counterpayment for animals contributed to the slaughter. Cloth is also given to show that a contract is binding (“you sign your name when you accept the cloth”), as a kind of “interest payment” to ask for more time to discharge a debt, and as a gesture of thanks for a kindness extended long ago and never reciprocated. Cloth in this sense is counted; its value is estimated on the basis of its materials, workmanship, and design, and its relative worth in relation to the livestock traded for it. These estimations place indigo dyed cloths at higher rank than those made with commercial dyes, place hand-spun thread ahead of store-bought threads,

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and overall value labor-intensive techniques of supplementary weft and ikat dyeing over simpler and faster designs. In the marketplace, however, cloth competes with money, the currency of traditional exchanges competing with the currency of modern commercial transactions, and cloth is of course also directly exchanged for money. This has created a certain nervousness about the relation between value and the market and the ways in which those who venture into the market may compromise the traditional obligations and moral standards represented by ancestral cloth. Gender concepts are particularly destabilized, because women have had a leadership role in textile production but have generally been excluded from other forms of monetary transactions. Suzanne Brenner has written sensitively about the relation between money and sexuality on Java, where market women are known for having “slippery sarungs” and morals supposedly soiled by commerce. In spite of an official rhetoric that associates men with mysticism and control and women with the body and sensuality, there is also another view in which men are seen as “unable to control themselves” (especially regarding sex and gambling) and women are presented as more monetarily responsible. Her argument explicitly frames one side as that of “official Islam,” while the other is the “culture of the marketplace.” This material from Sumba suggests that the “culture of the marketplace” is more widespread than Islam — as indeed might be expected in an archipelago where people have been linked by trade for centuries. The efforts of noblewomen to move into commerce have become entangled in the complex new moralities of the world of money, and there is a sneaking suspicion that women are better at managing small kiosks, textile marketing, and small-scale trade. The growing importance of money on Sumba over the past twenty years has been associated with a shift in gender relations, in which women have gained some power (through receiving government salaries as teachers and office workers, and as traders) while men have lost ground. Improved communications have made men more mobile, and many of them have started to merantau, or “travel to other islands,” in a pattern of labor migration that is widespread in Indonesia but had until the twenty-first century been rare on Sumba. A preoccupation with money is “modern,” but it is also linked to low social status, on both Java and Sumba. Webb Keane notes that people of slave descent (and, I might add, also members of the matriclans linked to hereditary witchcraft) are seen as particularly “clever at calculation” because they are unconstrained by a sense of honor.22 A nobleman must appear to disdain material

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considerations, even if he is privately bitter about unpaid debts, because an aristocratic disdain for haggling is part of his public persona. For these reasons, Raja Horo himself could not be seen to keep strict accounts, but he did ask his youngest wife to do so. While she was supposed to see to it that every last rupiah of the family’s money was wisely spent, her senior co-wives felt excluded from the decision-making process. “She was always sitting with the old raja and whispering over her books,” they told me once she had moved out. “She never told us what was going on. They both acted as if we were illiterate.” On Sumba, the fact that women are seen as “better at handling money” is linked to ideas that they are inherently more acquisitive and concerned with owning new clothes and jewelry to the exclusion of honoring personal relations. Marta Mete was already criticized for producing only four children, while her senior co-wives had had nine and seven apiece. “She’s too fond of dressing up and traveling to the town to stay home with a young child as we do,” they said, implying that she had controlled her own fertility with contraceptives obtained from the indigo dyers and herbalists she frequented. The image of new commercial acquisitiveness has in recent years been linked to the wild spirit mistress (yora) that most wealthy and powerful men are said to have. Raja Horo was widely known to have secret meetings with a wild “spirit wife” (ariwei marapu) who took the form of a snake and appeared most often in his bed.23 Other men met their secret lovers in the form of birds,24 wild pigs, or marine animals like crabs. The traditional wild spirit mistress appears as a sexually alluring woman who tempts her human lover with the prospect of wealth free from social obligation. She asks him to offer her private sacrifices and requires him to observe idiosyncratic taboos (avoiding a particular food or form of dress, abstaining from sexual contact with his human wives on one day of the week, etc.) in return for providing him with sudden and inexplicable wealth. In the past, this usually took the form of livestock — herds of horses and buffalo that reproduced at unusual rates — but today it is mainly money. Keane describes the version he heard of yora stories in Anakalang in the 1980s: Yora have several features in common with those presented by market, money, and government development projects. The yora is a source of antisocial wealth that cannot reproduce itself, lead to social ties, or be transmitted to one’s children. It is also associated with illicit unions between men and women, thus exemplifying unrestrained desire. Yora represent the conjunction of wealth from beyond the society with the threat of loss.

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It makes sense that such wealth is ephemeral, since it often manifests individual willfulness. The yora, like the government development project, is distinguished by the inexplicable entry of money from no comprehensible or stable source. The fact that this wealth is ultimately sterile parallels its lack of grounding in social interaction. Those who are considered most likely to deal with yora are either young, unmarried, adventurous men or, more rarely, men so rich and powerful that they can hope to enter into such dealings with impunity.25 While I think this account is roughly consistent with earlier descriptions of yora in Kodi I have published,26 I have two important modifications to suggest: The first is that the linkage of the yora to money and modernity (the government development project) is a recent one, dating to the New Order period of economic expansion in the late 1980s. The second is that describing this figure as a “demonic patroness” or “demonic familiar”27 introduces a Calvinist interpretive frame that is not shared by all Sumbanese, or even perhaps the majority of them. Since Marta Mete’s control over her husband and the family finances were explicitly linked to occult powers and the yora, these differences are also relevant to my wider argument about links between women, wealth, and modernity. Addressing historical shifts in the idea of the yora, I should note first of all that almost all wealthy older men in Kodi were said to have relations with a wild spirit, and I witnessed several divinations designed to find the cause of a man’s death where this spirit was explicitly addressed.28 The yora was a source of pride, since attracting such a spirit implied that the man concerned was not only virile and appealing, but also brave enough to confront mysterious forces and triumph over them. A prominent Sumbanese businessman, Cornelius Malo Djakababa, has provided an elaborate description of the yora who was an important part of the life of his father Yoseph Malo, who was raja of the neighboring district of Rara from 1912 to 1960: Aside from the forementioned wives, it was generally believed that Yoseph Malo had another wife, i.e. his mystical or supernatural wife . . . locally called “mavinne marapu,” whom he periodically met in romantic rendezvous. This mystical wife was said to have a strong role in Yoseph Malo’s life and fortunes. It was believed that she was responsible particularly in protecting him from harm, physical and spiritual, from natural and supernatural causes. In ritual language she was addressed by Yoseph Malo as:

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You the compartment of my betel pouch [Yo ndappeta kalukunggu] You the extension of my loin cloth [Yo kazanagata kalambonggu]29 As a child, I remember my father Yoseph Malo often mentioned her during rituals or in his talks with close family members. She was said to be very beautiful, with flowing black hair and a melodious singing voice. She was said to be very affectionate and full of concern but she could also cause him some harm. He could be mysteriously ill at times, if he displeased her, for example if he delayed their rendezvous, or if during a feast her share of a sacrificial animal was forgotten.30 He goes on to provide details about their favorite place of rendezvous, a cave with a cool natural spring inside it, where Yoseph Malo would go bringing a white rooster, white rice, and his betel bag filled with fresh sirih, betel, and tobacco. His manservant Popo would accompany him to the cave entrance, and he reported “he would hear the beautiful voice of a lady singing love songs from deep inside the cave . . . and every time Yoseph Malo reemerged from the cave, he was relaxed, happy and . . . [had] the smell of a person after a traditional herbal perfumed coconut massage.”31 His son continues with comparative notes about Nyai Roro Kidul, the goddess of the south seas who was reported to be the consort of Javanese kings, adding “such beliefs have certainly contributed to the mysteries and spiritual powers surrounding the lives of honored and respected leaders like Yoseph Malo.”32 This description suggests a female personage much closer to Western images of mermaids and water nymphs than demonesses, and it bears testimony to the fact that consorting with such a woman was a point of aristocratic distinction and political prestige. The wealth obtained from a yora was asocial, but it was certainly not unwelcome, and while it came with certain restrictions and dangers, many men were willing to assume these. In the modern era, some people have suggested to me that stories of yora might simply have been “covers” for a man sneaking off for an illicit tryst with a human lover (perhaps one married to another man), and I would imagine that such suspicions may have been around in the past as well. Calvinist teachings by Dutch missionaries on Sumba were full of references to temptations of the flesh, particularly since persuading local leaders to renounce polygamy was one of the greatest struggles the missionaries faced.33 In the summer of 2000, a former Calvinist village evangelist, Ngila Wora, whom I tried to interview about his family history, repeated a whole series of Dutch songs and proverbs he had memorized about the dangers of female sexuality. This recitation, however, only seemed to have the effect of exciting

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his narrative imagination, since he followed these verses with an account of how he himself was expelled from the church for taking a second and third wife. “I am in my seventies now, but I just married a girl of twenty one, and I ask her to share my bed along with her older co-wife,” he confessed, eager to demonstrate how unconvincing all this missionary instruction had been. The linkage of sexuality and asocial wealth was not, therefore, I would argue, a negative one for most Sumbanese, but in fact one of the attractions of these liaisons. While Dutch ministers did describe all the ancestral spirits and local spirits (marapu) as demons (setan), local people never accepted this. “How can our own dead mothers and fathers be described as demons?” one old man told me, partly to explain why he never converted. Since 1960, all the Protestant clergy have been native-born, and in the twenty-first century this is also now true of the Catholic priests. When I first came to the island in 1979, 80 percent of the people were officially marapu worshippers, but in the 1990s heavy government pressures to convert and opportunities for education and government jobs made conversion much more attractive. By the turn of the twenty-first century, 65 percent of the population had converted, but because of shifts in leadership in both the independent Christian Church of Sumba and the Catholic priesthood, Christianity had become more “Sumbanese” at the same time that more Sumbanese became Christian. Polygamous men were accepted back at the communion table, Christian graveyards had been emptied by villagers reclaiming their ancestors’ bones to bury them (underneath Christian crosses) in the traditional villages, and a spirited syncretism had replaced the stricter Calvinism of the largely unsuccessful European missionaries. The figure of the yora has, I argue, undergone a shape-shifting process that expresses Sumbanese ambivalence about their encounter with modernity, and particularly the new importance of both money and female commerce. From being a morally neutral wild spirit who provided an unorthodox path to wealth, she has become the image of an entrepreneurial woman who, like Marta Mete, holds her man in a sexual thrall in order to develop her own economic fortunes. With increasing Christian conversion, she may more often now occasionally be described as a “demon” rather than a “spirit wife,” but the first translation is still rarer, and her enticements outweigh her dangers for most Sumbanese. She is the seduction of the inexplicable and the unknown, the face of female daring in a world where women were supposed to be retiring and house-bound.

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Conclusions: The Sexualization of Commerce Marta Mete’s life offers us a parable about the dangers for women in dealing too directly with the world of money, since commerce is itself sexualized and seen as largely “illegitimate” in relation to traditional “social” sources of wealth. Because money can be secretly stored and hoarded, it is hard to enforce social practices that call for the redistribution and circulation of wealth — and those people who deal in money are inevitably suspected of being much richer than they actually are. “Art” and “commerce” are supposed to be separated, but are in fact nearly always inextricably linked. Textile artists, like all others, respond to market pressures and seek to innovate to sell their goods more successfully. Marta Mete is a woman who has suffered partially because of her role as a go-between and mediator between traditional textile weavers and modern dealers and exporters in centers like Java and Bali. Her story reveals two aspects of the “dark side” of textile production — its links to witchcraft, poisons, and supernatural influence on the one hand, and its links to money, modernity, and capitalist expansion on the other. Marta Mete’s story shows how her accomplishments were both praised and criticized in relation to new ideas of female commerce and craving, sexualizing the world of money and inscribing it within a new order of gendered power. I argue that this is a new value because the association with money itself is recent, although the idea of the spirit wife is recorded in the writings of early missionaries and others. Textile dyeing is one of the occult arts, and its present commercialization relates to the links between witchcraft and accumulation and ways in which women’s involvement in commerce has recently become inscribed in an ambivalent discourse about “modern values” and consumerism. As Geschiere has noted, the strong presence of witchcraft and sorcery in the more modern sectors of society in both Africa and Indonesia “is not an exotic curiosity. . . . It is also a language that ‘signifies’ the modern changes; it helps one to understand new inequalities, unexpected and enigmatic as they are, as seen ‘from below’; it promises unheard of chances to enrich oneself, and it can serve as a guide to find one’s way in the networks of modern society, reproduced on a much wider scale than the familial relations at home.”34 The clash between cloth as currency and money as currency has also been implicated in struggles that modern households have about control of cash and modern forms of debt (such as the bank loan for the truck). Forms of

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witchcraft in Kodi are the “dark side of kinship,” since they introduce the possibility of treason in a sheltered domestic space supposedly free of discord. Even in the interior of the family there is a frightening possibility of inequality and thus jealousy, and those people who most need to be trusted may also prove to be capable of betrayal. Because witches and sorcerers are often believed to be resentful people of lower rank, the discourse of the occult appears to confirm equality but encourages ambition and inequality at the same time. In more egalitarian contexts, witchcraft can express a deep distrust of power and also indicate a means of containing it. In traditional settings, the occult associations of indigo reminded people of certain limits that should not be transgressed. But commerce and state development projects have also reoriented gender relations. Geschiere argues that “modern transformations have tended to corrupt notions on witchcraft, so that it risks degenerating into a discourse on power and especially on disempowerment.”35 The “resistance” Gell talks about in art objects — their ability to challenge us and captivate us visually — suggests that the “magic” of indigo dyeing and the occult arts associated with it are not destroyed by a more commercial form of production but perhaps only enhanced by it. Gell asserts that things are made as a form of instrumental action: Art (and other objects) are produced to influence the thoughts and actions of others. Even those objects that seem to be without a directly identifiable function — that is, objects that have previously been theorized as simple objects of aesthetic contemplation — are in fact made to act upon the world and to act upon other persons. Material objects thus embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency. The psychology of art needs to look at how patterns and perception have specific effects on viewers and are designed to arouse fear, desire, admiration, or confusion. Gell’s work suggests a more active model of an object’s biography, in which the object may not only assume a number of different identities as imported wealth, ancestral valuable, or commodity, but may also “interact” with the people who gaze upon it, use it, and try to possess it. Gendering objects in itself allocates aspects of agency and identity to things,36 and Gell’s model of the “distributed mind” which we find scattered through objects has a strong kinship with Strathern’s notion of the “partible person” who is divisible into things that circulate along specific exchange trajectories. The equivalence suggested between the agency of persons and of things calls into question the borders of individual persons and collective representations in a number of ways. It implies that we need to pay more attention to the phenomenological dimension of our interactions with the material world and

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interrogate the objects that fascinate us as well as our reasons for feeling this fascination. The magical practices associated with the indigo hut were, as I have argued earlier, both a form of protest and a form of resistance for Kodi women, although they were also riddled with female rivalry.37 More recent confrontations with the market, tourism, and commerce have shaped older concepts (such as the “spirit wife”) in terms of new temptations (money and bank credit). Unused to these new forms of economic calculation, and resisting the suspicions of family members, many female entrepreneurs have struggled, often with little success, to find their own way in a new world. This story of one textile “author” suggests that parts of her struggle were told through the medium of the crab designs she tied at the edges of her sarungs.

Notes My title is inspired, of course, by Anna Tsing’s influential book In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton University Press, 1993). The diamond queen was a mythological heroine who inspired a contemporary female shaman in central Kalimantan. My own story, also coming from the margins of modern Indonesia, focuses on the struggles of a real woman caught between pressures to conform to traditional notions of feminine virtue and modern possibilities for greater mobility and commercial engagement. 1. Janet Hoskins, “Why Do Ladies Sing the Blues? Indigo, Cloth Production and Gender Symbolism in Kodi,” in Cloth and Human Experience, ed. Annette Weiner and Jane Schneider, 141–143 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). Also, Jill Forshee, Between the Folds: Stories of Cloth, Life and Travels from Sumba (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001). 2. Forshee, Between the Folds. 3. See Janet Hoskins, “Snakes, Smells and Dismembered Brides: Men’s and Women’s Textiles in Kodi, West Sumba,” in Weaving Patterns of Life: Indonesian Textile Symposium, ed. M. Nabolz-Kartaschoff, R. Barnes, and D. Stuart-Fox (Museum of Ethnography, 1991); and Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (Routledge, 1998). 4. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: A New Anthropological Theory (Oxford University Press, 1998). 5. Gell, Art and Agency, 68. 6. Gell, Art and Agency, 95. 7. Hoskins, “Why Do Ladies Sing the Blues?” 8. Danielle Geirnaert, “Textiles of West Sumba: Lively Renaissance of an Old Tradition,” in To Speak with Cloth: Studies in Indonesian Textiles, ed. Mattiebelle Gittinger (Museum of Cultural History, 1989). 9. I am not certain exactly which ingredient in the indigo bath is apparently used as

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both an emmenagogue (to induce menstruation) and an abortifacient, but I suspect it might be a member of the artemisia family. Artemisia, which includes wormwood (the source of absinthe), sagebrush, tarragon, and mugwort, has an Asian variant (artemisia cina) which has recently been shown to be highly effective as a treatment for falciparum malaria. A water-soluble derivative of artmemisinin, artesunate, is now manufactured in China and Vietnam to treat choloroquin-resistant strains of malaria. See Mark Honigsbaum, The Fever Trail: in Search of the Cure for Malaria (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001), 229–230. In early American folk medicine, Mexican villages, and Indonesian commercial herbal preparations (Terence and Valerie Hull, “Means, Motives, and Menses: Uses of Herbal Emmenagogues in Indonesia,” in Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations, eds. Etienne Van de Walle and Elisha P. Renne, 208 [University of Chicago Press, 2001]), artemisia variants are consistently identified as key ingredients in herbal abortifacients, and are also used (like quinine, derived from cichona bark) to combat fevers. See Janet Farell Brodie, “Menstrual Interventions in the Nineteenth Century United States,” 50; Susan E. Klepp, “Colds, Worms and Hysteria: Menstrual Regulation in Eighteenth Century America,” 27; Sheila Cominsky, “Midwives and Menstrual Regulation: A Guatemalan Case Study,” 263; and Hull and Hull, “Means, Motives, and Menses,” all in Van de Walle and Renne, Regulating Menstruation. Kodi midwives and indigo dyers identified a series of roots (amo ghaiyo) which they said could be used to regulate the flow of blood and were used both as medicine and as poison. 10. Anthony Reid, The Lands Below the Winds, vol. 1 of Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680 (Yale University Press, 1998), 77. 11. See Hoskins, Biographical Objects, 144, for the story of a woman abducted because of the legendary beauty of her tattooed thighs. 12. Geirnaert, “Textiles of West Sumba,” 57. 13. Geirnaert, “Textiles of West Sumba,” 78, reports that this taboo had a cosmological basis: “It is necessary to tie (ikat) both ends of the island in order to keep the ‘vital fluids’ from flowing out. In between, no ikat should be done, so these fluids can circulate freely.” The idea seems to have been that the island’s waters were bound by tying thread so that the rivers would not flow out to sea. I did not hear this explanation in Kodi, nor did Jill Forshee hear it reported in East Sumba, but there are early published reports of a snake deity in Memboro instructing his followers that they could wear only black and white cloths; see J. Fabricus, De heilige paarden (The Hague, 1960). In any case, even if the taboo corresponded in part to ecological possibilities and a traditional trade economy, it seems that there was no patterned weaving in central Sumba until the introduction of commercially dyed threads after World War II. 14. Geirnaert, “Textiles of West Sumba.” 15. Laurence A. G. Moss, “International Art Collecting, Tourism and a Tribal Religion in Indonesia,” in Fragile Traditions: Indonesian Art in Jeopardy, ed. Paul Taylor, 113 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994). 16. Janet Hoskins, “Predatory Voyeurs: Tourists and ‘Tribal Violence’ in Remote Indonesia,” American Ethnologist 22:4 (2002).

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17. Marta’s interest in innovation was particularly strong, but not untypical for Sumba. Jill Forshee has documented the influence of illustrations of “primitive designs” taken from Dayak textiles from Kalimantan on ikat produced in East Sumba in the 1990s (Forshee, Between the Folds, plate 13) and also the introduction of new narrative styles of cloth design. Rather than seeing all these novelties as a corruption of earlier traditions, she argues that they show the vitality and resilience of Sumbanese textile producers: “An international audience for their cloth inspires people with an enlarged social field in which to create, compete and display. Local concerns resonate with new audiences in radically different contests, wherein the artistic inventiveness visible in cloth is enhanced by the performances of those promoting it” (Forshee, Between the Folds, 197). 18. These rates of pay in Indonesian currency made the costs for producing a single cloth of good quality roughly equivalent to two weeks’ salary for a low-ranking civil servant. Indigo dyeing obviously offered the highest rewards in relation to the amount of time invested, while the labor-intensive task of weaving was usually delegated to young women, whose time was seen as less valuable. 19. Janet Hoskins, “Snakes, Smells and Dismembered Brides: Men’s and Women’s Textiles in Kodi, West Sumba,” in Weaving Patterns of Life: Indonesian Textile Symposium, ed. M. Nabolz-Kartaschoff, R. Barnes and D. Stuart-Fox (Museum of Ethnography, 1991). 20. The funds to send Yenny Horo to school eventually came from a scholarship established by Marie Jeanne Adams, an anthropologist/art historian who did the first significant study of Sumbanese textiles in their cultural context. See Marie Jeanne Adams, System and Meaning in East Sumba Textile Design: A Study in Traditional Indonesian Art (Cultural Report 16, Southeast Asian Studies Series, Yale University, 1969). 21. The “fidelity medicine” consisted in saving sexual fluids by secretly wiping oneself after intercourse with the husband and then secretly dipping a cloth drenched with these fluids in the husband’s morning coffee for three days running. Ingesting these fluids orally was said to affect his memory so that he could never forget his first wife even while attempting to seduce other women. Its mode of efficacy seems to recall the many forms of impotence medicine that are ascribed to witches, but of course this aristocratic woman maintained that “it was not witchcraft if you used it only on your own husband.” Because she had the old raja wrapped around her little finger in financial matters, Marta Mete was also accused of using forms of love magic. She was said to emphasize sexual attraction over reproduction, having fewer children but getting more attention from her husband because of her nubile body and youthful demeanor. 22. Webb Keane, “Money is No Object: Materiality, Desire, and Modernity in an Indonesian Society,” in The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, ed. Fred Myers, 72 (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series, 2001). 23. Hoskins, Biographical Objects, 83–113. 24. Janet Hoskins, The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, Time and History (University of California Press), 224–226.

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25. Keane, “Money is No Object,” 80. 26. Hoskins, The Play of Time, 259–263; Hoskins, Biographical Objects, 88–91. 27. As Keane does in “Money is No Object,” 80. 28. Hoskins, The Play of Time, 224–226, 259–263. 29. Here it seems useful to quote a passage from The Play of Time, which glosses this couplet as it appears in the Kodi language (Djakababa’s reference is to the same concept in the language of Rara, a highland domain directly to east of Kodi): “The spirit of wealth is not automatically passed down the patriline: each descendant must prove himself worthy of it and show the strength of spirit to control its demands. The wild spirit’s intimate relationship with a human friend is described as “[close as] the two pockets of a betel pouch, [tense as] two feet on a climbing rope” (ndepeto kaleku, hangato kalembe) — a dangerous combination of intimacy and the possibility of betrayal. For the person strong enough to control these magical powers, such a spirit can be a source of great wealth. But for someone who is not compatible (whose “body hair does not suit it”), such contact leads to exhaustion, emaciation, and premature death” (Hoskins, The Play of Time, 225). 30. Hoskins, “Predatory Voyeurs,” 117. 31. Hoskins, “Predatory Voyeurs,” 118. 32. Hoskins, “Predatory Voyeurs,” 118. 33. See discussion in Hoskins, Biographical Objects, 102–105; and Hoskins, The Play of Time, 290–294. 34. Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (University of Virginia Press, 1997), 23–24. 35. Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft, 135. 36. Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (University of California Press, 1988); and Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies (Manchester University Press, 1992). 37. Hoskins, “Why Do Ladies Sing the Blues?” 141–173.

Movements

five | james l. hevia

Plunder, Markets, and Museums The Biographies of Chinese Imperial Objects in Europe and North America

One of the recurring features of European imperial warfare in the nineteenth century was plunder. In Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, the armies of European nation-states sacked the royal palaces and cities of the defeated, often focusing special attention on the regalia and symbols of rulership. Objects seized through warfare invariably found their way back into Europe, circulating through art markets and into private collections and public museums, or placed directly into the regimental headquarters of the conquering armies. Some of these objects remain where they were deposited over one hundred years ago. Others have been recirculated through markets, museums, private collections, and art history books, acquiring, in Igor Kopytoff’s terms, additional biographical elements.1 Fortunately for the biographer of their careers, when they moved they more often than not left a trail, a paper trail of material citations and references. These records of sitings included military prize rolls and campaign accounts, newspaper notices, bills of sale, museum accession records, labels in museum displays, auction catalogues and art history books, and drawings or photographs in collection inventories, sales catalogues, and newspaper articles. Each citation, in turn, enmeshed the objects in dense referential grids, including taxonomic categories, aesthetic schemes, and temporal and spatial signifiers. Through these processes alien proper names adhered to and circulated with the objects. In the case of Qing imperial objects looted from the “Summer Palace of the Emperor of China” in 1860, the initial names were things like dragon robes, jade scepters, cloisonné incense burners, lacquered or “Japaned” boxes, porcelain jars, and wine cups. In an exercise of power in which plunder stood for the humiliation of the haughty Chinese monarch and his mandarins, these designations were understood to be transparent translations of Chinese ideograms.

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Indeed, in many cases, the pieces, especially those made of jade and porcelain, came with labels affixed by the imperial household department, the better to assert the clean fit across the linguistic divide. Later, these same objects would take on additional specifications as more and more was learned about their attributes, histories, manufacture, and so on. Some would even make another kind of journey. They would move from the realm of exotic curiosities of the Orient to decorative arts, and eventually to fine arts, linking them to dense material discourses related to colonial expansion on the one hand, and the appropriation by an emergent bourgeoisie of a pan-European aristocratic culture on the other. In what follows, I will track the movement of some of these objects to demonstrate just how heavily mediated and ideologically saturated were the practices associated with plunder and circulation. At the end of the chapter, I will discuss the recent sense of scandal that the continued movement of these objects has generated in the People’s Republic of China.

Plunder When Baghdad fell to the conquering forces of the United States and the “coalition of the willing” a few years ago, recall the expressions of outrage over the sacking of several museums in the city. Behind these sentiments lay a long history of international efforts to prevent looting in time of war. Beginning with the Hague Conventions in 1898, a series of international agreements had outlawed plunder and had made it the responsibility of military forces to guarantee that looting did not take place.2 But if “laws of land warfare” mediated the activities of armies in the twentieth century, no law prevented any army in the nineteenth century or earlier from garnering the fruits of what were normally presented as just warfare. And while bourgeois sensibilities might see plunder as a transgression of civilized behavior, in Africa and Asia, the principle of “to the victor went the spoils” remained the norm.3 On the other hand, those same sensibilities might expect no better from the lower orders enrolled in imperial armies. This is perhaps why the act of plunder, at least among enlisted men, was ascribed to an atavistic quality of human nature, the usual manifestation of which was held in check by military discipline and the threat of punishment. Under certain conditions, however, neither discipline nor punishment held the baser aspects of nature in check. The issue, therefore, had less to do with preventing looting than finding the means to manage and channel it in productive directions. In the case of British imperial forces, my primary focus

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here, this was accomplished by shifting objects from plunder into a militarylegal category termed “prize.”4 Briefly, what we see in this process was the application of naval prize law to land warfare. From at least the early fifteenth century the principle was established that booty taken at sea was the legal property of the British sovereign.5 At the discretion of the monarch, portions of the plunder could be awarded to the naval forces involved. From the reign of George III forward, a series of parliamentary laws created procedures for the disposition of plunder taken in land warfare.6 Parliamentary acts were based on the notion that unless there was a promise that plunder would be equitably distributed among forces, armies would become undisciplined mobs. To avoid such a possibility, lawmakers and military authorities treated plunder as the natural fruits of victory. They converted looting, with its threats to order, into prize, the lawful reward of righteous warfare, while transforming the stolen objects into private property. The procedures used by the British army for legalizing plunder included the following. Commanders in the field appointed prize agents to organize a prize commission and issued orders for all loot to be turned over to the commission. The commission inventoried all plunder, arranged for its sale at public auction after the campaign, kept meticulous records of each sale, and created a prize roll indicating how much money was to go to members of each rank in the force. Records of sales were forwarded to the Royal Hospital at Chelsea, which administered the allotment of prize money and kept records. Chelsea placed public notices of prize allotments, and soldiers or their heirs, with the proper forms of proof of service, could claim the money. During the invasion of China in 1860, these procedures were implemented following the sacking of the Summer Palace, a complex of gardens, pavilions, and palaces northwest of Beijing, by French, British, and Indian army regiments. When it was clear that his forces were as actively involved in the plunder as the French, the British commander, General Hope Grant, created a prize committee and implemented prize rules. But instead of removing the loot to a new site for sale, the auction was held immediately in the field. Items were sold to the looters themselves and the prize money apportioned on the spot.7 When the auction ended, prize money totaling £26,000 had been realized. With Hope Grant and his two generals of division, Michel and Napier, relinquishing their shares, it was divided up among officers and men as follows: first-class field officers, £60; second-class field officers, £50; chaplains, £40; lieutenants, £30; ensigns, £20; sergeants, etc., £7 10s.; privates, £5.8 Indian sol-

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diers, who made up a third of the army, were not included in the distribution, but were allowed to keep whatever they had looted. Although the processes of collection, auction, and redistribution of proceeds might seem unnecessarily involved, I would argue that their importance lay in the way Chinese imperial objects were thereby organized into a moral order of law and private property. The orderly procedures of prize deflected and channeled the potentially disruptive desires generated by the treasures of the emperor’s palaces into the pacific feelings consistent with equitable distribution. Moreover, because the distribution of prize money was done on the basis of rank and race, it also had the practical effect of reproducing the proper structure of the army, while maintaining a hierarchical distinction between British forces and Indian army units. With the army now sealed off from the polluting effects of plunder, the lesson should have been clear — disciplined forces, not a mob of looters like the French, achieved righteous conquest. Yet if these were the general points that prize law affirmed and reinforced, there were other kinds of meanings attached to loot and looting that elevated plunder beyond the mundane routines and rituals of the British army. First, and perhaps most importantly, loot stood as material proof of British superiority over the Chinese emperor and his empire. Loot bore the signs of the humbling of China’s haughty monarch and mandarins and stood as an object lesson for others who might contemplate defying British power.9 Such assertions of humiliation and dominance were especially pertinent to objects that could be identified as having a substantive connection to the emperor’s rulership. Interestingly, these included gifts previously given to Qing emperors by European monarchs and Manchu-Chinese symbols of imperial sovereignty. The first group was made up of numerous mechanical clocks and watches, one of which was said to be the very timepiece presented by Lord Macartney to the Qianlong emperor in 1793, the cannon that Macartney had brought as a gift from George III, works of fine art like an “extremely good French enamel” done by “Petitot” and a tapestry from Louis XIV that now hangs in the Ashmolean Library, Oxford, after having passed through the Victoria and Albert Museum.10 The second group, symbols of Qing imperial sovereignty, was made up of dragon robes and armor, jade scepters, several throne cushions, the “Cap of the Emperor of China,” imperial seals, a carved screen “from behind the Emperor’s throne,” pages from the Qing Court’s Illustrated Catalogue of Ritual Implements (Huangchao liqi tushi), which included hand-painted color drawings of court robes of emperors and empresses, various objects from the emperor’s private quarters, such as a small jade-covered book said to be the

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sayings of Confucius, a Tibetan ritual vessel purportedly containing the skull of Confucius, and a Pekinese dog, appropriately christened “Looty.” Much like the looted regalia of South Asian and African kings,11 imperial objects were sent to Queen Victoria, where they took their place with other symbols of the British monarchy. A large collection was also sent to France. After appearing on exhibit at the Tuileries, these objects became part of Empress Eugénie’s Oriental collection, where they presumably served a similar purpose as items given to the British monarch. Other pieces were deposited in the officer’s mess of various of the regiments involved, or entered regimental museums as trophies of war. As if to emphasize this triumph over the Chinese monarch, these and other Qing imperial objects also carried the proper name “From the Summer Palace of the Emperor of China.” If links to the emperor’s person established one sort of value for looted objects, there were others as well. In both campaign accounts and in London auction house records they were also referred to as “curiosities,” a term rich in historical significance. It had referred, for example, to collections of objects brought to Europe from other parts of the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and displayed in “cabinets of curiosities.” In this setting, curiosities stood as “singularities” that, because “anomalous,” defied taxonomic classification.12 By the end of the eighteenth century, the term was used to decontextualize South Pacific artifacts collected by the Cook expeditions and reorganize them into motifs, which foregrounded a collector’s claims of disinterested scientific inquiry. With respect to things Chinese, the term “curiosities” had been applied to collections that appeared at shows held in London in 1842 and 1847, and in the China section of the 1851 Crystal Palace exposition.13 While these various senses of the curiosity may have operated with respect to Summer Palace loot, they were given added weight by the fact that the objects themselves were not produced for export trade or gathered at one of China’s treaty ports for a London show. They were, instead, royal exotica. For some, such as Garnet Wolseley, quartermaster of the British forces, this made them exceptional candidates for consideration as examples of the stagnation and backwardness of Chinese civilization and the effete taste of her rulers.14 To summarize, objects looted from the Summer Palace in 1860 had a variety of meanings attached to them. They could signify the orderly reconstitution of the British army and the disorderly conduct of the French, the humiliation of the emperor of China, the expanded sovereignty of British and French monarchs, the situating of things Chinese in a global discourse on the curiosities of non-European peoples, and, as commodities, the common sense

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of capitalist market exchange. These meanings adhered to the objects once they left China and began to circulate in an alien environment on the other side of the Eurasian land mass.

Circulation in Europe In auctions in Paris and London between 1861 and 1865, French and British collectors, art dealers, and the public in general had the opportunity to see and buy Summer Palace curiosities. The first appearance in auction records was in London in 1861. The items were put up for sale by the courier who carried the dispatches that announced the defeat of China and the sack of the palaces to the British government and Parliament. Over the course of the next few years, Summer Palace loot appeared in a dozen or more auctions in both London and Paris. Moreover, sales of the items continued through the end of the century, with the Summer Palace designation indicating their provenance in newspaper advertisements. Occasionally such sales involved the disposition of the estates of campaign participants.15 This recommodification and recirculation of Chinese imperial regalia was paralleled by public display, first in the aforementioned Tuileries exhibit and later in the 1862 London International Exhibition.16 By the 1870s, objects began to enter the collections of public museums such as the Victoria and Albert and British Museums. Moreover, in many cases the epithet “from the Summer Palace of the Emperor of China” became part of the provenance of the items and, as we shall soon see, remained so down to the present. In the late nineteenth century, other forms of address were added to the biography of the careers of Summer Palace loot. This involved the accretion of layers of new knowledge onto things Chinese. For purposes here, I can only draw attention to part of this process of knowledge production. The key point was that this knowledge was produced not in Europe, but in China, by Western diplomatic agents, who in their spare time took up the study of Chinese objects and by so doing transformed them from curiosities into art. In the English-speaking world, the central figure was Stephen Bushell, the surgeon at the British legation in Beijing from 1868 to 1900. Through his study of objects available in Beijing through the art market and in the collections of Chinese connoisseurs and his translation of Chinese works on porcelain and jade, Bushell provided a host of new nomenclature, ranging from transliterated words for objects to wholly new classification schemes based on historical typologies, sites of manufacture, and descriptions that allowed pieces to be more accurately dated, all of which was based on references to

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more than a hundred Chinese sources. He also provided translations of the Chinese dating ideograms found on the bottom of pieces. Bushell’s efforts made it possible to identify previous errors in writings on Chinese porcelain and jade, and hence put the descriptive tags and accession files in order. For the first time, collectors and museums were able to place the authenticity of their holdings on a firm footing. At a stroke, Bushell also transformed the market, for it was now possible, with an unprecedented sense of certainty, to identify fakes and reward true value. Between 1897 and 1904, Bushell’s classification scheme became the standard for public and private collections, including the Walters and Morgan holdings and those of the Smithsonian in the United States, as well as the holdings of the Victoria and Albert and British Museums in London.17 We can glimpse some of the magic wrought by Bushell in a 1915 exhibition by the Burlington Fine Arts Club. The club had sponsored a few shows of Chinese porcelain in the 1870s and 1880s. These seem to have been framed around simple principles of organization such as “Blue and White” porcelain, a standard art market designation at the time. By 1915, however, substantive changes were evident in catalogue presentations, indicating the circulation and adoption of Bushell’s classification and descriptive schemes. It was perhaps at this show or one like it that aesthetes like Clive Bell could begin to look on Chinese objects in a new way, contemplating, as it were, a universal language of aesthetic form. But that is another story. What I’d like to draw attention to here is that Burlington’s 1915 show brought Summer Palace objects from private collections into public view. Donations came from luminaries such as Sir Isidore Spielman, the Marquis of Clanricarde, Lord Allendale, and Lady Sackville. One piece stands out. It was immersed in the following catalogue description. WINE-CUP. Silver, cast, repoussé and chased, in the form of a hollow, somewhat boat-shaped log, in which sits Li Po, the famous poet. On the scars of the log are engraved inscriptions, including the name of the cup, ch’a-pei (raft, log, driftwood, or rustic cup), the signature of the artist, Chu Hua-yü or Chu Pi-shan, a poem by the same name, and a date corresponding to A.D. 1345. Its history is as follows. It was handed down from Chih-chēng (1341 to 1367), last Emperor of the Yüan dynasty, and was used by Chu Pi-shan as a sconcing-cup for his Hall of Literary Competition. In 1689 it was bought by Kao Shih-ch’i from a boatman on the banks of the West River, whence it had perhaps been dredged up. It seems to

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have been acquired shortly before 1777 by the Emperor Ch’ien-lung, who caused the foregoing history and a description of the cup to be engraved on the box which still enshines it. Purchased by the lender in Peking in 1861, after the looting of the Summer Palace. Lent by Gen. Sir Robert Biddulph18 Evident in this description is a new form of identification, one built around an expertise in the Chinese language. While we may assume that General Biddulph probably did not have such talents, he would have had access to the linguists in the British legation in Beijing, people whose Chinese language training was more than adequate to the task of translating and providing the standard Wade-Giles orthography for Chinese ideograms. Also worth noting is the reference to the Beijing market. Soon after the establishment of the British legation in Beijing in 1861, Chinese art dealers began to arrive at the doors. Sources say they were offering items like those that had been looted the year before. Other sources tell of Summer Palace loot turning up for sale in Chinese curio shops in Canton (Guangzhou), incorporating, through processes of reterritorialization, ever-increasing elements of the China coast into global capitalist markets.19

Recirculations The research involved in this chapter began in 1987 and included the Victoria and Albert, the British Museum, and the Royal Engineers Barracks in Chatham. Subsequently, I added other sites such as the Musée de Fountainebleu outside of Paris, the Summer Palace Museum in Beijing, and regimental museums scattered around the British Isles. In 1987 it was common to find the Summer Palace reference on museum display tags, along with accretions of new knowledge produced by twentiethcentury art history. The development of a field of art history on China was, in turn, paralleled by periodic waves of the sell-off of imperial art in the general outflow of objects from East Asia brought on by war and revolution.20 While this pattern was different from European military plunder in the nineteenth century, the new objects circulated through the same markets and museums as their predecessors and took up positions adjacent to them. This proximity was visible not only on the shelves of museums and auction house, but in the accession records of the major museums. These records allowed one to fill in biographical detail and flesh out careers of Summer Palace objects, some of which never turned up in the nineteenth-

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century campaign accounts. For example, volumes from The Record of the Qianlong Emperor’s Ten Great Campaigns were donated to the British Museum in 1872 and came with a Summer Palace designation. Another Qianlong-era text from the same site was purchased in 1906 from a Paris dealer for £100. But perhaps the most interesting of the textual materials were pages from the Qing Court’s Illustrated Catalogue of Ritual Implements, mentioned earlier. This version was made of large-format, hand-painted leaves, other parts of which were in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Scottish Museum, and the National Museum of Ireland. The British Museum had purchased its portion in 1924 from Henry Knollys, author of several works on the 1860 campaign, and had then sold off parts to the other museums to recover its costs.21 In addition, the British Museum also held seals of the Qianlong emperor. Although none mentioned the Summer Palace, they told their own tales of circulation, mentioning Raphael, “Mallet of Bath,” Franks, and Christy’s bequests. All of the bequests, in turn, obliquely referenced changes in British inheritance laws, providing yet more meaning surrounding the objects. Meanwhile, in the early 1990s, the French government restored the Empress Eugénie’s “Oriental Collection” to its original splendor at Fontainebleu. To commemorate its opening as a public museum, a catalogue and postcards were printed for sale at the new museum gift shop.22 There were similar kinds of reworkings afoot at regimental headquarters, where substantial resources were put into renovating or inaugurating museum displays. Summer Palace objects, ranging from an imperial throne and throne cushions at the Royal Engineers museum to imperial robes at the Royal Wiltshire Regiment museum, were now organized into a chronological history of military campaigns from roughly the sixteenth century forward. These visible signs of triumph sat beside battle honors — in this case the Taku Forts and Pekin 1860 — that were prominently displayed on regimental colors.23 Other Summer Palace objects found themselves recommodified. In 1988, Sotheby’s auctioned off what it termed “original paintings from the Summer Palace Beijing” and included reference to the first sale of these paintings in London in 1863 as part of their provenance; the anticipated price was £80,000–£100,000. In 1993, Christie’s offered a white jade bowl said to have come via an American private collection from the estate of Sir John Michel. The asking price was between $150,000 and $250,000.24 Even more recently, items identified as from the Summer Palace turned up in “The Imperial Sale” held by Christie’s in Hong Kong in 1996, with pieces that appeared in the 1915 Burlington Fine Arts show.25 Finally, in 2001,

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Sotheby’s and Christie’s Hong Kong included four items from the Summer Palace in a second “Imperial Sale.” Two bronze animal heads (a monkey and an ox) were identified as from the zodiac of twelve animals on the water clock the Qianling emperor had commissioned his Jesuit missionaries to build in the European section of the Summer Palace. This sale proved to be the last straw for the government of the People’s Republic. Outraged, officials formally protested, requesting that Christie’s and Sotheby’s withdraw the items. When the auction houses refused, an unprecedented event occurred — mainland Chinese companies intervened and bought the objects, paying in excess of $6 million for the four pieces, three times the asking price.26 This singular and costly act of repatriation points to another biographical thread, another form of circulation of Summer Palace plunder. In this part of the narrative, the careers of Qing imperial objects are an absent presence in a tale of loss, humiliation, and the recovery of national sovereignty. Inscribed in this story is the refiguring of the Summer Palace by the Chinese government as a people’s park and permanent memorial to the depredations of Euro-American imperialism in nineteenth-century China. In 1997, with the recession of Hong Kong, a memorial was dedicated to that history. The “Never Forget National Humiliation” monument contained a densely written history of China’s “Century of Humiliation,” from the first Opium War (1839) to liberation (1949). Sitting close by is a history museum where Victor Hugo’s scathing critique of the looting and destruction of the Summer Palace sits beside reproductions of the recently produced French catalogue of the Empress Eugénie’s collection outside Paris. In this setting, the representations of lost objects rest near drawings of the destroyed architecture of the past, reminding a new generation of the humiliations that accompany technological and economic “backwardness.”27 It needs to be emphasized, however, that the rhetorical force of this nationalist argument is predicated on long-standing networks of relations between Europe, North America, and China, networks that carried more than Western arms and armies to East Asia. Also circulating were the products of the efforts of Bushell and others to reclassify Qing court objects and curiosities as Chinese art. Today, we see those efforts refigured in China as part of a global discourse on human cultural heritage, artistic contributions to world civilization, and transcultural aesthetic values.28 As elsewhere, value is not exclusively drawn from a rich history of local debate and discussion, but instead is fused with a collection of notions that circulated out of Europe and into China from the mid-nineteenth century forward. Translated into the local idiom, while appropriating elements of the local, this hybrid formation travels

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through the same venues as that of Summer Palace plunder, identifying them as discrete objects of desire for the universal connoisseur. Since the mid-1990s, the international auction market has also been present in China. Dynastic objects are commodified for global consumption, while local newspapers find confirmation of their value as high art through the bids made by foreigners. In Beijing and Shanghai, new art complexes have emerged, following European and American standards, which are understood to be global ones. Art books are evident in bookstores throughout China, implicitly and explicitly locating Chinese objects in comparative relation to the high art of Europe. Chinese artists, meanwhile capture Euro-American tastes as they make their work more desirable to foreign buyers. This current version of Chinese modernity is, in other words, unthinkable outside of the process by which Summer Palace loot was transformed into art and commodities.

Notes 1. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai, 64–68 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 2. For the particulars of the convention, see Charles Bevins, Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1876–1949 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968–1976), Vol. 1, 260. 3. During the suppression of the Boxer movement in 1900, Beijing was again sacked. John MacDonnell drew attention to the fact that different rules seemed to operate in Asia, for even though all participants, including China, were signatories of the Hague conventions, Beijing and its environs were still indiscriminately plundered. John MacDonnell, “Looting in China,” Contemporary Review 79 (March 1901): 444–452. 4. The French military, which was also involved in this campaign, seem to have assumed that looting would run a natural course to complete exhaustion of all involved. At that point, the army could be reconstituted. See Maurice D’Herrison, “The Loot of the Imperial Summer Palace at Pekin,” in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 601–635 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901). 5. For a history of prize law, see C. J. Colombos, A Treatise on the Law of Prize (London: The Grotius Society, 1940). 6. See The Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 54 George III (1814): v. 54, 328–351; 1&2 George IV (1821): v. 61, 210–211; 2&3 William IV (1832): v. 72, 236–259. 7. For accounts of the auction, see Gerald Graham, Life, Letters, and Diaries of Lieut.-General Sir Gerald Graham, ed. R. H. Vetch (London: Blackwood, 1901), 189; Henry Knollys, Incidents in the China War of 1860 Compiled from the Private Journals of General Sir Hope Grant (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1876), 193–195; R. J. L. M’Ghee, How We Got to Peking (London: Richard Bentley,

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1862), 211; Robert Swinhoe, Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860 (London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1861), 311; P. Beauchamp Walker, Days of a Soldier’s Life (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894), 213; and Garnet J. Wolseley, Narrative of the War With China in 1860 (Reprinted, Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc, [1862] 1972), 237–242. 8. The figures are from Knollys, Incidents in the China War of 1860, 226–227. In 1861 the average monthly pay of a sowar or trooper in an Indian army cavalry unit was 27 rupees. After the deduction of fees for the maintenance of uniforms, billet, horse, and transport, the trooper was left with about 8 rupees, which would make the China prize money equivalent to about six months’ take-home pay. In 1855 the monthly pay of British officers in the Indian army was as follows: Colonel, 1,478 rupees; Lt. Colonel, 1,157 rupees; Major, 929 rupees; Captain, 563 rupees; Lieutenant, 365 rupees; and Ensign, 311 rupees. All figures are from T. A. Heathcote, The Indian Army (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1974), 110, 128, who gives the exchange rate for this period at roughly 10 rupees to the pound. 9. Links between plundered objects and the signs they bore were legion in campaign accounts; see, for example, Swinhoe, Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860, 311–312, and George Allgood, China War 1860: Letters and Journals (London: Longmans, Green, 1901), 60. 10. For a fuller discussion of the objects mentioned here and in the next two paragraphs, complete with references and pictures of some of the objects, see James L. Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth Century China (Durham and Hong Kong: Duke University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2003), 86–90. 11. See Carol Breckenridge, “The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at the World Fairs,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 2 (1989): 195–216. 12. See B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Objects of Ethnography,” in I. Karp and S. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures, 392 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). 13. On cabinets of curiosities, see K. Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); and O. Impey, Chinoiserie (London: Oxford University Press, 1977). On the Cook voyages, see Nicholas Thomas, “Licensed Curiosity: Cook’s Pacific Voyages,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. Roger Cardinal and John Elsner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Robert Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1978), for Chinese objects in London shows. 14. Wolseley, Narrative of the War With China in 1860, 232–237. 15. Several such advertisements appeared in The Times of London between 1870 and 1902. I have located fourteen such notices in all. Objects from the Hope Grant collection were auctioned in 1893 and the Charles Gordon collection the following year. See The Times, March 8, 1893, p. 16, and January 23, 1894, p. 12. 16. See The Illustrated London News, April 13, 1861 and J. B. Waring, Masterpieces

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of Industrial Art & Sculpture at the International Exhibition, 1862, vol. 3 (London: Day & Son, 1863). 17. Stephen W. Bushell, Oriental Ceramic Art: Collection of W. T. Walters (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1899); Stephen W. Bushell, Chinese Porcelain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908); Stephen W. Bushell, Chinese Art (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1924 [1904]); Stephen W. Bushell, A Description of Chinese Porcelain, Being a Translation of the Tao Shuo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); and Stephen W. Bushell with W. M. Laffan, Catalogue of the Morgan Collection of Chinese Porcelains (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1907 [1904]). 18. Burlington Fine Arts Club, Catalogue of a Collection of Objects of Chinese Art (London: Privately printed for the Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1915), 9. 19. The Illustrated London News, April 13, 1861; David F. Rennie, The British Arms in North China and Japan: Peking 1860; Kagoshima 1862 (London: John Murray, 1864), vol. 1: 289–292, 300–302, 313–314, 324–325; and vol. 2: 100. 20. See Warren I. Cohen, East Asian Art and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 21. See British Museum accession records on these items. 22. See Colombe Samoyault-Verlet, Le Musée chinois de l’ impétrice Eugénie (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musée nationaux, 1994). Photographs of the collection that appear in this volume are on display at the Summer Palace Museum in Beijing; see below. 23. Personal communication from Simon Jones at the Royal Engineers Barracks noting changes since my visit there in 1986. The Royal Wiltshire Regiment museum displays a Qing imperial robe that can be found on their website. 24. Sotheby’s, The Library of Philip Robinson: Part II, The Chinese Collection (London: Sotheby’s, 1988), 34–39; and personal communication from Susan Naquin on December 2, 1993, Christie’s sale in New York. 25. The Daily Telegraph (London), April 29, 1996, p. 18. 26. New York Times, April 29, May 1, May 3, 2000. 27. These comments are based on visits to the Summer Palace park on numerous occasions between 1987 and 2003. 28. On world heritage in China, see James L. Hevia, “World Heritage, National Culture and the Restoration of Chengde,” positions: east asia cultures critique 9, no. 1 (2000): 219–244.

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Situating Moving Objects A Sino-Japanese Catalogue of Imported Items, 800 ce to the Present

(A)lthough I may deserve to be punished by death because I did not remain in China for the full period expected of me, I am secretly delighted with my good fortune to be alive and to be able to import these [Buddhist] teachings, so difficult to obtain.1 With these words the Japanese monk Kūkai (774–835) introduced to his emperor a new body of Buddhist teachings, the Esoteric (or Mikkyō) tradition. When Kūkai set sail in 804 for Tang China with a diplomatic mission, he had only recently been accorded official clerical status. Nonetheless, his religious devotion and knowledge of Chinese literature helped Kūkai find acceptance in the monasteries of the Tang capital, Chang’an. For about thirteen months, renowned teachers instructed him there, the Chinese Buddhist master Huiguo (746–805) foremost among them. The passage quoted above is drawn from Kūkai’s Catalogue of Imported Items (Shōrai mokuroku, hereafter Catalogue), which he submitted to the imperial court in 806 on his return from China. Elsewhere in this Catalogue, Kūkai recalls the admonitions of his master, Huiguo: I am not long for this world now. I urge you, take with you these great mandala paintings of the two realms, the hundred scrolls on the Esoteric teachings, and these items I inherited from my teacher [Amoghavajra], together with the ritual items — take them, return to your homeland, and spread the teachings. . . . The sutras have been copied and the images created. Return to your country swiftly, offer these items to the court, and propagate the teachings across the land to increase the people’s happiness. When you do so, the country will be at peace and its citizens content.2 Most of the temples, icons, and ritual implements that Kūkai experienced in China have not survived there. Several of the Chinese keepsakes he received

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from Huiguo (figs. 6.2 and 6.3), however, have been preserved for twelve hundred years in Japan, along with five Chinese paintings of the patriarchs in Kūkai’s Mikkyō lineage (related works, figs. 6.4 and 6.5) and a few Chinese ritual implements (fig. 6.1). These items are each listed in the Catalogue. Of related interest are ninth-century Japanese mandala paintings based on Chinese works inventoried in the Catalogue but lost (the Takao [sanji] mandala). There also exist Japanese copies of items omitted from the official record, such as iconographic drawings of the Esoteric divinities. The scholarly literature that speaks to the transmission of a Buddhist teaching from India to China, or from China to Japan, deals with the moving of ideas and doctrine through the agency of Buddhist monks and/or Buddhist texts. With hindsight, we may understand that the Catalogue and the legacy of its contents provide concrete indications of the role that ritual objects, icons, and all manner of material and visual culture played in the transmission of Buddhism — which is too often understood in isolation as philosophy and ideas — and in the formation of Japanese perceptions about Chinese culture at all levels of society. Buddhist objects themselves are powerful legitimating and proselytizing aspects of Buddhism. The imported items had great power, not only as elements vital to ritual efficacy, but also as rare and precious Chinese artifacts. Many were housed in temples, and some were also available for use or viewing by lay patrons. The imagery and forms of Kūkai’s imported objects became widely known in both temple and secular settings in a process of cultural diffusion. The legacy of the master adheres to them more and more with each passing generation so that they become Japanese in ways unique to objects. Texts may be received as objects, too, and the body of texts that Kūkai imported were similarly copied and offered up as proof of legitimacy. This same legitimacy often adheres to symbols or objects of royal authority, as in Pedersen’s discussion of the Balinese ceremonial dagger (keris) as an “object that embodies and generates collective history and identity.” The precious Buddhist artifacts and texts listed in the Catalogue are the subject of this chapter. Its focus will be less on individual objects and their formal characteristics than on their reception, use, and artistic transformation by Japanese priests, artists, and patrons. The primary goal of this analysis is to recognize the critical role of Buddhist visual culture and material artifacts (Buddhist “art”) as central to the movement and reception of Buddhist teachings between cultures, complementing but also taking effect differently than texts. It suggests that the role of visual and material culture in “religious” transmission is particularly striking in the case of Kūkai’s ninth-century Mikkyō teachings. Like the Khmer cultural treasures taken overseas by French “mis-

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sions,” there occurred in tandem with the reception of Kūkai’s imported cache a cultural transmission and transformation even when the texts and ritual goods were not visibly altered. The imported Catalogue items acquired and generated meaning primarily through their historical and physical association with Kūkai and all that the name and presence of the master represented. Today’s Buddhist “art” was (and may yet be) many things: a treasured icon or object, a major or inclusive ritual form (locus or agency), a topography of conceptual modes of thought, the source of prestige and legitimacy, a form of religious inheritance, a cultural sign, or the basis for artistic innovation and copies. This chapter will highlight the material and visual impact of the goods: the ways form and image were historically and conceptually framed by the Catalogue; interpreted and used as cultural constructs and Buddhist adornment by local recipients, including artists and ritual technicians; and the types of cultural or artistic production they engendered.

Issues: The Catalogue, 806 CE to the Present Historically, the contents of the inventory and the Catalogue itself are of great significance. First, because the cache of imported goods provided material proof of Kūkai’s activities in China and the transmission of the teachings, they were integral to his reputation and fame. Second, they were novel. The imported texts and visual culture were Japan’s first exposure to a system of Esoteric Buddhist teachings. As a new form of magical protection for Buddhist rulers and subjects, an intangible prestige could transfer to the items and Kūkai. Third, they were Chinese or foreign in origin in a period when China was admired and goods from the continent prized. Indeed, the court kept the Catalogue goods for three years at the same time as the imported texts were copied and scrutinized by the Nara clergy. Fourth, over time there adhered to both the extant items of the imported cache and their copies an accretion of histories. The objects potentially speak both to “worlds lost” and “worlds gained.” Foremost among those gained was a history of connection with Kūkai. As Kūkai became a historical personage, the imported icons, ritual goods, and texts became part of the Japanese artistic canon and Japanese Buddhist history. A parallel shift of origin of the goods occurred over time alongside the promotion by the Shingon sect of Kūkai’s activities in China as the true source of Japanese Esotericism. Kūkai’s Catalogue, as both a historical document as well as the goods it itemized, was the genesis and proof for a history of not only Japanese “Esoteric” Buddhism but also Chinese Esoteric Buddhism. The texts and objects were suffixed to an Esoteric history created

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in Japan that linked Kūkai and his knowledge to China and India, potent religious and visual sources. Finally, the visual and visually conceptual impact of the imported goods was profound, both in the Buddhist monastery and in the broader artistic and cultural context. We associate Esoteric visuality with a vast pantheon of divinities, many of which were entirely new in ninth-century Japan. The ritual paintings and implements itemized in the Catalogue generated a thread of copies and related forms that further solidified their place as the source of Esoteric visual proofs. This chapter intends to draw attention to the visual culture that constituted an important part of Kūkai’s ancient Buddhist transmission. At the same time, it understands the many imported texts themselves as “material culture.” Their replication and dissemination among temples and clerics conceptually links them to visual culture examples such as mandala and iconographic drawings, which were copied and used in religious study and ritual. Although recent studies have begun to address the role of visual culture in Buddhist practice and the strategies of reception that shape the meaning of art and practice alike, neither the scholarship on Esoteric Buddhism and its history nor the copious literature on East Asian Buddhist art emphasizes visuality and materiality as a vital component of Buddhist transmission. Rather, text and doctrine are understood as “Buddhism,” and art as “ritual tool” or evidence of patronage; for scholars, visual culture (icons, some types of ritual goods) and texts are typically held as distinct, even if for practitioners they are each part of an engagement with Buddhism that encompasses the scholarly categories of visual reception, belief, ritual practice, monastery, and community, among many others. Most of the research on the Catalogue so far has focused on the imported texts, including sutras, commentaries, and philosophical and secular treatises. Indeed, the title has been shortened to Catalogue of Imported Texts.3 In the only full translation of the Catalogue, the itemized lists of paintings, keepsakes, and ritual objects are not — despite their brevity — translated in full, but summarized.4 Commonly given as Shōrai mokuroku (Imported inventory), the title used by Kūkai (in the earliest surviving copy of the work) is Jo shinshōraikyōtō mokuroku hyō (Presenting a catalogue of newly imported sūtras and other items). The term mokuroku (Ch. mulu) is a common one in the official literature of premodern East Asia. In order to evaluate the standing of Buddhism in their realms, Chinese emperors would commission such mulu of ritual objects and texts that had been translated, copied, or printed. Such catalogues were simultaneously simple listings of holdings and indications to all of the merit

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of the emperor and the strength of his realm. A glance at Kūkai’s Catalogue headings demonstrates that texts are only a part of the imported picture. Newly translated sūtras (142 works in 247 fascicles) Sanskrit [works] (42 works in 44 fascicles) Treatises, commentaries, essays, etc. (32 works in 170 fascicles) Icons,5 etc. (five different types of mandala paintings and five portraits of the masters6) Ritual implements (9 types, 18 items) Items handed down by the masters (13 items in two groups) Three Sanskrit manuscripts The many items in the Catalogue have never been discussed in the sectarian or scholarly literature as a group.7 In spite of the goods’ extraordinary significance, there is not a single article in English or Japanese on the whole body of imported items, nor on the complete body of icons and ritual implements. Even the latter are typically discussed not as a group but as artificial subgroups according to the institutions that preserve them.8 Existing scholarship duplicates the same general information about an object time and time again, featuring material and technical, stylistic, or iconographic analysis without regard to reception and changing meanings. Despite the paucity of extant Chinese Buddhist art from the eighth and ninth centuries, especially works defined by modern scholars as Esoteric, the imported materials have not been well-studied by Chinese art historians either — due in part to their inaccessibility in Japanese temple collections. Because much of the art history literature is by sectarian scholars, questions of provenance or historical details of the Catalogue works are sometimes skirted. The sandalwood shrine (fig. 6.2) that Kūkai received from Huiguo is such an example.9 The work clearly shows Tang-dynasty stylistic traits, and museum displays in recent years have labeled it as Tang dynasty in date. But the literature is silent on the Catalogue’s conflicting cultural frame, which explains that the shrine is one of eight objects brought from south India by the master Vajrabodhi (671–741), then passed down to Amoghavajra (705–774), Huiguo’s teacher. The literature defers to the memory of Kūkai and his inheritance, reformulating “lost worlds” in new histories. Recalling the work of Alfred Gell, the visual efficacy of a work shifts and determines based on what it does, not what it is.10 This sectarian restraint has affected nonsectarian scholarship as well. The shrine will be discussed again below.

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Moving Cultures Waiting at a southern port to return to Japan, Kūkai had exhausted his financial resources and was dependent on Chinese officials and clergy for support. From Yuezhou (in modern Shaoxing, Zhejiang) he wrote: Seeking for the sea of teachings in this great country, I hope to pour its waters over the dry land to the east. . . . Now I am in possession of about three hundred scrolls of Buddhist scriptures (sūtras), treaties, and commentaries, and great mandala of the Matrix (garbha) and Diamond (vajra) Realms, etc., which I managed to reproduce in the city of Chang’an. I exhausted all my efforts and drained all my resources in seeking after and reproducing them. Owing to my inferior capacity and the magnitude of the teachings, however, what I have gathered is no more than a strand of hair. Gone are all my reserves. . . . Humbly I beg you to reflect upon the will of the Buddha, to have compassion on me who has come from afar, and to assist me in transmitting to my distant country . . . whatever teachings might enlighten the darkness of the people and help save them materially, be these scriptures, ethical texts, philosophical treatises; biographical records pertaining to Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism; books of poetry or of rhyme-prose ( fu); collections of inscriptions; or texts on divination, medicine, linguistics, arts, mathematics, logic.11 Someone, perhaps the governor of the region to whom this was addressed, made it possible for him to transport his precious goods. Kūkai reached Japan sometime in the tenth month of 806 and unloaded his personal effects. The Catalogue is dated the twentieth day of that month. It was delivered to the court in the newly established capital of Heiankyō (modern Kyoto, capital from 794–1184) on the thirtieth day of the twelfth month of 806, along with the physical contents of the Catalogue. The imported texts were gradually examined and copied by monks of repute; their copies remain, as does evidence of their discussions of the imported texts.12 We do not know how the priests or the court of Emperor Heizei (r. 806–809) reacted to the imported Buddhist icons. Three years passed with no response from the court to Kūkai, who waited in Kyushu. It was not until Emperor Saga ascended the throne in 809 that Kūkai was officially acknowledged, and in 810 the sacred items were returned to Kūkai, to his great joy.13 Kūkai arranged the list of imports in categories that point to both his experience in China and his intentions in Japan. The Catalogue items signified not only Mikkyō, but also Chinese Esotericism, and henceforth Esotericism’s

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alleged cultural as well as sectarian history. Their link to Kūkai above all others secured the works’ standing in the canon of Japanese art and Esoteric art despite their Chinese and occasionally non-Esoteric provenance. Kūkai was not the only monk who brought back Esoteric religious texts and ritual goods from China. The founder of the Tendai sect, Saichō (767–822), who traveled to China on the same fleet of ships as Kūkai but returned to Japan after only nine months in China, brought back 230 Buddhist texts, mandala, statues, and ritual goods. Saichō’s imported goods, like Kūkai’s, are known from the Catalogues he submitted. 14 Saichō was already an established figure at court and was welcomed to the capital upon his return from China. He supplied the court with a list of the Buddhist and non-Buddhist works in his possession and gave the court a copy of the Lotus Sutra group written in gold letters that he had received or had made in China. The court had Saichō’s imported Tendai works copied and distributed to the seven great temples of Nara, a major undertaking not completed for ten years. It is easy to imagine the exotic appeal and transmaterial signification of imported objects to a nobility already enamored of things Chinese, and the cultural effect of their purported efficacy. Their agency in the ninth century was powerful, but very different from today. The impact of these items is traced with difficulty not only — or even especially — because many have been lost, but because the responses to Buddhist material culture in this period were not recorded, even if they occurred. We occasionally find records, however, that suggest the import of the items to both the giver and the recipient. A letter written by Kūkai’s disciple Jitsue reporting the master’s passing to his “Dharma brothers in the distant land” notes that Kūkai studied with the great abbot of Qinglongsi and “returned to Japan, carrying with him ritual instruments and other items entrusted to him by his teacher.”15 The imported objects are singled out — word of them traveled back from whence they came, history trailing like a thread from source to extension and back again. Kūkai conveyed a world of unknown Buddhas and multiarmed and colorful manifestations of the Bodhisattva in a new two-dimensional configuration of divinities known as a mandala. He offered as proof of his Esoteric transmission the keepsakes given him by his Chinese teacher. He enshrined Chinese portraits of all the Mikkyō patriarchs. Some works in the imported body of materials are not Mikkyō Esoteric in terms of iconography, but their history or setting lends them such a definition. In short, Kūkai moved objects and ideas, and the two were mutually constituted. By what process do objects become memorialized within a culture and why? What does the memorialization of an object tell us about the value of the

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experience or person to which it is connected, and what does memorialization say about the role of memory in that culture or period? When does an object, idea, or practice cease to become an object of the culture that created (formulated or implemented) it and become the property of its new home — when and how does a loan word or imported object become Japanese? Sectarian Shingon Esoteric scholars are engaged in historical preservation to an extreme. By this I mean that the very idea of an “Esoteric” history began with Kūkai and his disciples and continued (with increasing intensity) through generations of Shingon priests. The maintenance of Esoteric history is critical to their purpose.

Situating Ideas: Kūkai’s Teachings When Kūkai returned to Japan in 806 he set about teaching what he had learned. Using the imported sutras and texts and the cache of mandala and other ritual artifacts he had had manufactured or received in China, he asserted that the “secret [Esoteric] treasury” contained the true teachings of the Buddha. Later generations said Kūkai based his Esoteric Shingon school on the Chinese Zhenyen “true word,” i.e., mantra, practices he learned from Huiguo and others.16 The designation “Shingon school” (Shingon shū) was one made by Kūkai, albeit infrequently and — some would argue — for different reasons than its later sectarian users used the term. Kūkai’s writings indicate that he sought to introduce a new way of interpreting the scriptures to the established and powerful priests at temples in the former capital of Nara (645–781) and to give a central place to Esoteric ritual practices. But Shingon was a taxonomic distinction for the exegetical and ritual efficacy of Esotericism, not a “school” per se. Much of the success of Kūkai’s Esoteric tradition during the ninth century, and throughout history, may be traced to its popularity at the imperial court and among the nobility. Initially, it was most strongly associated with state protection. Across East Asia, Buddhism had long been called upon to pacify and guard the state. In order to secretly transmit the teachings according to the requirements of the doctrine, an elaborate ritual technology was required in which teacher “pours knowledge into [disciple] like water into a vase.”17 (This is one reason that the emphasis on patriarchs is so strong and their images venerated.) The visual and material culture of mandala, ritual implements, and ritual altars were vital components of the ritual technology necessary for Esoteric practice and, by extension, the goals of the tradition. Visual and material technologies were efficacious when deployed alone or with voice (mantra), gesture (mudra),

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and mind (kansō or kan, contemplation or so-called “visualizations”); visual culture has its own apparatus of visuality and meaning and does not necessarily rely on ritual for efficacy. In the Japanese Esoteric Mikkyō tradition, ritual is not regarded as human action but as the very activity of the universe, because the practitioner’s mental and physical actions mirror the universe of deities represented in the mandala.

Esoteric Visual Culture The emperor received the Catalogue and all the items listed within it from an envoy while Kūkai waited on the southern island of Kyūshū, where his ship had landed. While the objects remained for three years at the court in Heiankyō, Kūkai proselytized in the south with texts and images he had copied or had not handed over to the court. Painted images of divinities not itemized in the Catalogue appear in the votive texts (gamon), suggesting that Japanese artists were creating works based on iconographic drawings kept by Kūkai (uncatalogued) or prototypes he memorized.18 In 809 Kūkai was called to Heiankyō, where he described his experiences and learning at the Tang capital and was tested by learned monks regarding the meter of his learning, the veracity of his imported texts, and his claims for the superior efficacy of Mikkyō.19 The imported mandala were returned for use in Esoteric rituals — rituals Kūkai was now asked to conduct for the protection of the state. It is telling that only fifteen years after their arrival in Japan a pair of the imported great mandala paintings had to be replaced with copies due to extensive wear from ritual use. During his lifetime Kūkai successfully established systematized Esoteric teachings in Japan as the Shingon school. To what can we attribute his success? The mandala, texts, and ritual items he imported are significant visual and material elements in Mikkyō praxis and its transmission. Visual culture offers a concrete veracity that ideas and philosophies cannot convey. Paintings, statues, and other objects may be copied or generate visually related representations that refer to the “original” in ways that ideas or doctrines cannot. Unlike the questioning and occasional skepticism that greeted Kūkai’s teachings or the message of the imported Mikkyō texts, the objects themselves were accepted more readily. The reasons for this have to do with the different ways in which visual culture is received from texts. Texts reify doctrine and philosophy, which have relatively little visual or functional embellishment. Thus, the role of visual culture in the legitimacy and transmission of a Buddhist school, particularly one like Mikkyō that relies on oral transmission, deserves careful study. The goods that Kūkai imported to Japan, most of them Chinese in origin, formed the basis for a rich totality that may be referred to as Japanese

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Esoteric visual culture. The Esoteric practices for which the implements and paintings were intended — as delineated in many of the newly imported ritual texts — were virtually unknown. The divinities depicted in iconographic drawings were largely unfamiliar, as was the assembly of divinities in mandala form. The imported materials of the Mikkyō tradition were received differently from the contents and exegesis of the texts or the verbal and written teachings of the scholastic masters. On the other hand, the ritual corpus offered by Kūkai both complemented existing corpera and went far beyond anything previously experienced, especially visually and aurally. Kūkai’s cache provided some of the same appeal offered by foreign and luxury secular goods in the palaces of emperors. Moreover, they were recognized as current continental styles and as such were studied by artists and priests alike. Both the texts and objects, and their interpretation and deployment, gradually became the dominant thread of the Mikkyō Esoteric tradition in Japan as well as Shingon history. Yet, as Ryūichi Abé convincingly argues, that distinction had to be created. The imported Mikkyō texts required interpretation and exegesis, which revealed the ways the Esoteric “always and already inhered in the exoteric as well,”20 while they manifested the difference of the Mikkyō Esoteric. The same cannot be said for the ritual goods, which were visually distinct and did not readily speak to continuities with earlier icons and visual representations. Their interpretation and reformulation — their re-expression at the hands of Japanese artists — shows how styles and forms from the continent were adapted to local traditions; in the process, claims to continuities with previous visual traditions were also made. In this way, it would also appear, both visually and spatially, that the Esoteric always and already inhered in the exoteric. Such adaptation and change in forms and visual expression are often understood as appropriation by power-seeking groups or individuals, as ideology reified. In the history of an icon, however, this is not necessarily the case. An icon has its own set of representational codes that interact with the believer and the believer’s world but at the same time rely on difference from them for efficacy. If we are to understand the reception and establishment of Esoteric Mikkyō belief in Japanese society, we must equally consider how Kūkai presented (and kept sacred) these first Esoteric visual treasures and how they were deployed and received over time.

Situating Objects: The Catalogue Contents In Kūkai’s short and at first glance routine record,21 he listed ten paintings — including huge mandala painted on silk and portraits of the Esoteric patri-

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archs, keepsakes from his teacher, gilt-bronze ritual implements, vessels, and other ritual items. Ten objects from the original body of imported goods are extant. There were also objects in Kūkai’s possession that were not catalogued but are known either through copies, documented references, or inference. These include paintings and statues, writing brushes, secular texts, ritual notes, and iconographic drawings. Kūkai imported 142 new sutras, and a total of 216 texts. Of these, 192 were Esoteric texts according to his own definition. The discourse surrounding the lists of items may be understood as but one of several types of internal framing and is of great interest; it describes the items and provides a window on Kūkai’s thinking at the time. In the discourse, Kūkai presents Esotericism as “the fundamental basis of all the divinities and the path to enlightenment, [beneficial] as are walls to the nation and fertile soil to the people.”22 He points to rulers in India and China who were devoted to the Esoteric teachings. He thanks the emperor for his influence in enabling the Esoteric teachings to reach Japan and asks for his indulgence — for Kūkai had spent his stipend, meant to last twenty years, on travel and the commissioning of mandala, texts, and other objects. In addition to the novelty and cachet of the imported objects, the visual and material authority of the patriarch portraits and the keepsakes of Huiguo and Huiguo’s teacher were considerable. The patriarchs were the great dharma masters who brought new forms of Buddhism to China. Thus, the persons depicted in or evoked by the paintings and keepsakes “transported” the viewer to Central Asia, India, and Sri Lanka. Even though Kūkai’s teacher Huiguo was not yet known in Japan, Huiguo’s teachers were known translators of the Indian sutras; they had received the patronage of the emperors of China and performed miracles. The portraits and keepsakes linked Kūkai to them and so to a legitimate history of Esoteric Buddhism. We have noted above the sheer volume of the goods that Kūkai gathered. Cost was a factor evident in their reception, both the cost of labor and materials. Chinese artists had been employed to make five mandala paintings of immense scale in polychrome pigments. Scribes had been commissioned to copy scriptures, exegetic texts, and ritual manuals. In early ninth-century East Asia these were highly specialized tasks requiring materials available only to select sectors of society. The status normally required to commission them in the first place factored in any consideration of their significance. They were also a kind of investment: the physical value of these goods enhanced their capacity to confer legitimacy. Like relics of the Buddha, they were imbued with the acquired virtues (as in the Latin virtutem) of religious masters. Their power would be paramount, both to individual believers and to the religio-political nexus into which Kūkai intended to introduce them.

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What Is Distinctive about Esoteric Visual Culture? Kūkai addressed the relationship between practitioner, practice, and the material-somatic topography of Esotericism in terms of the “three mysteries” (sanmitsu; Sk. tri-gyuha), the means through which the Dharmakāya (transcendent Buddha body) reveals its profound enlightenment. The new imagery of Mikkyō — systematized Esoteric Buddhism — was an astonishing departure from established modes of representing divinities, and so the world. Representation itself sets parameters for understanding and imagining the unseeable and unknowable; moreover, artistic and iconographic representation strongly supports the conferral of sacred power to material, inanimate forms.23 Esotericism, with its emphasis on the three mysteries, of which one — mind — inheres in the practitioner’s eidetic meditation and his evocation of mental imagery, is both implicitly and explicitly concerned with visual imagery. The Esoteric teachings were said by Kūkai to reveal the secrets and most profound intentions of the sutras. That revelation, ultimate Truth, is said to be “beyond word” and “beyond form,” yet overflowing with attributes that require form for expression. Kūkai’s most famous remarks on visual representation are found in the section of his Catalogue titled “Buddhist Icons, etc.”:24 The dharma25 is fundamentally unable to be conveyed in words, yet without words it cannot be manifested. The ultimate reality26 is beyond form27 but in taking form it is comprehended. In error one may take the finger pointing at the moon to be the moon itself. Unremarkable things astound the unaware eye; whereas [the dharma] is a true treasure that pacifies the nation and benefits the people. Because the Esoteric storehouse [i.e., sutras and texts] is so profound and mysterious it is difficult to manifest with brush and ink.28 Thus [the Esoteric storehouse] is revealed to the unenlightened by adopting the form of diagrams and pictures.29 Kūkai’s account of his master’s teachings clearly points to the necessity of image and icon in Esoteric practice. The passage continues, The great variety of postures and mudrā [depicted in pictures] come from the great compassion [of the Buddha]. With a single glance [at them] one becomes a Buddha. The secrets of the sūtras and commentaries are depicted in a general way in diagrams and images, and the essentials of the Esoteric teachings are actually set forth therein. If [the illustrations and images] are discarded, both those who receive and those who transmit the dharma will experience difficulty, for [the illustrations and images] are none other than the source of the ocean-like assembly.30

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In the phrase, “with a single glance one becomes a Buddha,” Kūkai conveys the force — the magic — of artistic representation. The empowerment (kaji) of the practitioner takes place because imagery is the divine, not because it merely represents the divine: “illustrations and images are none other than the source of the ocean-like assembly.” The interaction between the image and practitioner realizes the potential of the form. The mandala embodies the perfection of cosmic or deity relationships that are the Tathāgata;31 with a glance the devotee affirms his relationship to that perfection and participates in its formation. Visual culture and ritual have essentially the same goal, to empower the devotee through his partaking of the source of power. The enlightened mind is called “the mind of secret [Esoteric] adornment.” Esoteric ritual, which provides the technology and knowledge for entering the “secret palace”32 of “instantaneous enlightenment,” is the agency for realization. Ritual makes visible, audible, and kinetic the hidden secrets of the sutras; without meditation, words, actions, and imagery, ritual lacks the very qualities that define it. The distance enforced between material expression and Truth by Mahayanists in Japan prior to the ninth century was bridged by Kūkai when he asserted, “[W]ithout form [the Truth] cannot be understood.” Although this type of claim was not new to Buddhism, it was new to the Japanese Buddhist episteme.33 Though the Buddha had been represented for centuries, Kūkai’s fundamental premise that the mere viewing of and the immediate affective response to a material object can transport an individual to a catastrophically different cognitive state (Buddhist enlightenment) is as bold as the literary form of his Catalogue is unassuming.

Situating Objects: Visual Efficacy Kūkai opens the Catalogue with an introductory statement summarizing particular aspects of his sojourn and introducing the new teachings, “the secret storehouse,” by highlighting their power and influence in China. He ends by noting that the document records the following five groups: the imported sūtras, precepts, treatises, commentaries, and essays;34 an inventory of the (images) of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and esoteric divinities, etc.; the symbols mandala,35 the dharma mandala, etc.,36 and portraits; as well as (ritual) implements; also items handed down to him by the masters.37 Within the major body of the document, Kūkai arranges these five into seven categories, as listed earlier. Each of these groups is followed by a discursive passage ranging in length from several lines to several paragraphs. As scholars from various fields have shown — most recently perhaps Lamarre38

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— Chinese culture was an integral part of the life of the Japanese Heian court. Although the items brought by Kūkai were mostly new and exotic, they were nevertheless part of a familiar fabric of keepsakes and imports from abroad. Integral to the much-admired donor culture, they would have produced rare excitement at the Heian court. Their presumed powers would be emphasized by the fact that this new corpus built upon already established textual and iconographical forms, and extended these into areas the court can barely have imagined. Kūkai introduced a substantial number of new scriptures and conveyed a world of unknown divinities in drawings and mandala paintings. He had the knowledge to bring these items to perfection in the performance of Mikkyō rituals that had the power to draw divine presence into the service and preservation of the state. That East Asian Buddhism reveres such objects as icons, and uses them for a bewildering variety of ritual, decorative, talismanic, and contemplative purposes, should be seen in the context of this fundamental point. That not only Western scholars but also sectarian apologists have in recent centuries highlighted the complexity, mystery, and colorful aestheticism of the imported Mikkyō works speaks to the new worlds in which the imported representations of divinities find themselves, but we should not assert that the emphasis is entirely modern. Gell reasons that “the kind of agency exercised in the vicinity of works of art varies considerably”39 and that the making of a work speaks loudest in the case of art works — it exerts an artistic agency he calls “captivation.” His notion of “captivation” is relevant, for example, to Hoskins’ view that Sumba indigo textile dyeing — the occult “blue arts” — have “crosscultural visuality” (see the Hoskins chapter in this volume) wherein the visual efficacy of a work relates to its appearance. Gell’s “captivation” is an artistic agency that may be “art” for one audience and yet intersect with reception of the work as “religious” or visually efficacious by another. Particular kinds of indexes (the visible, physical “thing”) captivate the viewer; they demonstrate “technical expertise and imagination of a high order” that exploit “the intrinsic mechanisms of visual cognition with subtle psychological insight” so that they effectively “announce themselves as miraculous creations.”40 Here, for Gell, the status of the object as “art” derives from what it does rather than what it is. At the same time, although the physical craftsmanship and aesthetic merit of Mikkyō icon and “art” to the modern eye is incontestable, it is a prime premise of this study that for their ancient creators and beholders they were not “objects of art” in any modern sense, but material indicators (Gell’s indexes) of a reality of a radically different order from their overt forms. The key to arriving at this insight was the Esoteric Mikkyō system into which Kūkai

Figure 6.1. Ritual implements. Five-pronged vajra wand (Gokosho), five-pronged bell (Gokorin), and a trefoil tray. Ninth century, Tang dynasty, Chinese. Wand H. 24.05 cm (9.47 in.). Bell H. 24.5 cm (9.65 in.), Tray, W. 30.7 cm (12.09 in.). Gilt bronze. Reproduced by permission of Tōji (Kyōōgokokuji).

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had been initiated in China. The first contact the Japanese court patrons, aristocrats, and established clergy of Japan had with Mikkyō was the Catalogue of Imported Items — both in content and in form. Their captivation may well be linked to the same indexes (to use Gell’s term) that render the works art, or magic, to museums or practitioners. The mandala paintings imported by Kūkai and the gilt-bronze handheld ritual implements or accessories for the altar were components of practices prescribed in the ritual manuals. Other Mikkyō sacred objects introduced by Kūkai are less obviously a part of this matrix and relate to sectarian history and notions of lineage and transmission. These include painted hanging scrolls depicting the five master patriarchs as well as personal mementos given to Kūkai. Each functions in a modern history of “Esoteric art” by virtue of their place in the cache of imported works even when their appearance or relationship to ritual differ.

The Contents of the Catalogue The Catalogue section titled “Ritual Implements” (dōgu) lists eighteen items. Among these, three are thought to be extant: a five-gem five-pronged vajra wand, a five-pronged bell, and a tray (fig. 6.1).41 The long lower edge of the tray illustrated here is scalloped with three lotus-petal protrusions. Engraved on the flat concavity is a five-jewel five-pronged vajra and above it an eight-pronged chakra wheel. The mouth of the bronze ritual bell can be placed directly over the circle that outlines the latter and the bronze vajra over its engraved twin. The material composition of the bronze and the size and style of the three distinguishes them as Chinese. Beginning in the late Heian period, Esoteric ritual implements take on a distinctive Japanese style that is nonetheless based on these imported examples. The sixth of the itemized sections is titled “Items handed down by the masters (achāryā).” It lists thirteen personal keepsakes Huiguo gave to Kūkai. Following the first eight items are several lines of text in which Kūkai explains that they were brought from south India by Vajrabodhi, passed down to Amoghavajra, and then to the “master of Qinglongsi” (i.e., Huiguo).42 The eight items are: eighty grains of the Śākyamuni Buddha’s relics in one gilt (“gold color”) reliquary (śarīra) one carved sandalwood case [i.e., portable shrine] of Buddha(s), bodhisattvas, guardians (Kongō), and other divinities

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Figure 6.2. Portable Buddhist Shrine of Assembled Divinities (traditionally known as Makura honzon). Eighth century, Tang dynasty, Chinese. Sandalwood with pigment traces. H. 24.0 cm (9.45 in.). Collection of Kongōbuji. Reproduced by permission of Kongōbuji.

one “great mandala” (Daimandara, Sk: Mahāmandala, i.e. mandala of deities in human form) of 447 divinities [painted] on white silk one painted Diamond world samaya mandala (Kongōkai sanmaya mandara, i.e., symbols mandala) on white silk of 120 divinities one five jewels samaya vajra wand two bronze bowls one ivory chaise one white conch shell Three lines of text follow identifying the remaining five items as bequeathed to Kūkai by Huiguo: one kenda kokushi kesa [robe] two lapis lazuli offerings (kuyō) vessels one amber ritual vessel

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one white stone offering vessel one pair lapis lazuli chopsticks43 Among the eight, only the relics44 and the sandalwood shrine (collection of Kongōbuji; fig. 6.2) may survive. Among the five, Huiguo’s robe is probably the example in the Tōji (Kyōōgokokuji) collection (fig. 6.3).45 The shrine, the robe, and a lacquer box made for the robe in the tenth century (see detail of fig. 6.3) are all National Treasures.46 Photographs and brief descriptions of the shrine are found in numerous exhibition catalogues and sectarian publications.47 The robe has received very little attention in the literature even though it is a rare example of its kind, both as an early imported Chinese vestment and in its weaving techniques. The portable sandalwood shrine (H. 24 cm; 9.45 in.) is made of three sections carved deeply into niche-like cavities filled with sixteen standing Arhats,48 six standing bodhisattvas, two seated bodhisattvas, and one seated Buddha. The seated image in the central niche is usually identified as Śākyamuni. Each section of the shrine appears to have been carved from the same portion of a single log and each is joined by hinges and can be closed for transport. The flanking wings of the shrine each contain a seated bodhisattva on a lion throne. There is nothing that distinguishes the iconography of the sandalwood shrine carried home by Kūkai as Esoteric: neither the divinities nor the iconography of the grouping relates to any Mikkyō sūtra. Although said by the Catalogue to be Indian, the style is clearly Tang Chinese, a contradiction never mentioned in the literature. Whereas the sectarian and art historical literature alike stress stylistic visuality and Mikkyō iconography for some of the imported works, this is not the case with the shrine, for style does not serve modern aims. Furthermore, other extant Tang sandalwood shrines are rarely mentioned in contemporary scholarship, further enhancing Kūkai’s claims to uniqueness.49 The most interesting aspect of the shrine vis-à-vis the transmission of Mikkyō is completely overlooked. Namely, it is possible for a devotional shrine with neither Esoteric ritual function nor Esoteric iconography to be among the most cherished and representative items of the Shingon Esoteric tradition. Whereas Mikkyō visual efficacy typically embodies strong stylistic or iconographic difference, this work lacks such marks. For the modern viewer it is distinguished by its sandalwood material and its non-Japanese shape. Was neither Huiguo nor Kūkai aware that the shrine was not Indian? Or was the original shrine handed down to Huiguo lost and replaced with this one at some point in time, either in China or Japan? Vajrabodhi arrived in Chang’an

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Figure 6.3. Priest’s Robe (Kesa, known as kenda kokushi kesa) and storage box. Robe: Dyed and woven silk, L. 237.0 cm (7.78 ft.), W. 116.8 cm (3.83 ft.). Box: Wood and lacquer with gold and silver pigments, L. 47.8 W. 38.9 × H. 11.5 cm (18.82 × 15.31 × 4.53 in.). Robe: Ninth century, Tang dynasty, Chinese. Box: Tenth century, Heian period. Collection of Tōji (Kyōōgokokuji). Reproduced by permission of Tōji (Kyōōgokokuji).

in the year 720. The style of the shrine could be early eighth century, suggesting that if Vajrabodhi owned the shrine then it was manufactured in China. If its history begins in China in the early eighth century, then the absence of distinctive Esoteric divinities sculpted within the shrine is also understandable. The Catalogue is silent on these matters. The most recent exhibition to feature the Kongōbuji portable shrine was

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the 2002 Honolulu Academy of Arts’ Sacred Treasures of Mount Kōya: The Art of Shingon Buddhism. Its catalogue provides the following translation of descriptive text provided by the Mt. Kōya Reihōkan Museum: This Buddhist shrine, which is valued as proof of the transmission of Esoteric Buddhism in the three countries from India and China to Japan through the efforts of Kōbō Daishi, was safeguarded strictly in the Miedō [Founder’s Hall] of the Garan central complex [of Mt. Kōya] along with the three-pronged vajra implement that Kōbō Daishi threw from China and that landed to mark the founding of Mount Kōya, this shrine is a treasure of the Shingon sect and establishes a connection between Kōbō Daishi and the esteemed deities.50 Again, the cultural- and historical-lineage value of the shrine dominates other visualities. This suggests an objectified charisma of the type that religious amulets and charms often hold.51 Moreover, the connection suggested by the statement “this shrine is a treasure of the Shingon sect and establishes a connection between Kōbō Daishi and the esteemed deities” is vague, and necessarily so since the deities depicted are not part of the Shingon Esoteric pantheon per se, but deities respected by all Buddhist traditions. The Tōji robe is thought to be that inherited from Huiguo by Kūkai (fig. 6.3). The earliest text to mention an imported robe is the document of 1182 for the Seven-day Mishuhō Ritual in the imperial palace. The robe is a mantlelike outer robe (samghatī) worn over an upper garment and lower-body garment, presumably draped over both shoulders and under the left armpit as worn by patriarchs represented in the portrait paintings (figs. 6.4 and 6.5). Its most characteristic feature, patchwork,52 is executed in a random arrangement of rectangles of different sizes, each using a remarkable patterned brocade silk piece, now faded and deteriorated, arranged in twenty-one patches and seven columns. The columns here number seven, the patches twenty-one; this corresponds to the type of outer robe detailed in the Fozhi biqiu liuwu tu.53 The overall appearance refers to the tattered garment of a monk without worldly means, jiasha (Jpn: kesa, Sk: kāsāya). Both the motif and the brocade technique of this robe were a great influence on Japanese kesa. It is listed in Kūkai’s inventory as kenda kokushi kesa; it is thought that the term kenda refers to the distinctive brown color, probably the result of an aromatic wood dye such as magnolia, and kokushi to the particular brocade technique. Kūkai’s jiasha was woven in a brocade pattern known as “stratified clouds” in ten hues on a dark red base color, including purple, pale green, yellow, and indigo, and it measures 116.8 cm (3.83 ft.) wide by 237 cm (7.76 ft.) long. Here, the use of a

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Figure 6.4. Portrait of Ryūchi (Nāgabodhi). Dated ca. 821. Heian period. From a set of hanging scrolls known as The Seven Patriarchs of the Shingon Sect. Color and ink on silk. Each approx. 212 cm high × 150.5 cm wide (6.96 × 4.94 ft.). Collection of Tōji (Kyōōgokokuji). Reproduced by permission of Tōji (Kyōōgokokuji).

discontinuous (brocaded) supplementary weft thread distinguishes it as brocade. Complex in color and structure, a purple thread “floats” every fourth or fifth thread, conveying the appearance of an embroidered thread. Gifts of silk brocade and other valuable textiles were made from the Tang imperial family to priests. The pieces in the Tōji robe are of the highest quality, but their precise origin is unknown. The appearance of the robe linked two types of signification: ideology and patronage. The gift of a robe to Kūkai by his teacher is in keeping with yet a third practice, that of transmission. Transmission, as we have noted, is central to legitimacy in many Buddhist traditions. The robe and items that have been touched by the masters are what Bernard Faure refers to as “contact relics,”54 which he distinguishes from corporeal relics (śarīra) “in the strict sense.” Such souvenirs as the sandalwood shrine and robe were not only of personal and ideological significance. Public and patronage elements were also imbedded in the Buddhist signification system. Purple robes, the color of rulers, were conferred on priests by Chinese emperors and empresses during the Tang, if not before. Whatever they may have meant to Kūkai privately, on a

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Figure 6.5. Portrait of Ryūmyō (Nāgārjuna). Dated ca. 821. Heian period. From a set of hanging scrolls known as The Seven Patriarchs of the Shingon Sect. Color and ink on silk. Each approx. 212 cm high × 150.5 cm wide (6.96 × 4.94 ft.). Collection of Tōji (Kyōōgokokuji). Reproduced by permission of Tōji (Kyōōgokokuji).

public level they were concrete, material proof of the legitimacy of the direct transmission of knowledge, wisdom, and authority from master to disciple, and of a Chinese master supported by the Chinese imperial court. Insofar as these otherwise non-Esoteric items served to vindicate this authority, they became an integral part of the Japanese Esoteric tradition. In 821 one pair of the imported Tang mandala, due to damage, was copied in polychrome pigments (the copies are now lost). These copies were in turn copied for installation in the Jingoji Initiation Hall between 829 and 833, but this time in gold and silver paint on purple-dyed damask silk. This pair, known as the Takao [sanji] (i.e., Jingoji) mandala, survives.55 Myriad divinities in gold and silver lines literally vibrate from the rich purple surface dyed with the plant root murasaki amid oval medallions, some with phoenixes and floral patterns. The Takaosanji works are slightly smaller than the size notations given in the Catalogue for the Chinese works; the Diamond World mandala is 411.0 × 366.5 cm (13.48 × 12.02 ft.) and the Womb World mandala is 446.4 × 406.3 cm (14.65 × 13.33 ft.). More striking is that the Takaosanji copies are not executed in polychrome pigments, the medium of the originals. I believe that

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the gold- and silver-line works were requested for expediency, as they could probably be produced faster than polychrome works and because they were more durable and less costly. Whatever the reason, the copying and change of medium brought the foreign imports much closer to a Japanese artistic sensibility. The differences have nothing to do with “ritual function” per se. When the original pair of Chinese mandala were copied in 821, Kūkai also had artists execute two painted portraits of Nāgārjuna and Nāgabodhi (Jpn.: Ryūmyō and Ryūchi, figs. 6.4 and 6.5) to bring the imported Chinese set of five to a new quota of seven patriarchs, the number historically designated by the Shingon school — part of a historical controversy around the legitimacy of Nāgārjuna as a legitimate heir to Śākyamuni’s teachings from the bodhisattva Vajrasattva. In terms of both style and scale, the two Japanese portrait additions were clearly modeled after the Tang images, which use a relatively firm but narrow “iron wire” brushed line for the realistically rendered figures and furnishings, and carry inscriptions in Siddham letters (Sanskrit) and Chinese characters naming the individual at the top and descriptive passages in Chinese at the bottom of each painting. For these works, unlike the mandala copies, visual stylistic conformity was paramount. Various groupings of patriarchs figured largely in Kūkai’s rhetoric and strategies, especially sets or sites featuring all seven Mikkyō masters. They were Kūkai’s six linked predecessors, a linkage that guaranteed that the transmission, before passing to the Japanese master, was Indian as well as Chinese — a point emphasized by Shingon masters today (recall the description of the sandalwood shrine in the Hawai‘i exhibition catalogue). Kūkai seems to have developed his ideas about the historical transmission of Esotericism at this relatively early stage in his post-China career, from his return until 821, and his commission of portraits of Nāgārjuna and Nāgabodhi further points to this thinking. The Initiation (Abhiśeka) Hall (Kanjōin) for Tōji, which Kūkai directed from 823 as the Shingon training center in the Heian capital, featured portraits of the patriarchs. Although completed after Kūkai’s death, it was the most important ritual hall of the monastery, and the design is thought to have been created by Kūkai and his immediate successor. It was a 7 × 5 bay rectangular structure with a central chancel of 3 × 2 bays in which mandala were hung. According to a drawing of the hall dated 843 in the Tōboki, the walls were embellished with images of Kongōsatta, and portraits of the patriarchs (Ryūchi and Ryūmyō are between Kongōsatta and Kongōchi). In addition to the eight patriarchs, there were portraits of Kūkai’s disciples Jitsue, Shinga (801–879), and Shunga. The design is much like an icon hall (although with-

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out a raised altar). This may be because the Tōji Initiation Hall functioned as a central building of an independent precinct (in) and emulated the outward appearance of a traditional Butsudō. Patriarch paintings were hung on the walls of the Initiation Hall during the Kamakura period, but as far as we know not during the Heian period. The sacred mountain training site for Shingon priests, Mt. Kōya, had two initiation halls (there called Shingondō), which were completed around 887. The larger hall, five bays square, was the same size as the Kongōbuji’s original Lecture Hall and had a pair of mandala, four mandala scrolls on altars, Kongōsatta, and painted hanging scrolls of the Shingon patriarchs. This grouping of images parallels those in the Tōji Initiation Hall with its painted wall images of Kongōsatta and the eight patriarchs. The Tōji pagoda today has eight patriarch portraits painted on the interior walls.56 As noted, genealogical continuity was critical to transmission. In the section on sūtras translated by Amoghavajra in the Catalogue, Kūkai uses terms that evoke “the image of genealogical continuity — mainstream, tributary, fountainhead, root, branches” — thereby linking the sūtras translated by Amoghavajra to the secret treasury and to the lineage of masters who introduced Esotericism to China, of which Kūkai is the inheritor.57 In a complex didactic structure Kūkai then goes on to declare that the 118 texts translated by Amoghavajra are part of a class of Esoteric teaching by virtue of their transmission by a particular lineage of Esoteric masters. This is the language of instantiation, where subject becomes structure and structure becomes subject. Within it, the portraits and their inscriptions play a vital role. The creation in 821 of the two new portraits of Nāgārjuna and Nāgabodhi provided Kūkai with an opportunity to further instantiate for posterity the tradition of seven patriarchs and the transmission of the secret teachings from the Bodhisattva Kongōsatta (Vajrasatta) to Huiguo. Kūkai composed at least two works presenting the hagiographies of the masters, both dated around 821, the second and longer of which is the Record of the Secret Mandala Teaching Dharma Transmission.58 His own writings were one means by which Kūkai secured the legitimacy of his transmission. The portraits with inscriptions are another, and they function as both “image” and “text.” Although the Catalogue explains that the artist Lizhen and more than ten assistants created the five portraits in Chang’an at the behest of Huiguo for Kūkai, the style and construction of each work does not entirely support this assertion.59 The inscriptions on the upper sections, which name the masters using Chinese and/or Siddham (Sanskrit) letters, appear to date to the creation of the portraits. The provenance of the biographical text on the lower

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third of the seven works, however, is less easily traced. On the five Chinese works, the inscription is brushed on a piece of silk attached horizontally to the upper portrait section. Its disposition and silk matches precisely that used for the inscription on the corresponding areas of the two Japanese portraits.60 The 821 Japanese paintings of Nāgārjuna and Nāgabodhi and their biographical texts were directed and composed, respectively, by Kūkai. Hamada hypothesizes that Kūkai determined the content of all seven biographical inscriptions and had them attached to each painting in 821. It is also possible, however, that one or more of the Chinese works carried inscriptions so badly damaged that they had to be trimmed and recopied in 821, and the same format was used in the two new Japanese works.61 The content of all seven inscriptions is recorded by Kūkai in his Record of the Shingon Dharma Transmission. Such biographical inscriptions must have been standard on Tang dynasty paintings. Each paintings’ text describes the accomplishments of the seven masters and reinforces the transmission lineage from Kongōsatta to Huiguo. If the five Chinese works carried biographical inscriptions from the start, which were then repaired (and this seems a more likely situation), it is doubtful that Kūkai would have edited their content. The imported texts and icons were in the possession of the court from 806, when they were duly submitted with the Inventory, until the emperor returned them to Kūkai in 810.62 In 821, the need to repair the paintings suggests that they were used extensively. Any changes to the content of the biographical inscriptions would have been conspicuous to Kūkai’s circle — and to his critics, who questioned his transmission. Nonetheless, because their content can only be traced to Kūkai’s written work, and because each supports the Mikkyō lineage he embraced, the possibility that Kūkai edited the original content or freshly composed the five Chinese inscriptions cannot be completely dismissed.

Situating Taxonomies: The Internal Structure of the Catalogue The language of the Catalogue gives clear proof of Kūkai’s concern with transmitting new, unknown, and powerful teachings to Japan. He stresses the legitimacy of his transmission, highlighting the accomplishments of his teachers, the continuity of the transmission, and the lineage of which he was now the most recent link. The texts were subdivided according to translations by Huiguo’s teacher, the Esoteric master Amoghavajra, and those of other masters, and these were further subdivided according to those known in Japan and those known only by name.63 Kūkai distinguishes the meaning and efficacy of the “Esoteric storehouse,” the “unsurpassable vehicle,” through taxo-

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nomic structure and textual commentary, just as the commentary on artistic representation accompanying the section entitled Icons and Images, quoted above, buttresses the efficacy of visual culture in the newly introduced Esoteric tradition. The text surrounding each category of items in the Catalogue describes the efficacy of the new Esoteric teachings Kūkai studied and introduced to Japan. The ritual significance of the imported items and the broader significance of visual and material culture to the goals of Esotericism are introduced and supported, both by Kūkai’s own philosophies and through his explanations of the words and activities of his master Huiguo. His narrative concerning his training in China and the lineage of his teacher created a history and genealogy that not only gave his transmission prestige and legitimacy but also a basis for growth in Japan. The patriarch paintings exemplify visual materials that did not “illustrate” this strategy but worked independently as images and in tandem with descriptive text and viewer knowledge to create, validate, and extend genealogy and history. Thus, Kūkai situated the items in his Catalogue in a complex discursive framework that endowed them with meanings arising from their genealogical, liturgical, visual, philosophical, and historical qualities, among other aspects. Neither the headings of the categories of texts and objects, nor the arrangement of the imported goods within the categories of the Catalogue, announce their Esoteric distinction to the reader-recipient. Not one heading uses the term Vajrayāna (another term for Tantric teachings), or secret storehouse for marking Mikkyō Buddhism. Rather, it is the content of the discursive passages that follow each section heading that clarifies what Kūkai has to offer: a transmission of difference — of the Esoteric. I would argue that the visual culture of Esotericism drives home that difference more forcefully than words were able to do or could do, for in texts the Esoteric was already present. If the values we normally allow the rigor of taxonomy are shifted to the links between categories and practice, between ontology and ideology, then the headings, categories, contents lists, and the explanatory texts that surround them can be understood not only as a method of distinguishing but as a result of experience. Ideology, the overt and often coherent organization of reflections on experience; ritual practice, the agent for change and insight; and ritual goods, the agent for human practice and the embodiment of the residual experience of practice, are each evident in the organization of the Catalogue and the ideas it offers. The Catalogue (and its author) oriented responses to it. Kūkai was aware that this was Japan’s first broad contact with the Esoteric. The Catalogue employs discursive strategies and taxonomies; later, through

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the appearance of the very items it catalogues, there is a new layer of response to items previously conjured through words. In this way the multivalent meanings of the Catalogue are actualized as a kind of hypertext. The visual, artistic, and material qualities of the items witness similar but also radically different responses. The items are ritually and personally deployed. They function as both an authoritative “original” and a foreign trace. As material culture, the imported goods grounded the Esoteric teachings in everyday realities while simultaneously declaring themselves as gateways to the profound and mysterious. They were both the thread to the foreign patriarchs and Esoteric history, and proof of the transmission (and hence authority) of the Japanese teacher, and thus succor to the future of Kūkai’s teachings.

Conclusion The same Law, the same teacher: our joy in meeting is deep. The white mist that wanders in the sky suddenly returns to the peak. One life, one parting: to meet again will be difficult. Not in dreams but in waking thoughts, let us often visit. — Kūkai’s farewell to a fellow disciple in China, 806.64

Kūkai’s teacher Huiguo died before Kūkai departed China. Thus, his parting from the disciples who shared the same master must have been especially difficult. The items Kūkai brought back to Japan were used or preserved in various ways, and they conveyed many things to many people. Their bittersweet association to his experience in China and his master was Kūkai’s alone, yet Kūkai sought to convey this association and memory in the Japanese context. He did so knowing it would be meaningful to his own disciples and to his patrons. The Catalogue is the text, the items a hypertext with historically diverse meanings. The practitioner, viewer, or reader is simultaneously an actor and spectator as the Catalogue changes in successive readings, in part because the imported items have a life outside the text. Meaning can be bent in many ways, depending on its frame. The isolation of many Catalogue items from individual use or ritual deployment by the temples that now own them, in order to preserve them, does not silence their history even as it alters their meaning, precisely because of their multivalent power and historical significance. The history of Esoteric Buddhism in Japan begins with Kūkai and his studies in Tang China from 804 to 806. The history of Esoteric Buddhist art in Japan begins with the sacred ritual objects he carried aboard ship from China to Japan. The items the Catalogue introduces are distinct from the Catalogue itself, but they are necessarily related once they inform its contents. The Cata-

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logue does not predict an item’s reception nor its subsequent use and history. It does, however, set the stage for all these events and serves as a heuristic model for later teachers. As a type of document, an inventory, its author anticipated a certain expectation and he wrote to fulfill it. According to Bahktin, when speech is formulated in a novel it structures and is structured by the semantic milieu configured by the author. Neither the speech nor the context can be isolated from its contextualized (dialoguizing) framing; both “the formulation of another’s speech as well as its framing . . . express the unitary act of dialogic interaction with that speech, a relation determining the entire nature of its transmission and all the changes in meaning and accent that take place in it during transmission.”65 At the point of reception, the signifying value of the items in Kūkai’s Catalogue lies not in their meaning per se, but in the framing. The Catalogue colors the recipient’s response with descriptive language and taxonomies that are met interactively by the reader in an organic process of multiple voices, in heteroglossia.66 In a novel, “the distinctive qualities of a character’s discourse always strive for a certain social significance, a social breadth; such discourses are always potential languages.”67 What, then, of individuated ideologies and representations, which the Esoteric body of imports can be said to occupy? The imported objects are called into being by the interactive structure set forth by Kūkai in the Catalogue, which is, later in history, interactive with the appearance of the objects themselves. The Esoteric recipient multiplies the signifiers among the Catalogue objects. First, when the items are described, they occupy an abstract physicality, once removed; the Catalogue produces an anticipation of the item. When the items were viewed, they had usually been preceded by the Catalogue. The experience of a description is always different from the cognitive or language categories of the description. For this reason, the passages accompanying the lists of goods in the Catalogue were considered here. Second, when they are viewed, or deployed, the imported materials create a second body of responses (an “experience”) comprising primarily visual, ritual, and ideological inferences. Visual experience, again, differs from description. It exceeds description while it simultaneously embodies it and is structured by it.68 Third, the items constitute a cultural memory of Kūkai’s experience in China that was conceptualized as memory (keepsakes of the patriarchs, remarks about his teacher and fellow disciples), praxis (mandala paintings for Esoteric rites, ritual implements), history, and so on. In other words, the objects straddle two existences and derive meaning from both — from a past and a present. Lastly, once they became part of the Japanese Esoteric tradition, they reconstituted themselves, carrying both their

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past and creating their present history. Copies of the paintings, the increasing value of a rare sandalwood shrine associated with Kūkai, the magical power of a ritual bell brought from China — all these lives and new histories commingle with memory and a present. The Catalogue has been approached with this commingling in mind, and the argument made that whether theological, hagiographical, ideological, or visual, Esoteric belief and history — the historical narrative — draws from materials as well as ideas and practices.69 The Catalogue, its objects of transmission, and their copies become the mutually constituting subject(s) of histories.

Notes The author would like to thank the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center (Friday Harbor), University of Washington, where this chapter was composed in several periods in a very quiet, splendid, and supportive environment. This research was made possible with support from the Royalty Research Fund, Office of Research; the Japan Endowment, Jackson School of International Studies; and the Division of Art History; all at the University of Washington; and the Getty Foundation, Collaborative Research Grant. Thanks are also due to John Stevenson and Ian Astley for their encouragement and suggestions. 1. Kōbōdaishi zenshū (KZ), 5 vols., ed. Mikkyō bunka kenkyūjo (Mt. Kōya: Mikkyō bunka kenkyūjo, 1970–1977), Kūkai, Shōrai mokuroku, vol. 1: 70. For an English translation of the full text, see Yoshito S. Hakeda, Kükai: Major Works. Translated, with an Account of his Life and a Study of his Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 140–157 (Hakeda’s English title is A Memorial Presenting a List of Newly Imported Sutras and Other Items). 2. Kūkai, Shōrai mokuroku, KZ 1: 100. 3. David L. Gardiner, “Transmission Problems: The Reproduction of Scripture and Kūkai’s ‘Opening’ of an Esoteric Tradition,” Japanese Religions 28, no. 1 (Jan. 2003): 5. 4. Hakeda, Kūkai: Major Works, 140. 5. Zō (Ch: xiang). 6. Denpō ajari. 7. The body of imported works is briefly discussed by art historian Ishida Hisatoyo in “Mikkyō bijutsu,” chapter three of his collected essays, Nihon bijutsushi ronshū, sono kōzōteki haaku, vol. 6 (Tokyo: Chūō kōron bijutsu shuppan, 1988), 229–230, which otherwise deals with texts. A more thorough discussion of the works is by Sawa Ryūken in his chapter “Kōbō daishi shoraimokuroku no mikkyō bijutsu,” in Kūkai, ed. Wada Shūjō and Takagi Shingen, vol. 3, Nihon meisō ronshū, 346–384 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1982). 8. Among recent publications that include extant Catalogue items are: Kyoto National Museum, ed., Kūkai to Kōyasan: Kōbō Daishi nitto 1200-nen kinen (Kyoto, Kyoto National Museum, 2003); ibid., Tōji Kokuhōten (Tōji National Treasures) (Kyoto and

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Tokyo: Kyoto and Tokyo National Museums, 1995); Honolulu Academy of Arts, ed. Sacred Treasures of Mount Kōya: The Art of Japanese Shingon Buddhism (Honolulu: Honolulu Academy of Arts, 2002); Tōji Hōmotsukan, ed., Tōji no nyorai, sōshizō (Kyoto, Tōji [Kyōōgokokuji] Hōmotsukan, 1994) and Tōji (Kyōōgokokuji), ed., Kōbō daishi no sho to sono shūhen (Kyoto: Benridō, 1987), figure no. 3. 9. The portable shrine belongs to Kongōbuji, Mt. Kōya, and is housed at their museum. 10. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: A New Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). See Janet Hoskins’ chapter for a response to some of Gell’s ideas and my discussion below. 11. Hakeda, Kūkai: Major Works, 3, from KZ 3: 459–460. 12. Thirty volumes of texts (approximately 140) in the hand of Kūkai, Tachibana Hayanari, and Tang transcribers survive in the collection of Ninnaji and are collectively known as the Sanjūjō sakushi. See the exhibition catalogue Tōji (Kyōōgokokuji), ed., Kōbō daishi no sho to sono shūhen (Kyoto: Benridō, 1987), no. 3, and Takagi Shingen, Kūkai shisō no shoshiteki kenkyū (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1990), especially 104–105, 167, 231–234, 248, and 276–294. 13. In 809 (Daidō 4.7.16) Kūkai was ordered to proceed to Takaosanji, a monastery northwest of the capital of Heiankyō (Kyoto). In 810 the texts and mandala were returned to Kūkai (Daidō 5.5th or 6th month and 5.11.14); Takagi, Kūkai, 104–105 and 167. Very little about the status of the goods before 810 can be gleaned from the records. One informative source is a letter Kūkai composed in 821 to Fujiwara no Fuyutsugu and Fujiwara no Otsugu, which summarizes the years he passed upon his return to Japan without the imported items. See Kōysan zappitsu shū, jo, in Mikkyō bunka kenkyū Kōbō daishi chosaku kenkūkai, ed., Teihon Kōbō daishi zenshū, vol. 7 (Wakayama, Japan: Mikkyō bunka kenkyūjo, 1991–97), 107. We know that Saichō borrowed texts from Kūkai from 809 (a document dated 809.8.24, in the compendia of Saichō’s works, Dengyō daishi zenshū, 5 vols. [Tokyo: Sekai Kankō Kyōkai, 1975, reprint of the 1926 edition published by Heizan Tosho Kankōjo, Ōtsu] 5: 450–451). See the items and records noted by Takagi, Kūkai, 153– 154, 181, 207, 231, 245–247, 284, and elsewhere. See also Ōyama Ninkai, “Kōbōdaishi to Dengyōdaishi shishojō ni tsuite,” Mikkyō gaku kenkyū 6 (1974): 163–171; and Ryūichi Abé, “Saichō and Kūkai: A Conflict of Interpretations,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 1995 (22/1–2): 103–137. Between 809 and 816, Saichō copied nearly half of all the texts listed in the Catalogue (Abé, “Saichō and Kūkai,” 111, 122). 14. Saichō was briefly introduced to the Esoteric teachings in China and returned with items that would be classified as Esoteric. None of the imported items are extant. Saichō wrote two inventories. One, no longer extant, was a catalogue of items he collected in Taizhou (modern Zhejiang); the second was of items collected in Yuezhou, which is owned by Enryakuji. See Eizan Daishi den in Dengyō daishi zenshū, vol. 5, supplement 1–48, and Shōrai mokuroku, in Dengyō daishi zenshū, vol. 4, 349–350. Other ninth-century inventories are extant from the priest Jōgyō (?–866), who studied with Kūkai and traveled to China in 838 with Engyō, a Gangoji priest who had also

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studied with Kūkai, and the Tendai priest Ennin. Kūkai’s disciple Jitsue trained Eun in Esotericism; Eun traveled to China in 842 and returned in 847 with many Esoteric items. 15. Tsuikai bunsō no. 5, as translated by Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 41. 16. Kūkai rarely used the term Mikkyō (“secret teachings”); rather, he deployed a range of descriptive terms prefaced with the key words mantra, secret, or vajra, such as vajra vehicle, and secret storehouse. For a detailed discussion of the term, see Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 189 ff.; and Cynthea Bogel “A Matter of Definition: Japanese Esoteric Art and the Construction of a Japanese Esoteric History,” Waseda Journal of Asian Studies 18 (1996). “Mikkyō” is a taxonomic distinction that found its greatest currency in the centuries after Kūkai’s death. It is used here to stress that it is a Japanese category. 17. From Hakeda, Kūkai: Major Works, 32, who notes that Huiguo used this expression to describe his relationship to Kūkai. He cites the Shingon fuhō den, KZ 1: 61. (Note that this is Kūkai’s reporting of Huiguo’s words and transmission.) 18. In a survey of thirty ganmon I found six that note commissions for icons. Some of the ganmon are spurious. See Sangō shiiki, Seireishū, in Nihon koten bungaku taikei (NKT), vol. 71 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1975). Kūkai is reported to have brought back a Thousand-armed Kannon statue. Ten deva images on a single handscroll are known from a work at Daigoji, as are illustrations of the five directions deities in the Benevolent Kings sūtra (five scrolls each, now mounted as hanging scrolls), Kyōōgokokuji (fourteenth to fifteenth centuries) and Daigoji (Kamakura period), and the New York Public Library, Spencer Collection (twelfth century). Ishida comments on the uncatalogued items imported by Kūkai as significant (“Kūkai to Shōraimokuroku,” 213) and Sawa takes them up in “Kōbō daishi shoraimokuroku no mikkyō bijutsu,” especially 378–384. 19. An example of one such intense scrutiny was by the priest Tokuitsu. 20. Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 234. Abé uses a lower case “e” in esoteric to map Kūkai’s distinction of the Esoteric; “exoteric” is a translation of kengyō, i.e., “not esoteric.” 21. The original Catalogue is lost, but two copies remain, one kept at Tōji (Kyōōgokokuji), attributed by colophon and style to Saichō, and one at Hōganji in Shiga Prefecture. Saicho’s work is a National Treasure, illustrated in Tōji kokuhōten, plate 76 and text, 223 (Handscroll, ink on paper. 27.1 × 885 cm [10.67 × 348.4 in.]). Enryakuji donated it to Tōji in 1341. Although most opinions cite the Tōji copy as closest to the original in content, Ishida believes that the Hōganji version is earlier, based on epigraphic and textual inconsistencies in the Tōji text. See Ishida, Nihon bijutsushi ronshū, sono kōzōteki haaku, 213–214. A text by Kūkai attached to the original Catalogue, known as the Jōhyōbun Sōkō, was discovered at the temple Sefukuji, Osaka, by Iijima Tachio in the 1970s. For an illustration, see Kōbō daishi no sho to sono shūhen, figure no. 8. 22. KZ 1: 69–70. 23. Among art historians who have dealt with this issue, the work of David Freedberg and Hans Belting has been especially helpful.

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24. The section title is “Butsuzō nado,” literally Buddhist images (or icons) and other items. 25. The teaching of the Buddha; Buddhism. 26. Sk: tathatā. Traditionally translated as “Thusness”(Jpn.: shinnyo), a Mahayana conception of the true reality underlying all phenomenal discrimination, the absolute source of all. 27. Sk: rupa (Jpn: shiki). Form or matter, that is capable of disintegration. 28. Literally, make visible with quill and ink. 29. Zusho. This term probably includes zuzō, or ink drawings and diagrams, and pictures, as in the modern zuga. 30. KZ 1: 95. 31. An epithet for the Buddha (“one who has come from tathatā”). 32. Among the other terms used are the Dharmakāya [Dharma realm] palace, or vajra storehouse. 33. One important aspect of this claim that no researcher has, to my knowledge, pursued is the following: Kūkai’s explanation of the place of image, form, and word in Mikkyō in the Catalogue echoes much earlier (Six Dynasties) inscriptions found on Chinese Buddhist icons or stele. See for example a statue in the Nelson Atkins Gallery dated 494, a stele in the Victoria and Albert Museum (A.9-1935), and a rubbing in the collection of the Fu Ssu-nien Library, Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica (No. 23253), Taiwan. 34. Or poems. 35. Sanmaya mandara, depicting deities in symbolic forms. 36. Hō mandara, made of bīja (Siddham [Sanskrit] letters) forms. 37. The original document is not punctuated. My punctuation marks follow the periods used in the transcription found in KZ and the grammar of the original. KZ 1: 71–72. Pursuant to my point above that Buddhist scholars make light of the nontextual contents of the inventory, Hakeda translates Kūkai’s five categories in the opening section as simply “newly imported sutras and other items.” 38. Thomas Lamarre, Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). 39. Gell, Art and Agency, 66. 40. Gell, Art and Agency, 68. 41. Collection Tōji. The Shōrai mokuroku section does not specify a set, only lists the items. Later documents found in the Tōboki give these three as a set imported by Kūkai. 42. Huiguo was Amoghavajra’s last disciple. Amoghavajra named Huilang, not Huiguo, as his principal successor, but Huiguo achieved greater fame, and by the time Kūkai arrived in Chang’an Huiguo was the foremost teacher of the Amoghavajra tradition. On Huilang, see the entries in the dictionaries Shūyū Kanaoka, ed., Kūkai jiten (Tokyodō shuppan, 1979), 188–189, and Mikkyō Daijien (Hōzōkan, 1987), 429. 43. The section titled “Items handed down by the masters” is in KZ 1: 96–101. 44. See Abé and Brian Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in

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Early Medieval Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University East Asia Center, 2000). See also Nara National Museum, ed. Busshari no shōgon (Kyōto: Dōhōsha, 1983). 45. For a discussion of extant items said to be imported by Kūkai and housed at Tōji, see Tōji sōken issen-nihyakunen kinen shuppan hensan iinkai, ed. Tōji no rekishi to bijutsu (Tokyo: Tōkyo bijutsu, 1996), 444–464. 46. On the robe, see Tōji no rekishi to bijutsu, cat. no. 318, 457; on the box see cat. no. 319, 458; see also Tōji kokuhōten, cat. no. 106, 236–237; on the box see cat. no. 108, 237. 47. See the catalogues noted in note 8. 48. Ten Arhats (Jpn.: Rakkan, enlightened persons, usually old and eccentric men) have a human form, but six appear to be bodhisattvas, so their identity is unclear. 49. Sandalwood shrines made in Tang China and Central Asia include works in the National Museum, New Delhi; British Museum; Musée Guimet; Nelson Atkins Museum; Cleveland Museum; the Metropolitan Museum; and in Japan, at the Fumonin, Itsukushima Shrine, and a private collection. A fine example unpublished outside Korea (although recently restored in Japan) is the sandalwood shrine of Songgwangsa, Jeollanam-do, Korea (13.9 cm [5.47 in.]; Korean National Treasure No. 42). Its style is similar to the Kongōbuji shrine, and both are likely eighth-century Tang. Temple records indicate that the shrine belonged to the priest Jee Nool, founder of Korean Son (Chan), who resided at Songgwangsa from 1200 to 1210. There is no record of how he came to acquire the shrine; he never traveled to China but kept the portable shrine with him at all times until his death. Sincere thanks to Kokyoung Sunim, director of the Songgwangsa Museum, for information conveyed to Ms. Seungeun Yoo, on February 18, 2003. Illustrations of the shrine appear in Songgwangsa’s publications. 50. Honolulu Academy of Arts, Sacred Treasures, cat. no. 2, text 153, translation by Willa Jane Tanabe. The shrine was also featured in the twelve hundredth anniversary of Kūkai’s China sojourn exhibition at Japan’s national museums (see Kūkai to Kōyasan). The three-pronged vajra implement likely postdates Kūkai. Only recently have Shingon publications begun to indicate spurious provenance with terms such as “traditionally attributed to,” etc. 51. See Stanley Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets: A Study in Charisma, Hagiography, Sectarianism, and Millennial Buddhism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 208ff, 321ff., and especially 335ff. See also David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 52. Pamsula (Jpn. funzō-e) are Indian garments of discarded cloth. Nine kesa are in the inventory of items belonging to Emperor Shomu, and four others date to the eighth century. On Buddhist robes in English, see A. B. Griswold, “Prolegomena to the Study of the Buddha’s Dress in Chinese Sculpture, Artibus Asiae 26, no. 2 (1963): 85–130; and Alan Kennedy, Manteau de nuages: kesa japonais, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1991). On the Tōji robe, see Tōji no rekishi to bijutsu, 457, for bibliography, see 538; Tōji kokuhōten fig. 106, 236–237; and Kōbōdaishi to mikkyō bijutsu, fig. 200, 216. 53. Junjirō Takakusu et al., eds, Taishō shinshū Daizōkyō, 85 vols. (Taishō Issaikyō

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kankōkai, 1914–1922; reprint Taishō shinshū Daizōkyō kankōkai, 1969), 45, no. 1900: 897 (page references are to the reprint edition). 54. Bernard Faure, Visions of Power (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 159. 55. The restoration is noted in Seireishū, fasc. 7. See Tōji no rekishi to bijutsu, 446. For an important basic study on the pair, see Takata Osamu, Akiyama Terukazu, and Yanagisawa taka, Takao mandara no kenkyū (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1967). 56. Today there is a pair of mandala paintings, and on the walls a Siddham bīja for the Dainichi and images of Kongōsatta and the eight patriarchs. See Tōji no nyorai, soshizō, 71–72, and p. 19 for plates of the current pagoda interior (cf. page 20). 57. Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 180 for the quote and 181. 58. Himitsu mandarakyō fuhōden, KZ, 1: 1–49. The shorter work, Shingon fuhōden, is KZ, 1: 50–68. There are differences between the two records, most notably the addition of Subhakarasimha and Yixing to the lineage and the question of Kongōsatta’s initiation of Nāgārjuna. 59. On the paintings, see Tōji no rekishi to bijutsu, 444–446, for bibliography, 530; and Tōji (Kyōōgokukuji) Hōmotsukan, ed., Kōbō Daishi no sho: Onhitsu shichisoei, scichifuku (Kyoto: Tōji (Kyōōgokokuji) Hōmotsukan, 2002). Of the five, only Amoghavajra is painted on a single width of silk; the others three. Hamada Takashi postulates based on style that Lizhen may only have painted Amoghavajra. In Hamada Takeshi, “Kōbō daishi to mikkyō bijutsu,” ed. Nakano Gisho, Kobodaishi kenkyū (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkakan, 1978), 294. It is also possible that Kūkai was not given all new works in Chang’an. 60. All seven fabric widths are turned horizontally and mounted below the portrait section. On the back of the lowermost section added to the Subhakarashima painting is the notation Kōnin 12 (821), the year the paintings of Nāgārjuna and Nāgabodhi were made and the repairs undertaken. See Kōbō Daishi no sho: Onhitsu shichisoei, shichifuku for photographs of the paintings, inscriptions, and transcriptions of the inscriptions. 61. Since the works are hanging scrolls it is natural that the lower sections would have deteriorated more rapidly than the middle or top; the tension caused by handling and rolling would have stressed the fabric, applied ink, and pigments. Today the lower inscriptions are in poor condition. Hamada, “Kōbō daishi.” 62. On the status of the texts prior to 810, see Takagi, Kūkai shisō, especially 276– 277. In 809 (Daidō 4.7.16) Kūkai was ordered to proceed to Takaosanji, northwest of Kyoto. In 810 the texts and mandala were returned to Kūkai (Daidō 5.5th or 6th month and 5.11.14); Takagi, Kūkai shisō, 104–105 and 167. Saichō borrowed texts from Kūkai from 809; see the items and records noted by Takagi, Kūkai shisō, 153–154, 181, 207, 231, 245–247, 284, and elsewhere. See also Abé, “Saichō and Kūkai,” 103–137. 63. For a more detailed discussion of the divisions, see Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 179–180. See also KZ 1:72–87. 64. Keikokushū, in Gunsho Ruijū, vol. 6 (Nagai Shoseki, 1931), 154. Translation by Robert Borgen, “The Japanese Mission to China, 801–806,” Monumenta Nipponica 37, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 20.

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65. See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 340. 66. On heteroglossia, the assertion that a word’s meaning is negotiable, multifarious, and completely contingent on context, see Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 263, and the glossary, 340, on framing. See also Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign (Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). 67. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 332. 68. This is neither an essentialist, universalistic view of visual experience nor one that privileges it. The intention is to point to the tendency to privilege description as the only thing relevant to cultural categories. Descriptions are consciously reflected categories; experience exceeds them. 69. Terry Eagleton defines an “ideologico-aesthetic” between “the empirical and theoretical” occupied by certain religious objects. See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990). See, for example, 95.

Memories

seven | ashley thompson

Angkor Revisited The State of Statuary

Cambodia’s kings are forever returning to Angkor. The foundation of the Angkorian empire was itself constituted by a spectacular return, a return that set the cycle in motion, to deeply mark the Khmer collective memory for centuries to come.1 In a remarkable discursive return to roots, an eleventhcentury court Brahman recorded in stone the legendary return of an exiled prince to Cambodia in the eighth century.2 This was Jayavarman II, who, our early historian tells us, concluded a series of military campaigns with a series of religious campaigns, claiming to restore order to the land and then reclaim the throne. Building temples in the east, the south, the west, and the north of the broad plain, Jayavarman II was reputed to have physically and symbolically circumscribed the space that is known today as Angkor (fig. 7.1). For the next five centuries Cambodian kings and court officials built and restored temples to the gods, their ancestors, and themselves in and beyond Angkor. The statues now exhibited in museums, conserved in warehouses, or sold on the international market once peopled these temples. “Bodies of glory,” (yaśasarīra) or “dharma,” as they are often called in stone inscriptions of the time, these images portray gods, kings, queens, and other officials. After the fall of Angkor in the fifteenth century and the permanent removal of the capital to the south, Khmer royalty repeatedly returned to Angkor’s temples, paying their respects to gods and ancestors, restoring old statues and erecting new ones. And they continue to return, with unflagging assiduity. Of course such royal returns constitute religious, personal, or “cultural” events, but at the same time they have political implications. The king’s return to Angkor is a performative act: it promotes the stability of a certain politicalcultural continuity only insofar as it is itself an example of such continuity. Indeed, the vitality of this returning tradition in Cambodia is due no doubt, at least in part, to a certain recurring instability of political and to some extent cultural structures. However, this situation is not, in my opinion, an anomaly, but rather an example of what can be seen as a general axiom: that culture, on

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Figure 7.1. The Angkor region is situated in Cambodia’s northern Siem Reap Province, to the northeast of the Tonle Sap lake and southwest of the Kulen mountains. Officially defined by zoning regulations adopted in 1994 with reference to colonial and post-Independence legislation, the central Angkor Park is in effect an open-air and, to some extent, living museum. Most archaeological vestiges — temples, statuary, and civil works — date to the period of the Angkorian empire, from the ninth to fifteenth centuries. (For an English translation of the 1994 zoning regulations, which constituted the first legal act to be signed by King Sihanouk in his role as head of the first postwar elected government, see Ang Chouléan, A. Thompson, and E. Prenowitz, Angkor: A Manual for the Past, Present and Future, APSARA and UNESCO, Phnom Penh, 1995.) (Map courtesy of Kim Samnang, APSARA Authority, Angkor)

the one hand, and threats to culture, on the other, are not simply antithetical forces. A certain cultural drive gains its urgency and to a degree its raw materials precisely from rupture or the threat of rupture in cultural tradition. This is not intended as a eulogy to cultural destruction, which is always, in some sense, a destruction of humanity. However, insofar as cultural vitality is never a question of simply conserving or preserving objective cultural products, but rather resembles a process of managing loss, a sort of ongoing healing process in which the new grows out of gaping wounds in the old, the implications for cultural curators of all kinds could not be more profound. The physical and symbolic pilgrimage of the king’s return is a complex

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movement that can hold both conservative and innovative potential in a powerful though fragile balance. A telling contemporary example is that of King Sihanouk’s return to Angkor after the coup d’état of “July 5–6,” 1997.3 This return after a long absence no doubt signified many things in many different arenas. But from a historical point of view, the king was participating in an ancient and august tradition by making the pilgrimage to the seat of the ancient empire to receive his adoring people and, in his words, to “pay [his] respects to the statues,” while hoping to reconcile warring factions and re-establish peace. The king’s return to Angkor was a kind of real-life metaphor for another “return,” as he himself put it. “I want to return to the status quo ante,” the king said, “with genuine respect for human rights, genuine freedom of the press, peace and democracy.”4 In Cambodia, art, religion, and politics have always gone hand in hand. I will address here the general question of this dynamic, looking in particular at the relations between statues and kings and the problematics of the portrait. In the process I too will embark on a voyage of return: a return to the traditional sources of the field of Khmer studies, and through them of course to Angkor, in order to take a fresh look not only at classical Khmer statuary but also at related inscriptions and cult practices.5

Portraits of Early Angkor In the late ninth century, King Yasovarman moved the Khmer capital to the central portion of the Angkorian plain, slightly north and west of his father’s capital city at Hariharalaya. But before doing so, he erected a temple on an island rising at the center of an enormous reservoir that had been constructed there by his father.6 Today, this temple carries a linguistic vestige of the name of the ancient city [Harihara]alaya, pronounced “Lolei” in modern Khmer. Lolei temple was dedicated to the memory of Yasovarman’s two parents and two distant ancestors in the maternal line. A Sanskrit inscription on a stela from the site speaks of Yasovarman’s religious and political work: These four statues of Śiva and Śarvāni, works of his own art, were erected together by Śrī Yaśodharman, brilliant with srī (prosperity), with yaśas (glory) and dharma (moral merit), moon amongst Kings, whose face was equal to the moon, who began to reign in the year 889, in view of accumulating the merits of his parents. (K. 323, st. 58–59)7 Other inscriptions record that one of these Shiva statues was named after Yasovarman’s father and predecessor on the throne, and the other after a male

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ancestor. The images of Śarvāni, Shiva’s consort, were named for those men’s wives. While ensuring the continued association of these men and women with the gods, symbolically ensuring their afterlife in divine paradise, the creation and installation of these statues reflects directly upon their creator, Yasovarman. As the inscriptions point out, these are “works of his own art” (sva śilpa racita). This is a remarkable phrase in that it demonstrates a distinctively individualistic or personal relationship to his (sva) statuary. The king distinguishes himself in commissioning religious art. Like Angkorian statues themselves, the king is characterized here by yaśas, glory, and dharma, moral merit, order, law — a crucial term in Brahmanic and Buddhist doctrine with a broad range of related meanings.8 Yasovarman becomes in fact Yaśodharman. The simple consonant change endows the king with dharma, the attribute he reveres. Through this linguistic turn, we are made to understand that the king’s meritorious works (dharma), that is, the statues he has built, reflect directly upon him. In this light, it is notable that it is the king’s face, “equal to the moon,” rather than that of the statues or the people they purport to represent, which is evoked. In erecting these four images, Yasovarman, in a sense, portrays himself. In Khmer religious practice, the statue plays a central role. And in studying the statue in this Cambodian context, one comes up against what we might call the question of the portrait. In fact, the history of Khmer statuary can itself be construed as a grand study in the portrait, although this is not exactly the orthodox view. In any case, the issue raised by the role and status of the portrait in classical Khmer traditions of anthropomorphic representation are complex ones. Did Yasovarman’s father serve as a model for the god Shiva? Or was his father portrayed as the god? Recognizable by a well-defined Indian iconographic canon, most statues can be identified as a recognizable god or goddess. Shiva has a crescent moon in his diadem; Vishnu has four arms and carries a conch shell, a disc, a mace, and a globe. And so on. Art historians have generally concluded that Angkorian royalty and dignitaries were sculpted in the image of the gods. However, a statue would typically be given a name combining that of the honored individual and his or her preferred god. It has also been suggested that upon death the individual’s mortal remains (ashes, bones, jewelry) were in one way or another incorporated into the statue. In these ways, the statue, actually representing the god, would in some sense have been personalized.9 In the generally accepted view, the “true portrait”10 does not appear until the reign of Jayavarman VII, the last great Angkorian king. Centuries of formalized or generic modes of representation are seen to have been interrupted

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by this king with the introduction of his own portrait in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.11 There is clearly rupture; the difference is visible and undoubtedly translates a new vision of statuary and royalty at Jayavarman VII’s court. It is in fact this very difference that most strikes the eye, as if Jayavarman VII’s artists were concerned not only with representing the god or the king but, perhaps more importantly, with representing the portrait itself. J. Boisselier suggests as much in pursuing the work of G. Cœdès. The famous “statue presumed to be of Jayavarman VII”12 in Phnom Penh’s National Museum (see fig. 7.3), Boisselier writes, “evokes, through its facial characteristics, an authentic portrait.”13 If the statue “evokes” a portrait, if it has “characteristics” that suggest that it is a portrait, in other words if these characteristics suggest that they correspond in a unique way to the characteristics of a particular person, then the statue is communicating something about the portrait, about what it is to be a portrait, even as it communicates something about the person of whom it is a portrait, Jayavarman VII. Cœdès had in fact indicated a similar logic in discussions of a hypothetical statue of Suryavarman II, the twelfthcentury king associated with Vishnu in “his temple of Angkor Wat.” This, Cœdès notes, is where a statue “must have represented him [Suryavarman II] with the features of this god,” and “with, perhaps, some features indicating the nature of the portrait-statue.”14 This hypothetical statue bears, then, the features of the god, of course, and also perhaps those of the portrait. This may seem to be splitting rhetorical hairs. What Cœdès and Boisselier no doubt meant was that these images represented particular people, not the portrait as such. But their formulations betray a deeper meaning by pointing to a paradoxical interdependence of the singular and the generic that runs throughout Angkorian statuary and must underlie any theory of the portrait. The conceptual complexities of the portrait in general, coupled with Angkorian traditions of ancestral and funerary cults, render problematic any absolute distinction between idealized representation before the reign of Jayavarman VII and realistic representation under his reign. For example, it turns out to be extremely difficult to establish a rigorous distinction between a generic and a relatively realistic representation of a face. What is a face? And first, is it unique? One could say that even the most “realistic” traditions in portraiture are deeply convention-bound. We can represent the mouth or the smile of an individual only if we can represent the mouth or the smile in general. The portrait inevitably depends on the possibility of generic representation for its very realism, and vice versa. One must be able to portray “the face” in general in order to be able to portray any particular face, and any apparently generic rendering always runs the risk of being identified with some individual person.

Figure 7.2. One of the Bayon temple’s remaining “face-towers,” Angkor Thom, Angkor. These sanctuaries, sculpted with four faces, each looking out to one of the cardinal points, are characteristic of the architecture produced during Jayavarman VII’s reign. Late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries. (Photo courtesy of Kim Samnang)

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Yet every face is unique, eternally irreducible to the generic. The multiplicity of interpretations inspired by the faces of Jayavarman VII’s Bayon temple towers — faces representative if not of Jayavarman VII at least of his reign — also derive from this problematic of the portrait (fig. 7.2). Further exploration of these issues will in fact lead us to see that this tension between the generic and the singular or individual lies also at the heart of conceptions of the king. The question was raised well before the reign of Jayavarman VII: Did the king serve as a model for the god, or was the god a model for the king? What inspired these undeniably Khmer figures at such a great temporal and geographic remove from their Indian sources? While Angkorian kings, at least until Jayavarman VII, were represented with the features and the attributes of the gods, Angkorian inscriptions repeatedly proclaim the superiority of the king to the supreme god; pointing out the flawlessness of the one and the flaws of the other, they posit the king as the model for the god.15 Other questions further trouble the image we might have of these statues. How does a son portray a father at his death? To what extent does a portrait of one’s ancestor portray oneself? Yasovarman himself was associated with Shiva and would be portrayed in that god’s image, if not during his lifetime surely after his death. Like the father, the son both worshiped and was to be worshiped in the image of the supreme god. Bearing the father’s name and perhaps his incinerated remains, the Shiva statue is animated not only with the father’s spirit but also with that of the son, his creator. The portrait in its old Khmer avatars embodies these many genealogical complexities. Virtually every major Angkorian king would seem to have created “his own art,” a style characterizing at least his reign and usually the art produced in its immediate wake. These repeated assertions of individuality are, however, haunted by tradition, at times punctuated by conscious returns to the past. Scholars have generally read into each individual style a form of what we could call state propaganda, a sort of idealized image of the kingdom. A style is in a sense taken to be a portrait of a reign.16 The differences between successive styles within the generally conservative Angkorian tradition can seem slight even to well-informed observers. But it is important not to underestimate the significance of the stylistic evolution of Khmer art as both a vehicle for and a reflection of continuity and change. The mere fact that styles can be distinguished in association with kings indicates a very particular relationship between the state and statuary. The king himself would have been something of an art historian, as the inscriptions suggest, by insisting on a king’s “own art” in a phrase that anticipates the modern understanding of Khmer artistic styles by a thousand years.

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An Iconographic Genealogy Yet the meaning or the status of this expression “works of his own art” (svaśilpa racita) begs explication. Who lends authority to the expression? Who is the author? Who signs? Who reigns over the signature of an art? Such a royal art, such an art of the king, such a tradition of the arts held firmly in hand by successive kings, is without doubt an elitist art. In the ancient period, art was certainly a vehicle for power, and for a king to have “his own art” also suggests that art can be conquered not unlike a neighboring kingdom. Yet the elitism of this art is not necessarily to be understood as taken up in an oppositional structure that would exclude the possibility of a simultaneously popular implication. From this perspective, relations between the elite and the popular are embedded in the problematic of the portrait that depends on a subtle balance between the individual and the general, the particular and the universal, between realism and idealization, between the person and the people — a subtle balance at the heart of any concept of the king: an individual person who must in some sense embody “his” kingdom. This description of the relationship between a king and a kingdom, which assumes at least a partial deconstruction of any simple opposition between the individual and the collective, can be read as an example of the canonical mandala model of Southeast Asian power structures.17 The mandala — a geometric diagram of any scale structured by a series of concentric layers radiating out from a center — has served as a graphic model of Southeast Asian conceptions of territory and sovereignty. In O. W. Wolters’ usage, this mandala-type organization of land and power is characterized by a circular view of history focused on the present, with shifting centers and surface areas and indeterminate, flexible boundaries. Each mandala is animated at its center by a “man of prowess” singled out not through some preordained process of genealogical calculation but by the living members of his community on the basis of his “achievements,” magical or military, mundane or heavenly. This model is established in clear opposition to another, the centralized bounded state, involving an important investment in lineage, dynasty, and institutions that outlive any particular ruler, in conjunction with a certain linear conception of history. An important feature of the mandala as model of the state for our purposes here is the assimilation between microcosm and macrocosm that it figures in its pattern of concentric radiation. Through a series of associations, the king embodies at once the people and the state — as a microcosmic version, of course, of the universe. This is certainly not a situation that ought to pertain in a democracy in the Western sense, where the sovereignty of the

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nation is assumed to be distributed evenly among the citizens, and where the state must see its citizens as essentially identical, undifferentiated entities. And yet in Cambodia’s mandala system, there is some other, organic relation between the people and their “elected representative” in the person of this “man of prowess” that is the king. I will return to this briefly at the end of the chapter. For the moment, another, perhaps more telling way of getting at this relationship is through the role of the statue and the question of dharma, a wideranging term, as mentioned above, typically translated as “merit,” “moral order,” or “law.” In the first place, dharma has a crucial function within the imagined community of past and future kings. Because if kings reign over the community of their subjects, they also form a kind of phantom community in their own right. The concluding stanzas of the Lolei inscription make a strident appeal to just such a community: Śrī Yaśovarman implores in these terms the future sovereigns of Cambodia: “I beg of you, respect this dharma, o you who are rich in dharma.” (K. 323, st. 90) A single word, dharma, is used here to designate at once the statues erected by Yasovarman and the attribute of future kings — that which constitutes their royalty, for kings are not simply rich; they are rich in dharma. By a kind of metonymy, dharma comes to designate that which embodies dharma: the statue, which is in its turn a trope for the king. Bearing his name and perhaps other physical mortal remains, the statue represents the king as dharma, the embodiment of moral order. Rich in dharma, Cambodia’s future kings are called upon to maintain the dharma, which is to maintain the images of the past, the memory of the king — in short to maintain moral order. The kings embody dharma through their perpetuation of the dharma-worshipping cult. The simultaneity of past and future salvation as embodied by statuary — that is, the protection of the heritage as investment for the future — is expressed in another inscription at Lolei: And here he pleads to all future kings of kings of Kambujas (people of Kampuchea), he who walks at the head of donors, “Protect the bridge which is my own dharma.” (K. 324, st. 2)18 Or, in an alternative translation, Yasovarman calls on future kings to “[p]rotect the bridge which is your own dharma.” The expression sva-dharma-setu is notably ambiguous; for whom is the dharma a bridge, present or future kings? Pivoting on the third person pronoun sva, the Sanskrit — like the bridge

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itself — leads in both directions. That is, the third person pronoun simultaneously functions here as a first- and second-person pronoun.19 The dharma, the statue, is figured as a bridge (or more precisely a dike [setu]) that leads me or you across the water of time. The statue retains the past in opening a path to the future. It is a bridge for the king’s deceased ancestors to cross to eternity. A bridge for Yasovarman to his father and to his own metempsychotic future, for he will be remembered if not recalled for his meritorious work. And a bridge for future kings, a bridge to their past that is of course a bridge to their future — if they keep it from collapse. The next stanzas elaborate on this mirror image: You who are incarnated in a glory that survives you, who are prepared even to sacrifice your life for your dharma, you the first among those who carry their heads high, could you covet the good of the god? This is what I tell myself. (K. 324, st. 3) Telling future kings what he tells himself, the king is fused with his successors by the image of the head. He who speaks, in addressing himself at once to future kings and to himself, is “at the head (agra: “summit”) of donors.” Those to whom he speaks “carry their heads high (uccais).” The passage from the one to the other is announced in this capital image proper to kings. The whole being of this highest being is concentrated in the image of the highest of heights, the head above all heads. In the yaśasarīra, or “bodies of glory,” statues named at once for ancestors and ancestral gods, the future kings are incarnated in a glory that survives them. The yaśasarīra precede them, to survive through and after them, in perpetuation of their glory. Protecting the statues is perpetuating their own life in the form of the dharma. The dharma, one could say, designates the extraordinary and complex phenomenon of the portrait as a concentration of past and future, of ancestors and successors seen in a singular face. Some fifty years after this inscription, Yasovarman’s nephew, Rajendravarman, retrieved the throne from what would seem to have been a usurping rival line and returned the court to Angkor. Toward the end of a long and beautiful Sanskrit poem inscribed at the temple of Pre Rup in 968, King Rajendravarman is seen to recall his uncle in word and act.20 As if he had attached to Śiva, who had only an incomplete adornment, an eminent and unprecedented adornment, he produced in all directions a thousand moons full of his glory. (K. 806, st. 265) King Rajendravarman, this stanza means to say, outshines the god Shiva. While the god bears only an “incomplete” crescent moon in his diadem (one

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of Shiva’s traditional iconographic attributes), the king’s glory accounts for one thousand “full” moons. Attached to Shiva, Rajendravarman’s glory lights all directions of the universe. Yet it is important to note that the king cannot do without the god; it is only when attached to Shiva that Rajendravarman’s glory lights the universe. The next stanza continues this portrait of the king with a remarkable mango-flower-and-bee metaphor: Attracted by the flower of his glory on the fruit of the beauty of the mango tree of his body, the bee of the eye of men could not detach itself. (st. 266) With all eyes on the king, the poem next reports how Rajendravarman fulfills his stately (or universal) duties by refurbishing statues erected by his Angkorian ancestors and then consecrating new images across the land. The royal acts are consigned in the astonishing Sanskrit poetic tradition in which single phrases carry carefully calculated double meanings: Searching somehow for a reason to call himself master [or to say that the individual soul is the supreme soul], this king, active and exempt of indifference, fulfilled his duty toward the elements constituting the State. To the gods erected by kings Śrī Indravarman, Śri Yaśovarman and their successors, he confirmed the elements of sacrifice established by these kings. (st. 267–268) In seeking to proclaim himself (atman) master (iśvara, also an epithet of Shiva), the king simultaneously demonstrates the union of the individual (atman) with the universal (iśvara). The supreme master unites within himself the individual and the universal; through his person, the “elements” constitute the “State.” This union, which is the formation of the State in the person of the king, is accomplished through the act of restoring the cult of ancestral statues. After then enumerating many new constructions and offerings made to other traditional gods, the panegyric goes on to celebrate the restoration of the capital city at Angkor. It is here that Rajendravarman claims to have enhanced his own dharma by answering to his uncle Yasovarman. In restoring order to the city, his acts have given meaning to his uncle’s selfless plea: After having restored this glorious city [or Yaśodharapura, name of Angkor] (which had become) invisible, he filled it with dharma, profit, and pleasure, as (Vyāsa), son of Satyavatī who filled the Bhārata with the three Veda.

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Thanks to this king, elevated by the height of his own dharma, the just plea of king Yaśovarman which was without (desire for) profit [or empty of meaning] like a request made by an ascetic [or which has for object the void, like the thoughts of a Yogācāra], acquired signification like the triple science [or reality like the (Buddhist) Triad]. (st. 274–275) Rajendravarman does his duty. He does his own duty and in so doing does another duty — that vis-à-vis his uncle. He elevates himself higher in making sense of the prayer which his ancestor had left to the “void.” The inscription then announces the foundation of the temple of Pre Rup and its statues of Shiva and Vishnu associated with certain ancestors, as well as one image — perhaps a linga — endowed with the king’s own royal essence. Addressed to Cambodia’s future kings, and in echo of Yasovarman’s supplication, the inscription’s closing stanzas provide a dazzling performative exegesis of the conception of dharma. The king and the statues embody dharma, moral order, and stability in continuation of ancestral tradition; future kings are implored to maintain the statues in view of making that dharma their own. The first image here is literally one of ingesting. Fed by offerings made to the religious foundations, future kings embody the dharma through the act of giving the dharma continued life: Like cows, having received in a bowl, in offering to the gods, divine food blessed with the six flavors, may the men placed at the head (of this religious work) by this king [or by Indra], give milk with the unique flavor [or with the unique pleasure] of their own duty (sva dharma). “The king Śrī Rājendravarman, informed, liberal, pleaded incessantly to the future kings of the Kambujas,” in this thought, protect this great work which is his (sva dharma). Because in a body divided into multiple parts, there is only a single soul (atman) which acts and enjoys, oh you who are wise, may you seize more and more upon your own duties (sva dharma) in all of the good works (dharma). Even (based) on the distinction of attributes, the distinction between the author (of a good work) and he who participates in it, in view of distinguishing the fruit of an act (as they should be accorded to each one), should be rejected, like the eclipse of bad method (should be destroyed) by the solar clarity of Supreme Truth.21

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You have conquered the earth by your exertions: you must protect everything found on its surface. Your attention should not fail for a single moment, in case someone come to trouble (this foundation). Oh (kings), you who are issued from the arm of (Brahmā) born of the lotus, and who are abundantly armed by the strength of your arm, may the word ksatra, characterized by the action of saving from destruction,22 ˙ manifest for you its proper meaning. Oh you who are plunged with fortune into sleep which is the enjoyment of royal power, if this good work (dharma) came to collapse, may you awake in its favor, like Vishnu (asleep) on the ocean of milk.23 (st. 285–291) This long exposition of the dharma concludes with a final stanza whose double meaning is redoubled by an ambiguous address. In the image of the “bridge of dharma” that leads in two directions, this stanza produces a mirroring effect between the first and second person, which in turn reflects the dharma or the statues described: May this resolution (Dhr ti, wife of Dharma) of mine, like a young ˙ woman obeying her duty [or having approached Yama], charming for her reserve, dear to the honest man [or to Satyavat], teaching the doctrine to the ignorant [or giving sight to the blind (Dyumatsena)], give you life according to the dharma in a body of glory. (st. 293) Or : May your resolution [or Dhr ti (wife of Dharma)], like the beautiful ˙ (Sāvitrī) wife of Satyavat, obeying duty [or having approached Yama], charming by her observance of rules [or by Niyama], procuring knowledge for the ignorant [or vision for the blind (Dyumatsena)], give life to the dharma [or to (her husband) Dharma] in my body of glory.24 In the first version, it is the resolution of King Rajendravarman — the resolution to make this religious foundation — that gives life according to the dharma to Cambodia’s future kings. Rajendravarman’s “body of glory,” his statue, bears their dharmalife. In the second version, it is the resolution of future kings — the resolution to maintain the religious foundation — that gives life to the dharma embodied by Rajendravarman’s “body of glory.” The continuation of the cult by future kings gives Rajendravarman continued dharmalife. It is significant that, like the bridge passage from Lolei cited above,

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no single translation sufficiently relates the text’s undecidability regarding the begetter of life, the begetter of dharma. Is it he who erected the statue, the statue itself, or he who maintains the cult? The father or the son? The ancestor or the successor? Or the art? Does one inherit dharma, or does one pass it on? It is in any case not surprising in this context that the resolution be personified as a woman. The word for “resolution,” dhrti, is also the name of the wife ˙ of Dharma, she who gives the dharma life. She, Resolution, is furthermore compared to Sāvitrī, the wife of Satyavat, literally the “honest man,” a couple from the Mahabharata. I will comment only on a few points of G. Cœdès’ lengthy explication of this stanza.25 Sāvitrī is the faithful wife who obtains from the god of death, Yama, the resurrection of her deceased husband, vision for her father-in-law, Dyumatsena, and a posterity of one hundred sons. The mention of the rules of niyama, which is also the name of the son born to Dhr ti and Dharma, accentuates the notion of posterity obtained from the god ˙ of death, or of a resuscitated husband. Absent from the preceding stanzas in the exchange between kings, born of the arm of a god himself born of a lotus, “resolution” marks here the part of women in perpetuation of the royal line: it is the wife and mother who “gives life.” The metaphor of vision in which Sāvitrī “gives vision to the blind” is intriguing in this context. Cœdès points out that this phrase may refer to a ritual opening of the eyes of the statue (called here a “body of glory”). This rite, essential still to ceremonial consecration during which the statue is endowed with life, consists in a ritual pinprick and painting or incrustation of glass or jewels to open the statue’s eyes. The mirroring effect is at its most spectacular in these images of vision. The exchange begins with the superposition of the couples Dhr ti-Dharma and Sāvitrī-Satyavat. To give life to the dharma is to ˙ give vision to the blind, as if the dharma were, in the image of his father (the father of Satyavat adopted by Dharma in the poetic exchange), blind, and thus dependent on others for his own vision. It is in fact the dharma that makes visible — once it is seen. This image appears earlier in the inscription when it is said that Rajendravarman made the dharma visible through the foundation of the Mebon, a temple this king had dedicated to his ancestors (like Lolei temple for Yasovarman) before consecrating the temple of Pre Rup. The temple embodies the dharma: In the pond of Yaśodhara built by Śrī Yaśovarman, this active King made there appear a meritorious work (dharma) which had until then been invisible. (st. 269)

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As we have already seen in stanza 274 cited above, the city of Angkor (Yaśodharapura) had become “invisible” during the removal of the court from Angkor after the reign of Yasovarman. In returning to Angkor and in restoring the cult of the statues erected there by his ancestors, Rajendravarman, whose glory illuminates the universe “in all directions,” makes the capital visible again.

Featuring the King The return of Jayavarman VII to Angkor in the late twelfth century and the conversion of the court to Mahayana Buddhism marked a major turning point in Khmer art. Drawing on ancestral traditions, Jayavarman VII was to create his own art — once again art was to portray the character of the king and his reign. The originality of Jayavarman VII’s art was in breathing fresh life into the iconographic tradition to forge a striking portrait of the king and his kingdom — and indeed an unprecedented reconfiguration of the portrait itself. At the symbolic center of Jayavarman VII’s kingdom stood the Bayon temple, a complex of towers sculpted with faces, which was itself a portrait — faithful or not, physical or metaphysical — of the king (fig. 7.2). As mentioned earlier, these faces, facing or towering above us, have inspired a multiplicity of interpretations. Stepping back from the temple, or rising above it, the Bayon appears however as one element in a triad. The Bayon sheltered in its central sanctuary a statue of the Buddha protected by the nāga. This mountain-temple, the seat of royal power at the center of the new city of Angkor Thom, was the latest in a long tradition of “funerary temples” built by and for Khmer monarchs. But the Bayon was built only after the consecration of two other major temple complexes: Ta Prohm, dedicated to the king’s mother in association with Prajñāpāramitā, “Perfection of Wisdom,” mother of all buddhas; and Preah Khan, dedicated to his father in association with Lokeśvara, bodhisattva of compassion, savior of the world. This divine familial triad (mother-father-son), spectacularly manifest on a monumental scale, was reproduced in diverse forms over the course of Jayavarman VII’s reign. The numerous bronze miniatures dated to this reign show permutations in the configuration, in which the three figures could take on different forms or different positions within the triad. In and of itself, the triad reflects, in comparison with its artistic precedents, a more “realistic” image of royal family members, precisely because it represents the family. Divine triads were common in ancient Cambodia’s Brahmanic art, but before Jayavarman VII, the

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lineup was most frequently all male: Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahmā. Variations on this did exist; we see for example a central male divinity flanked by two female consorts or by one consort and another male ally. The conceptual fusion of the gods and the ancestors in the body of the statue was, likewise, an ancient one, as we have seen with the statuary of Lolei. Yet I would argue that in explicitly associating the Buddhist triad with his nuclear family, Jayavarman VII introduced a new iconographic genealogy into conceptions of the kingdom’s protective powers.26 Jayavarman VII’s realism takes on still more explicit form. It is a series of more or less identical statues that has long intrigued art historians in that these would seem to represent portraits of the king (fig. 7.3). While the facial features of these images remain somewhat idealized, the statue differs radically enough from the Angkorian ideal to suggest a personal portrait. The singularity of the portrait depends, as suggested earlier, on the generic reference, such that this figure implies individual identity while nonetheless escaping precise definition as another descendant in the Angkorian line. The fact that a number of virtually identical statues have been discovered in different sites27 has encouraged scholars to see in these the statues mentioned by Jayavarman VII’s second wife Indradevi in the inscription of Phimeanakas, her poetic tribute to the king’s first wife (her younger sister), to the king, and finally to herself. Her sister, she records, erected images of the king, of herself the queen, and of other family and court members across the land. Once queen, Indradevi erected even more portrait-statues.28 Yet what has often been considered the introduction of the portrait by Jayavarman VII can also be seen, at least at first glance, as the introduction of a distinction between worshiper and worshipped. For the distinctive characteristics of this art lie as much in the figuration of the body as in that of the face. Devoid of any royal or divine attributes, the Jayavarman VII portrait-statues represent a man in venerating meditation. He is seated, leaning slightly forward, his hands thought to have been clasped before him in prayer, meditation, or offering. Associating themselves with their preferred gods, Angkorian kings before Jayavarman VII had always been worshipers, but never, as far as we know, were they portrayed in worship.29 The portrait, in the vision of Jayavarman VII — or, more precisely, of his wives — introduced or reflected a notable separation of the human and the divine.30 A number of female images are thought to represent Jayavarman VII’s first queen (fig. 7.4). The thin, almost sickly features of this figure, which represent a radical change in artistic tradition, are associated with the queen’s early death as recorded in inscriptions; some scholars have even seen in these im-

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Figure 7.3. One of a series of nearly identical statues presumed to represent King Jayavarman VII in meditation. The head of this statue was found in the enclosure of Angkor Thom; the body was found close by, outside of Angkor Thom at Krol Romeas. Late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries. National Museum of Phnom Penh. (Photo courtesy of John Gollings)

ages the portrait of a queen suffering from tuberculosis. The realism of the portrait is, however, complex. Bearing an image of the Amitabha Buddha in her headdress, this woman is herself divine. She is iconographically determined as Tara, companion of the bodhisattva Lokeśvara, or Prajñāpāramitā, supreme mother of the buddhas and another companion of Lokeśvara. Her hands must have been drawn before her, either holding a book as the embodiment of wisdom, presenting an offering, or clasped in prayer as a devotee. The human is not distinct from the divine in this figure. Yet, portrayed kneeling, she has moved from the position of the worshipped to that of the worshiper. Rarely, if ever, was an Angkorian queen or goddess portrayed on her knees. As I have attempted to demonstrate above, throughout Angkorian art, the worshipped image always contained a reflection of the worshiper; one important innovation of the Bayon style was to bring this reflection to light. This artistic innovation may in some ways be attributable to the predominance of

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Figure 7.4. One of a series of statues presumed, for their shared physical traits, to represent Jayavarman VII’s first queen, Jayarajadevi. Preah Khan temple, Angkor. Late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries. Musée national des arts asiatiques —Guimet (Paris), MG 18043. (Photo courtesy of John Gollings)

Buddhism at court and a concomitant modification of the status of worshiper and worshipped, along with relations between these two. In any case, as the worshiper participates in the accumulation of merit that constitutes the path to enlightenment, a mirroring effect is produced. Consequently and in a most original fashion, in this art it is the act or practice of worshiping itself that is worshipped. In a similar way, images of the Buddha from this period call into question the realistic nature of Jayavarman VII’s likenesses. It has been hypothesized that this head (fig. 7.5), readily identified as the Buddha by the hair and the conical protuberance, but bearing the facial features of the statue presumed to portray Jayavarman VII, may be one among many statues erected during

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Figure 7.5. Head of the Buddha, bearing the presumed physical characteristics of Jayavarman VII. Angkor. Late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries. Musée national des arts asiatiques —Guimet (Paris), MG 17482. (Photo courtesy of John Gollings)

this monarch’s reign under the name of Jayabuddhamahānātha.31 In perpetuation of Angkorian tradition, the name combines that of the reigning monarch, Jaya, with that of his preferred god, the Buddha. However, rather than sculpting the king in the image of the god as tradition would seem to have had it, in this reading Jayavarman VII had the god sculpted in the king’s image. While the inversion is remarkable and raises essential questions concerning the kinds of changes Buddhism may have brought to the culture and the state or what this culture and this state brought to Buddhism, as I have attempted to demonstrate above, the concepts it manipulates are not entirely absent or imperceptible in pre-Jayavarman VII art and epigraphy. Like his predecessors, Jayavarman VII is not only a worshiper but is also to be worshipped. Certain

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Figure 7.6. Head of the Buddha “in the Bayon style.” Found with a collection of other small statues and statuary fragments in the pedestal of the post-Angkorian colossal Buddha of Tep Pranam, Angkor. Late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries. National Museum of Phnom Penh. (Photo courtesy of John Gollings)

divine statues had always been seen as images of the king. As the dharmarāja — a title typically rendered as “moral or law-bearing king” but which one might be tempted to translate in this context as “statue-king,” Jayavarman VII incarnated the role of the statue as it had been formulated since the beginnings of Angkorian epigraphy. The art of Jayavarman VII poses the broader question of the portrait in general with particular clarity. While some believe the “Jayabuddhamahānātha” image portrays the Buddha as Jayavarman VII, others attribute its likeness to the king to elements of style. Similar questions can be asked of this second image of the Buddha (fig. 7.6): Are we looking at a Buddha sculpted with the features of Jayavarman VII, or a Buddha of the Bayon style?32 Female figures are similarly ambiguous. The iconographic identity of this image (fig. 7.7), for example, leaves little room for doubt. Holding lotus flowers in her two

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Figure 7.7. Statue of the Hindu goddess Laksmī, bear˙ ing the presumed characteristics of Jayavarman VII’s first queen — or “in the Bayon style.” Preah Ko temple, Roluos (Angkor region). Late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries. National Museum of Phnom Penh Ka 1698. (Photo courtesy of John Gollings)

hands, this is Laksmī, consort of Vishnu. Yet her features also recall those ˙ of the kneeling female figure we have just seen. Shall we consider this to be another portrait of Jayavarman VII’s first wife? Or shall we call her Laksmī in ˙ the Bayon style? Like most other styles of Angkorian art, the Bayon style is particularly as-

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sociated with one monarch. The art is seen to illustrate the conflated religious and political ideology of the kingdom at that time — like a portrait of the reign. I mean to suggest that in fact each period style had always in some way been a portrait of the reigning king. The innovation of Jayavarman VII — or of his wives — was to bring this concept to its most literal, its most extreme expression in highlighting the impossibility of establishing an absolute distinction between iconographic characteristics dictated by canon and style, and those corresponding to a human subject, body and soul. In the image of the Buddhist triad, Jayavarman VII’s art further teases out the complexities of Angkorian statuary, associated at once with royal funerary and divine cults. In the temples of Ta Prohm, Preah Khan, and the Bayon, along with their associated gods, we see, at first glance, the straightforward triad of mother-father-son. Yet the undecidability of begetter and begotten, this undecidability that would seem to be a driving paradox of Angkorian tradition as I have attempted to describe it above, takes on full form in the multiple manifestations of the triad. Associated as much with Lokeśvara as with the Buddha himself, Jayavarman VII’s features appear in images of the father as in those of the son. One might ask, what could be more natural? Yet this is the point in which the natural and the unnatural so uncannily meet. Why is Prajñāpāramitā, mother of the Buddha, or Tārā, companion of Lokeśvara, thought to be a portrait of Jayavarman VII’s wife? Why do we see his wife in his mother? This follows of course once we see him in his father. And so on. Perhaps this mirror image, this image that is the family and that is a kingdom’s art, may help to explain this image of a child bearing Jayavarman VII’s features (fig. 7.8). Are we looking at Jayavarman VII’s wife in the past, or at his child as their future?33 A last sculpture reveals the conceptual framework discussed here in a particularly poignant way. This lesser known Bayon-style sculpture (fig. 7.9), found at the Kompong Svay temple of Preah Khan, consists in a triad set on a high pedestal framing a worshiper. The Buddha in the center of the triad bears the features of Jayavarman VII — or is in his style — while the worshiper below strongly resembles, both in physical features and posture, the portraitstatues of Jayavarman VII, with one notable exception. The portrait-statue king’s hair-bun is replaced here by the cranial protuberance characteristic of the Buddha. Of approximately the same size, the Buddha sheltered by the nāga above and the divine worshiper below are aligned on a single axis. Humanizing the worshipped and divinizing the worshiper, these figures constitute a single lineage in which the Buddha and his Other — the king? — are together yet separately manifest.34

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Figure 7.8. The small Buddha in the headdress of this statue representing a child with the presumed characteristics of Jayavarman VII identifies her iconographically as Prajñāpāramitā or Tārā, companions of the bodhisattva Lokeśvara. North of Angkor Thom. Late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries. National Museum of Phnom Penh Ka 1691. (Photo courtesy of John Gollings)

Religious change undoubtedly played a major role in this artistic movement. Reconfiguration of relations between the human and the divine, if not a full-fledged dedivinization of religion, is only one aspect of new perspectives that came to light with the gain of Buddhism over Brahmanism. But the everturning nature of the causal cycle — was it the adoption of Buddhism that dictated artistic change or was it political change that stimulated Buddhism and its arts? — along with the particularities of the Mahayana cult practiced at Jayavarman VII’s court, should suffice to keep us from attributing all artistic innovations to religious evolution.35 Continuity and rupture, conservation and innovation, the return and

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Figure 7.9. Boundary marker depicting Buddhist figures. Preah Khan, Kompong Svay, Kompong Thom Province. Late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries. National Museum of Phnom Penh Ka 1848. (Photo courtesy of the National Museum of Phnom Penh)

the new departure, but also the singular and the universal, the king and the people, the divine and the human. These are the alternating buoys that have guided the present reflections along a busy channel to — or from — Angkor. There is no easy synthesis of these intractable oppositions, and the prevailing interpretative paradigms are unable to account for the cultural phenomena I have been attending to here. It seems to me that there can be no alternative to measuring, as best one can, with such incommensurables.

Afterword: The State of the Art In closing, I would like to briefly consider what I will call a crisis in representation in today’s Cambodia. In this, I aim to bring the above discussions of the statue to bear in the contemporary context and into sharper focus on the driving question of this volume: what’s the use of art?

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The ancient statue is a site of memory in contemporary Cambodia, a remainder or a return, a quid pro quo, something here — but whose being somehow escapes us — in the place of something else that is no longer. Though I have not discussed the correspondence in this chapter in any detail, for our purposes here it should be understood that interpretation of the ancient statue can in many ways be extended to include the ancient temple. Suffice it to note that the temple, like the statue, was and is conceived as the posthumous abode of the person/god embodied within, and as an embodiment of the reign of successive kings — constructors and reconstructors; as an architectural body the temple is an extension or substitute for the statue itself, hence their common appellation of dharma, as illustrated by stanza 269 of the Pre Rup inscription cited above. The anthropomorphic tower introduced under Jayavarman VII’s reign brought this assimilation of statue and temple to the fore. In the likeness of gods and departed or departing kings and queens, the statue-monument necessarily involves a foundational spectrality. That is, as I trust is clear from above discussions of epigraphy and iconography, from its very origin, the statue-monument takes the place of the divinity-ancestor as that which gives transcendent order, place, meaning, life, territorial definition, in the very testimony of its own retreat. Yet over time, this presence of absence becomes complicated with an additional fold, as the art comes to supplement itself, standing in for what it itself no longer is. Today, a remaining fragment stands in for a lost whole — which itself can only have been “originally” lost. A broken pedestal takes the place of a stolen statue, making present its absence, or its lost presence. A medium fills in for who or what is gone or only partly here. There is a certain lack of form that calls now, as ever, for formulation. This is to say that the return to the aniconic in and of an iconic art does not signify, as one might suppose, the demise of an artistic tradition. To the contrary, twice removed, the ancient remainder appeals that much more intensely to the dharma whose absence and presence it represents again today. The crisis of representation that I aim to consider here thus concerns at once art and politics, the one being unthinkable without the other — in the name of the dharma, as I have attempted to demonstrate above. Political representation remains inseparable from artistic representation, such that the unprecedented vast destruction of Cambodia’s statues and temples over recent decades now raises the question: what form will the modern nation take? It is in this context that I would like to examine recent anti-Thai violence in Phnom Penh. On the afternoon and night of January 29, 2003, a mob of boys and men ransacked the Thai embassy and a number of Thai-owned businesses in the Cambodian capital. Accusing Cambodian officials of complicity, Thai-

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land swiftly evacuated its citizens, downgraded diplomatic relations, ordered the closing of all border checkpoints, and threatened to deport all Cambodians from Thailand — or, in the words of Thai defense minister Gen. Thammarak Isarangura na Ayuthaya, “I told the police to round them up and dump them at the border.”36 The violence erupted in reaction to an alleged statement by Suwanan Kongying, a Thai soap opera actress, regarding the temple of Angkor Wat. In the week preceding the violence, a Cambodian newspaper had quoted Kongying as saying in an interview that she would only go to Cambodia once the temple of Angkor Wat, which had been illegally annexed by Cambodia, were returned to Thailand. This is where the plot thickens. Because while it is true that Suwanan Kongying did indeed make such a statement, it was, to use the terminology of speech-act theory, not a case of use but of mention. Suwanan Kongying is an actress, of course. And it was as an actress — in an episode of the soap opera Look Mai Klai Ton originally aired two years previously — that she made this call for the “return” of Angkor Wat. Shortly after the publication of Kongying’s alleged statement, her popular show was banned on Cambodian airwaves, with Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen vehemently denouncing Thai hubris. Violent anti-Thai riots followed shortly thereafter. Initially blaming extremists, Hun Sen was quick to offer apologies and compensation to the Thai government and businesses; days later, the prime minister reshuffled a number of government officials, the most prominent of whom was the mayor of Phnom Penh, Chea Sophara. The mayor was removed from office and reassigned as ambassador to Burma. The king, meanwhile, announced his imminent departure for Beijing.37 A series of contextual factors can be seen to have contributed to the violence of January 29. These include increasing Thai economic and popular cultural hegemony over Cambodia, historic rivalry between Cambodia and Thailand, Phnom Penh male youth culture, along with misogyny associated with militarism and the forms of rule prevalent in contemporary Cambodia, or, perhaps even more generally, with state formation itself. Here I will discuss three other factors: border definition negotiations with Vietnam on the one hand and Thailand on the other, national elections scheduled for July 2003, and the political dimensions of art. For months before this explosion of violence, the Cambodian government, under the close direction of Hun Sen, had been negotiating border treaties with Vietnam and Thailand. The proposed treaty with Vietnam had been the object of sustained public outcry, with critics accusing the government of ceding Khmer territory to this neighbor as a sort of modern-day payment of tribute. The figurehead of opposition to the treaty was King Sihanouk, who,

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in public and private venues, had persistently denounced the further loss of Cambodian territory, with reference, in particular, to official maps drafted or approved under his prewar rule. In late December 2002, Hun Sen announced that the treaty would be signed around March of the next year. Chea Sophara, mayor of Phnom Penh and also a member of Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, was at the time reputed to have become one of the capital’s most popular politicians and a potential rival to Hun Sen for the premiership in years to come.38 Though held responsible by Hun Sen for not controlling the riots, Chea Sophara was actually far from the capital on January 29; on that day the mayor was at the ancient temple of Preah Vihear, on the Khmer-Thai border. This eleventh-century Khmer temple sits atop a cliff of the Dangrek mountains, which form the modern border between the two nations. Preah Vihear is best known in modern times for its role in a landmark border dispute. In the post-Independence period, both Thailand and Cambodia claimed the temple, and the conflict was resolved with a 1962 World Court decision confirming Cambodian ownership of Preah Vihear. Yet in recent years Thailand has maintained more or less exclusive tourist access to the temple. Only on January 15, 2003, was tourist access from the Cambodian side officially opened (along with a Cambodian television and radio station), with Phnom Penh mayor Chea Sophara presiding over inaugural celebrations. Over the course of 2002, the mayor had played a leading role in reasserting Cambodian control over Preah Vihear. It was thus in the context of a certain ongoing process of forming the nation, drawing its contours in the image, I would say, of its leaders — or defining its leaders in the process of defining its borders — that the Thai actress’s alleged claim to Angkor Wat sparked explosion. The crisis triggered was one of representation. Who was to represent the nation — the king, the prime minister, or another rival in the guise of the mayor of the capital? And literally how was the nation to be sculpted? The attempt to define territory and/or political prowess appealed to art for its own representation. In other words, each vying leader was to lay a claim to his own art.39 We see here a perfect demonstration of galactic polity or mandala theory. The contest to define the nation’s borders represented, in fact, a contest for central authority in the capital. Each leader strove to realize the necessary commensuration of his own body with that of the nation through identification with the ancestral body: in the case of Hun Sen, Angkor Wat; in that of Chea Sophara, Preah Vihear; and in an otherwise spectacular manner, in the case of the king, the Royal Palace. Angkor Wat has served as the icon of the Cambodian state uninterrupt-

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edly since at least the sixteenth century, that is, after the fragmentation of the Angkorian empire. Perhaps it is for this reason that the temple has remained virtually intact — or vice versa, perhaps it is the unique integrity of the temple that has served to maintain its central role in representing the state. The alleged claim to Thai hegemony over Angkor Wat represented of course a claim to hegemony over Cambodia itself, harking back to Siamese occupation of Angkor in the fifteenth century, and to then nascent Siam’s role in bringing about the downfall of Angkor. Yet it is not the Thai claim or fear thereof that I mean to emphasize here. It is rather the renewed Cambodian struggle for self-representation that appeals to Angkor Wat as the embodiment of dharma, which is to say the embodiment of the state in the leader. Maintaining Angkor Wat means perpetually re-establishing the dharma that has always already been lost. What is of interest in the context of this chapter is how the temple came once again to symbolize a contest for representation of the nation, most specifically of the nation’s borders and its leaders. While the king was denouncing Hun Sen for dealing with Vietnam, Hun Sen was identifying with Angkor Wat in a struggle for symbolic central authority radiating out to undefined limits. Meanwhile, the mayor of Phnom Penh was projected as vying for sovereignty not through direct identification with the capital but rather through restoration of Preah Vihear, this other temple whose border position has enhanced its inherent capacity for state representation. In the end, Hun Sen emerged victorious in the capital, with the mayor and the king exiled, virtually at least,40 beyond the country’s borders. Recent events may not be reassuring, but they do continue to ensure an important role for art. As long as the integrity of the nation remains in question, in and around Cambodia there will always be a use for art.

Notes 1. See Ang Chouléan, “Collective Memory in Ancient Cambodia with Reference to Jayavarman II,” in Southeast Asian Archaeology 1996. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists, Leiden, 2–6 September 1996, ed. Marijke J. Klokke and Thomas de Brujin (Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hull, 1998). I will be using the terms “Cambodian” and “Khmer” here interchangeably to refer to anything of or belonging to Cambodia. 2. The inscription, found at Sdok Kak Thom temple at the modern Khmer-Thai border near Aranyaprathet, is inventoried as K. 235. Like Preah Vihear temple, which I will discuss at the end of this chapter, Sdok Kak Thom’s border location undoubtedly enhanced its inherent capacity for state representation. For English translations, see A.

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Chakravarti, The Sdok Kak Thom Inscription, Part II: Text, Translation and Commentary (Sanskrit College, Calcutta, 1980), and C. Sak-Humphrey, The Sdok Kak Thom Inscriptions (Buddhist Institute, Phnom Penh, 2005). 3. During these two days, long-standing political conflict between co-prime ministers Hun Sen and Norodom Ranariddh erupted in armed battle between their respective armies/supporters in both the capital and provincial regions. Hun Sen proved himself the strongman, ousting Ranariddh, and is to this day Cambodia’s sole prime minister and power figure. What local newspapers quickly labeled “the events of July 5–6,” in part to avoid the term “coup d’état,” has become an important historical reference point in Cambodia. “July 5–6” (1997) follows in the lineage of “April 17” (1975), the day the capital Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, and “January 7” (1979), when the capital again fell to the Vietnamese. 4. Norodom Sihanouk, cited by Seth Mydans, “In Cambodia, King Sihanouk Once More Moves Deftly among Powers,” New York Times, September 1, 1997. 5. My reflections here build upon George Cœdès’ pioneering work, particularly his studies of vocabulary associated with statuary: “Note sur l’apothéose au Cambodge” Bulletin de la Commission Archéologique de l’Indochine, 1911, 5–16 (off-print); “La destination funéraire des grands monuments khmers,” Bulletin de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, XL, 2, 239–343; “Cultes personnels: l’apothéose des princes et le Dieu-roi” and “Le dernier grand roi d’Angkor: Jayavarman VII,” in Pour mieux comprendre Angkor, Publications du Musée Guimet, Bibliothèque de diffusion, t. LV, Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient Adrien Maisonneuve, Paris 1947; “Le portrait dans l’art khmer,” Arts Asiatiques, t. VII, fasc. 3, PUF (1960), 179–198. Though their influence can be felt throughout, I cite these articles only when explicit reference is made. 6. J. Dumarçay has proposed that the construction of this reservoir dates not to Yasovarman’s father, a great nephew of Angkor’s founder, Jayavarman II, but to Jayavarman II himself. In Dumarçay’s reading of the archaeological and historical data, Jayavarman II initiated this construction in copying Javanese models. The initial reservoir was formed of walls raised on only three sides, the east, the west, and the south. Indravarman would then have closed in the northern side, to slow sedimentation. See J. Dumarçay, “Histoire des retenues d’eau khmères,” Journal Asiatique, t. CCXXXII, n° 2 (1994): 371–389. 7. For a full transliteration and French translation of this text, see, A. Barth and A. Bergaigne, Inscriptions sanscrites du Campa et du Cambodge, LV, p. 391–411, 2e fascicule, (Imprimerie Nationale, 1893). 8. On the term dharma employed in ancient Khmer idiom, see G. Cœdès, “La destination funéraire,” especially p. 300–319; K. Bhattacharya, Recherches sur le vocabulaire des inscriptions sanskrites du Cambodge, (EFEO, 1964), p. 47–49; and S. Pou, “Dharma and Trivarga in the Khmer Language,” Rtam, R. Babu Ram Saksena Felicitation Volume, vol. XI–XV, (Lucknow, India, 1983), p. 289–297. 9. Premodern and modern evidence indicates a variety of telling practices, such as burning one’s hair to extract a resin with which to make lacquer to cover wood or stone statues (see S. Lewitz, “Inscriptions modernes d’Angkor 2 et 3,” Bulletin de l’Ecole

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Française d’Extrême-Orient LVII, Paris 1970: 99–126), or melting down personal jewelry for casting bronze statues (a practice frequently noted in the context of royal funerary ritual in the colonial period and that I have had the occasion to observe in popular contexts today). The phenomenon has not been studied in any detail in Cambodia, as far as I am aware, though such practices are frequently mentioned or implied. See for example, references listed in note 5 above. 10. J. Boisselier, “Réflexions sur l’art du règne de Jayavarman VII,” BSEI, t. XXVII, n° 3, (1952), 265. 11. See especially Cœdès, “Le portrait,” and Boisselier, “Réflexions.” 12. Boisselier, “Réflexions,” pl. XXIV, A. 13. Boisselier, “Réflexions,” 265. 14. Cœdès, “La destination funéraire,” 340 (n. 1, 339). 15. This intriguing formulation of the king as model for the god is not highlighted in scholarly work, I suspect for its blasphemous implications. Though the prevailing interpretation (of the god as model for the king) is certainly founded, insofar, for example, as kings were said posthumously to have “gone to the paradise of (their favored divinity),” or as pre-Jayavarman VII statuary would seem to have physically rendered the god only bearing the king’s attributes in name, it does not adequately take into account its own mirror image, which will interest us most here and which is indeed evidenced in the ancient epigraphic material. See for example stanza 265 of the Pre Rup inscription (K. 806) cited below. 16. Again, this is my reading of the art historical readings, whereby styles have been named either for the king under whose reign they emerged (e.g. “Jayavarman VII style”) or for the major temple site associated generally with a single king’s reign (e.g. “Kulen style,” for the Kulen mountain site where Jayavarman II is thought to have confirmed sovereignty over Cambodia through artistic, architectural, and associated ritual production; or “Angkor Wat” style for the major temple complex constructed under the reign of Suryavarman II; or “Bayon style” for work produced during and briefly following the reign of Jayavarman VII; etc.). Established by colonial scholars, this classification system remains firmly in place in contemporary scholarship and teaching, notably at Phnom Penh’s Department of Archaeology (Royal University of Fine Arts). As should become apparent in the present chapter, I do not doubt the validity of this system. I am interested rather in examining its ideological import, for both politico-cultural complexes at hand, i.e., that of the ancient Khmer kingdom and that of modern art historical scholarship. The present chapter is meant as a first attempt at the former. A next step toward examining both would be to consider ways in which characteristics of style (rigid, hieratic, supple, naturalistic, etc.) are, implicitly and explicitly, imbued in the scholarly literature with moral and political meaning, such that the (artistic) nature of the style is taken as the (political) nature of the reign. The commandeering statuary of the Kulen style is assumed to correspond, for example, to the triumphant inauguration of the Angkorian empire by Jayavarman II in the late eighth century, while the softer, relatively subdued attitudes of the Bayon style are taken to

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represent Jayavarman VII’s projection of compassionate Buddhist rule heralding the end of Angkorian power in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. T. Zéphir’s introductory note to Angkorian art in the catalogue of the 1997 international exhibition of Khmer sculpture, Angkor. Millennium of Glory, illustrates my point well. This catalogue chapter is titled “The Angkor Style: Echoes of the Centralized State.” The opening paragraphs precisely date the coming of age of Khmer statuary to the foundation of the independent state in 802 CE; what’s more, political independence finds its artistic expression in technical innovations, allowing statues to literally stand on their own as well. “In 802, as the Khmer monarchy — assuming the classic form it would retain throughout the Angkor period — moved toward absolutism with the consecration of Jayavarman II- Parameśvara . . . (c. 790–a little after 830?) as cakravartin (universal monarch), Khmer sculpture was entering its maturity. This period of expansion, beginning with the Kulen style (first three quarters of the ninth century), saw images gain total freedom from the constraints of the material composing them. The large sculptures discovered in 1936 . . . in the monuments of Jayavarman II and his son and successor Jayavarman III-Visnuloka (a little after 830?–at least 860) on ancient Mahendraparvata (present-day Phnom Kulen) no longer have the various struts and supports, notably the supporting arch, that characterized the great majority of preAngkor works. While the pieces thought to be the very earliest in this style retain certain of these reinforcing elements . . . the sculptures that followed take full advantage of the space surrounding them.” (H. I. Jessup and T. Zéphir, Angkor. A Millennium of Glory [Réunion des musées nationaux 1997], 189). Individual descriptions of “Kulen style” statuary in this chapter provide cogent descriptions of the emerging centralized state. See for example H. Jessup’s striking reading of the Prasat Damrei Krap Vishnu statue from the first half of the ninth century. “The influence of Gupta style . . . has evolved toward a more hieratic form. The stance of the Prasat Damrei Krap Vishnu has a certain rigidity, a certain tension, that seems to imply a controlled inner power. The impression, though less humanistic and benign, is more consciously imposing. . . . There has been a considerable evolution of facial features since pre-Angkor types. The face is squarer while the eyes, brows and lips are outlined with fine incised lines. The mustache emphasizes the expression of the mouth, smiling slightly, rather arrogant, or at least imperious. . . . Such features may be considered typical of Kulen style. . . . Kulen-style sculpture is characterized by the disappearance of the supporting arch and the stays linking arms to the head” (p. 194). The presumed association between artistic and political style has led to an intriguing use of art in the field of political history. It was in fact art historical research, in conjunction with epigraphy, which provided the foundations for the scholarly establishment of a chronology of reigns at Angkor. 17. See S. Tambiah, “The Galactic Polity,” in World Conquerer, World Renouncer (Cambridge University Press, 1976); and in particular O. W. Wolters, History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Southeast Asia Press, Cornell University, 1999). 18. See Barth and Bergaigne, Inscriptions sanscrites, XXXIX A, 319–326. A nearly

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identical stanza is found in K. 282, from the northwestern corner of Thnal Baray, dated to the same period. See Inscriptions sanscrites, LIX D, st. 23, 486 (Sanskrit), 503 (French translation). The expression, dharma-setu, literally “dharma-dike,” is common in Khmer epigraphy. See B.-Ph. Groslier, Inscriptions du Bayon (Publications de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient Mémoires Archéologiques III-2, Paris, 1973), 179. 19. The semantic ambivalence is noted by Barth in his commentary to the translation of Bergaigne, who gives “dont j’ai voulu me faire un pont.” Barth proposes “qui est aussi pour vous un pont de salut” (p. 326). The undecidability of the third-person pronoun sva in this phrase is also noted by Cœdès in “La destination funéraire,” 304, n. 1. 20. K. 806. For full transliteration and French translation, see Cœdès, Inscriptions du Cambodge, I (Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, Paris, 1937), 138–142. 21. For an explanation of this concept of equal participation, see Bhattacharya, Recherches, 48. 22. Cœdès explains that the Sanskrit ksatra, royal power, was given a fanciful etymology meaning “that which saves from destruction.” (Inscriptions du Cambodge I, 141, n. 3). 23. In the midst of chaos, Vishnu wakes from his cosmic sleep to save the world in his multiple avatars. In ancient Cambodia this savior god associated with the king was frequently represented asleep (or in meditation) on the ocean. 24. This second translation is also by Cœdès (in French), but in a later publication, “La destination funéraire,” 325. K. Bhattacharya cites only this second rendition in discussions of the term dharma (Recherches, 47). 25. Cœdès, “La destination funéraire,” 325–326. 26. In “Tantric Buddhism at Angkor Thom” (Ars orientalis 12 (1981): 57–71), Hiram Woodward gives extensive consideration to the triad under the reign of Jayavarman VII. He is, however, interested less in the realistic (or “exoteric”) aspect I have underlined here than in the specifically Tantric implications of the cult as manifest in different forms over the course of Jayavarman VII’s reign. 27. In addition to references listed in note 5 above, see H. Jessup and Th. Zéphir, eds., Angkor et dix siècles d’art khmer (Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 1997), pp. 300–301. The torso belonging to the Jayavarman VII head from Kompong Svay pictured on p. 300 was subsequently found at the same temple complex, and the two pieces have since been reunited at the National Museum of Phnom Penh. 28. K. 485. See Cœdès, Inscriptions du Cambodge, t. II, 161–181. 29. I know of only a few images of worshipers prior to the Bayon style. These are primarily female and are not clearly identifiable as individual royal or other figures. They are largely utilitarian pieces: a mirror pedestal, an incense burner, etc. The kneeling bronze female of the Metropolitan Museum collection is exceptional and difficult to place within Angkorian tradition. See Steven Kossak, The Arts of South and Southeast Asia (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1994), 80–81, fig. 84. 30. Hiram Woodward has written that these statues do not represent a worshipper per se, but rather “a man receiving a prediction – in accordance with Burmese

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thinking – as to when in the future he will become a Buddha” (Hiram W. Woodward, “Practice and Belief in Ancient Cambodia: Claude Jacques’ Angkor and the Devaraja Question,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32, no. 2 (2001): 251). Insofar as a man “receiving a prediction” is necessarily in this context a worshipper, it seems to me that the distinction could be further considered. Nonetheless, this more specific identification of the worshipper calls for a reassessment of the nature of the distinction between the human and the divine apparently emergent under Jayavarman VII, namely in that the human would be represented distinctly awaiting apotheosis. Woodward’s interpretation of the posture here is integral to a series of essays on Buddhist art in India, Burma, Siam, and Cambodia in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, which together indicate for Woodward that the turn to Theravada Buddhism came about in Jayavarman VII’s time. In this proposition of a relatively early dating of the appearance/spread of Theravada in Cambodia, which I find extremely compelling but which to my knowledge remains to be thoroughly fleshed out, the apparent coexistence of images “of the king” as both worshipped and worshipper (or, more specifically, receiver of prediction) under Jayavarman VII is to be attributed to temporal evolution in religious orientation during the reign itself, i.e., the “portrait images” would “date from late in his reign” following conversion to Theravada (Woodward, “Practice and Belief in Ancient Cambodia,” 251). See also, in particular, Hiram W. Woodward, “Influence and Change: Burma and Thailand in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Arts of Asia 24, no. 2 (March–April 1994): 99–104; and “Tantric Buddhism at Angkor Thom,” Ars Orientalis 12 (1981): 57–71. 31. The sculpted form of the “Jayabuddhamahānātha” has often been questioned. Cœdès first saw in the epigraphic appellation the portrait statues of Jayavarman VII discussed above. More recently, Woodward has proposed that the group of Jayavarman VII–style statues that scholars have commonly called “radiating” bodhisattvas are a more likely fit with the name. See “The Jayabuddhamahānātha Images of Cambodia,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 52/53 (1994–1995): 105–110. 32. The question would also hold following Woodward’s interpretation noted above of the Jayabuddhamahānātha as the “radiating” bodhisattva. 33. Such ambiguity of familial relations in ancient epigraphy has long troubled scholars, but it has inspired evasion rather than analysis. See, for example, Cœdès, “Note sur l’apothéose,” 11, n. 3. 34. Cf. H. Woodward, “The Jayabuddhamahānātha Images of Cambodia,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 52/53 (1994–1995): 108–109. In this article Woodward draws attention to epigraphic data, notably from the Bayon, indicating, in his reading, a proliferation of images depicting more or less divinized worshipers under the reign of Jayavarman VII. 35. My arguments would hold — and even be further supported — if indeed the Theravadin turn were to some degree involved with the phenomenon I have been concerned with here, as Woodward’s work would suggest. This would further contribute to what I see as a need for better understanding of the post-Angkorian complex as also perpetuating rather than simply breaking with the Angkorian past.

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36. Ker Munthit, “Thailand Suspends Relations with Cambodia, Military Planes Evacuate Thais after Rioting,” Associated Press (Thursday, January 30, 2003). 37. The data regarding the January 29 events in this and following paragraphs are compiled from a variety of news sources from December 2001–June 2003, including the Cambodia Daily, the Straits Times, Rasmei Kampuchea, Koh Santepheap, the Nation (Bangkok), the Bulletin Mensuel de Documentation (published by the cabinet of King Norodom Sihanouk), and various Internet forums. 38. Of course, it is quite possible that this rivalry was essentially a fabrication, perhaps even of Western media in Cambodia, or a foil for conflicts between other figures more powerful than Chea Sophara. Well before the January outbreak, rumors about hidden forces propelling Chea Sophara into the limelight were rampant. Chea Sophara clearly served as a scapegoat in the resolution of the conflict, if not in its staging from start to finish. In any case, it is the symbolics of the situation as much as any “reality” it appears to conceal that most interests me here — and then of course relations between the symbolic and the real, if such a distinction can indeed be made to hold in this example. 39. The symbolic significance of Preah Vihear in the contemporary Cambodian territorial imagination is striking. Allow me to cite another example, from Kampuchea Krom, “Lower Cambodia,” the southern Mekong Delta region now a part of Vietnam but predominantly inhabited by Khmer populations. A strong sense of cultural belonging to Cambodia has developed over the course of past centuries in this region, in direct relation to a gradual loss of political belonging. My example here, from a pagoda called Wat Sangke (Vatt Sange) in Kampuchea Krom’s Khleang (Soc Trang) province, is of another art form: the Buddhist temple mural. Dated 1965, Wat Sangke’s murals are unusual in that they are on the outside walls of the worship hall and do not represent a story from the Buddhist canon as is typically the case. At Wat Sangke we see neither a jataka tale nor the story of the Buddha’s so-called historical life. We see instead the story of Preah Ko Preah Kaev (Brah Go Brah Kaev), a Cambodian legend ˙ bull and his brother the that recounts the theft of Cambodia’s palladia˙— the sacred emerald Buddha — by Thailand. This story of the loss of Cambodian politico-cultural integrity to Thailand apparently reached new heights of popularity in the early 1960s, in the buildup to and the aftermath of the Preah Vihear World Court case. Promoted by the government through radio broadcasts of performances by the National Theater Troupe of Cambodia (Krom Lkhon Jāti Kambujā), the story was taken up in popular protest against Thailand’s claim to Preah Vihear (Ang Chouléan, “Nandin and his Avatars,” in Jessup and Zéphir, Angkor. A Millennium of Glory, 67). What interests me in this mural is its appearance in 1965 in Kampuchea Krom. We are far from Preah Vihear here, we are far from Thai hegemony, yet in Kampuchea Krom we are in the heart of the struggle against the loss of Cambodian territorial and cultural integrity. The two borders are clearly in communication with each other in their common appeal, through art, to belong to Cambodia. On the one hand, Kampuchea Krom belongs to Cambodia as it too tells the story of loss to Thailand; on the other hand, Cambodia staves off Thai hegemony in reclaiming the temple of Preah Vihear. And I

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believe that it was such border negotiations, a give and take between Thailand on the one hand and Vietnam on the other, again in relation to art, which came to bear in the recent outburst of violence in Phnom Penh. In fact I originally intended to discuss these events in relation to a series of Buddhist mural paintings in Kampuchea Krom. For political reasons, however, it was not possible to do so at the time and in the venue of the publication at hand. Therefore, for more on issues raised in these concluding pages, particularly concerning relations between borders and art, please see A. Thompson, “Drawing Cambodia’s Borders: Notes on Buddhist Temple Murals in Kampuchea Krom (Vietnam),” Udaya 4 (APSARA, Phnom Penh, 2003). 40. Chea Sophara ended up avoiding exile as ambassador to Burma, and the king’s threat to leave only enhanced, as usual, the promise of his return.

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An Ancestral Keris, Balinese Kingship, and a Modern Presidency Malay keris, the double-edged ceremonial daggers that have been such popular exemplars of the region’s court cultures, typically have been displayed in museums and books as artful heritage objects, admired for their ornate sheaths, bejeweled hilts, and the nickel-iron laminations of their blades. But in their presentations as art and culture objects, they are divorced from their particular histories, including the very stories of their acquisition often through the conquests of colonialism or collectorism.1 However great the appreciation for their once-upon-a-time role in local culture,2 they become frozen in foreign time and space, objects uprooted from the mutually constitutive socioreligious contexts in which they have led their lives and earned their reputations. To gain access to the human projects that enliven such objects, we must go beyond their static contemplation to follow the things in motion,3 follow their involvement in social relations.4 Cynthea Bogel puts it aptly in this volume that we must seek to understand their “deployment.” On the Indonesian island of Bali, keris still feature in social life in a variety of capacities. Men may wear their personal keris at ceremonies or a keris may be used in a marriage ritual for the symbolic penetration of the hymen. At village meetings sometimes a man’s keris is placed in the center of the group to represent money still owed, and I have observed farmers spend well over an hour at a temple prior to the opening of a regional irrigation meeting, admiring and talking about one another’s keris. Certainly, they too appreciate their physical attributes, but they do so in the context of the wider lives of these objects. Keris often are what Janet Hoskins has referred to as “biographical objects,”5 and the stories of keris and their owners are told in terms of each other (fig. 8.1). Considerable attention goes into matching a keris and its owner, for much more than a weapon, a keris is linked to a person’s identity. Like many

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Figure 8.1. Young men at a Balinese village ceremony wear their personal keris on their backs.

of the objects featured in this volume, keris also are objects of power and potential efficacy that confer prestige upon persons. In the case of a royal keris, it symbolizes “the power of the ruler and the mandate to rule,”6 and an heirloom keris, as it is passed on through generations and centuries, can become a “history object.”7 Such an object not only represents;8 it is conflated with the ancestors and both embodies and generates collective history and identity. In August 1998, in a highland valley of eastern Bali, a series of remarkable events developed around such a royal heirloom. The occasion within which the keris manifested as a central actor was a postcremation ceremony of ancestral deification (maligya), the highest caste version of the postmortem ceremony (memukur) discussed also by Kaja McGowan in this volume. It was a royal ceremony sponsored by a minor noble house, the performance of which came to coincide with the fall of Suharto, Indonesia’s military dictator of more than thirty years. On May 21, 1998, Suharto had resigned his presidency following months of economic and political upheaval, a culmination of growing dissatisfaction with his government, em-

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broiled also in the widespread Asian financial crisis. Suharto’s vice president, Habibie, had succeeded him, but preparations were underway for elections in 1999, and the time was one of expectation for profound change. The slogans of the day called for an end to the “corruption, collusion, and nepotism” associated with Suharto’s reign. On the local level in the context of the political uncertainty of the time, many people looked to the noble house for guidance, even as they directed their energies to tasks at hand in preparation for the ritual.9 Witnesses serve a critical purpose of verifying and validating important events, so efforts are made to attract prominent ones. Invitations to attend the apex of the ancestral ritual were sent to, among other dignitaries, the recently appointed President Habibie as well as to his strongest political opponent, Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of the nationalist hero Sukarno, proclamator of Indonesian independence and the nation’s first president, who had been ousted when Suharto came to power. A bit to everybody’s surprise, Megawati, whose grandmother was Balinese (although not of any relation to the noble house) and who had a trip planned to Bali for meeting purposes, accepted the invitation.10 One late August afternoon, scores of people waited for hours at the noble house for Megawati to arrive from her lodging nearby. As dusk settled, word circulated that she had been on her way when something had stopped her to let her know that it was not yet the right time, that the ancestors were not yet ready for her arrival. So she had waited. By the time she arrived, it was dark. She entered the noble house’s courtyard amidst a respectfully subdued crowd and was escorted to the innermost purified area of the high caste family temple. After prayer, the noble house’s heirloom keris was carried from its shrine and extended to Megawati, who in view of all present examined it (fig. 8.2).11 According to those within earshot, she declared that she had had a dream of precisely this keris! The keris in question, the noble house claims, is Ki Bangawan Cangguh,12 one of the keris historically most significant to the powers of Bali’s most important kings.

Balinese Kingship and the Keris Ki Bangawan Cangguh From a Balinese perspective, keris are integral to the constitution, transfer, maintenance, and also the decline of royal powers. This is reflected in the dynastic chronicle of Bali’s foremost line of kings, referred to as Babad Dalem,13 through which Margaret Wiener has analyzed Balinese kingship from the vantage point of Klungkung, considered Bali’s paramount court. Arguing

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Figure 8.2. Megawati inspects the noble house’s heirloom after prayer in the family temple.

that outsiders have had insufficient appreciation for the importance of keris to Balinese kingship, Wiener demonstrates how this text depicts keris as constitutive of royal authority: “Gifts of keris, at decisive moments in history, establish Kapakisan rule over Bali.” Sri Kresna Kapakisan, the first Javanese king to rule Bali, is considered the founder of the dynasty of Bali’s foremost rulers. He is said to have been appointed ruler by Gajah Mada — chief minister of Majapahit, the fourteenth-century Hinduized empire based in eastern Java — following his 1365 conquest of Bali. With an entourage of Javanese nobles, Kapakisan, the son of a Brahmana Buda priest, established his capital and Javanese-style court in Bali.14 The occupation of ruler required a transformation of his caste status and qualities from Brahmana (the priestly caste) to Ksatria (the ruling caste), a transformation that the Babad Dalem describes as having been achieved through gifts of keris. Babad Dalem further “attributes the success of subsequent kings to their continued possession of these same, and newer, keris.”15 In other words, the transmission of an object is involved in conferring legitimacy, a theme with other objects discussed in this volume. For example, the robe the Japanese monk Kūkai received from his teacher also

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Figure 8.3. Mount Agung in the clouds, with river flowing at a boundary of the princedom.

exemplifies a practice, which, as Bogel points out, was “central to legitimacy in many Buddhist traditions” wherein the conferral of an object verified a “mind to mind” transmission. Conversely, in the case of Bali, extant oral accounts relate how the desecration of formerly invincible keris is linked to the downfall of the kingdom of Klungkung.16 One of the keris highlighted in the Babad Dalem is referred to as Ki Bangawan Cangguh, which Wiener concludes was “singularly important” to the Kapakisan clan that came to rule Bali.17 Although it is known to cause earth tremors, it is seen also “as a force that binds the earth and keeps it steady and that binds hearts to a single center.”18 This keris that “binds and inspires love” is considered “an icon of the cosmic naga [serpents] that maintain the stability of the world.”19 It is identified specifically with Naga Basuki,20 identified in turn with Besakih, Bali’s “mother temple,” situated on the slope of Mount Agung, the island’s highest mountain, which rises 3,142 meters (10,310 feet) upslope from the noble house (fig. 8.3). David Stuart-Fox mentions that Basuki

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Figure 8.4. Palm-leaf manuscripts chronicle the history of the keris and the noble house.

may be addressed as Lord of the Mountain, envisioned “with his tail at the summit of Agung and his head in the ocean, with the waters of Bali’s rivers flowing on his body from tail to head to the sea,”21 and there are texts indicating that Mahadewa, god of Besakih, creates serpents and himself assumes the form of naga.22 The keris, snake, and mountain all are associated with Bali’s foremost line of Dalem kings. To return now to the highland valley: The keris the noble house claims to possess, the keris featured at their ancestral ceremony, is precisely Ki Bangawan Cangguh. Their story and the more standard Babad Dalem account of this historically most eminent keris start at the same point, with its conferral by the emperor of Majapahit to the raja of Bali, Dalem Ketut Ngulesir, Kapakisan’s son. In August 2000, referring to ancient manuscripts and the oral tales of his forefathers (fig. 8.4), the head of the noble house related to me that what he called “the first postcremation purification ceremony for deceased ancestors ever attended by Balinese” took place at the court of Majapahit during the rule of Hayam Wuruk. The story goes: “When the Balinese delegation was about to return home, the Emperor asked the ruler of Bali if they, in Bali, lacked anything. ‘What is missing,’ was the reply, ‘is something to purify the earth, the realm of Bali. That we do not yet have.’ ‘If that is so,’ responded the Emperor, ‘I will give to you this suda mala [purificatory] keris. With its suda mala qualities it cleanses both the micro and macro cosmos.’ ”23

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A family manuscript adds more detail to the interaction: The Emperor asked of the Raja of Bali: “My child, you who are like an incarnation of the God of Love [Dewa Asmara], do not be offended. I wish to ask of you what has come to my knowledge, that you apparently have a black mark on your thigh. I truly would like to see it.” So Dalem Ketut Ngulesir immediately opened his sarong and showed it to the Emperor. . . . The mark was taken to be an incarnation of the God of Love [here Sang Hyang Aswino]. So the Emperor gave a gift of cloth [wastra] accompanied by a keris that had a carving on it in the shape of a mythical snake [Nagapasa].24 The head of the noble house continued his story, explaining that “on the way back to Bali, at the crossing of the river Canggu,”25 the keris fell in the water and sank. But through meditation, it was brought back out: “the water opened for the keris to reemerge, and reenter its covering.” “From then on,” concluded the head of the noble house, “the Keris Suda Mala acquired the additional name of Bangawan Canggu” — river Cangguh. And henceforth, “whenever there was a big ceremony in Bali, holy water prepared from the keris was used to purify the realm.” The head of the noble house went on to stress that “the Keris Bangawan is thus a gift directly from Majapahit, from the Emperor himself. It is the only such keris in Bali.” By comparison, he said, “the keris of Bali’s foremost kingdom, Klungkung, was given not by the Emperor, but by the minister, Gajah Mada. It therefore ranks lower and is not as powerful as Bangawan Canggu.” Whereas the Babad Dalem forefronts the keris here referred to as the keris of Klungkung, a keris known as Durga Dungkul, as having established Kapakisan authority over Bali, members of the noble house say that this happened successfully only with their keris, Ki Bangawan Cangguh. A daughter of the house explained that when Kapakisan got here, “Bali still fought.” So “Gajah Mada conferred the first keris weapon [upon a Balinese raja], to convince the people of Bali that this is your raja.” “But it still was not possible to win them over,” she continued, “not with the second keris either; it did not make Bali peaceful; it did not make Bali harmonious.” Only with the third gift of a keris, from the emperor of Majapahit to Dalem Ketut Ngulesir, this Keris Suda Mala (or Bangawan Cangguh), “only then did Bali become peaceful.”26 And Dalem Ketut Ngulesir, the recipient of the keris, came to exemplify good kingship. He established a kingdom at Gelgel that was to become the seat of Bali’s “Golden Age,” often referred to as Bali’s only relatively unified kingdom.

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The noble house’s story goes on from there with a strand unique to its own dynastic chronicle, describing how with Gelgel’s disintegration and the dispersal of its competing brothers, one brother, their forefather, left the court, taking the keris with him. He passed it on to his son, who took up the seat of the highland noble house. 27 Since then, it is said, Keris Ki Sudamala or Ki Bangawan Cangguh, along with other valuable objects that made this journey from Gelgel, has resided at the noble house. According to the princes of the noble house, their forefather in fact was the older of the brothers vying for position at Gelgel, making them in truth the most rightful heirs to Bali’s foremost kingship.28 Yet they recognize that the descendant who by the beginning of the eighteenth century established a new court at Klungkung also established the more powerful line, for Klungkung nominally became the seat of the second “central” kingdom of Bali. Though it was never to exercise direct control of all of Bali, Bali’s other rulers did and do generally acknowledge a certain supremacy of the “Dewa Agung” (kings) or “Dalem” of Klungkung and at times supported them in ritual and war on this basis. The noble house, meanwhile, was conquered by the kingdom of Karangasem, which rose to power to the east of Klungkung and, though it remained linked genealogically to Klungkung, has sorted under Karangasem since. As told by the priestly brother, the story of how they, at the noble house, safeguarded the keris throughout the turmoil of history is one of active defense against the fate that, as we are overwhelmed by in several chapters in this volume, sent many another heirloom on the road to a gallery or a museum: This took place over a long process, from when my forefather left Gelgel defending this keris. . . . He just kept these objects safe. He carried them with him, to the east, all the way [to the north] and the west, to here. He kept them safe. . . . Certainly during the colonial era, the Dutch and Japanese also made it to our village. It is true that they came to look for such items. But these objects were buried in the family temple by my elders. In one hole they used a kind of tub, they put a lid on it, and they buried it. Then above that they built a structure so that it would not be known. . . . If they had not done so, the objects would have been taken by the Dutch, or if not by the Dutch, by the Japanese. It is also noteworthy, perhaps, that the head of the house interprets this keris differently from Wiener. Both describe the keris as a sudamala or purificatory healing keris, which “had the capacity to bind people to the king, to inspire their devotion,” but whereas Wiener talks of Ki Bangawan Cangguh as evoking warfare as well as healing,29 the head of the noble house emphasizes

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that this keris is not for war. He has another keris for war, associated with his role during the turmoil and violence of the 1960s. This was when a coup brought down Sukarno, Megawati’s father, and brought Suharto to power, and conflict erupted as well on the local level, leading to widespread killing of people accused of being communists. “Suda Mala,” he says, “may not be used for warfare; it is for purification only.” It is for purifying both individual mental impurities and is for purifying the earth. Therefore it has the highest value. It is the gift of the raja. If given by an ordinary person, it would just be for war. But this keris is not for war. . . . Because of that it has a naga basuki . . . its base is a naga. It is for purification. Highlighting purification over warfare of course is fitting with the role accorded rajas following their “restoration” in the 1930s by the Dutch administration,30 and it renders the keris itself less threatening to governmental powers. As Wiener comments, “[i]ronically, it was the colonial government who regarded the keris as powerful immediately after the conquest,”31 whereas to the Balinese, conquest signified their loss of powers.32 In 1908, Resident G. F. de Bruyn Kops wrote in a report to the governor general regarding the keris seized by the Dutch that “the people attribute [to these] the possession of supernatural forces,” so he recommended that “[t]o bring these again in the possession of Balinese lords would not thus be defensible.”33 Contemporary representatives of the Indonesian nation-state have cautioned similarly and in the context of nation building there has been a general wariness of local traditional powers as manifested in such objects. Stories abound of keris. Van Duuren writes about the personalities of some that have what he calls a “genie-in-the-bottle” quality, “tales about unruly weapons seeking adventure independent of their owners, out to drink blood. Others would not be drawn from their sheaths at critical moments, or, on the contrary, would rattle in their sheaths, desiring to be drawn.” One particularly fascinating tale is of “[a]n ancient Malaysian kris which had for years been in a glass case in a museum, [but] was claimed to be unable to forget its bloody past; it allegedly left the museum to wander about at night and kill rancorous old enemies. Afterward it cleansed itself meticulously, returning to its usual spot again in the morning.”34 These kinds of stories were well-known to the Dutch, as they are to contemporary state officials. To the head of the noble house there is still a strategic value to stressing that his heirloom keris is purificatory only. It is not a blood-seeking object that is emerging at the center of action here. Ki Bangawan Cangguh, then, was one of those magical objects that con-

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nect people to prominent ancestors, to sources of royal powers, including in some cases to Majapahit, for keris that were conferred upon Balinese rajas by Majapahit rulers provided — and, as its reappearance indicates, continue to provide — what is perceived as a legitimating link between Balinese and Javanese rulers.35 In this volume, Hoskins, following Alfred Gell, talks of objects created “to influence the thoughts and actions of others,” with emphasis on the intentionality of the maker. Similarly, people may act through existing objects by entering them into new performances, which, too, affect their audiences. With this in mind, then, let us consider further the events involving the keris in the context of the postcremation ceremony.

Revisiting the Incident with the Keris and Megawati At the time, no explicit explanation was made or needed as to the significance of the keris incident with Megawati at the ancestral ritual. It is common knowledge that keris are powerful and affect their viewers and surrounding circumstances. Wiener explains that it is in this way that “powerful keris may work magic,” in the sense of “surpris[ing] us into acknowledging that there is more to the way we act and perceive in the world than we normally agree to agree about.” Here Hoskins’ discussion of Gell’s notion of the agency of art objects applies too, for “these things have agency because they produce effects” in the viewer that may be beyond comprehension. Wiener points out that “Balinese do not claim to understand how these things work”; “they are allowed to operate without interpretation, without the active intervention of authoritative discourses.”36 In this way of experiencing the world, then — to draw on Jan Mrázek’s discussion in this volume — viewer and viewed are not uncoupled and their relationship is not mediated.37 Rather, as with the offerings described by Kaja McGowan, the magic of the encounter is one of “enlivening boundaries between worlds.” Instead of mediating discourses, the keris incident with Megawati was surrounded by other stories, some of which distinctly coupled the viewer and the viewed in physical and visceral experiences, involving fear, awe, and shaking. It became known that earlier in the afternoon, a strong light had emanated from the enclosed shrine within the family temple where the keris was kept. The women preparing offerings in the inner temple had come running out in fright. This was followed by another mystical event, recounted by the brother of the noble house, who is a non-Brahmana priest in charge of performing the rituals surrounding the keris. He explained that he, through prayer, requested “permission” of the keris to bring it out in Megawati’s presence and, with the

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assistance of his brother-in-law, was preparing its ritual bathing prior to her arrival: “So I took hold of the keris,” he said. “I was going to bathe it. Then it was as if [the brother-in-law] was startled; he saw the rays, and the rays had smoke above them. And I said, ‘What’s going on?’ And then it was shaking.” As he told me of what happened, he demonstrated by shaking vigorously, his hands held out in front of him. “Shaking, shaking,” he reiterated. “But outside there was no shaking; in fact people were bustling.” Finally, he explained, everyone did see “the rays above:” “They say they were like rays of crystal, perfectly clean. They were beyond description.” Reflecting on the same event, the assisting brother-in-law remembered having been sent to fetch a cloth and, upon returning to the pavilion on which the bathing ritual took place, seeing the rays: “Then, above it, there were rays, beautiful rays, like rays of the moon, the full moon. Not strong rays, but very beautiful,” he explained. He, too, shook to demonstrate, as he reiterated: “I saw it, up above. [The priestly brother] with the keris was like this. It was frightening.” He reminded me that “there once was an ancestor here who was struck only ever so slightly with that keris, and yet she died, right in the family temple.”38 The head of the noble house recalled when he brought out the keris for Megawati to see. She said she had seen this keris before, in a vision, “as in a void, in the sky,” he explained, gesturing in the space above his face. He specified, “It was the sculptured handle that she saw, of gold with inlaid jewels . . . ‘Oh, this is what I saw’; that is what she said.” When asked specifically about the significance of what happened with Megawati, another member of the house responded that “it means that she will receive power from that keris, maybe because she was going to become vice president” — to which we may now add president. At the time there was much talk of how important it was that she was present for this ceremony, a purification ceremony so big it was believed it could bring a strong balance in her and in the country. In the end, many sources legitimizing her authority were evoked: descent, connection to the powerful keris, and qualities of leadership — all commentary that was sure to spread in the village and surrounding areas. In large part, people, both within and surrounding the noble house, attribute Megawati’s attendance and interaction with the keris to the power of the heirloom, for what else could have drawn her to this small noble house in the eastern Balinese highlands? Moreover, her proclamation that she had had a vision of precisely this keris, both legitimates her, and she, in turn, authenticates its power and identity. Most importantly locally, these events were seen by the participants to validate the local princedom and its princes, to show that they

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really are the line of Balinese kings that rightfully holds the Majapahit keris and is endowed with the powers to attract and rule represented both by the genealogy and the heirloom to which they lay claim. Skeptics remained largely silent. Time would show. The incident demonstrates that there are connections between keris and royal and/or state power that, contrary to predictions, continue to this day. The preparations for the ancestral ceremony were well underway before the political situation with which it came into play developed, so one could not claim that the particular situation and political opportunity resulting from Suharto’s downfall motivated the ritual. Nonetheless, inviting Megawati and mobilizing the heirloom in the context of its ancestral ritual may be viewed also as part of the noble house’s wider approach to both local and national politics, an attempt to readdress events of the past and make history in the present.

Autonomy from Government: A Keris for True Kings, the People of Bali, and the World Upon, as he terms it, experiencing distaste for the “arrogance” of government, the head of the noble house withdrew years ago from his official role in local government positions. He talks a lot about his “noncooperation” and of working outside of government, and he acknowledges that it was the same arrogance of local government that sparked him to invite Megawati. He felt she was “better for the people,” mentioning that Westerners supported her as well because she is “for the people,” and, in addition, pointed out that she too was being pressured by the government. The ritual events became an opportunity for him to effect “an alternative government strategy,” promoting Megawati as a presidential candidate and in the process boosting his own house’s position. He, the noble house, and the participants in the princedom are both resistant and subtly subversive in their allegiance to an order that to them is higher than that of the nation-state. He pointed out that there are still royal families elsewhere in Indonesia, too, and he granted that they do often become government officials, “not because of the power of our inherited titles,” he emphasized, but “because we work for the people.” But most importantly, whether they are in government or not, their families are “still strong,” he explained: “The important thing to remember is the connection to the ancestors.” For his own house he continued, “Our raja is our ancestor. My ancestor is my raja. We have the keris as symbol, that is the raja, because it belonged to the raja. I consider him to still exist. It is to this that I pay respect, that I pray. I pay homage

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to the keris as my ancestor, as my raja.”39 The Keris Ki Bangawan Cangguh, in other words, conveys standing to the noble house and is a symbol of a kind of autonomy from present government structures, however much power these might otherwise have over the princes as national subjects. The role of the keris in establishing a degree of autonomy from government and reclaiming the noble house’s special position in history is also brought home in a story of the new post-Suharto governor of Bali’s request for Ki Bangawan Cangguh. Apparently, the governor sent somebody to the noble house to ask that it be brought to the governor’s office. Such an attempt to have this keris of kingship associated with the “rule” of a person not of the lineage associated with this keris was considered inappropriate. The head of the noble house affirmed his respect for the governor as a governor, but “my raja,” he said, “is a person from the Majapahit.” As a descendant of this line, he emphasized, “I am the keeper of the keris.” He explained that neither the governor nor anyone else other than those of Dalem heritage from Klungkung can hold it. “But Megawati was allowed to?” I inquired. “Yes, she was, because I was aware that she was an important person. I permitted it,” he added, underscoring his own embodiment of powers that locally may rank higher than the head of state. The priestly brother confirmed that the governor asked to have the keris brought to Denpasar, Bali’s capital. He assessed that “it had to do with the political situation at the time and the peacefulness and safety of Bali. That was the purpose.” But, he stressed, “I did not agree with it.” When asked why not, he elaborated that this keris, which is “pure and whose value cannot be figured,” should not be used for “politicking,” for seeking a position of individual power. The governor, however, would be welcome “to come here, to request its holy water or to pray here. . . . If he were to come here there would be no problem,” for “we are open to anyone.” In explaining the refusal of the governor’s request, he also stressed that if it had been the people of Bali asking for the keris, they would have been welcome to it. With regard to the holy water produced from the keris, meanwhile, the priestly brother explained that this is “for anyone who needs it” and not just for people, but also “for the realm, for the ricefields and the gardens, as a [magical] prevention against pests. It is for the world.”40 The governor’s request was construed as being for personal political gain, whereas ultimately stabilization of the realm was seen to be behind the significance of Megawati's participation. With the same display of respect as when she waited for the ancestors to indicate the right time for her to proceed to the noble house, Megawati came to meet the keris; she did not ask for it to come to her.41 A follower of the noble house, a neighborhood leader, and a farmer specu-

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lated that Megawati too may have wanted to request the keris, yet “she only got to see it. Maybe she would have liked to have asked for it, but it was not given to her, . . . for you cannot do that with the heirloom.” Megawati demonstrated responsiveness to local place and forces, the very kinds of gestures that helped gain her support in Bali but criticism from some of her opponents for not displaying sufficiently Muslim practices. Later in 1998, for example, there was a great stir around a newspaper article that showed Megawati praying in a Hindu temple. A member of the Muslim United Development Party (PPP), then minister for food and horticulture, reportedly suggested that Indonesians would not elect “a Hindu president.” This sparked heavy protests in Bali, with calls for his resignation.42 Subsequently, Megawati of course was elected president, and in connection with policies of decentralization in Indonesia, the members of the noble house, representatives of the ancient princedom, continue to play leading roles in the area — but let us take a closer look at how we might consider the claim that their keris is Ki Bangawan Cangguh.

Assessing the Noble House’s Claims Regarding the Keris A Western scientific or scholarly approach would tend toward authenticating the identity of the keris through physical attributes, but such pursuit soon falters. The Babad Dalem contains no detailed physical description of the keris known as Ki Bangawan Cangguh other than that it was “a keris decorated with a snake design,” a description that applies to a great many keris.43 With regard to Ki Bangawan Cangguh, the Babad Dalem specifies that the snake design is on the blade and implies that it is incised on the blade.44 The head of the noble house also draws attention to a snake when describing his house’s keris: “It is beautiful. Here there is a naga, [the blade] originates from a naga; it is measured with gold. It is truly extraordinary, and extraordinarily strong.” Yet the text for the picture of this keris in Urs Ramseyer’s classic book on The Art and Culture of Bali states the following: “Hilt in the shape of a demon figure. Blade encrusted with gold wayang figures [iconography] on both sides.”45 There is no mention of an incised snake. In a more recent article specifically about Ki Bangawan Cangguh, which also includes elaborate illustrations of the designs on the blade, Ramseyer gives a thorough description of the keris owned by the noble house, clarifying that the snake on it takes the form of the mythological Naga Tatsaka at the base of the blade, where it completes the blade’s rim design, which runs “like a magical circle around the iconography of the blade.”46 It is probably not possible to determine whether all of the sources refer to the same snake design.

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Hilts are of even less help. There are only limited descriptions of some of the hilts of the Kapakisan heirlooms, including Ki Bangawan Cangguh’s in the shape of Bayu (the Hindu God of Wind) and set with rubies (mirah bang) and “water jewels” (manik toya).47 But hilts are interchangeable and therefore do not provide definitive identity. As Solyom puts it, “the blade is the ‘essence’ or the ‘heart’ of the keris” and “[t]he sheath and hilt in which it is dressed are dispensable and may change.”48 In fact, it has been tradition to lavish new dress upon old blades, such that “a blade attributed to fourteenth century Majapahit may appear in twentieth century dress.”49 In most accounts of the incident in the highland valley, it was precisely the hilt that Megawati identified from her vision: “the keris itself was not visible; all I saw was this, she said, the sculpture, the handle, the gold. That is what she had seen” (related by the priestly brother). It could be construed that it was important that she recognize the hilt and not just the blade, precisely because the hilt’s identity is more in question, but this remains speculative. Ramseyer writes in his 1995 article that “through its construction and, above all, by the style of the illustrations on its blade, Ki Sudamala [i.e., Ki Bangawan Cangguh] reveals its origins in the East Javanese Majapahit Empire.”50 He cites expert assessment that even the hilt originates from Majapahit: In the case of Ki Sudamala, according to the examination and findings of the keris specialist Martin Kerner, stylistic features and technical particularities lead to the conclusion that also the grip in the shape of the demon Kalantaka, which is constructed from several parts, originates from Majapahit and presumably always has belonged to the blade.51 But Ramseyer also has indicated that there are those who contest these assertions, so again we do not have certainty.52 Surrendering the keris to more systematic scrutiny for material dating might achieve a determination whether this keris is a fourteenth-century heirloom,53 but even if that were affirmed, in the absence of an original detailed description with which to compare it, it would not be possible to establish definitively whether or not the keris in the noble house’s possession is the original Ki Bangawan Cangguh. Either way, these were never the terms in which Balinese observers or participants addressed the matter. Not dismissing the object’s physical characteristics, from a Balinese perspective there are additional criteria for “testing” it. One such criterion is the aspect of behavior. Through the ancestral ritual, the keris was indeed confirmed to behave as Ki Bangawan Cangguh, with a display of shaking and success in attracting great numbers of followers. More-

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over, the qualities of the head of the noble house and of his forefathers, characterized by strong powers of attraction and ties to the people,54 correspond to the associations of this particular keris. Another important test to claims of this sort is linked to the risk involved in making false claims and having in your possession a keris beyond your standing, just as it may be risky to have a ceremony above your standing. On the level of kingdoms, for example, some suggest that earlier disintegration and civil war on the neighboring island of Lombok may be attributed to a ceremony that they should not have attempted, and well-known elaborations abound on hell’s punishments of those who err in this way. A story also exists of a different keris belonging to the noble house, which was “borrowed” and sold by a neighboring kingdom. The head of the noble house explained that he offered considerable sums to buy it back from the family now in possession of it, but to no avail. Meanwhile, great misfortune has fallen upon the illegitimate owners “because that keris is not appropriate for them; they are not supposed to be in possession of it. They are ordinary people, low people [referring to caste standing].” As in his response to the governor, he stated “it must be a raja that keeps that keris”; anyone else “usually will fall.” Finally, to most Balinese, the test to claims of legitimacy, as to those of higher status through ancestry, is how much support they can garner, the ability to draw people on the basis of those claims. When people — people in different positions in the princedom — talk about the significance of what happened between Megawati and the keris, it emerges quite explicitly that the incident was in part about verifying the identity of the keris. Thus the priestly brother viewed the keris’ rays and shaking as a manifestation of the strength of its soul or spirit, concluding that after Megawati’s recognition of it in the family temple, “it was apparent that this was the true keris, this was really it.” Similarly, a Brahmana priest from the area pointed out that only something very powerful indeed could have drawn in someone like Megawati (fig. 8.5). In other words, he said — again according it legitimacy — “it must have been the keris.” Most followers of the noble house were not in the royal family temple that night, but they heard about the incident and concluded that “this is the proof” of the power and legitimacy of the keris or that “this incident was the proof that this was a certain kingdom brought from Gelgel.” One follower explained that people “know that keris is there; they know it to this day. It is proof of the connection to Klungkung, that these are the descendants of Ida Dalem, up until now; it is the proof of that. If there were no proof, it would not be received,” that is, people would not accept it. We see that objects become proof

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Figure 8.5. Megawati on a ritual platform with the ancestral effigies and heirloom keris.

in other case studies of this volume too, a point that relates to how visual culture is received differently than texts,55 even if it is an illusion that the message is necessarily clearer in an object. Following the ancestral ceremony, several people mentioned that they would not want to come to just anyone to work as they had for this ritual, but because they know the history, they come, and, some added, “foremost because of that keris.”56 Any attempts by the princes toward grandiose proclamations concerning their keris likely never would have been accepted by people in the surrounding area. For this audience, Ki Bangawan Cangguh had to be entered into social performance and its stories had to develop and spread more indirectly to assume credibility. Important to the success of status-related claims is also the support of those of equivalent or higher legitimacy or standing. For example, in the case of ancestry, a major determining factor is whether those with whom you claim shared ancestry are willing to treat you as kin, as marked by a number of practices. As a possible reflection of this, the events surrounding the ancestral ritual appear to have begun to redress the relationship between the noble house and Klungkung. Two years later, the head of the noble house expressed his pleasure that the members of the palace of Klungkung had started to come to pray to the keris during the Tumpek Landep ceremony — a day of offering for metal weapons (landep means “sharp,” but nowadays such metal objects of power and potential danger as motorcycles and vehicles also are included in the offer-

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ings). He pointed out that Klungkung has difficulty now because they do not have their heirloom. So members of the royal family from Klungkung come to the smaller noble house. Said the head of the noble house, “This is for the keris, because of the keris, and what it stands for.” He went on to specify, “It is actually for the ancestors. This keris is symbolic of the ancestors.” Though he is the holder of the keris, the royal house of Klungkung, because they are considered family, is “included in the ownership” and has access to it in ways that others do not. If they want to include it in a ceremony, for example, “it will be brought to Klungkung.” When done, however, “it will be returned here again. They are not allowed to own it directly.” Thus, even in stressing Klungkung’s inclusion in the ownership, the head of the noble house also subtly asserted his own house’s superior position in this regard. The noble house’s dynastic chronicle already reveals that they are descendants of the older brother from Gelgel, but the keris underscores the claim to seniority and legitimacy, although the head himself did not state it as boldly as that. What he stressed was that it has brought his noble house and the palace of Klungkung back together and that he has gone to Klungkung to talk over their history and clear up what happened to split them. And so, the head of the house concluded, “that is it concerning this keris Ki Bangawan Canggu. Its original name is Suda Mala.” It is a purificatory keris, with the power to bind the hearts of subjects to the ruler and create stability in the realm.

Conclusion Keris have been rendered silent not just by museums, but sometimes by the very scholars who otherwise further their appreciation. The same year as the noble house’s ancestral ritual, a publication of the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam declared keris “part of a now practically extinct phase in Indonesian cultural history,” a lost world of a “cultural and spiritual framework” that allowed a keris “to acquire a meaningful function as an object with a living soul which is therefore magically charged,” but without which they now are viewed as objects “without especial meaning or power.”57 Even Margaret Wiener, in her book, which so successfully recovers understanding for the role of keris in Balinese kingship and the connection in Bali between power in the invisible and visible realms, concludes that “among the things finished in the puputan [the early twentieth-century court massacres by the Dutch] was the identification of royal power with keris and all that this entailed.”58 Profound political changes notwithstanding, the events at the ancestral ritual in the highlands of

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Bali suggest otherwise. Here a keris known as Ki Bangawan Cangguh, a keris of kingship claimed to be the fourteenth-century gift to Bali’s king from the emperor of Majapahit, was entered into a late twentieth-century social project connecting the object, ancestral powers, Balinese princes, and a nation-state president, thus appearing more than half a millennium later to manifest its potential action.59 We could imagine a situation where an object materially determined to be Ki Bangawan Cangguh had been recovered from the bottom of the sea, where some keris are rumored to have found rest when ships sank en route to Europe, or from the recesses of Dutch museums, where other stories place it — or indeed from a minor noble house in the highlands of Bali — an object that, thoroughly tested, might be presented with all of its objective credentials in order. In the context of the ancestral ceremony, we are not provided this kind of assurance, nor is it needed. Here indigenous producers “perpetuate[d] their own uses and construction of things.”60 With Megawati’s engagement and the success of the ritual, the claims of the noble house appeared indeed to receive validation. Drawn upon once again to activate, legitimate, and infuse local hierarchy and state power, the events also infused the keris with renewed life. It has come in greater demand, as evidenced by everything from attempted theft, to the governor’s request, to a recent occasion I witnessed of a general of the Indonesian army seeking its water for his Balinese healing practice, and whose Brahmana family, moreover, came to pray and read manuscripts in the presence of the keris to re-establish their shared ancestry with the noble house. Certainly some keris continue to resonate culturally and remain “embroiled in time and history,”61 both generative of and generated by power, with “both conservative and innovative potential.”62 Emphasized at the same time is the concomitant need to protect Ki Bangawan Cangguh from promiscuous circulation not only in the “inter-related web of commerce, scholarship and desire that is the modern art world,”63 but also in that of the modern political world motivated by individual gain.

Notes I extend my profound gratitude to the members of the Jero Gede Sidemen, with special mention of Tjokorda Gede Dangin, Tjokorda Raka, Tjokorda Pemangku, and Tjokorda Sawitri. 1. Cf. Margaret Wiener, “Object Lessons: Dutch Colonialism and the Looting of Bali,” History and Anthropology 6, no. 4 (1994): 347–370. Following Dutch conquest and the associated looting, many keris ended up either in the Netherlands or in the museum of the Batavian Society. In the 1930s, when the Dutch were reinstalling Balinese

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rajas, they offered to return some of the royal objects. Most of the rajas requested keris, but the returns were never effected. The fate of many keris remains unclear. 2. E.g. Helen I. Jessup, Court Arts of Indonesia (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990). 3. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai, 5 (Cambridge University Press, 1986). 4. While this chapter focuses on the involvement in Balinese social life of an object that escaped looting, another interesting study would be to focus on the role an object on display might assume in the lives and understandings of its visitors. What does an heirloom dagger of notable heritage “call out to its viewers” as Kaja McGowan evocatively puts it in this volume? Might it go beyond “Look at me! I’m art!”? Might it enter into the observer’s life in sometimes unexpected ways, becoming part of new stories? (In this volume, see also Hevia’s summary of a variety of meanings attached to objects looted from the Summer Palace and Mrázek’s discussion of Malraux’s “musée imaginaire,” wherein objects “acquire new relationships and meanings.”) 5. Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (Routledge, 1998). Cf. also I. Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge University Press, 1986). 6. Garrett Solyom, The World of the Javanese Keris (East-West Center, 1978), 5. For some discussion on gender and keris, see Lene Pedersen, “Ambiguous Bleeding: Purity and Sacrifice in Bali,” Ethnology 41, no. 4 (Fall 2002). 7. Janet Hoskins, The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange (University of California Press, 1993). 8. See also DeCaroli (this volume) regarding South Asian statues and the divinities they depict. In discussing teachings on icons and images, Bogel, too, concludes that imagery not merely represents but is the divine (this volume). 9. See Lene Pedersen, Ritual and World Change in a Balinese Princedom (Carolina Academic Press, 2006). 10. Megawati was in Bali in the days leading up to a meeting of her faction of the Indonesian Democratic Party. The next day, moreover, while she was attending the climax of the ancestral ceremony, the Indonesian Supreme Court was scheduled to determine the outcome of her challenge to her ouster from the party’s leadership. 11. I did not ask to photograph the keris as an object, nor was photographic attention sought for it. “We once brought it out too readily just for people to look at or photograph it,” said the head of the noble house; “now we understand that was not right.” Instead, the images in this chapter present some of the contexts for the keris. For very nice photographs and sketches of the keris itself, see Urs Ramseyer, The Art and Culture of Bali (Oxford University Press, 1977); and Urs Ramseyer, “Wie Ki Sudamala nach Sidemen kam: Geschichte und endogener Wandel in einmen balinesischen Dorf,” in Kulturen und Raum/Konkrete Fremde, ed. B. Werlen and S. Wälty (Verlag Ruegger, 1995). 12. Ancestral heirloom (pusaka) keris are often addressed by the honorific, “His Eminence” (Ki, in Bali, or Kyai, in Java).

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13. The genealogical text dealing with Bali’s Gelgel period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. 14. The historicity of this migration of Javanese nobility to Bali remains uncertain, but Bali retains a form of caste grouping within which status claims are still made by tracing connections to this establishment of Majapahit rule over Bali. Balinese Brahmana, for example, emphasize descent from the same ancestry as Kapakisan, though they do so from a branch line that remained priestly, while Kapakisan himself is considered the ancestor of Bali’s highest-ranking Ksatria, the Ksatria Dalem. Dalem literally means “inner” or “inside,” but here it is a royal title, indicating the line to which the members of the noble house belong, as do those of the palace of Klungkung. 15. Margaret Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali (The University of Chicago Press, 1995). The connection between kingship and events surrounding keris is demonstrated also in Babad Blabatuh, which “equates a new ruler with each event surrounding the history of the family’s sacred keris and hence the number of rulers in this work tends to be somewhat inflated.” Henk Schulte Nordholt, “Bali: Colonial Conceptions and Political Change 17001940: From Shifting Hierarchies to ‘Fixed Order’ ” (Ph.D. diss., Rotterdam, 1986), 53, note 22. 16. Wiener also suggests that “[t]he [initial] gift of Bangawan Canggu to Dalem Ketut . . . foreshadows and perhaps even explains the next episode in the text: the fall of the Majapahit empire.” Visible and Invisible Realms, 121. 17. Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms, 118. 18. Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms, 305. 19. Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms, 305. Mrázek points out that there are also legends of transmutations of keris to and from naga (personal communication). Here we find an example, as DeCaroli also observes in this volume, of a completely different association with serpents than the Protestant one with corruption. Snake images can serve to link the ruler to the earth (it writhes along the ground), associating him with fertility and the basic life force — all of which may be symbolized in keris, the blades of which represent a serpent, be they undulated (luk), “as if snaking their way upward from the hilt to the sharp pointed tip,” or straight — a snake in meditation rather than motion. See David van Duuren, The Keris: An Earthly Approach to a Cosmic Symbol (Pictures Publishers, 1998), 9, 35–36. In some cases there is a literal depiction or relief of a snake, following the undulations of the keris. The keris finally is produced in a process of fire recognized to unleash great power into the objects of its creation, a process that may be likened to the kind of volcanic eruption joining earth and heaven, which according to some legends has produced deities (cf. Kaja McGowan, “Jewels in a Cup: The Role of Containers in Balinese Landscape and Art” [Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1996]) or perhaps to death rites of fire performed to release and deify ancestral souls, as in the kind of ritual within which the above keris interacted with Megawati. For as Solyom writes, “the forge was a holy place . . . possibly a place that relates to the spirits of the ancestors, whose traditional abode is the mountains, the fire being the medium through which the souls of the ancestors could be released or an ancestral

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spirit could enter the blade.” Solyom, The World of the Javanese Keris, 7; see also Stanley O’Connor, “Metallurgy and Immortality at Candi Sukuh, Central Java,” Indonesia 39 (April 1985). Through its combined symbolism and powers of heaven and earth, the serpent/keris becomes associated with Southeast Asian kingship. See Robert HeineGeldern, Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia, Data Paper: Number 18 (Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1956), 9. 20. The three naga — Anantaboga, Basuki, and Taksaka — are also said to be incarnations of Brahma, Wisnu, and Siwa respectively. Commonly the three are merged into one, also called Basuki. Heine-Geldern, Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia, 9. 21. David Stuart-Fox, Pura Besakih: A Study of Balinese Religion and Society (Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, 1987). 22. Christian Hooykass, Cosmogony and Creation in Balinese Tradition (Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). 23. Sudamala means to be cleansed from stain and impurity. Sudamala is the title of a Javanese myth from between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries: “[I]t tells of Prince Sahadewa, the youngest Pandawa brother, a powerful healer who neutralizes evil” when he liberates Durga, restoring her to her benevolent form of Uma, Siwa’s consort, after she has requested him as an offering in return for her help in fending off monsters threatening the Pandawas. See Angela Hobart, Urs Ramseyer, and Albert Leeman, The Peoples of Bali (Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 180. The story may still be told in Balinese shadow puppet performances held for purificatory and exorcistic purposes. There are also sudamala (purificatory) fabrics used for ceremonies, just as there is the sudamala keris. 24. The Babad Dalem of the Jero Gede; from an unpublished family transcription. Compare this to Wiener’s translation of Babad Dalem, Visible and Invisible Realms, 118. 25. The court of Majapahit was located in the foothills, west of the river Brantas, where Canggu was a river port. Majapahit was an inland, rice-based kingdom, but also engaged in trade — with connections to Burma, Siam, Cambodia, and Vietnam, as well as China. 26. For the Babad Dalem account, see Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms, 110. 27. Balinese royalty, like the Esoteric scholars Bogel writes about in this volume, have been “engaged in historical preservation to an extreme,” with maintenance, in the Balinese case, of historical chronicles being “critical to their purpose.” 28. For more detailed presentation of these events, see Ramseyer, “Wie Ki Sudamala nach Sidemen kam,” 267–284; and Lene Pedersen, “The Sphere of the Keris: Power and People in a Balinese Princedom,” (Ph.D. diss, University of Southern California, 2002). 29. Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms, 118–120. 30. Cf. Henk Schulte Nordholt, “The Making of Traditional Bali: Colonial Ethnography and Bureaucratic Reproductions,” in Colonial Subjects, ed. Peter Pels et al. (University of Michigan Press, 1999), 258–259.

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31. Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms, 345. 32. See Hevia’s discussion in this volume of the differential meanings of looted objects. 33. Quoted in Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms, 345. 34. Van Duuren, The Keris, 61. 35. Here there is still an emphasis on Majapahit origin, not a shift of origin as with the Esoteric objects brought from China to Japan (cf. Bogel, this volume). 36. Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms. 37. Cf. Mrázek, this volume. Cf. also Kūkai’s “fundamental premise that the mere viewing of and the immediate affective response to a material object can transport an individual to a catastrophically different cognitive state.” Bogel, this volume. 38. This was a daughter of the house who refused an arranged marriage to Gelgel and committed suicide with the keris in the family temple. 39. As per note 12, the heirloom is addressed with a royal title. Much as how people describe having to greet rajas in the past, I have experienced the arrival of the keris being called out and everyone shuffling onto their knees in a prayer position or bowing low with their hands in a position of subordinance as the keris was carried through. This happened very quickly; the keris had passed before I figured out what was going on. 40. Cf. how Kūkai’s objects from China, too, were used for magical protection of the nation. Bogel, this volume. 41. At a time when Balinese were urging the state to support rituals at Besakih, Megawati's father, President Sukarno, had pressed for Eka Dasa Rudra, a large purificatory ceremony, to be held in 1963 rather than at the proper end of the Balinese century in 1979 (Saka 1900). Given the president’s request and the economic and political instability of the time, it was rationalized that an earlier ceremony might indeed be in order. The effort ended in disaster when Mount Agung erupted, causing extensive death and destruction. Two years later Sukarno was ousted and hundreds of thousands of supposed communists were massacred throughout Java and Bali. The comparison between Sukarno’s relationship to the ritual in 1963 and Megawati’s in 1998 was not elaborated, but the connection was made and it is not insignificant that Megawati now made a point of adhering to ritual time rather than forcing the ritual to adhere to her time. Sukarno violated the integrity of the ritual. Hers may have been a kind of restorative gesture. 42. “Indonesian Presidential Hopeful Denies Vilification of Hindu Religion,” (http://www.abc.net.au/ra/asiapac/archive/1998/oct/raap-28oct1998-2.htm, accessed 3/4/03). 43. Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms, 118. 44. Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms, 120. 45. Ramseyer, The Art and Culture of Bali, 73. 46. Ramseyer, “Wie Ki Sudamala nach Sidemen kam,” 270–271. 47. Babad Dalem, Kidung Pamancangah canto 2: 76–77, in C. C. Berg, Kidung Pamancangah: De geschiedenis van het rijk van Gelgel (Mees, 1929), 29.

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48. Solyom, The World of the Javanese Keris, 5. 49. Van Duuren, The Keris, 29. 50. Ramseyer, “Wie Ki Sudamala nach Sidemen kam,” 267–284, 270. 51. Ramseyer, “Wie Ki Sudamala nach Sidemen kam,” 271. 52. Urs Ramseyer, personal communication. 53. Dating of keris requires “painstakingly precise charting of historic dapurs,” writes Van Duuren, pointing out that “no centuries-old kris has ever come to us unaltered. Many krisses were reassembled, their sheaths were replaced, their hilts renovated.” Also, “the fact remains that the blade is the heart of the kris. . . . Therefore the dating of the weapon in its entirety is frequently based on this one particularly hardy component, which has frequently survived its own accessories,” The Keris, 91. 54. Pedersen, Ritual and World Change in a Balinese Princedom. 55. Bogel, this volume. See also Hevia, this volume. 56. For more context as to why people adhere to the princes’ claims, see Pedersen, Ritual and World Change in a Balinese Princedom. 57. Van Duuren, The Keris, 95. 58. Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms, 329. 59. DeCaroli, in this volume, points out that “miraculous events” obviously are not historically accurate, but, as indeed DeCaroli’s own analysis shows, to further the project of transcending ethnocentric limitations of scholarship, we must precisely consider them as historical sources that tell us not just about beliefs but possibly as much about “actual practice” as do “texts that dictate [ideal] legal and political behavior.” This point is only confirmed by the fascinating information in DeCaroli’s account that these latter texts may suggest that a prince “fake miracles.” 60. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects (Harvard University Press, 1991), 174. 61. Margaret Wiener, “Object Lessons: Dutch Colonialism and the Looting of Bali,” History and Anthropology 6, no. 4 (1994): 361. 62. Cf. the Cambodian king’s pilgrimage return to Angkor, Thompson, this volume. In the Balinese case I would not posit a “fragile balance” though. Rather, the past, always open to re-evaluation, infuses the present (and vice versa) and can be used to understand and act within it. 63. O’Connor, quoted by McGowan in this volume.

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Raw Ingredients and Deposit Boxes in Balinese Sanctuaries A Congruence of Obsessions

Judging from a rash of reports in the Bali Post during an extended bout of fieldwork in Bali from 1990 to 1991, the looting of shrines appeared to have become a recurrent pastime. Descriptions of the stolen articles given by distraught temple priests and villagers usually included small gold, gilded wood, or coin statues. Infrequently, mention would be made of deposit boxes or clay containers and their ingredients. The thefts were almost always blamed on outsiders (wong jaba) from the neighboring islands of Lombok, Madura, and Java. Rumors circulated that some looters caught in the act came to violent ends, descended upon by a group of villagers who, sensing that justice would not be done expediently enough by local authorities, took the law into their own hands. The statues were ultimately sold through a series of clandestine transactions to satisfy a burgeoning antique market. When the clay containers were disturbed, they were rifled through nearer to the site, and the valuable contents — jewels and coins — were pocketed, while the clay pots, white cloth, and other raw ingredients were promptly discarded. These pillaged shrines and their scattered contents reflect an insidious example of what Stanley J. O’Connor has called a “congruence of obsessions.”1 By illegal methods, beloved heirlooms are being snatched from their ancestral villages and delivered into the clutches of urban dealers, who supply that exoticized craze for antiquities from Southeast Asia, “part of an inter-related web of commerce, scholarship and desire that is the modern art world.”2 These shrines then are potential “sites” that permit a kind of comparative, albeit devastating, study in connoisseurship and criticism.3 The enumeration of shrine contents in newspaper clippings, and the dispersed ingredients that go unmentioned, reflect a frenzied moment in selectivity with a vigilant eye on market demands. By the time the chosen contents leave their sacred niche and

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reach the domain of commercial exchange, what has been lost is the site where unique cultural meanings were generated. This site, which Michel Foucault refers to as the tabula, represents that familial locus where Balinese language intersects space, where thought is permitted to “operate upon the entities of our world.”4 Without the tabula of variously tiered shrines, the taxonomy of raw ingredients in Balinese deposit boxes reads not unlike that humorous passage on animals in Borges, excerpted from a Chinese encyclopedia and quoted in Foucault’s preface to The Order of Things. Whether sucking pigs are brought into proximity with sirens on the page of a Chinese book of reference, or sweet-smelling anise stars with sewing needles in a Balinese ritual text, our resounding response across cultures is one of wonderment, even laughter, at the incongruity of linking such seemingly inappropriate articles. We are made to feel, strikingly, the “exotic charm of another system of thought” and, in a more wholesome leap, the stark “limitation of our own.”5 And it is precisely there, in the fluid interstices of time-worn activities, where diverse cultures experience separately the propinquity of things, while simultaneously collecting and even obsessively appropriating each other in parts and pieces, that this chapter ingests (in jest) its inspiration and its form. The image of swallowing, fraught with its potentially humorous and gullible connotations, is intentional here. It is meant to assist readers in discerning the fluctuating outline of what might for the moment be some Balinese aesthetic feelings and assumptions toward shrines as potential receptacles for ancestral forces, fertile, hungry, and occasionally even farcical extensions of humanity. Examining Bali’s current modes of shrine construction, in place possibly for centuries, allows the historical material compiled in O’Connor’s article on deposit boxes a chance to sink down suggestive roots and become part of the density of ritual information surrounding the cultural fabric of life in Bali. By focusing on the raw ingredients used to activate the inward form of shrines, I shall chart how shrines and their ritual deposits are not isolable, but collective entities, marking the various rites of passage for Balinese families. By looking at what some Balinese say and do with regard to shrines, we should perhaps be able to ascertain in part their theoretical premises on the role of art and architecture in public life, even if, as in many Southeast Asian countries, these views are rarely made explicit. Out of these emerging responses, I shall attempt to discriminate some critical assumptions that Balinese make about shrines and their contents. By examining the relationship between Balinese concepts of beauty and interiorized, life-activating forces, we may try to uncover what constitutes a shrine’s

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aesthetic appeal. Inspired by a selective instance of borrowed beauty, it may be possible to discern in the context and manner of this appropriation the underpinnings of culturally distinctive patternings at play. With these tentative aesthetic principles revealed through ordered ritual lists and rules of construction, I shall then purposefully disassemble that order by introducing a dynamic alternative for assessing the critical climate surrounding shrines, namely, through observing the salient role of the trickster in Balinese legends. Tricksters must know the social tabula in order to wreak havoc with its organization. Profaning or inverting social beliefs brings into renewed focus how much a society values these beliefs. By turning the world topsy-turvy, the trickster defines the boundaries of Balinese shrines and deposit boxes, what can and cannot be safely said of them. Within Balinese oral traditions, only tricksters can tamper with temples and live to tell the tale. Through outrageously unacceptable uses of sacred space and concepts of containment, Balinese trickster figures manage invariably to make the most of otherwise unlucky situations, and in the process rise from rags to riches, or in the case of Balang Tamak, from village outcast to deity, with a designated shrine. Though this chapter may at times appear tongue-in-cheek in its tenor when confronting religious issues sacred to another culture, I find myself in accord with Stanley Diamond, who proposes that “why and how and at what people laugh is perhaps the most revealing of human actions.”6 Analyzing raw ingredients and the inward form of shrines serves ultimately as the way toward laughter. By doing so, we can attempt to break down gender barriers more rigidly in place when confronting the external surfaces of people and things. Examining Bali’s current deposit box practices, probably in place with minor variations for centuries, in relation to material compiled from South and Southeast Asia’s more distant past, dislodges in part the artificial dichotomies of “traditional” and “modern.” The material presented here forces readers to grapple with more supple ways to assess how the past thrives in the present, and conceivably beyond. What I may refer to as modern Balinese approaches to shrine construction, still heavily steeped in tradition, are in a continuous state of transformation even as I write. As the pillaging of shrines continues unabated, it is possible to discern evershifting codes of connoisseurship and criticism as a global market must, often unwittingly, accept Balinese ancestral adaptations to repeated loss. In a perverse way, looters, like tricksters, are forcing the Balinese to strengthen their beliefs while continually seeking new strategies for shrine construction. It is in these subtle adjustments between market demands and Balinese insurances

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against further theft that a complex nexus of desires and concessions can be ascertained. Can an active engagement with art criticism as a competing practice of interpretation offer anything for increased understanding of Balinese shrines on a global scale? Can there genuinely be a dialogue between evolving Balinese conventions, rooted in ancestral space, and the global market, which brutally wrests objects from their “sense of place,” only to reaffirm their regionality to make them more lucrative commodities with localized “ancestral auras” in evidence? If the active “collecting” of shrine contents continues its corrupt trafficking from sites, which for the Balinese are collective ancestral activators for sacred journeys — way stations for souls — then what conceivable future do these shrines have? What kind of “travel life” is in store for them? What indeed are predictions as to the changing nature of the role of deposit boxes in Balinese sanctuaries? How will these internal transformations affect the external appearances and meanings of shrines? Will trickster figures emerge to lead the way, and will these changes be entirely new, or shaped by visitations from the past? Finally, how will this congruence of global obsessions play itself out in the emerging light of the twenty-first century?

Between the Body and the World: Divining an Internal Aesthetic An enduring theme throughout Southeast Asia, historically, has been the effect of cosmology on built forms, the belief that there exists a magic relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm, between the human body and the natural world. This has produced awe-inspiring attempts on the part of social groups to achieve harmony by integrating courts, governments, customs, and kingdoms into conformity with the laws of nature.7 From their internal contents and design, deposit boxes make symbolic reference to these cosmic ideas and have been observed to be fundamentally similar in both Brahmanic and Buddhist systems of thought.8 From O’Connor’s “Ritual Deposit Boxes in Southeast Asian Sanctuaries,” we know that in the ancient kingdoms of Southeast Asia it was customary practice for one or more sacral deposits to be placed in the foundations of religious structures, and sometimes underneath the crown of the pedestal as well. Though it is virtually impossible to make direct correlations between current deposit practices in Bali and discoveries from the distant past, it is useful to draw analogies, if only to shed possible light on underlying motivations. The data collected by O’Connor is concerned primarily with foundational deposits (panca datu).

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Only occasional reference is made to the deposit boxes (pedagingan) placed near the crown of stone pedestals, which will be my primary focus here. While archaeologists have uncovered deposits of differing types in the ancient monuments of Champa, Cambodia, the Malay Peninsula, and Java, in most instances scholars have been preceded by looters who had invariably absconded with the container and its contents, usually destroying the substructure of the shrine in order to burrow below to the internal deposit. O’Connor cites the case of Angkor Wat, where pillagers never reached the sacred deposit located twenty-three meters (seventy-five feet) below the central sanctuary floor. In this and other rare instances, like the 1958–1959 find in Kedah, where archaeologists from the University of Malaya recovered six deposit boxes that were undisturbed, the careful cataloguing and study of these containments invites many questions about their function and variety and the significance of their contents. Indeed, without the luxury of available ritual texts as in Bali, and the tabula where language intersects space, all the careful cataloguing and listing of finds in Southeast Asia leaves many questions unanswered. Were these boxes related to the received Hindu-Buddhist tradition from India or were they to be regarded as a cultural phenomenon that had its origin and meaning in the indigenous traditions of Southeast Asia? Given the vast variety of finds and contents and the local inflections, we will probably never know, but O’Connor’s careful scholarship demonstrates ultimately how Southeast Asian deposit boxes can be easily integrated into the religious traditions of India.9 Examining Balinese present-day deposit box practices, and the subtle adaptations to pillaging, in relation to the examples provided from the ancient past suggests that the prevailing influence of looting on the art and architecture of Southeast Asia is an area of study that has not yet been sufficiently examined. Khmer architects planting deposits at great depths in Cambodia, or Tana Torajans setting their ancestral figures in niches propped high on stone precipices in south Sulawesi emerge in a curious light when juxtaposed with current Balinese practices for adjusting not only the quality and quantity of deposit box contents, but also securing small-scale statues, no longer on separate pedestals as witnessed in ancient Javanese practices, nor as a family of figures arranged on stone platforms as in the remote and remembered past, but finally padlocked (as are the majority today) in shrines of little aesthetic distinction, called “shrines for safe-keeping” (gedong penyimpanan).10 Clearly this predilection toward greed, theft, and the destruction of shrines is not limited to Bali and not unique to the present. Examining Balinese deposit box practices in relation to rituals of life sequence also reveals where scholars like J. L. Moens, W. F. Stutterheim, and by

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extension S. J. O’Connor were misled when alluding to the tradition in Java and Bali where the ashes of dead kings were supposedly placed in the deposit boxes of what were thought to be funerary monuments (candi). It was the Indonesian archaeologist R. Soekmono who, with architectural and epigraphic evidence from Java combined with current practices of shrine construction in Bali, argued convincingly for the purely commemorative character of funerary monuments, thereby correcting Western scholars’ misconceptions, a fact alluded to by many Balinese archaeologists.11 Looking to the internal life of shrines requires adjusting to an aesthetic that subsists on disappearing. Images are always about to be wrapped up, to be contained, or to be swallowed. By looking at the raw ingredients of Balinese shrines and the life sequential rituals related to them, it can be discerned how shrines in Bali become open seats, way stations for souls en route to purification. These shrines are receptacles for the “purified body.” This is why looters and tricksters disconcert, precisely because they play with the boundaries of the body in all its impurities, trying to take advantage of sacred containments and temple environs in ways that most Balinese find shocking. Before proceeding toward divining this internal aesthetic, however, it is necessary to briefly trace the external relationship between Balinese commemorative shrines (meru) and Javanese funerary monuments. Between the human body and the natural world, there exists the potential for erecting a second, more refined “architectural body”: a commemorative shrine. Modern Balinese temple architecture is characterized by these pagoda-like constructions topped by an ever-diminishing series of superimposed roofs, always odd in number, and made of wood and fiber. Deriving its name from Mahameru, the residence of the gods on the cosmic mountain in India, these shrines serve as axial evocations in miniature of this mythical abode, the tectonic subdivisions of the structure — base, temple body, and superstructure — corresponding both to the human body as microcosm (bhuwana alit, literally, “small world”), composed of feet, trunk, and head, and the universe as macrocosm (bhuwana agung, “large world”) composed of three tiers: Bhurloka, the human plane; Bhuvarloka, the purified domain, and finally Svarloka, the celestial realm. Arguably a relatively recent addition to Bali’s vast assortment of shrines, the architectural intentions of commemorative shrines have been compared to the ancient Javanese stone funerary monuments.12 The Javanese word for funerary monument, “candi,” is derived possibly from the many names of the Hindu goddess Durga, who was (and in Bali still is) connected with death. Funerary monuments in Java are made of stone. However, structures similar to the modern Balinese commemorative shrines,

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consisting of a stone base and a roof of perishable material, are evident in some late East Javanese temples, now consisting solely of stone substructures, their ephemeral roofs long vanished. Fourteenth-century East Javanese temple reliefs confirm the existence of such structures, the modern Balinese commemorative shrine either derived in part from these prototypes or from indigenous models. Texts from the same period, Nagara-Kretagama and Pararaton, record the deaths of royal personages of the Singasari and Majapahit dynasties in connection with the name and location of funerary monuments erected to commemorate them. After a ceremony, called pranapratistha, derived from Hindu religious practice, the soul of a deceased king or queen would be invited to descend into the statue of his or her chosen deity. Out of this suggested conflation of the characteristics of historical persons with divine gods and goddesses, the concept of “portrait-statues” emerged, the finest example being the exquisite stone image depicting the deceased Queen Rajapatni of Singasari, preserved for posterity as the Buddhist goddess of wisdom, Prajnaparamita.13 In Bali there are also posthumous stone statues of gods and goddesses intended to portray the features of actual historical persons. Such statues were placed inside funerary monuments in Java, while in Bali, a separate pavilion seems to have been the prevailing method. This physical separation of statues and their intended shrines in Bali is arguably an adaptation to multiple concerns: security (statues are easier to guard when together), religious doctrine (either the ascendancy of the Saiva-Siddhanta school of Brahmanic worship by about the eleventh century in East Java, and [presumed later] in Bali, favoring ritual practice and incantations over the use of small statues, or later encroachments from Islam), or, finally, in response to volcanic activity (where statues secured together under one roof or on one platform can be more easily exhumed when buried under molten lava). Because these statues, often representing a male and female, are kept separate from their designated shrines, save for special ceremonies, many art historians have not grasped the subtle internal aesthetic between descending deities and the powerful dualistic symbolism of the internal deposit box ingredients, especially the two symbolic jewels indicative of the consummation of male (purusa) and female (pradhana or prakrti) energies in the womb-like clay pot. A. J. Bernet Kempers observes that: A well known feature in Tantric iconography (e.g. in Tibet) are a male and female deity closely embracing (copulating). In Java and Bali are statues of a man and woman standing side by side. . . . These should be seen as mere portrait statues without any dualistic background.14

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Generally speaking, art historians trained in Western visual sensibilities tend to be drawn first to more monumental stone images, often anthropomorphic in appearance, when looking at the art of unfamiliar cultures. In the case of Balinese images, this inherent weakness causes many scholars to overlook the more ephemeral sculptures or “effigies” made from raw ingredients in the landscape, ingredients that hold meanings as sheer potential. Looking only to the statues without taking into consideration the power of the intimately related deposit box is to emphasize the hierarchically ordained importance of portrait-statues and their related historical personages over the often quite complementary predispositions of place. Issues of gender, which argue for power having a dual configuration, surface when visual sensibilities are trained to see beyond the external anthropomorphic evaluations and to read signs generated from selected raw ingredients in the natural world.15 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to address the abundant variety and complexity of temples and shrines in Bali, but pursuing the relationship between commemorative shrines and funerary monuments encourages us to confine our focus to geneological temples, with shrines commemorating deceased ancestors who eventually become deities through a series of postmortem rituals carried out by their living descendants.16 Multitiered commemorative shrines, like the stone funerary monuments, imply that the deceased ancestors being venerated in a public sphere are of royal or priestly caste. A single-roofed, origin shrine (kamulan), on the other hand, is not considered a commemorative shrine, but a “seat” for the deified ancestors (palinggih). Erected in the house temple when a couple marries, the kamulan will be examined presently in relation to current Balinese deposit box practices.17 While an origin shrine generally has no statues related to it in the domestic sphere, as family shrines grow significantly into public structures and ancestral deities become more distanced, small statues called “likenesses” (pratima) begin to become associated with certain deities in their shrines. Stories relate how a particular likeness came to be associated with a chosen deity, either through dreams, natural occurrences, or by materializing as a “gift” (anugraha) near a given shrine through divine intervention. No doubt, centuries ago in Java, ordinary people had ways of erecting shrines to commemorate their ancestors as well, with similar miraculous narratives, but only the most durable building materials, afforded by royal and semiroyal personages, have withstood the vicissitudes of time and climate. Ancestral shrines in Bali serve as a token that the final rites have been performed for the deceased person’s spiritual deliverance from his or her material bonds. Only after the physical body is destroyed by fire is the spirit free to

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ascend to heaven. It is not surprising then that the commemorative shrine has been compared morphologically to the slender towers (bade) used for conveying the deceased to the cremation grounds.18 While the former is a replica of the celestial mountain, from which a deity descends by way of the roof, the latter equally stands for the heavens, but as a symbol of the soul’s intended ascent to the celestial quarters, where it waits, preferably until it can reincarnate back into its own family by way of the shrine of origin. In this way, related commemorative shrines and cremation towers are not isolable structures, but serve as points of familial contact between worlds, repositories, or way stations on proliferating cyclical journeys. What does the act of looting do to Balinese shrines? By seizing and scattering objects and ingredients from their architectural niches, looters annihilate the transportational systems for ascending souls and descending deities. Their actions force certain elements “outside” of shrines, which are for the most part kept “inside,” save for the occasion of special purifying rites, when the smaller statues (pratima) are brought out from their secured structures and carried to a pavilion, where they are bathed, fed, dressed, perfumed, and adorned with flowers. In the case of the deposit boxes, once planted into the womblike cavity of the stone pedestal, the offering is sealed inside with cement, never intended to be tampered with again. Its internal presence is what gives “life” (urip) to any shrine. By ruthlessly snatching statues from these secured shrines and, by extension, from their appropriate commemorative shrines, the dynamic relationship between statue as potential repository for a deity and the one or two sets of sacral deposit boxes beneath is obliterated. One temple priest compared the deities to hovering planes, flying blindly (ten nyingakin), without any navigational aids to guide them and without a designated landing field. In order to pursue this comparison of commemorative shrines and funerary monuments still further, it is necessary to briefly reflect upon the meaning and function of the funerary monument. As stated above, the external shape of the funerary monument can be linked to the three spheres of the universe. The same tripartite division applies to the interior of the funerary monument as well, save with a concealed dualistic component. Soekmono has described the internal workings of the monument accordingly: In the center of the base there is a shaft-like opening, at the bottom of which the pripih or sacral deposit was placed. The pripih consists of various pieces of metal, precious stones, seeds, and plants, all of which together symbolize the earthly elements. Over this is the chamber of the

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temple where the image of the God is enshrined. Above, in the superstructure of solid stone, another small space has been left open in which additional pripih was deposited. This second pripih represents the divine elements, and the space in which it was placed was meant to be a temporary abode of the God. During the ritual ceremonies the God imbues the statue with his spirit, while the earthly elements serve symbolically to provide the statue with a temporary body. Complete with body and soul, the statue is no longer an inanimate object, but rather a living God, capable of communicating directly with the officiating priest.19 Soekmomo’s description is a rare instance where the outward and inward forms of an art object are discussed in unison. Rens Heringa reveals how scholars tend to emphasize the outward and completed forms of art objects when engaged in making visual assessments, paying little or no attention to the meanings of the raw materials gathered and the technical and symbolic processes involved in an object’s creation. By focusing on tracing the actual dye process in relation to life sequence, Heringa emphasizes the ingredients used in the dye vat as if activated in a symbolic womb, thereby revealing what she calls the “inward form” of textile production.20 Curiously, shrine construction for ancestral deities and rituals of life sequence in Bali suggest a similar trajectory informed by an equally procreative internal aesthetic. Looters demolish the inward form of shrines precisely because it is the mysterious contents that suggest lucrative possibilities on a global market. Therefore, it is not surprising that some Balinese refer to these lootings as violations or rape (perkosaan) of the collective ancestral body. And yet when shrines are discussed by scholars, it is their external aesthetic that is most frequently examined. On the subject of aesthetics, while Balinese art has received much scholarly attention, curiously its social roots have never been adequately explored in any far-reaching or methodological manner. Clifford Geertz has stated that a sociology of Balinese art remains as yet undeveloped.21 He hails Lansing’s Three Worlds of Bali, in which the author argues for the centrality of the Balinese temple system in providing a material context for the creation of Balinese art through the dissemination of information by way of performed rituals, shadow theater, masked dances, and texts that are sung. But what of the shrines themselves as disseminators of information? As architectural evocations linking the collective human body (family) and the natural world, do some Balinese judge shrines as possessive of aesthetic appeal? If so, what form does this commentary take? And from these responses, whether informal or

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implicit, is it possible to discern some kind of theoretical premises emerging on the role of art and architecture in public life?22 To “knit the essence of man and nature together,” harmonizing what the Balinese call respectively “great world” (bhuwana agung) and “little world” (bhuwana alit), Lansing invokes the “god of beauty,” referred to as lango.23 Quoting an Old Javanese poem entitled “Sumanasantaka,” he demonstrates the impassioned and almost melancholic role of lango in Javanese aesthetics: When a woman wishes to die, she asks the gods to return her beauty to the month of Kartika, the loveliness of her hair to the rainbearing clouds, the suppleness of her arms to the welas-arep creeper, her tears to the dewdrops suspended from the tip of a blade of grass.24 Beauty in pre-Islamic Java would seem to have encompassed the celebration of intense feelings of longing without relying on formal qualities, an emphasis on the invisible force or process that begets form, rather than on any final product. It is significant that the word for “beauty” (lango) accentuates feeling rather than an object that elicits feeling.25 Lango would appear to be about the fervent emotional sentiment attached to the disintegration and reintegration of form, a mapping of the human body on the land by way of a series of similitudes — hair to clouds, arms to vines, tears to drops of dew — only to be realigned and recontained (often through the process of ingestion in the case of Bali) into a newly recycled form. This is a concept of form that only makes sense in motion, and it is this principle of mobility, often generational in transmission, that attracts what is heavy to the weight of the earth while what is light floats upward toward the sky. The cosmological theory espoused by many educated Balinese today to explain this elemental transmutation is called the doctrine of the five elements (panca mahabhuta), believed to evolve from eleventh-century Javanese philosophical texts tinged by Saivism (tutur). Balinese Hindus believe that the human body and the universe are composed of the same five elements: sky or ether (akasa, envisioned as Siva), wind (wayu), fire (teja), water (apah), and earth (pertiwi, described as Siva’s Sakti, Uma). By way of the transmutation of these elemental forces, everything can be seen to eventually return to its origin, only to be regenerated into the lived world. Many Balinese feel that fire and water are the most efficient means of accelerating the disintegration of the gross body (sthula sarira) into the subtle, rarified body (suksma sarira). This restoration into nature is best carried out in a cremation ceremony, followed by a series of postmortem rituals performed by the family of the deceased, all in orthopractic dialogue with the origin shrine.26

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Clearly, the doctrine of the five elements did not come to an empty void. It was probably assimilated to animistic concepts already long-connected to the worship of natural elements in the landscape, where awe-inspiring sites — hidden springs, standing stones, spurts of fire, and the distillation of steam rising from volcanic depths — were no doubt perceived as corresponding to powerful ancestral forces. It can be argued that there is an infinite variety of emerging theoretical assumptions being conceived by Balinese, who each bring their unique perspective to their orthopractic endeavors with no uniform access to knowledge or experience. Asking a group of temple priests in Batur who they considered to be a founding father of Balinese Hindu art and architecture, one name surfaced regularly in the conversation, the great sage, Rsi Markandeya, credited with having first brought Hindu religion to the island. Believed to be a descendant of Pasupata, Rsi Markandeya arrived from India with a group of followers, who settled first on Mount Demalung in Java. Plagued by disease, he and his company traveled from Java to Bali until at last they arrived on the slopes of Mount Agung. There, supposedly on the site where Besakih Temple now stands, Rsi Markandeya erected a shrine to the descending deities, Pura Hyang. To achieve harmony with the surrounding spirits (bhuta), Rsi Markandeya is also celebrated for having “planted” the first foundational deposit box (panca datu). From this story, Markandeya’s planting of the cosmologically significant five metals not only secured a temporary body for descending Hindu deities, but it simultaneously appeased the anxious spirits already inhabiting the place. The theory of the doctrine of the five elements, by extension, promises a continual return to harmony between the body and the land through a hidden process of disintegration and reintegration, an internal aesthetic made manifest through orthopractic activities surrounding the related structures of cremation tower and origin shrine.27 As Rsi Markandeya’s story reveals, the very survival of originally foreign concepts like the first foundational deposit box and the doctrine of the five elements required their immediate assimilation to pre-Hindu dispositions toward the land, promising a return to harmony and renewed balance with the unpredictable natural powers of a mountain like Agung. These applied theoretical answers to cosmological questions were successfully absorbed into indigenous magical beliefs because of their ability to coincide with a dynamic, overarching equivalence already in place between concepts of birth and death, particularly surrounding the planting and harvesting of staple crops. In Balinese language, for example, the word tanem means “to plant” and “to bury” simultaneously. This equivalence is best discerned in a number of related stories

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found throughout Indonesia, where an original progenitor (usually female, and in islands influenced by Hinduism, Dewi Sri, the goddess of rice and agriculture) sacrifices herself, and from her body a variety of foodstuffs grow. Each plant is graphically associated with a body part — melons for breasts, cucumbers for thighs — in a kind of Arcimboldesque image of feminine beauty as diffused, piecemeal in nature.28 In this way, the transmutation of the elements comes to exist in compatibility with a whole cluster of beliefs in Southeast Asia, linking the birth of progeny with the ingestion of seeds or fruits, or, in the case of Bali, where a child is the reincarnation of an ancestral spirit who descends in a drop of dew (titisan), which is unintentionally consumed by a married couple after sexual intimacy.29 The inspiration for the aforementioned “Sumanasantaka,” where the combined essence of nature and the human body are played out in a woman’s death and in her prayers concerning the renewal of her body and her beauty, is enhanced by the doctrine of the five elements and sustained by pre-Hindu equivalences made between sowing seeds and interment. Ultimately, the poem can be most richly associated with the Balinese orthopractic relationship between raw ingredients and deposit boxes in shrines and the related rituals of life sequence. In the process from marriage to death to rebirth, preferably back into the same family shrine, an internal aesthetic can be observed, where bodies in various states of disintegration and refinement spring in and out of focus through a series of transformational enclosures. What activates this internal aesthetic in Bali is, finally, the raw ingredients of an essential offering called pedagingan.30 Not all shrines contain statues, but every shrine contains a deposit box, thereby inviting ancestral forces to descend, or as I Gusti Ngurah Sindhya puts it, to help the Balinese “remember life” (mengingatkan hidup).31 It is remarkable given the intense scrutiny of scholars on all aspects of Balinese culture that there has been little mention of the prescriptive quality of many sacred Balinese texts, texts that read much like shopping lists of raw ingredients. One deposit box offering is required for the origin shrine, which is divided into three chambers, with the two external rooms dedicated to the ancestors (males right, females left). The central chamber, sometimes structurally elevated, symbolizes the divine synthesis of the two groups in the guise of Batara Guru (Lord Teacher), or Paramatma, another name for Siva, arguably the original ancestor for all Hindu Balinese, who now, in the interests of monotheism, is called Sang Hyang Widhi (fig. 9.1). Some argue that the origin shrine is the seat of the Hindu trinity with Brahma, Siva, and Visnu presiding: Brahma on the side of the male ancestors; Visnu the female; and Siva, again, in the fractious (decentering) center. How-

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Figure 9.1. Kamulan shrine, Denpasar, Bali, 1990.

ever, arguing for the conjugal nature of the shrine, Jane Belo relates a high priest’s response: When a question came up of installing figures of the gods in the sanggah kamulan, that the figure of only one god with his wife, either Siwa or Wisnu, could be placed there. He said that to place Brahma, Siwa and Wisnu, with or without their wives, behind the three doors was impossible.32 Arguably, then, the procreative capacities of a husband and wife serve as the human analogue for the mystical union of Siva and his wife (Uma, or Pertiwi, as she is often called in Bali) on the site of the origin shrine.33 With the current state of the origin shrine in mind, it is intriguing to return yet again to the “Sumanasantaka,” which relates how, after the death of a royal couple, a combined statue of them as ardhanarisvara (half Siva, half Parvati or Uma) was enshrined in a sanctuary within the royal compound, where their children

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Figure 9.2. The unwrapped pedagingan ingredients in their clay pot with the two jewels represented on the lid. Read the footnotes carefully as a subtext to the ritual prescription.

came to commune with them.34 Jan Fontein uses this example in his discussion of portrait-statues to argue against the possibility of such a statue having any resemblance to a deceased historical personage. Fontein is clearly caught up in the concept of portraiture as an isolable practice, where only one person can be depicted. Could not this be a collective portrait, a pre–Saiva-Siddhanta response to geneological worship in the private, royal sphere?35 This claim for complementarity on the site of the origin shrine can be still further substantiated by the material contents of the inward form of the deposit box offering that serves to activate not just the shrine of origin, but all temple constructions. From the palm-leaf text Dewa Tattwa, the following ingredients are required for one deposit box to be inserted into the origin shrine (fig. 9.2): In a clay container, place 1 gold, 1 silver, and 1 copper amulet (pripih) with sacred syllables inscribed by a priest.36 1 gold, 1 silver, and 1 copper needle; 1 small slab of iron; 2 pink rubies (mirah or pudhi);37 wangi-wangian, literally “sweet-smelling things.”38 The clay container is then wrapped in a white cotton cloth and tied with strings of three or four colors, accom-

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panied by praboting, literally, “tools,” or necessities for the afterlife, today, crudely cut out miniature mirrors and combs, two kawangen offerings, and 200 antique Chinese coins tied together on a string.39 Finally, flowers are attached at the neck of the offering to make it more pleasing visually.40 To formally activate the shrine, the deposit box is placed by a priest into the crowning, central womb-like cavity of the stone or brick pedestal, which is then cemented over. As a family increases in size, shrines adjust externally to the growth by accumulating brick and stone constructions over the original wooden three-roomed structures. Internally, shrines are calibrated by increasing the number of deposit boxes in direct relation to the number of family units represented. This symbolic practice could perhaps account for the multiple containers found in ancient sites. Moving out of the domestic and into a more public sphere, the origin shrine develops from one to ten households (pertiwi shrine) to twenty households (paibon, “pa-ibu-an,” ibu meaning “mother”), and on to full-fledged origin temples (kawitan or dadia), the fullest expression of this being enshrined at Besakih, the mother temple for all Bali, located on the slopes of Mount Agung. The origin shrine points to procreation as the route to spiritual liberation, not through renunciation but through progeny.41 For Balinese, children represent an unspoken promise. In both the cremation and the ensuing postmortem rituals, it is up to them to make sure that the bodies and souls of their parents are treated appropriately. After the cremation ceremony, the remaining bits of bone and ash are gathered by the family. With these fragments, a miniature body of the deceased is resurrected on a palm mat and covered with flowers. Before the flowers are placed over the reconstituted fragments, tiny pieces of ash and bone are plucked from the effigy, a little taken from each part of the body, starting with the head. Placed in a coconut, this is the body as “little world” encapsulated. When wrapped in cloth and adorned with flowers, this offering is called sekah, intended to liberate the deceased in an orderly fashion from its material body when ritually thrown into the sea. The figure composed of ashes and flowers is, likewise, wrapped in a white cloth, and carried symbolically just like a miniature corpse in tandem with the sekah. Only the soul, encapsulated in the sekah, is invited back, preferably twelve days but often years later, depending upon a family’s finances. The postmortem rite (memukur) represents the final sendoff for the soul to the realm of the gods. In this ceremony, a flower effigy (puspa lingga or puspa sarira) is constructed for the deceased (fig. 9.3). This is probably very similar to

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Figure 9.3. A woman carrying the flower effigy, puspa lingga. The umbrella suggests the soul’s transition to a deity, Denpasar, Bali, 1990.

the puspa offering mentioned in the Nagarakrtagama, in connection with the sraddha ritual for Queen Rajapatni, a ceremony discussed earlier in relation to portrait-statues. The flower effigy is prepared, complete with the name of the deceased (soon to become a deified ancestor), hanging from a tag on a string. This offering, like the deposit box inserted in the shrine, is made from a vast assortment of dried natural ingredients. While the deposit box can be seen to give a temporary body to a descending deity, the effigy, with its two jewels intact, likewise serves as a temporary body for the soul, soon to disappear as deity, the orthopractic equivalent to the comparison made much earlier between commemorative shrines and cremation towers. The effigy is then burned, like the corpse but in a more rarified state. The aromatic plant fragments are ground up and placed inside a cup, which is put into a new coconut. A duplicate of the sekah is made, only this time it sports a silver face (prerai) and is a portrait of a god (bhatara male, bhatari female).

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After it is thrown into the sea, it is invited back into the origin shrine by way of one final containment (daksina), which is finally “planted/buried” behind the origin shrine (males right, females left). And so the elemental process of the body from material to immaterial has come full circle through a series of containments. The ancestor has become a god for a time, only to reincarnate again, preferably into its own family. Many Balinese are primed from birth to set great store by the power of encapsulated spaces. Regardless of a container’s rough or makeshift exterior — heirloom chest, sack, or cracked clay pot — it is always the interior ingredients that hold hidden promise and an invitation for transformation. “A cracked clay pot is filled with rice wine” (payuk perumpung misi brem) is a Balinese expression used by relatives and friends when advising a young man in search of a wife. External beauty is rendered suspect here; the superior sweetness is to be tasted internally, sip by sip. Hovering between inside and out, these subtle interstices of desire and hope become the emotionally charged sites where tricksters flourish. Before turning to these triumphant tricksters, however, I wish to conclude this investigation of Balinese aesthetics with a remarkable instance of borrowed beauty. “Mona Lisa: Capsules for the Heirloom of Beauty” (Mona Lisa: Kapsul Pusaka Ayu), an Indonesian advertisement printed on wrappers of herbal medicines known as jamu, was a popular product for women to purchase in 1990, while I was conducting research in Bali (fig. 9.4). Indonesian herbal medicines are believed to have had their origins in the royal court of Solo in the seventeenth century. Such medicines are now a thriving industry, controlled largely by Indonesians of Chinese ethnic descent. It has been estimated that 80 percent of Indonesians drink some form of these products every day. The preponderance of recipes can cure anything from kidney stones to infertility. The Mona Lisa Jamu, in particular, is intended to restore women’s beauty and physique after pregnancy. The raw ingredients, a botanical storehouse containing anywhere from 150 to 200 distinct types of dry and desiccated plant matter, can be purchased at the same market stalls where the materials for deposit boxes and the other life-sequential offerings are found. These dry ingredients are gathered, pulverized, and mixed with water for immediate consumption. Usually bitter and sludge-like in consistency, these herbal medicines are an acquired taste, often chased by necessity with a spoonful of honey. The Mona Lisa Jamu offers women the expedient opportunity to consume the “heirloom of beauty restored” by simply popping two or three pills per day. It is intriguing that the designers for jamu packets at the Sari Bumi (literally, “essence of the earth”) factories in Java should have selected the Mona Lisa for their im-

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Figure 9.4. Mona Lisa: Kapsul Pusaka Ayu, a jamu packet purchased in the Kreneng market, Denpasar, Bali, 1990.

mediate consumption. It is in the context and manner of this appropriation of such a world-famous portrait, perhaps not an altogether cognizant choice on the part of the Javanese designer, that the underpinnings of culturally distinctive patternings are brought into a cozy, cross-cultural embrace. In his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, published in 1869, Walter Pater is believed to be the first on record to have called attention to the metaphorical interaction between figure and landscape in the Mona Lisa. Pater commented that the figure of the mysteriously smiling La Gioconda was surrounded by a “circle of fantastic rocks” appearing “beside the waters,” and is “older than the rocks amongst which she sits.” In the painting, Webster Smith has remarked how the landscape rises up to the full height of the portrait figure, as if for comparison with it. Responding feature by feature, he writes: The highest mountains ascend from the level of her cheek-bones to that of her forehead. . . . The curve of her right shoulder is touched by a tangential bend of the serpentine river-or-road. As her rivulets of hair become prominent against her pale skin, so, in the same zone, the comparatively wide river on the right finds its way downhill, which may bring

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to mind Leonardo’s observation of the similarity of water currents to wavy hair. This river and the river-or-road on the left both turn and then disappear behind the figure, perhaps to arrive and meet at the same low level, just as in the lower part of the figure two edges of veil converge and the hands join.42 Glancing back at the series of life-sequential offerings, each container wrapped in white cloth and adorned with abstract features and flowers, it becomes abundantly clear that for the majority of Hindu Balinese these triangular floral compositions, set in bowls, balanced on heads, shaded from the sun with silk umbrellas, are perceived as ephemeral portraits of the soul in transition, orthopractic snapshots of an emerging ancestral deity, a countenance (prerai) mapped, like the Mona Lisa, on a mountain landscape. The joining rivers of the former can be seen externally; the two symbolic streams in the latter pursue an internal transformation, distilled into drops of dew and transmuted into rose-colored jewels, joined in a cup. While Leonardo’s metaphorical conflation of figure and landscape gives primacy of place to the visual and to a historical person, the Balinese offerings of life sequence created by women give center stage, ceremonially, to emotions of longing, as the physical body of a beloved family member transforms through a series of containments, piece by piece, into an ancestral deity, whose portrait can be everywhere sensed in the powerful predispositions of place. The beauty of the Mona Lisa, mapped externally on the landscape, is transformed by Indonesian imagination into a capsule, restoring a woman’s beauty through internal means, revealing an aesthetic that must be swallowed to be divined.

Triumphant Tricksters: The Quick and the Dead Contained Trickster figures can be better comprehended in terms of metaplay, an inversionary logic that distorts and disassembles behaviorial norms. Acting at the boundaries of ordered experience, tricksters encourage anarchy and confusion, thereby redefining and strengthening pre-existing categories of thought.43 I shall contain my discussion of Balinese trickster figures to two stories, “I Gelijah” and “Pan Balang Tamak.” Each protagonist adds his own incremental measurement of trickster laughter, probing cultural levels otherwise overlooked.44 Earlier, I argued that the ingredients of the offerings used to activate shrines resemble the raw materials used to symbolize the refined body in death. It is

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this ritualistic distillation of the quick and the dead through a series of containments that invites metaplay by Balinese tricksters, precisely at those junctures where earth, hell, and heaven meet on what might be considered the “normal” path of the Balinese soul. And who better for the trickster to impersonate at such a liminal moment than the Brahmana high priest (pedanda).45 The trickster’s unabashed disdain for rules of etiquette and ritual prescription endows him with the audacity to not only impersonate holy men, but God as well. Gelijah and Balang Tamak are triumphant because their victims are gullible, falling for each ruse because of its uncanny resemblance to what constitutes normative Balinese beliefs and practices. We begin our first story of Gelijah after he has been thrown out of the house for lying, stealing, and embarrassing his father in public. . . . Setting forth unscathed into the world, Gelijah arrives one day at the kingdom of Kerta Negara, where a corrupt king, disliked by all his subjects, holds court. Unknown to our hero, a reward has secretly been issued, stating that whoever can exile the king from the kingdom, will win the crown. Working as a moneylender, Gelijah soon is tempted to cheat and steal again. When the king hears of this, the miscreant is severely punished. Nailed shut inside a box and abandoned in the forest, Gelijah discovers to his good fortune, that his final resting place borders upon a venerable hermit’s hut. When Gelijah hears the hermit singing songs of praise, he plans his escape. Pretending to be God, Gelijah announces, “Say priest, your prayers have reached me and I know your desires!” Overjoyed, the hermit stops his supplications, and runs in the direction of Gelijah’s voice. “To serve you, God, please tell me where you are?” importuned the priest. “I speak from this box, priest,” replied Gelijah. “Open it quickly, for you have earned both enlightenment and my blessing into the bargain. Naked you came into the world, and naked will you meet with God, so remove your clothes, and step inside.” The priest joyfully complies. As he steps into the box, Gelijah jumps out. He nails the box shut, and dresses in the priest’s garb. As the hermit speaks wistfully of his big house near the temple, and his kind wife, Istri Gria, Gelijah decides to impersonate the priest for a time to see what fate has in store for him. “I have no husband as fat as you!” remarks the priest’s wife in dismay, when she sees Gelijah. “I prayed for a favor at the hermitage, and a different body was given to me,” remarked Gelijah. Though Istri Gria initially accepts the trickster into her bed, she begins to suspect him when he asks after their children, a sensitive subject since she has been unable to

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conceive. Sending a scout out into the forest to look for her real husband serves as Gelijah’s excuse for escape. Back in Kerta Negara and up to his old antics, Gelijah is captured almost immediately by the king, who orders two soldiers, Bretek Kaut and Semar, to put the guilty party in a sack, attach stones to his feet, and hurl him into the sea. Walking by the beach in the heat of the day, the soldiers stop to rest, during which time Gelijah evolves a cunning strategy. Convincing the guards that he has buried a considerable sum under the temple pillars, he bemoans the waste, encouraging the two soldiers to split the money between them. While Bretek Kaut and Semar set off in search of the treasure, Gelijah bides his time, tied up in the sack. When he hears a fisherman approach, Gelijah begins to complain. “Oh, dear God, how terrible! I just avoided marrying the princess, but now the king has decided to bring me to my senses by leaving me out in this sack for the whole day!” “Don’t you want to marry the princess?” the fisherman asks somewhat bewildered. “Oh, I have no wish to marry so soon,” replies Gelijah. “Let’s change places then,” suggests the fisherman, thrilled at the prospect of a royal wedding. The angry soldiers eventually return empty-handed, taking rare pleasure in tossing, who they believe to be that swindler Gelijah into the sea. With sounds of wedding bells in his ears, the fisherman meets a salty demise, while Gelijah is already back in Kerta Negara, plotting revenge against the king. Imagine everyone’s surprise when Gelijah shows up the next day at court. “Didn’t you throw this thief overboard as I ordered?” asked the king. “The fish are our witnesses,” pleaded the soldiers, looking startled as if they’d seen a ghost. “Yes, indeed, these two bullies threw me overboard,” remarked Gelijah. “My soul then wandered about in hell, sightseeing, and who should I meet, good king, but your father being cared for by the King of Snakes. Your father wishes to speak with you immediately. He wants to give you some essential advice on how to rule the world. Waste no time, your majesty; prepare to meet your beloved father today!” The greedy king began to envision himself as world ruler. “What direction must I take to get there?” he asked, hardly able to contain his excitement. “Must I get into the same sack with my feet tied accordingly? Should I be dropped in the very same place in the sea to be sure to meet my father?” asked the king, a little out of breath. “Surely that would be the most expedient way,” replied Gelijah. The sack was dropped into the sea that very day. Bubbles rose for a moment, only to disappear, and Gelijah, without delay, claimed the reward

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and became King of Kerta Negara, assuming full responsibilities, not only for the kingdom, but for the late king’s two hundred wives as well. THE END Convinced that his fellow Balinese believe so strongly in containment as a vehicle for transformation, Gelijah invites high priests, kings, and commoners to their demise. While Gelijah’s domain for snaring his victims is the natural world, Balang Tamak’s field for finagling is found closer to home, in the house temple (sanggah or, for high-caste families, pamerajan) and village origin temple (pura puseh), where his weapon is wordplay. While Geliijah becomes king, Balang Tamak is elevated to an enshrined deity. The relationship between Balang Tamak’s story and the shrines that bear his name is ambiguous at best.46 He is usually described as an agricultural deity. Perhaps intended as a homoeopathic response on the part of Balinese farmers, by praying to Balang Tamak (“Greedy Grasshopper” in Balinese), insects might be averted from destroying the crops. According to the story, Balang Tamak taunts his fellow villagers with a series of puns. Asked to bring cooked rice (senggauk) to a community effort, for example, Balang Tamak brings a broken household shrine (sanggah uwug) instead, the words deceptively similar in sound when uttered quickly. Balang Tamak emerges victorious as always, with a shrine as good as new, repaired for free by the irate villagers. At last, with the king’s consent, the community conspires to poison their shrewd and irritating neighbor. Predicting that his hour of death is at hand, Balang Tamak gives his wife precise instructions. After propping up his corpse to make a secular mockery of a Brahmana priest, his wife is advised to place his decomposing body in the chest usually reserved for family heirlooms. She is then told to transfer the valuables to his coffin. Leaving the chest in the bedroom, Balang Tamak’s wife goes out into the yard to grieve over the coffin. Two thieves take advantage of the widow’s distress. Sneaking into the house, they steal the chest presumably filled with valuables. Tempted to divine its contents, the thieves are dissuaded by the increasingly repugnant aroma until, crazed with fear and overwhelmed by the smell, they decide to take the chest to the village temple. Envisioning the sacred courtyard smelling sweetly of flowers, the thieves remark that nobody in their right mind would dare to bury a corpse in such a place. You can imagine their horror when they pry open the lid to discover the putrid remains of the trickster, Balang Tamak. The terrified thieves flee, leaving the chest in the temple. When morning

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arrives, a priest enters the courtyard. Apprehensive, he draws near to the box. Kneeling, he thanks God for delivering such a mysterious gift. Surely the god, inhabiting the box, has chosen this temple as his place to descend. Imagine the horror on the faces of the villagers when, assembled in all their finery on the auspicious day appointed to consecrate and activate the new shrine, they discover that their arriving deity is none other than their cursed neighbor, Balang Tamak. The villagers plot revenge, but are ultimately dissuaded by the priest, who reasons with them accordingly. The corpse could only have been placed in the temple by divine intervention, and having already dedicated the shrine and gone through the proper ceremonies, it is impossible to undo what has been done. Balang Tamak creates a series of disjunctions in the minds of many Balinese. They cannot help but adore him for defying the establishment while despising him for turning their own weaknesses into his strength and ultimate triumph. So great is the ambivalence toward his character that many Balinese refuse to acknowledge the connection between the wily trickster, cast out by society, and the deity whose shrine is associated with preventing plant disease. Balang Tamak laughs last because his fellow villagers invite him, as deity, to descend into their midst. Not only are they hoodwinked into fixing his shrine in life, but they are likewise deceived into constructing his commemorative monument in death. Presumably enlivening the pedestal with a deposit box, so as to invite their mysterious deity to materialize, they discover to their dismay upon opening “the gift” that Balang Tamak’s rank corpse has not been dispensed with properly and is in fact desecrating the very shrine they are trying to purify. While tricksters merely impede the transportational system of souls, obstructing way stations by putting living and dead bodies into containers intended for more refined ingredients, looters obliterate the system entirely by absconding with the statues, toppling the pedestal, and rifling through the landing apparatus. In this way, looters, like tricksters, play with the boundaries between life and death, forcing Hindu Balinese to further strengthen their religious convictions. The impetus for some Balinese artists to create innovative expressions by transforming traditional media can be perceived as a definite kind of trickstering. Nyoman Erawan’s “Ancient Time” (1987) is a dramatic case in point, where, like a corpse, the actual canvas endures the process of cremation. Indeed, the creative expressions of many Balinese modern artists, when perceived to be extending beyond the realm of the “traditional,” arouse laughter or discomfort for some Balinese, an emotional response perhaps akin to that directed at tricksters.

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Erawan’s choice of depicting the symbolic mountain as a commemorative shrine is echoed in the charred astrological calendar (pelelintangan) in the background of “Ancient Time.” Whether intended or not, Erawan has placed the peak of his mountain directly between two days on the calendar, Wraspati Pon and Buda Pon, symbolized respectively as a cremation tower (bade) on the right and a rice granary (lumbung) on the left. Affixed to a panel made from an old detached chair back, Erawan, in a single stroke of brush and match, conflates and ignites the roles of mountain, commemorative shrine, cremation tower, and rice granary as “seats” (palinggih), both literally and figuratively, for descending deities and ascending souls. Like Balang Tamak with his broken shrine restored by his fellow villagers, Erawan’s detached chair back is “made whole” by a global art market ready to invest in his startlingly innovative reinventions of tradition. Erawan’s creativity can be seen to ascend to the ancestral summit, where, straddling past and present, Erawan forges his national identity as an Indonesian world-renowned artist by adding his own incremental trickster measurements. Playing with the symbolic boundaries between death and life — cremation tower and rice granary — Erawan navigates the calendrical boundaries of time, choosing to hover between two possibilities, the best of both worlds. By being born under the ephemeral sign of the cremation tower, he can enjoy showing off his possessions but is likely to lose his wealth as quickly as he accumulates it; being delivered under a full rice granary, he will potentially have everything: money, good luck, and all the desired accolades.47 Artists and tricksters are not the sole navigators of “Time” in Bali. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, many Balinese are being forced to pilot their ancestors into safer havens in response to any number of threats, generally falling under the rubric of “the modern world” (zaman moderen). Lack of space due to urban sprawl, encroachment from tourism, and a barrage of thefts are all influences forcing many Balinese to strengthen their religious resolve while simultaneously seeking more streamlined strategies for shrine construction. Wiana envisions some of the future adjustments and concessions that Balinese will be making with regard to their ancestral shrines. What he predicts would potentially do away with deposit box practices entirely. As houses begin to have multiple levels, he observes that a room must be set aside for the family shrine on the roof. If this proves inconvenient, he suggests cordoning off one room in the house for prayer, ideally in the northeast corner. The origin shrine with its three rooms, externally reflecting the complementarity of husband and wife, their consummation, by extension, envisioned in the internal ingre-

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dients of the deposit box, will very possibly be replaced, according to Wiana, by a single offering stand (dulang) or lotus seat (padma capah), reflective of an increasingly simplified, monotheistic vision with Sang Hyang Widhi officiating. In conclusion, Wiana suggests that the entire family temple with its myriad shrines be brought indoors into a closed room and recreated in miniature. Such an idea smacks of Bali’s ancient past, when small-scale stone replicas of structures similar to East Javanese funerary monuments may have been a common sight in the landscape. Wiana himself admits that such transformations will have to be discussed by the religious authorities at Parisada Hindu Dharma Indonesia before they can be implemented.48 The global art market can already be seen to position itself for the swift appropriation of the by-products of these predicted adjustments and concessions, made more often than not in response to looting practices in the first place. These sacred objects follow the force of a current created by a subtle dialogue between an insatiable global market and Balinese ancestral adaptations to loss. Can an active engagement with art criticism as a competing practice of interpretation offer anything for an increased understanding of Balinese shrines on a global scale? I pose this question in conclusion, if only to envision a more responsible dialogue for the future. Let us begin by imagining what looted ancestral statues from Bali, often quite circuitously transported to art galleries or museum settings, might be heard to call out to their viewers from sanitized glass cases. Perhaps they would say something like: “Look at me! I’m art!” Whereas in their rootedness to deposit boxes within an ancestral shrine setting, these statues might call out, “Look at me, gods and deified ancestors! Inhabit me, and learn of your descendants’ needs, receive their gifts — their newborns — waiting as potential receptacles for you to return through reincarnation back into your family!” Looters are responsible for helping to set in motion what Fred Myers has referred to as a series of disjunctions. The disjoined relationship between the discourse of the modern art world and those of Balinese producers of shrines and their enlivened contents — the gap between how Balinese account for their shrines and what significance the pillaged parts and pieces are made to have in other venues — is at the source of a heated controversy over the politics of representation.49 This debate thrives on the tensions between two approaches to the representation of so-called “non-Western” images in art museums. One approach strongly advocates the importance of providing detailed, contextual information drawn from the indigenous producers, or what we shall refer to

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as “anthropological knowledge.”50 The other approach champions that all art should be exclusively treated as a visual experience without the ethnographic onus of additional contextual information.51 There is no need for contextual sources to “burden” our vision unnecessarily. Artistic choices surrounding issues of display can begin to reflect a more critical and informed position by visually introducing looting in connection with ancestral artifacts. Museum curators can do their part, by choosing not to show the isolated statue in a case without juxtaposing a reconstruction of a demolished ancestral shrine nearby. By making a spectacle of looting and the loss expressed by its victims, viewers may begin to grasp the price that is paid for such aesthetic pleasure. In turn, increased cross-cultural sensitivity would automatically affect market demands, diverting interests elsewhere. Virtual replicas of these statues are being made by Balinese for the tourist industry. Fabricated with exceptional skill but without the offerings and ceremonies needed to activate the images for divine occupancy, investment in these products would support Balinese artists without causing generations of familial anguish. It is not enough, however, to suggest a decisively Western curatorial response to increase our understanding of Balinese shrines on a global scale. It is also essential to try to divine what might be a Balinese competing practice of explication and a critical reaction to such calamities. A “fragment” (kepingan), published in the Bali Post on January 27, 1991, titled “Tourist Temples” (Pura Pariwisata), suggests just such a critique, tinged I might add with trickster-like intent. The text describes a panel discussion taking place at a conference on tourism held in Lovina, north Bali, in the beginning of December 1990, where Ida Bagus Made Mandra, a representative from Nusa Dua, made a remarkable suggestion to the other panelists present: “Why don’t we build tourist temples?” Of the fifty participants, the majority could not contain their laughter. A few were offended that the sacred could be toyed with and degraded in this way. And so the idea was dropped. But the premise behind the inversionary logic was profound. There is no activity in Bali that does not in some way reveal connections between religion (agama) and traditional customs (adat), although religious authorities continue to struggle to define the precise boundaries between them.52 Mandra pointed out how temples in Bali serve many functions: irrigation organizations have their sacred sphere (pura subak), the marketplace has its temple (pura melanting), and even farmers have their places of worship (pura ulunsiwi), where occasionally the shrine to Balang Tamak can be found, if it is not in the great hall (bale agung), sometimes connected to the origin temple (pura puseh). Charting contemporary trends,

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Mandra discerned how Balinese farmers no longer encourage their children to follow in their footsteps. If children should choose to “fall” (jatuh) into such a profession, parents would feel like “complete failures” (gagal total). Balinese youths are increasingly drawn to touristic professions, asserted Mandra. With all these newly emerging occupational options, Mandra challenged the committee to consider the benefits of erecting tourist temples, where the employees of hotels, golf courses, and restaurants can go with their immediate family to bring offerings to the gods who oversee their occupations. Even tourists could be made to feel welcome. A mixture of laughter and shock greeted Mandra’s proposal. What would these temples be called? Where would they be located? And, finally, who would be the deity selected to descend into the shrines? The unanimous response on the part of the government organizational committee at Lovina was, not surprisingly, monotheistic: Sang Hyang Widhi. But what of the other commemorative shrines accompanying Sang Hyang Widhi’s? Soon after reading this article, I began to wonder what might constitute a farmer’s critical response to these transformations? In the village of Bwahan, poised on the edge of Lake Batur between Kedisan and Abang, in the area where I was conducting research, I met a group of farmers harvesting onions one day in early February 1991, while I walked with Jero Gennep, a man from Kedisan, to a combined origin temple (pura puseh) and great hall (bale agung) in Bwahan. The bale agung portion of the temple was said to house a shrine to the trickster, Bhatara Balang Tamak.53 Balang Tamak’s shrine is posted as a kind of guardian at the threshold of the temple, appropriate for a trickster who negotiates liminal spaces. I was told he kept all manner of pests at bay in Bwahan.54 Describing the article, I asked Jero Gennep and his friends what they thought of the idea of erecting tourist temples. They expressed immediate concern as to who the gods might be. They laughed at the thought of a tourist becoming the god, with camera and sunglasses as attributes. Inviting me into the bale agung, they showed me the various shrines to Dewi Sri, the goddess of rice and agriculture, to Surya, the sun god, to Pertiwi, the more public version of the origin shrine at home, and the shrine to Mount Agung. Discussing the growing trend for Bwahan youths to leave their village in search of work in tourism in more urban centers like Denpasar and Kuta, I asked them once again to consider the possibility of erecting tourist temples in the future. When I then went a step further to suggest that in the place of an agricultural deity like Bhatara Balang Tamak, they erect a shrine to Bhatara Maling, “the God of Thieves,” they laughed uncomfortably and grew silent. Then a man with ties to the neighboring village

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told of a shrine to Bhatara Bebotoh, “the Gambler,” at Abang’s geneological temple, Pura Tulukbyu. After some reflection, he said, “If we can have a shrine to a god of gambling to keep us from cards and cockfights, why not have a god of thieves to keep people from stealing?”55 As Balinese shrines in urban centers begin to adjust to the incursions from without by being moved indoors, made bereft of precious access to sky, denied their internal deposits and their structural complementarity (developments, curiously, in direct alignment with Hinduism’s current shift toward monotheism), one might, like a trickster, apply inversionary logic and argue that a shrine to Bhatara Maling (“the Thief”) could one day in the distant future be the only shrine standing whose fundamental relationship between small statues (pratima) and deposit boxes (pedagingan) must be kept intact, if only to portray the looter’s function and to suggest the congruence of obsessions that once surrounded Balinese shrines. If shrines are erected to “remember life,” then they, like museums, become repositories of memory and discovery where past, present, and future must thrive together, eternally attuned to the touch of tricksters.

Notes 1. S. J. O’Connor, “Critics, Connoisseurs, and Collectors in the Southeast Asian Rain Forest,” Asian Art 4, no.4 (Fall 1991), 55. 2. O’Connor, “Critics,” 55. 3. Whether his sentences evoke the smooth articulation of lugs on a ceramic pot or the anticipation of unearthing a casket of gold foil figures from the soil of Santubong, S. J. O’Connor leaves his readers with a tangible sense of having participated in the actual unveiling of something powerful and formative. Because his work has this geographical scope, I wish to honor him here by setting up a conversation of texts, bringing my own material on Balinese shrines to bear on two of his articles, “Ritual Deposit Boxes in Southeast Asian Sanctuaries,” Artibus Asiae 28 (1966): 53–60, and the aforementioned essay. 4. It would be too simplistic to chart a single trajectory from sacred sphere to commodity for these shrine contents. O’Connor has demonstrated how Ming dynasty ewers were originally traded from ports on the Borneo coast, and up country to the Kelabit Highlands, where Dayak communities transformed them from commodity use to sacred surrogate bodies for the ancestors (“Critics,” 55). Similarly, many of the looted ancestral statues in Bali are composed of antique Chinese coins, ingeniously threaded together, currency that played an important role in Javanese and Balinese economies since the late twelfth century if not earlier. See Robert S. Wicks, “Monetary Developments in Java between the Ninth and Sixteenth Centuries: A Numismatic Perspective,” Indonesia 42 (October 1986): 59–60. Currently, Ming dynasty ewers, like

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the coin statues, are resuming commodity status while suffused with renewed auras of significance as valued heirlooms, caught up in a global market of antiquities. For the concept of tabula, I am referring here to Michel Foucault’s tribute to the French novelist Raymond Roussel, in M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Vintage Books Edition: New York, 1973), xvii. 5. Foucault, The Order of Things, xv. 6. Stanley Diamond, “Jung Contra Freud: What It Means To Be Funny,” in C. G. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture, ed. K. Barnaby and P. d’Acierno, 70 (Princeton University Press, 1990). 7. Nowhere has this concept been more powerfully conceived than in the great architectural creations of the Khmer at Angkor Wat in present-day Cambodia. Not merely a group of buildings, Angkor is a replica in miniature of a legendary world in Hindu cosmology. See G. Cœdes’ Angkor: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 1963), 39–53. 8. Robert Heine-Geldern, Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia (Cornell Southeast Asia Data Paper, No. 18, 1956), 2. 9. O’Connor, “Ritual Deposit Boxes,” 53–60. 10. In “Rape of the Ancestors: Discovery, Display, and Destruction of the Ancestral Statuary of Tana Toraja,” in Fragile Traditions, ed. Paul Michael Taylor, 31–32 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994), Eric Crystal is able to chart historically the rationale for dramatically shifting the location of Torajan ancestral statues. The historical reasons underlying Balinese ancestral relocations would seem to have multiple explanations. 11. See R. Soekmono, Candi, Fungsi dan Pengertiannya [Candi, its function and meaning] (Ph.D. diss., University of Indonesia, 1972, Jakarta, 1977). 12. R. Soekmono, “Indonesian Architecture of the Classical Period: A Brief Survey,” in The Sculpture of Indonesia, ed. Jan Fontein (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990), 73; and A. J. Bernet Kempers, Monumental Bali: Introduction to Balinese Archaeology and Guide to the Monuments (Periplus Editions, 1991), 70. 13. For the evolution of the concept of “portrait-statues,” see Fontein, The Sculpture of Indonesia, 51–55. Also see Marijke J. Klokke’s articles in Ancient Indonesian Sculpture, ed. M. J. Klokke and Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer (KITVL Press, 1994), 178–194; and in Southeast Asian Archaeology 1994: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists, ed. Pierre-Yves Manguin (Hull Center for SE Asian Studies, University of Hull, 1998), 171–179. 14. Kempers, Monumental Bali, 59. 15. In “Early Buddhist Art and the Theory of Aniconism” Art Journal 49, no. 4 (1990): 401–408, Susan L. Huntington traces the development of the theory of aniconism in the history of art of South Asia, showing how objects in early Buddhist reliefs were said to be substitutes for anthropomorphic images of the Buddha and not emblems revealing the predispositions of pilgrimage sites in their own right. 16. For simplicity’s sake, Balinese temples can be subdivided into four characteristic types: geneological, territorial, functional, and, finally, to bring all of Hindu Bali together, state-affiliated.

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17. Balinese palm-leaf texts (lontar), like Dewa Tattwa, Purwa Bumi Kamulan, and Widhi Papincatan, discuss the contents of pedagingan offerings and the quantity required for certain shrines based on group affiliation. These texts usually always begin with the role of the single, wrapped pedagingan, ceremonially planted in the most fundamental family shrine of origin, the kamulan. 18. Kempers, Monumental Bali, 76. 19. Jan Fontein, R. Soekmono, and Satyawati Suleiman, eds., Ancient Indonesian Art of the Central and Eastern Javanese Periods (Asia Society, 1971), 16. 20. R. Heringa, “Dye Process and Life Sequence: The Coloring of Textiles in an East Javanese Village,” in To Speak With Cloth: Studies in Indonesian Textiles, ed. M. Gittinger, 107 (University of California’s Museum of Cultural History, 1989). 21. J. S. Lansing, Three Worlds of Bali, with a foreword by Clifford Geertz (Praeger, 1983), ix. 22. Drawing on S. J. O’Connor’s observation in “Critics, Connoisseurs, and Collectors” that “our theories rise with us from the familiar world that is our daily life, and most of the time these theories are not wholly systematized and explicit, they are usually informal and implicit” (54), I shall rely on ritual action, or what Ketut Waspada refers to as the “orthopraxy” of Balinese Hinduism (Harmonie als Problem des Dialogs, Zur Bedeutung einer zentralen religiosen Kategorie in der Begegnung des Christentums mit dem Hinduismus auf Bal [Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 1988], 42), where the raw ingredients required for offerings connected to origin shrines acquire meaning not from logical expectancy, but from the way they are observed in use. 23. Lango is defined as “aesthetic experience, romantic feelings, and raptures of Love” in P. J. Zoetmulder, with S. O. Robson, Old Javanese-English Dictionary, 2 vols. (Nijhoff, 1982), 976. 24. Lansing, Three Worlds of Bali, 79. 25. The concept of “beauty” in Western art, likewise evolving within its own unique historical and poetic conditions, hinges not on intensity of feeling, but rather on powers of vision, the eye creating beautiful objects from nature in a careful process of selection. Leone Battista Alberti (1404–1472), hailed by some as the father of Western art theory, maintained that beauty could be achieved through a combination of parts to arrive at an agreeable visual presentation. For further details, see Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art: From Plato to Winckelmann (New York University Press, 1985), 120–127. 26. For the doctrine of panca mahabhuta, see F. L. Bakker, The Struggle of the Hindu Balinese Intellectuals: Developments in Modern Hindu Thinking in Independent Indonesia (VU University Press, 1993), 68–69, 82, 113–114, 163, 258–259; and Urs Ramseyer, The Art and Culture of Bali (Oxford University Press, 1977), 106, 107, 110. 27. For a published account of the story, read “Riwayat Rsi Markandeya: Beliau Sebagai Peletak Panca Datu Dasar Pura Besakih” (Ria: Percetakan & Stencils) Toko Buku, Jl. Pelawa No. 43 (Pagan, Denpasar, Bali, 1981), 1–16. 28. This conceptual equivalence of birth and death was observed for Java and Sumba by P. E. de Josselin de Jong in “An Interpretation of Agricultural Rites in Southeast Asia, with a Demonstration of Use of Data from both Continental and Insular Areas,”

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Journal of Asian Studies 24 (1965): 284, 287. For Flores, see M. Yamaguchi, “Nai Keu, A Ritual of the Lio of Central Flores: Social Structure, House Form and Cosmology,” in Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkekunde 145 (1989), 478–489. For related themes, see R. H. Barnes, Kedang: The Study of the Collective Thought of an Eastern Indonesian People (Clarendon Press, 1974), 74; for the Iban, E. Jensen, The Iban and their Religion (Clarendon Press, 1974), 75; for the Balinese, Leopold E. A. Howe, “Pujung: An Investigation into the Foundations of Balinese Culture” (Ph.D. diss, University of Edinburgh, 1980), 162–179; and in Tjerita Rakyat, Tjerita Rakyat (P. N. Balai Pustaka, 1963), vol. 1, nos. 1, 4, 5. 29. The Balinese verb numitis means to pass into a new body, to be reincarnated. It is also decribed variously as dew, froth, and foam, the water in which rice has been boiled. Finally, ngidih nasi (“asking for cooked rice”) is an expression referring to the ancestors: hoping to be fed, waiting to be reborn. 30. Pedagingan is a noun, either connoting wealth associated with the image of being sated with things, or evoking a deposit box, a contained, womb-like offering used in all types of shrines to give life (urip) to any structure. 31. I Ketut Wiana, “Palinggih di Pamerajan,” in Proyek Penyluhan dan Penerbitan Buku Agama, i (Denpasar, 1988–1989). 32. Jane Belo,”A Study of the Customs Pertaining to Twins in Bali,” in Traditional Balinese Culture, ed. Jane Belo, 517–518 (Columbia University Press, 1970). 33. For a discussion of possible “Tantric” elements in the Kamulan shrine, see Kaja McGowan, “Balancing on Bamboo: Women in Balinese Art,” Asian Art and Culture 8, no. 1 (Winter 1995). 34. For a translation of “Sumanasantaka,” see P. J. Zoetmulder, Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature (Nijhoff, 1974), 206. 35. For a discussion of the ascendancy of the Saiva-Siddhanta school of Brahmanic worship by about the eleventh century in East Java and (presumed later) in Bali favoring ritual practice and incantations over the use of statues, see William Stutterheim, “De-Oudheden-Collectie van Z.H. Mankoenagoro VII te Soerakarta,” Djawa 17 (1937): 13, 32–33. 36. Once cut in distinctive shapes from gold sheets, pripih are now reduced to thin shavings of metal foil. Distinctions between sheets and shavings are explained by caste affiliation. Of course, resorting to inexpensive materials sitting in for valuable ingredients discourages thieves as well. 37. Symbolic of the meeting of the male (purusa) and female (pradhana or prakrti) energies, also referred to as sexual fluids, sukla and swanita respectively, in the moment of consummation, these jewels are now, increasingly, being substituted with rose-tinted glass. Clearly, pilfering is radically reduced in cases where glass replaces rubies. 38. A pharmacological treasure trove of aromatic dried plants — anise stars, cactus lobes, cinnamon sticks, to name a few of the more recognizable items — are meant to symbolize in a refined state the material body with its vital organs, limbs, and vertabrae intact. Two varieties of dried nut, jebug harum, symbolic of the male and female genitalia, resemble in unison a linga and yoni of the plant world. This assortment of dried

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herbs can be purchased (bahan pedagingan) from Balinese vendors who sell other ritual paraphernalia as well. 39. Chinese coins, kepeng (pis bolong in Balinese, meaning “money with a hole in it”), are included in both the panca datu and the pedagingan offerings. A string of two hundred is referred to as the “base” or body of the offering. Coins in the pedagingan provide “pengurip-urip,” a prayer for a structure’s internal activation and well-being. Small conical offerings (kawangen) contain flowers and other ingredients, especially one centrally threaded coin with fertile connotations synonymous with the entrance to the womb. The link between plant-matter and coins (food and wealth) is made explicit. By extension, the bodies of the small statues (pratima) called Rambut Sedana are usually composed entirely of coins. 40. Concerning the pedagingan, see Wiana, Palinggih di Pamerajan, 33. 41. See James A. Boon, Affinities and Extremes (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 81–82; Belo, “Study of Customs Pertaining to Twins,” 517–518 ; and Wiana,”Pelinggih di Pamerajan,” 16–42. 42. Webster Smith, “Observations on the Mona Lisa Landscape,” The Art Bulletin 67, no. 2 (June 1985): 184. 43. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty, eds., Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms (The University of Alabama Press, 1993), 30–31. 44. The story, “I Gelijah,” was collected by Walter Spies in the village of Selat in East Bali and published in the “Collection Kirtya Liefrinck van der Tuuk Library,” in Singaraja. C. Hooykaas translated the first part of the story into Dutch. The second part was translated by W. Spies into German and was included in Hans Rhodius, Walter Spies: Schonheit und Reichtum des Lebens (Boucher, 1964), 464–470. I am indebted to Kari Kise McGowan for her translation of “I Gelijah” from the German. There are a number of sources for “Pan Balang Tamak” as well as a scattering of shrines throughout Bali that bear his name. See C. J. Grader in J. L. Swellengrebel, ed., Bali: Further Studies in Life, Thought and Ritual (W. van Hoeve, 1969). For an Indonesian version, see Cerita Rakyat Klasik (Universitas Udayana, 1973). More recently, Fred B. Eiseman, in Bali: Sekala and Niskala: Essays on Society, Tradition and Craft (Periplus Editions: Singapore, 1990), vol. 2, devoted one chapter to this cunning trickster, entitled “Pan Balang Tamak: A Curious Folk Hero and Deity,” 101–113. 45. Mac Linscott Rickets argues that the trickster fulfills a role similar to that of a shaman or priest in his essay “North American Tricksters,” in Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan, 1987), 48–51. 46. Eiseman, “Pan Balang Tamak, 101–102. 47. Nyoman Erawan’s “Ancient Time” graces the cover of Joseph Fischer, ed., Modern Indonesian Art: Three Generations of Tradition and Change 1945-1990 (Panitia Pameran KIAS and Festival of Indonesia, 1990), where the connection between triangle and mountain is made explicit, 16, plate 20. My own visual analysis of the work evolved out of a long-term fascination with Balinese timekeeping devices. 48. Wiana, Palinggih di Pamerajan, 39–42. 49. This debate concerns art historians, museum curators, art educators, anthro-

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pologists, and boutique owners, who market, amongst other things, the “ethnographic object.” For a discussion of these issues, and for the inspiration to imagine the statue’s point of view, see Lynn M. Hart, “Three Walls: Regional Aesthetics and the International Art World,” in The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, 138–140 (University of California Press, 1995). 50. For some of the ramifications of this debate, see Benjamin Buchloh, “The Whole-Earth Show: An Interview with Jean-Hubert Martin,” Art in America 77 (May 1989); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Harvard University Press, 1988); and Richard Kurin, “Cultural Conservation through Representation: Festival of India Folklife Exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). 51. Described in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), this detached aesthetic, promoting “art for art’s sake,” owns cosmopolitan acceptance and is regarded simply as the “modern” way of talking about art. 52. For a discussion of the problematic issues of determining what is ritual and what is entertainment, particularly in the area of Balinese performance, see Seminar Seni Sakral dan Provan Bidang Tari [Seminar on sacred and profane arts in dance] (Proyek Pemiliharan dan Kebudayaan Daereh, 1971). For the historical development of these arguments since the 1970s, see Michel Picard, “ ‘Cultural Tourism’ in Bali,” Indonesia 49 (1990): 39–74. For essays on the relations between adat and agama in various Indonesian societies, see Rita Smith Kipp and Susan Rodgers, eds., Indonesian Religions in Transition (University of Arizona Press, 1987). 53. For a transcription of Bwahan’s inscriptions, including a plan for the combined temples with a list of the deities represented, see Putu Budiastra, Prasasti Bwahan (Museum Bali, 1978). 54. For a discussion of how this relates to mice, see W. F. van der Kaaden, “Nangluk Marana in Gianyar,” Djawa 16 (1936); R. van Eck, in “Schetsen van het Eiland Bali,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlansch Indië 8 (1879): 125. Elevating pests to deities, reminiscent of the honor shown to Balang Tamak, might suggest a homoeopathic response on the part of Balinese farmers to the pressing concerns for a successful yield. 55. In conversation, Putu Budiastra suggested that Bhatara Bebotoh was a localized name for Manik Angkeran, a deity with a weakness for gambling.

conclusion | jan mrázek

Ways of Experiencing Art Art History, Television, and Javanese Wayang

A thing, such as an art work, is perceived and experienced differently by different people and in different situations. This obvious fact, and the fact that art history makes people experience things in specific ways, is often concealed by the pretension of the discipline that its way is the most informed and objective way of seeing art. This chapter shows the limits and prejudices of art historical vision by reflecting on a particular Javanese artistic and cultural phenomenon, wayang, which can be preliminarily glossed as shadow puppet theater. Delicately carved and painted wayang puppets are presented as “art objects” in some art history books, museums, and art history classes. One of the points of this chapter is that the “wayang” of mainstream art history, or wayang as “art object,” is a different kind of animal than the wayang that people most commonly encounter in Java, even though art history pretends that its “wayang” is the Javanese wayang. In the later part of the chapter, I will look more broadly at the encounter of art history with Southeast Asian art, and finally I will briefly relate my ideas to other chapters in this volume. The word wayang — which resonates with words referring to shadows, reflections, and imagination — can mean both the puppet(s) used in Javanese puppet theater and the performance itself. To watch (nonton) wayang does not mean to look at the puppets as one looks at art objects, but to watch a wayang performance and enjoy the event (fig. 10.1). In verbal form, mayang refers not to making wayang puppets (as “to paint” does to creating paintings), but to performing wayang — to moving the puppets, giving them voices, and making them alive. Javanese language situates the wayang puppet in wayang performance and treats the object and the event as essentially one. Even in Java, one encounters wayang puppets in other situations — heirloom collections, souvenir and antique shops, museums (few and far apart) — and images derived from wayang puppets can be seen in a variety of media, from manuscript illustrations to packages of tea and cigarettes. Nonetheless, wayang puppets are thought of as elements of wayang performance, and for performers

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Figure 10.1. Wayang performance, seen from behind the puppeteer. The gamelan orchestra is visible in the foreground. In the back is the wayang screen, with a lamp in the center. The puppets acting in the story are arranged in the central part of the screen while other puppets are arranged in two rows for decoration.

and spectators they are integral elements of this larger organic whole that is not an object but an event. Whereas puppets are a “minor” art in the West, many Javanese traditionally consider wayang the most important and highest form of Javanese art, one that expresses central tenets of Javanese culture and worldview, and they celebrate the “multimedia” nature of wayang, the way it combines painted and carved puppets, verbal arts, complex movement, and music. Wayang is also central in Javanese culture as a social event. Allnight wayang performance events are still popular in Java and they are also frequently broadcast on radio and television. As I was doing research for a book about the interaction between wayang and television, it struck me that there was a curious similarity between a question I was asking about wayang and television on the one hand, and another question I have been asking about art history of Southeast Asia ever since I have been involved in it. The first question was about how people experience wayang when they watch it on television and how they feel this is like and unlike watching a wayang performance directly. The other question concerned how people see Southeast Asian art, such as wayang, through the disciplinary lenses of art history and how this compares to the ways the same things are ex-

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perienced in Southeast Asian contexts, such as performances, ceremonies, or heirloom collections. This chapter brings these two questions together, comparing the three different ways of experiencing wayang — in performances, on television, and in art history — with the primary objective to learn something about art history and its encounter with wayang. Wayang on television is discussed in order to complicate the notion of “Javanese ways of experiencing,” to show that there is not a single Javanese way of experiencing wayang, and, as will be discussed in the conclusion, ways of experiencing — like art history and television — travel, change, and coexist.

Wayang on Television Before I discuss art history as a way of seeing, I will compare two ways in which wayang puppets are commonly experienced by Javanese people today, in live and in televised performances, the latter often perceived by Javanese people as somehow new, modern, and “Western.” My discussion of watching wayang directly and on television follows closely, and reflects on, the comments of Javanese people I interviewed or with whom I informally discussed the matter.1 At this point, let me just say that the ways in which television alters the experience of wayang as articulated by Javanese viewers seems to me to be in certain ways curiously similar to what art history does to the experience of wayang. The most popular version of the program is shown every Saturday night on a national channel. Even as the televised performance is to some extent adapted to television, it is presented as if it were unchanged by television, as if television were merely looking on. Television producers emphasize that wayang on television is “authentic.” One is given the feeling that through television one can actually see, like through a telescope, something that is far away, as the name tele-vision emphasizes. One can see without being physically present in the midst of what one sees. Tele-vision separates and distances vision from one’s body. Javanese viewers say that “the camera’s eyes should be the deputy of my own eyes.” Sitting on the sofa in front of a television, one sees not with one’s own eyes but with the eyes of television, which are not part of one’s body. The disembodiedness of this vision allows one to see something that is far away, in another space. Television annihilates experienced physical distance and place. This possibility of seeing wayang without having to travel to where the performance takes place is one of the advantages of wayang on television often mentioned by Javanese viewers. Moreover, one doesn’t have to be bodily pres-

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ent in the midst of what is happening: if it rains, one doesn’t get wet, if it’s cold, one doesn’t get cold. The viewer doesn’t have to stand in the crowd; his or her body is spared, because television is at the performance instead and one sees through its eyes. Another advantage is that viewers can switch programs, which people like to do. In an Indonesian newspaper, there was a letter from a reader who described with enthusiasm how, without having to travel anywhere but just by switching channels, he could see and compare three performances happening at different places at the same time. He described how he switched between the three performances to select parts of the performances that especially interested him.2 Javanese viewers also point out the disadvantages of watching wayang on television. Television liberates the viewer from having to be physically present in the midst of the event, but it also takes away the pleasures of being at the event. In this context, many have emphasized that watching wayang does not mean only watching puppets on the screen, but an indivisible part of the experience is eating and drinking at the food stalls, smoking, and enjoying the atmosphere, the night air as it gradually gets colder toward the morning and the occasional breeze. The experience of wayang performance as described by Javanese viewers involves perception with all the senses, with the whole body. The disembodied vision that is television does not capture many of these bodily sensations because one’s body stays at home; television only allows the viewer to see and hear. An essential aspect of watching wayang is socializing. Many people come not simply to see the performance, but to participate in the festive social event, whose function is to bring people together and affirm a sense of community. If a wayang fan is not invited as a guest, he or she may go to the wayang event with friends. They meet other people, talk to them, and watch the performance with them. Watching other people is another pleasure of the performance. Some people gamble or play chess. All this is an integral part of the experience of wayang. People say that this is lacking when they watch wayang on television, and they often feel bored or sleepy. Part of the social feeling of wayang is the interaction between the performers and the audience, which is not a one-way flow of information but a way of being together. People shout comments and laugh, and the atmosphere is charged with people’s attention and reactions to the performance. Puppeteers talk about an energy that emanates from the crowd and enlivens the puppeteer’s performance. As one puppeteer put it, the puppeteer brings what is happening in the gathering onto the screen and into the puppets, through what the puppets do and say, through jokes about and allusions to various aspects of the event, the sponsor and

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other people, the weather, the place, and local issues. In a ritual performance, the sponsor as well as the performers and the local community of spirits are represented on the screen by the puppets. This social quality of the wayang experience is not captured on television. Television allows for a different kind of sociality, specific to television — one can watch wayang in the comfort and relative privacy of one’s home. As one person put it, “it’s a different kind of fun.” While occasionally people watch wayang on television with a few friends or neighbors, the experience never approaches the festive wayang event, and the two-way interaction between performers and the audience is reduced to looking at the television screen. Another aspect of the disembodiment that television effects has to do with televisual focus. Javanese spectators complain that they cannot choose what to look at and that television presents them only with “cut up pieces” of the performance, while when they are at a wayang performance they see, as they say, the “whole.” Normally, perception is bound to the body and to bodily movement, and one perceives only with one’s body as it is situated in and moves through the perceptible. The television cameras substitute for one’s perceiving body and are in the midst of the perceptible whole as the viewer’s “deputy.” They try to simulate to some extent what one would look at, the movement of one’s focus, but, as one producer of wayang on television said, the “eyes of the camera” have different “norms” than one’s own eyes, and they “edit” what they see differently. Television’s eyes move through space in a way one never could and see things from angles and combinations of viewpoints one never could with one’s own perceiving body. Moreover, camera’s eyes are not one’s own eyes, and one can’t decide oneself where to move and what to look at; the choices are made by television. One Javanese wayang fan said, “Television is a dictator!” and others say that one is not “free” when one watches wayang on television: television dictates where to look and what and how to see. At a performance, one can look at what one wishes to look at in the unfocused, unframed, uncut visible that surrounds one and through which one moves — this freedom of one’s perceiving body is denied by television.

Art History Compared to Television The following reflections are primarily based on my experience as an undergraduate and graduate art history student, a teaching assistant in art history classes, a professor of art history at American universities, and an avid museum goer in Europe, Asia, and America. I use the term “art history” to mean broadly the discipline as well as its associated institutions, such as museums that ex-

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hibit art and books about art. Art history is a multifarious creature, and it has been slowly becoming increasingly more so — this volume shows that much. Any brief account of a discipline is doomed to generalize, and one can find art and art history texts that do not fit my description and often rebel against mainstream art history. Yet by and large the mainstream tends to be curiously uniform in its basic axioms and modes of working with art, especially when it presents itself to the larger public of undergraduate students in survey classes, readers of general art surveys and textbooks, and museum goers. Like television, art history is a particular vision, a way of seeing things — and more than in the case of other humanities, it is a vision in the literal sense. The typical art history class is like many other classes except there has to be one or two slide projectors, and, like in a movie theater, what happens in that class revolves around the photographic images projected on a screen. Like the voiceover in a documentary or a football announcer on television, the teacher’s voice tells the students what they see and teaches them — some students may say dictates — what they should see in this photographic reproduction on the screen and in art generally. Students are taught to see the way art historians see, and they are disciplined if they see otherwise. The same is true of many art history books: photographic images are central to them, the text tells the reader what the reader sees, and his vision is guided and manipulated like the vision of a television viewer. In museums, one perceives things in a prescribed way. If one is in the museum frame of mind, or the art-history-class-slide-show frame of mind, it is absurd to think about smell, taste, sounds, movement, and even the physical feel of things as something relevant. Art objects are permanent and static; nothing perishable may become an art object, and movement is banned. In all cases, what is shown has been carefully selected and framed, and close-ups (“details”) are used to further guide one’s attention. While television transmits sound — but always selectively, “cut up pieces” of sound rearranged and combined with cut up pieces of sight — art history combines its focus on the visual with the logocentrism of the humanities. The sound in art history, when present, is always the voice of the discipline, separate from the things as subject from object — objective, impersonal, disembodied, inviting me to join it in looking at objects from outside of their world. The objects themselves are silent. Photographic reproduction is an integral part of the art history apparatus. As with television, it overcomes distance. Most of the art presented in art history courses and books, like what one sees on television, is far away and in different places, and the student can see it without going anywhere. André Malraux’s book Le musée imaginaire provides some reflections, from

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within the Western art historical mind, on the centrality and function of photography in modern art historical vision. Malraux writes, with enthusiasm for the idea, that modern art history is the history of “that which is photographable [ce qui est photographiable].”3 Malraux sees a functional continuity between the conventional art museum and his “imaginary museum” made possible by photography. The museum is the first step in the decontextualization of things, and photography goes even further. One of the main advantages of photographic reproduction is connected to overcoming place and distance. The conventional museum is deprived of the “intransportable,”4 but photography overcomes “intransportability” and “ ‘brings’ the objects it represents together” (“ ‘raproche’ les objects qu’elle représente”).5 Because it overcomes the “intransportability” of art rather than actually transporting it, this “bringing the objects together” can be also “diffusion.”6 Photography “brings the objects together” in space, in size, and in character, and “most distinctive objects, reproduced on one page, become one family. They lose their color, their material (sculpture something of its volume), their format. They have lost almost all their specificity, but to the benefit of their common style.”7 This is the style of being of art objects in art history. It makes possible new comparisons in which the objects acquire new significance. Photography “liberates,” “delivers,” “resurrects” — words Malraux likes to use — objects from their size, materiality, and context.8 This bringing together of all kinds of works of art from all kinds of places, with the resulting new way of seeing of this “heritage of the world”9 made possible by photography, is compared by Malraux to the way that the “movement of film makes the pictures alive.”10 In short, visual images of things are separated or liberated from the context, size, material, and place of the things, and these images or fragments of them are brought together or “reunited,” another word Malraux uses repeatedly, into one “family” in which they acquire new relationships and meanings, in a “musée imaginaire.” They are made into a “film” in which they are perceived in a radically new way. Malraux’s comparisons of art history to filmic representation have special resonance in the context of this chapter. And Malraux is not the only one who emphasizes the importance of photography in art history and compares art history to cinematic representation to describe the way art history re-presents art. Although he doesn’t make reflection on photography as central, Donald Preziosi writes in Rethinking Art History that “art history as we know it today is the child of photography.”11 He talks about the “cinematic sensibility” of art history12 and says that it is “a supremely cinematic practice concerned with the orchestration of historical narratives and the display of genealogy by filmic means,” with the “discursive logic of realist cinema.”13

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I have mentioned that Javanese spectators of wayang on television often complain that they can’t see the whole, and they see only “cut up” pieces. Several puppeteers told me that they dislike extreme close-ups of puppets that show the details of the rich carving and painting and that are very popular with the cameramen. According to the puppeteers, the puppet does not look alive in these shots; it becomes a “dead object.” Such framing of details is essential to art history as much as it is to television. Malraux speaks of the “expressive value of the fragment”14 liberated from its context. Art history works with fragments framed and cut out from the whole, and it puts together a montage from these pieces of the perceptible, like the close-ups of television. The frame delimits the edges of the seen, but both art history and television need another border between the viewer’s body and what the viewer sees: the television screen, the glass of museum vitrines, the DO NOT TOUCH sign, or the ropes separating the viewer from the object. The Mona Lisa, the superstar of art history, is exhibited within a box with a framed screen of thick glass that strongly resembles the television screen. Photographs are protected by a similar screen. Their realism simulates three-dimensional reality, but I cannot touch what I see or enter its space. The philosopher Yves Michaud writes that “the specific experience of looking at a photograph . . . is a bit like banging one’s head against a pane of glass which one has not noticed.”15 One may be reminded of the invisible glass in the “window” through which one sees what is represented in Western perspectival painting, an ancestor of photography and the favorite family of objects of art history. These screens of television and art history keep one’s body and what one sees apart, separating subject from object, and separating one’s vision from one’s body in the physical world. In light of the Cartesian model of cognition, this is hardly an accident. Cartesian dualism, the disembodied objective vision of science, art history, photography, and television, have all grown in the same climate and there is a kind of “family resemblance.” Both art history and television are indebted in the characteristics of their visions to science, with its telescopes, microscopes, and scalpels. The screen and the frame are essential to this sort of seeing, but it is also essential that they remain “out of focus,” invisible as if they were one’s own eyes; they are to be respected but not attended to or mentioned. They are scrupulously kept as if of no consequence to the perception of objects. The television screen, the screen on which slides are shown in art history classes, the glass pane of a museum vitrine, the whitewashed walls of a modern museum, are all out of focus. This kind of space helps to annihilate place and distance and thus makes disembodied seeing possible. Objects liberated from their be-

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longingness to place, “brought together” and at the same time “diffused,” are seen from non-place, a God’s all-seeing point of view. The claim of television that through it one can see anything anywhere is reminiscent of the claim of the discipline of art history that it can study “art” from any period and any culture. This is connected to how wayang is shown on television. Television does not paint a picture of wayang or tell a story about it, but it claims to let one “actually” see the event in which it pretends to play no part. Television and art history manipulate one’s vision, direct one’s attention, focus on some things and keep others out of focus, show only fragments or “cut up pieces” — they are essentially different visions from direct perception. The art history teacher and television both pretend they are only making us see what is there. This transparency makes it meaningful to speak about television and art history as, literally, ways of seeing. On the other hand, if one “sees through” this transparency, one can also talk about television and art history as actions, comparable to utterances or performances. Art history and television focus or “zoom in” on and make visual images — art objects in the case of art history — out of selected things, leaving other things invisible. Malraux writes that the “museum strongly contributes to transforming dreams into paintings and gods into statues.”16 Television and art history thus “liberate” objectified images from their environment and compose new stories or performances — television programs, art history books and lectures, museums — in which the images have new meanings and are seen in new ways and in new contexts, within new frames and frameworks. Art objects enter what Preziosi referred to as the “universal archive” or le musée imaginaire of art history, where they are compared to other objects and made sense of in art history categories and through description using the art history rubric. Wayang on television becomes part of television programming, where it finds its place in the regularity that is essential to television and in its categories and genres. Both art history and television are media: they mediate between the viewer and reality, pretending to let one see for oneself. Bruce Ferguson writes that in analyzing art exhibitions one could use “methods . . . used to analyze mass media”17 and think about genres of exhibiting art “like genres in mass media.”18 Television and art history are technologies for seeing, in the way that Michel Foucault sees disciplines as technologies. When one thinks not only about slides and art history books full of photographs, or vitrines and all the glass in museums, but also about the earphones as well as computer and video monitors now so popular in art institutions, one gets again the impression that art history technology bears many resemblances to television and related mass media.

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Wayang in Art History: A Different Kind of Fun In the first part of this chapter, I discussed how the experience and perception of wayang on television is different from the experience of being physically present at a performance. The same is true about art history’s perception of wayang, except that art history goes even further in that it separates objects from people and conceals that wayang is not only puppet but also performance. It is instructive to look at illustrations of wayang in textbook surveys of Southeast Asian art. These are more relevant here than books specifically on wayang, as the books on art situate wayang in the “world of art.” Probably the most widely used textbook until recently, and a survey of Southeast Asian art most often encountered in bookstores at the time of writing, is The Art of Southeast Asia by Philip Rawson, first published in 1967 in the series “World of Art.” 19 It includes four small photos of wayang puppets. There are no photos of performance or people, and the puppets themselves are shown against a flat, light gray background, in a kind of visual vacuum and a state of weightlessness. The social, human world in which these puppets “lived” is not in the picture. In the massive, visually sumptuous survey Art of Southeast Asia by Maud Gerard-Geslan (published in French in 1994 and in English in 1998), there is one photo of a wayang puppet, essentially the same as the photos in Rawson, except that it is a full page and in full-color against a uniform black background.20 Again there are no images of performances. In the most recent (2004) Arts of Southeast Asia by Fiona Kerlogue, published in the same series as Rawson’s 1967 book, there is one Thai shadow figure that, in performance, is held by a dancer-puppeteer above his head as he expresses the nuances of the action and the character’s mood through his dance, but in the book the object is shown against a white background. A small photo of a Javanese wayang puppet, shown against a uniform light gray background, represents Arjuna, a character who is renowned for his calm and physical and spiritual power and balance, but in the picture he seems to be falling back as if in fear of some invisible monster.21 There is no discussion of shadow puppet performance. Much the same visual presentation of wayang can be found in other books, such as Fritz A. Wagner’s Indonesia: The Art of an Island Group (from the series “Art of the World”) and Tibor Bodrogi’s Art of Indonesia.22 In some cases, one also finds line drawings of wayang puppets. In none of these books are there people, performances, or even the wayang screen visible. We have seen that art history works with fragments or “cut up pieces” of the world, creating art objects out of these fragments. The puppets, outside of the performance, are fragments of something larger: the wayang performance.

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Wayang means both the puppet and the performance, which is significant if one thinks about wayang as an art object, the primary characteristic of which is stasis and permanence. Art history has to create the art object out of wayang by separating a fragment of wayang from the performance, locking the object behind glass and making the performance invisible and unessential to the being of the puppet. Music in wayang is as important as in Western opera or ballet, and it interacts closely and intensely with dramatic action and physical movement. Music helps to create the mood of each scene and to express feelings of individual characters. It is often the primary medium of storytelling when a strong emotion or a change in mood needs to be expressed. Music provides a musico-dramatic continuity and expresses the changing tension and mood as well as the musico-dramatic development of the all-night performance. This organically integral element of wayang is not part of the “wayang” with which art history works. The importance of music in wayang and the lack of it in art history shows another way in which the “wayang” art object is based on a small fragment of wayang. Wayang means not only (wayang) puppet, but also (wayang) character. Javanese language does not distinguish between wayang puppet as an object and wayang as a (represented) living being. The puppet character in performance is not only a material object but it has a voice, it moves, and the incompleteness of the material puppet allows it to change and be alive in the performance, to act in different situations, to express different feelings. Visual appearance, voice, style of movement, and language used by the character form an organic whole in performance. Puppeteers describe how the puppeteer’s voice enters and becomes one with, or is “incarnated” into, the puppet, comparing the union of the puppet and the voice to the union of body and soul. Presenting the puppet as mute and static, a purely visual art object rather than a speaking and moving puppet character, is another aspect of the framing or cutting out of fragments. In performance, the puppet becomes a part of a larger picture that is created when, during dialogues and narration, puppets are carefully arranged on the screen, their positions, arm arrangements, and spatial relationships expressing the relationships between the characters (fig. 10.2). The puppet arms in performance show, through their movements and arrangement, the character’s feelings and mood and his or her relationship to other characters, and their movements help to make the puppet character alive. The puppet character interacts with other characters, in both space and time. In the museum or in the photographs in art books, the arms are usually arranged in such a way that

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Figure 10.2. The wayang puppets are arranged into picture-like compositions during dialogues and narrative passages. Their position on the screen and arm arrangement reflect their relative status, importance in the particular scene, family relationships, and personal character. The dark band of fabric on the bottom of the screen represents the ground, to which the puppets are carefully related. The light helps to define the central performing area, and the more spatially and dramatically central puppet characters are illuminated more strongly.

anybody familiar with wayang is only affirmed in the feeling that the wayang is dead and has been kicked out of the wayang world by some enormous ogre and is now floating, lifeless, in an outer space. Ward Keeler has shown how the relation between the puppeteer and the puppets, and the fascination with the figure of the puppeteer, who alone moves all the puppets and speaks their voices, resonates with Javanese notions of power, hierarchy, and social order, and how this is one of the reasons for the popularity and significance of wayang in Javanese society.23 In my work, I have emphasized that the physical connection between the puppeteer and the puppets, a union between them, is at the heart of wayang. The puppet is held in the puppeteer’s hand and, as described by some Javanese puppeteers, it is made alive by life energy that flows from the puppeteer’s body through the hand into the puppet that thus becomes a part of the puppeteer’s living body (fig. 10.3). The puppet trembles with life and energy, and it is very important for the puppeteer how the puppet, an object made to be handled, feels in the

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Figure 10.3. As he holds and moves the puppet, the puppeteer “makes the puppet-character alive” (nguripke wayang), and the style of movement and bearing of the puppet and the puppeteer’s own body express the inner character of the warrior represented by the puppet.

hand.24 In the museum or in the art history photograph, this essential union between a performer and a thing is broken: the puppet is no longer a living extension of the puppeteer’s hand, and the puppeteer himself, the human center and source of energy of wayang, is absent. Similarly, the collective audience, which is integral to wayang celebration and without which it lacks life, energy, and purpose, is not part of the museum or art book picture, where the viewer is outside and at a distance from the picture. So if in performance the wayang puppet character speaks, moves, or is arranged together with other puppets to become an integral, active element of a larger composition, and if for everybody concerned the performance is a social event, then in the art museum, art books, and art history classes, one sees wayang puppets behind a glass or the “screen” of photographs, purely visual, mute, immobile, untouchable, unmusical, with no traces of the sounds, smells, tastes, and other physical sensations of the performance, of its specific sociality, the energy of the crowd and the charisma of the puppeteer, of the night air, all of which is integral part of wayang (fig. 10.4). The vision that is left is not the same kind of vision. Seeing is no longer part of perceiving with all the senses and with the whole, situated body moving through the space of a wayang performance. Art history, like television, is a curiously disembodied kind of vision, in which a fragment of what is seen is separated, lifted from the physical world.

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Figure 10.4. The puppeteer uses puppets and their shadows to tell the story and to create the appropriate atmosphere. In this case, King Kresna is diving into the sea. (Puppeteer: Ki Sutino.)

Like the Javanese viewer said about television watching, I might say that art history’s presentation of wayang is “a different kind of fun” from watching wayang performances (fig. 10.5). The purely visual object that used to be the puppet is given new meanings by the label and the object’s spatial and conceptual juxtaposition to other objects in the museum. One is compelled to focus on the details of carving and painting, and all this makes one see the puppet in ways it would not be seen at a wayang performance. In art history classes when the students are shown a slide of the puppet, its size being transformed to the standard size in which all objects of art history are shown on the screen, the former performance instrument, transformed into an art object, a visual object, is similarly separated from the performance event and is seen in new ways and becomes one frame of an art historical “film.” The hyperrealism of art history, like that of television, claims that it helps one to see unmodified reality. In the first paragraph of this section, I commented on the standard presentation of wayang puppets in surveys of Southeast Asian and Indonesian art. I conclude the section by commenting on one more survey, Claire Holt’s 1967 Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Changes.25 While most of the illustrations

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Figure 10.5. Audience at a wayang performance watch an exciting battle scene. During less intense moments of the all-night wayang performance, they may talk to friends or go to drink or eat.

conform to the art history standard in many respects — such as the objects floating in a uniform gray visual vacuum — one can discern signs of discomfort and attempts to go beyond this misleading vision. Out of the twelve photographs of puppets, eight show more than one puppet, and they try to suggest that in performance the puppets are seen together, often arranged on the screen in pictorial compositions. One of the illustrations shows a puppet held in hand, with its arms arranged correctly as when the puppet is moved. The way the puppet is held is awkward, with the person holding the puppet seemingly horrified that he or she is in the picture, but it at least acknowledges the otherwise lost world of the performance. An additional illustration reproduces a Balinese painting of a wayang performance that shows the puppets in their performance context, with people (literally and figuratively) in the picture, unlike all the other surveys discussed here. The text shows a sensitivity to wayang as a performance event. Holt explicitly comments on the conflict between the modes of being of a wayang puppet and an art object:

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I vividly remember my perturbation when the director of a university museum decided to exhibit some wayang puppets purely as objects d’art, in total disregard for their symbolic meaning and status in the polar hierarchies. It was impossible! A noble hero’s profile could not be in certain combination shown on the left; a deity, though small, could not appear on a level lower than a prince. I could imagine the dismay of an Indonesian visitor to the exhibition. A group of wayang puppets obviously is meaningful and beautiful only if in their order they reflect the laws of the wayang universe. . . . The viewer responds acutely to the totality of form and meaning. The totality dictates the grouping no less than the individual wayang’s elaborate iconography.26 Unfortunately, Holt’s relatively early survey, published in the same year as Rawson’s very different book, is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. It also demonstrates that art history could open up. It is interesting that Holt was not only an expert on the visual arts, but also a student of Javanese dance. Perhaps art historians should learn to use their bodies?27

Art History and Southeast Asian Art This is how one typically sees wayang in museums, art history classes, and textbooks. Stanley O’Connor writes about the “standard textbook treatment of Southeast Asian art”: One has only to scan the illustrations in them to find that viewer and viewed are uncoupled. There are usually no people, only things in their purity and isolation. The performative, participatory arc joining the perceptual object with the passionate interests, actions, intentions, and desires of the perceiver is eliminated even in those works that have not yet lost their world through the disappearance of their original audience. Often, there is no visible effort to establish their place whether in the landscape or in the house, compound, palace or monastery. They are placeless, viewed from nowhere, unframed by cultural practice or physical circumstance and are thus unworlded.28 Wayang is not alone in becoming something quite different when it is made into an art object. Much the same happens with Southeast Asian textiles, weapons, ritual objects, masks, or food offerings. O’Connor has articulated most explicitly the differences between the values and axioms of Western art

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connoisseurship and local people’s views and values in his case study of heirloom ceramic jars on Borneo.29 While the same objects are desirable possessions for Western and local connoisseurs, their ideas about the nature of the objects — their origin, mode of being, what makes them desirable and valuable, and what they are for — are very different. Let me briefly introduce two other examples. Textiles are one of the most important media in Southeast Asia. The visual splendor and variety, their importance and multiple functions in people’s lives (from everyday life to rituals), the rich and complex symbolism and magical powers ascribed to them, and traces of Southeast Asian history and cultural interaction all add to their fascination. I have seen Southeast Asian textiles exhibited in a number of museums in America, Europe, and Asia. They are most often hung in glass cases on walls just as one hangs paintings — in other words, they have become art objects. The 1994/1998 Art of Southeast Asia survey includes a brief section on textiles and several illustrations. Textiles or their details are not seen worn by people or otherwise used, and they are not seen as a part of their world or any physical world, but as art objects, resembling Western paintings. They appear perfectly flat, immaterial, with the texture of a photograph, with their edges (often decorated in an “un-painting-like” way) cut off and framed only by the empty whiteness of the page, with their “textileness” repressed as much as possible. Not even the tiniest wrinkle, wave, or fold is visible, even when textural variations are part of the intended decoration. The same description applies to the representation of textiles in Wagner’s Indonesia: The Art of an Island Group and Bodrogi’s Art of Indonesia. Yet the ways in which textiles are experienced in Southeast Asia tend to be entirely different than what one would expect from an art object. In Solo, a town in Central Java where I used to live, I used to go to a batik market, and I enjoyed watching the women there buying batik. They weren’t standing in passive contemplation in front of the textiles, and their encounter with the textiles wasn’t merely visual, but there was a constant and intimate bodily interaction with the fabric. They were actively feeling them, stretching them, turning them over, rubbing them against their cheeks and smelling the odor of the wax. I saw batiks worn by people, taking the shape of the body, alive with movement, with folds and wrinkles, and shaping the image of their wearers, expressing who they are and how they want to be seen. At dance performances in a palace in the city, many wore batik, including the dancers. A dancer’s costume consisted of several textiles of different colors and designs, complemented by accessories, and a mask or heavy makeup; each cloth was seen as a part of this complex larger living “composition,” the dressed human body. No

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glass and no frame separated the textiles from the rest of the world, but they were seen through the density of the experience of the whole performance, they were integral elements of a larger whole. To perceive the textiles was to perceive the dancers with their makeup or masks and jewelry; to see the movements of the dance; to hear the music and to see the beautifully decorated musical instruments; to smell the fragrance of jasmine blossoms that were put into the folds of the batik cloths in such a way that they would gradually fall on the dance floor during the performance and the fragrance would spread and become just another part of the whole; to feel the space of the architecture, which situated and enclosed the performers, the artworks, the music, and all people present in the same space, in a relationship of physical proximity rather than the kind of separation of subject and object effected by frames and glass cases. In many cases, Southeast Asian textiles play a vital role in ceremonies of state and in rituals, and, like other heirlooms charged with a magical potency (pusaka), they are believed to be able to act on their own as if they were alive. The chapter by Janet Hoskins in this volume provides further discussion of how textiles are different from an “art object.” To see textiles as static, visual objects to be passively contemplated is to miss most of what they are. Balinese offerings, which have equivalents in many other parts of Southeast Asia, are another example. I have never seen Balinese offerings exhibited in a museum. After a few hours, they would begin to decay. And yet even a casual look cannot but impress by the beauty and complexity of their appearance and the skill and creativity that has gone into making them. Their visual beauty and odor are essential to their function: to attract and please the gods or demons. The offerings are richly symbolic, and each is a more or less complex depiction of the universe. The symbolism is articulated through colors and visual forms, but also through the material: rice, fruits, flowers, vegetables, meats, and so on. Aside from the fact that they are in many ways like forms of “recognized” art, they also interact with the latter. Each offering has basically the same symbolism as a temple tower in that it represents the cosmic mountain, and at a Balinese temple festival, the whole space and atmosphere of the temple complex is transformed by the presence of a multitude of complex offerings as well as various kinds of performances. Yet the offerings do not make it into museums and into art history; they do not fit because of their material and their temporary nature. The material is integral to their appearance, symbolism, and function — the invisible, unphotographable, unvitrineable fragrance is offered to the gods — and their perishability is part of the temporal structure of temple festivals. Each of these examples could be explored much further, and many other

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equally engaging examples could be found — this volume offers a number of case studies, and I will say a little bit more about them later. My point here is merely to sketch the broader context for the objectification of wayang in art history. Each kind of art challenges art history in a different way, showing the limits of the discipline in a different way. In addition to art history’s reduction of Southeast Asian arts to static, permanent, purely visual “art objects,” a clash emerges from rival hierarchies of the arts, by which I mean the difference in value placed on artistic practices and artworks in different cultures, with art history assuming that its values are universal. Puppets and textiles, for example, are not considered “fine arts” but rather “minor arts” or “decorative arts,” which in art history are either ignored or considered inferior. Practices and things that are central in their world and that are among the most impressive in terms of artistic creativity and significance, are “minor” in art history, which is blind to their significance and place in society and imagination. The discipline thus misrepresents individual works through objectification and misapprehends the artistic landscape by underestimating or leaving out what is valued most highly in Southeast Asia and emphasizing what may be marginal. Rawson’s The Art of Southeast Asia, which has 248 illustrations, features four photos of wayang puppets, which are among the smallest in the book, and no textiles. About 98 percent of the illustrations are dedicated to ancient stone temples and associated art, especially stone statues. The four puppets and one painting are the only objects from the last two or three centuries among “the elect” (to use Malraux’s word) objects in the book. The 1994 Art of Southeast Asia features 841 illustrations, among them one wayang puppet and twelve textiles. Here again, about 98 percent of illustrations represent ancient art, predominantly stone temples and sculpture. Offerings are found in none of these books. Both Rawson’s and the 1994/1998 survey ignore several Southeast Asian countries — the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei — where they don’t see anything that would fit their definition of art. Kerlogue’s survey, published just as this article was being completed, is significantly different from its predecessors. Kerlogue’s degree is in anthropology rather than art history, and she is primarily known as an expert on textiles. Her book profits from the fact that she is not a mainstream art historian. Her scholarship, while showing some virtues and some vices of art history, differs significantly from the standard fare. Her book presents a wide range of media that do not qualify as “fine art” in mainstream art histories, including textiles, lacquer, jewelry, weaponry, painting on glass, and more. It covers art from prehistory to the present and includes an introduction in which she

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briefly introduces a number of important issues in studying Southeast Asian art, including observations on the variety of media and the fact that much of the art was in one way or another functional rather than meant to be exhibited in a museum. Unfortunately, in the photographs and discussions of specific objects, they are in many cases still treated as art objects: what is emphasized is their visual, formal appearance and their (narrowly) aesthetic qualities, and discussion of function and context often seems secondary or is lacking, although there is generally much more interest in context and function than in previous surveys. The opening paragraphs in the first chapter, “Origins,” reveal a way of thinking in which the essence of art is the “aesthetic” and “pure form,” while the “functional” is only incidental (even symbolism, which is a form of the objects’ power and is usually closely connected to function, seems inferior to pure form). In looking for origins of art, Kerlogue looks for what “is not determined by function”: Stone bracelets from this period may have been intended as merely symbolic, perhaps of protection or status, but their forms imply the beginnings of a concern with adornment that is clearly aesthetic. . . . [T]he distinctive T-section of the bracelets is not determined by function, and the range of materials used to produce such bracelets, in slate, marble and shell, shows consideration for colour, texture, and pure form.30 In concluding the discussion of the next object she introduces, shell beads, she talks of “a surface sheen that can have no practical function; it is clearly an aesthetic elaboration.”31 Thus, Western prejudices about what is art, and specifically the opposition between function and aesthetics — art being that which is not (just) functional — still pervade Kerlogue’s book. It should also be noted that Kerlogue discusses only visual or material arts and avoids not only performing arts, but all objects connected with them. I have commented above on the photographs of Thai and Javanese shadow figures; they are in the book as evidence of the presence of Indian epics in Southeast Asia, but they are not discussed per se as objects, let alone as elements of a performance. In two photos, ritual masks are shown as objects against a black background, but they are only briefly mentioned in the text. The absence of performing arts in the book reveals a disciplinary distinction imposed on Southeast Asian arts — to which I will return when I comment on Holt’s Art in Indonesia, which does include performing arts. One should note the absence or near absence of modern art in many of these books (except Holt and Kerlogue). While the 1994/1998 Art of Southeast Asia includes no images or discussion of modern art, Rawson’s survey

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includes one modern painting, as the last of 251 plates. Wagner’s survey of Indonesian art includes also only one modern painting, again as the last photo in the book — the same painting! As if there were only one Southeast Asian or Indonesian modern painting. There is another genre of art books that (mis)represent Southeast Asian art in a strikingly different way. Books with titles such as Southeast Asian Art Today32 and Southeast Asian Art: A New Spirit33 focus exclusively on contemporary, Western-inspired “modern art.” Rather like in Kurosawa’s Rashomon, they tell an entirely different version of the truth from the books discussed earlier, but their vision is no less limited, excluding again wayang, textiles, and anything that does not fit the category of modern art, even though the different traditional arts are in many cases forcefully and consciously part of Southeast Asia’s (post)modernity. I am not criticizing these books for representing limited views of Southeast Asian art, but for consistently misrepresenting what is Southeast Asian art by claiming to represent and survey a whole — “Southeast Asian art” — but in fact showing only small “cut up pieces” and leaving much invisible. Some country surveys are like the regional surveys. Helen Jessup’s 2004 Art & Architecture of Cambodia34 — from the same series as Rawson’s book — features almost exclusively ancient temple art and architecture, with one tiny photograph of a textile and no shadow puppets. Hiram Woodward’s 2003 The Art and Architecture of Thailand35 also presents only ancient art, with overwhelming focus on temple art and architecture. It’s truly spooky. In these books, and in the many hundreds of photos in them, there is not a single human being visible. Uniform blackness or the whiteness of the book page form the background — the visual context — for the overwhelming majority of art objects represented in these books. 36 Southeast Asians are consistently made invisible. I have mentioned that Holt’s Art in Indonesia is exceptional in its presentation of wayang, and it is also unique in its scope and breadth of vision. The first part, “The Heritage,” covers prehistoric and ancient art while showing its relevance for later art. The chapters in the second part, “Living Traditions,” each a substantial contribution to scholarship, are “The Dance,” “The Wayang World,” “Dance Drama,” and “Bali’s Plastic Arts: Traditions in Flux.” Part three provides the first substantive study on Indonesian modern art. While certain fields of Indonesian arts are not discussed — textiles, offerings, jewelry, music, and so on — of the existing surveys this book gives the best picture of the variety of artistic creation in Indonesia. The discussion of wayang benefits from the fact that dance, dance drama, and ancient temples are part of the same book since they are all closely related, and in general it is fruitful to dis-

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cuss visual and performing arts together because in Indonesia they are indivisible in their world — the distinction is another imported, misleading axiom of Western scholarship. The discussion of modern art profits from the fact that the book provides a substantial background in terms of the other kinds of art in Indonesia. One sees dancers on temple reliefs, temples and wayang performances in modern painting, and echoes of prehistoric art in ancient as well as modern art. The whole of the book is more than a sum of its parts, and the inclusion of each different form of art enriches the understanding of all others.37 Holt’s book demonstrates how single-mindedly limited the more general surveys of Southeast Asian art are in scope and vision. If one looks at major surveys of Asian art and those surveys of art that include Asian art — that is, if one gets even closer to mainstream art history — accounts of Southeast Asian art are even more limited in their vision to art history ways of seeing; in general they include a few ancient stone monuments and nothing else. The same goes for displays of Southeast Asian art in major art museums (New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute in Chicago, and the Musée Guimet in Paris), which are either limited to or overwhelmingly emphasize ancient stone artifacts. Ancient Southeast Asian temples and stone sculpture, somehow familiar to art history from Greece and Italy and, secondarily, from the “Great Civilization” of India, fit quite easily into art history and its photographs. This does not mean that art history represents them well, only that it pays more attention to them at the cost of being blind to other things. Static and permanent, even they are sheltered from lively festive celebrations and rituals that would be part of their experience, and they are cut out from the sacred landscape of which they were integral elements. Similarly, modern art in Southeast Asia is something that art history can easily relate to and recognize as art. It is an important practice to attend to, but in elevating it above everything else, as happens in some cases, art history sometimes ignores how modern art fits into the larger artistic landscape. Wayang and other arts that are central in their world are marginal in art history, and Southeast Asian art history is marginal in mainstream art history. Art history, with its visuality and its categories, has developed in the world of a particular kind of art, especially perspectival, illusionistic oil paintings and to some extent stone sculpture — its principles (categories, attention, etc.), its form as a kind of machine for seeing, relates closely to the character of its object. Photography, through which art history so often sees, is part of the tradition. Malraux writes about photography that “visual arts have invented

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their printing/way-to-imprint-themselves” [“les arts plastiques ont inventé leur imprimerie”].38 Western scientific, objective ways of seeing, art history, and its primary object, perspectival painting, are all part of Western culture and are historically and epistemologically closely related. When one tries to see other things through this apparatus, distortions emerge. Its distinctions are misleading, its focus out of focus; one may not be able to perceive most of the depth and richness of what one sees, and the choice of things that are to be studied is itself problematic. Much is left out. This is comparable to what Javanese observers say about wayang and television: there is a kind of “stumbling,” as they call it, when wayang and television meet, because television and wayang have different “principles.”39 The “stumbling” of art history could help to alert it to the specificity of its own way of seeing, to its limits, to the fact that it is not the only or the most natural way of seeing, but only a way of seeing. The “stumbling” of art history in Southeast Asia, and the uneasiness of mainstream art history with Southeast Asian art history, have different manifestations and consequences, including some excellent writings that try to be sensitive to Southeast Asian ways of experiencing art, to the ways that art fits into people’s lives and is important for them. Often, these writings themselves cannot be easily classified as “art history,” and they often learn from and reach into other disciplines, such as anthropology. A number of art historians of Southeast Asia have seriously studied various Southeast Asian performing arts. Southeast Asian art history, having learned from other ways of seeing and other disciplines, has particular relevance for mainstream art history and art historical theory. Because of its difference, it can help art history reflect on itself and its way of appropriating art. Southeast Asian art is not alone in this of course. Mainstream art history is constantly challenged by contemporary art, and it faces challenges when it looks beyond the mainstream “Fine Art” even in Europe. Even within the mainstream art history tradition, the standards of a more prestigious kind of art may be misleadingly applied to an art that is considered to be less prestigious but that in fact has its own values and culture, such as in the case of Dutch seventeenth-century art being judged by the values of Italian art, as shown by Svetlana Alpers.40 But just as people in Southeast Asia have their own visions, concepts, and experiences of art, Southeast Asian art raises its own problems and questions, and offers unique lessons. Like Malraux, I find it exciting to look at art from different cultures, but I want to go beyond looking at photographs made in such a way that the resulting images fit most easily into the art history textbook, and I want to reflect on different ways of experiencing art. It is not only that I like to look at art from different places, it seems

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to me that in the present world it is inevitable. Art history urgently needs to learn to be sensitive to other ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

Art Objects As Cut Up Pieces: From Theory to Practice Malraux’s case is instructive. I propose to show his musée imaginaire in light of his earlier adventures with Southeast Asian art. In 1923, he traveled to Indochina and tried to “rescue” several stone sculptures from the ancient temple of Bantay Srei. He used stone saws, hammers, and metal blades to cut several sculptures, in total about a ton of “art,” from the walls and corners of the temple. He was later arrested (meaning he had to live in Le Grand Hotel, Phnom Penh) and sentenced in 1924 to three years in prison, although he never went to jail. Leading French literary figures and artists wrote to newspapers and signed petitions to convince the authorities that Malraux had not done anything wrong. Walter Langlois, in his book about Malraux’s “adventure,” also argued that Malraux suffered injustice.41 The arguments are fascinating. They can be summarized into four (contradictory) points: (1) Malraux should not be punished because what he has done has been done by many others before and they were never punished; (2) legally, he has not done anything wrong because Bantay Srei has not yet been formally classified as art by the French authorities; (3) Malraux is a great French writer, well-educated, an aesthete, and a promising amateur archeologist, as demonstrated by his great taste in choosing Bantay Srei, and this justifies his actions (this was the most frequent justification, although no one tried to deny that his motivation was in large part financial gain); and (4) Bantay Srei was a “pile of rubble” anyway, in the midst of a jungle full of savages (Malraux himself claimed this, forgetting for a moment that he discovered in it a “gem” of Khmer art). I am impressed by the ideology of art in which cutting a ton of sculpture from the temple is an aesthetic action. The knowledge of what is art and the authority to decide what to do with it belong entirely to the French, whether Malraux or the colonial authorities. Suggesting that cutting pieces off the temple was an act of an aesthete is even more striking if one has seen Bantay Srei; perhaps even more than at other Khmer temples, architecture and sculpture are indivisible and there are no individual sculptures, but rather every stone of the building appears alive with carving. In describing Malraux’s actions, Langlois notes: “The only sculptures of artistic value were on the stones that still remained in place on the walls.”42 It is “us,” the cultivated French, who can separate, in our discriminating vision and with our saws and hammers, art from non-art. If Malraux writes admiringly that the “museum strongly

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contributes to transforming dreams into paintings and gods into statues,” he created statues — art objects — by cutting up a temple with a stone saw. That is the doing of his dreaming. Malraux’s novel The Royal Way is based on this adventure and gives a feel for Malraux’s ideas. It is worth noting that only ancient Cambodian sculpture was “art” for him, and he apparently never noticed the rich traditions of work in wood, ceramics, textiles, shadow puppetry, and so on. Cambodia is described as a land “of all dead lands most dead,” and Malraux powerfully evokes an “atmosphere of decay” pervading the “land of decay” and uncivilized jungle from which he rescues great art. The people that he encounters do not have “art,” but “fetishes.”43 He describes “a tall tomb with fetishes composed of feathers and a huge gaur’s skull” and “a grave surmounted by two large fetishes with projecting teeth; they represented a man and a woman, each clutching its red-dyed sexual organs with both hands.” The images of the people and the images of their fetishes are indivisible: “a sea of bestial faces, creatures of savage cruelty, as little human, as implacable as the gaur’s scull with its grinning death’s-head teeth.” The following passage comes just before the temple is discovered: Above a line of bushes that partly blocked his view he saw a medley of thick-lipped faces and scintillating war-spears. A guttural dirge vibrated in the leaves and branches round them. In the center of the glade the thick white smoke could now be clearly seen, rising from a squat tower of wattles, at the top of which four wooden buffalo-heads, with horns the size of canoes, stood out against the sky. Leaning on the shaft of his flashing spear, scratching his head and bending towards the center of the pyre, a yellow warrior was gazing at the flames; he was stark naked and in a state of erection.44 The people are features of the menacing jungle, the land of decay characterized by the “odor of corruption,”45 and their “fetishes” are certainly no art object that would be allowed into the musée imaginaire. This is in contrast to the great “humanity” of art exemplified by the stones pried from Bantay Srei, the “common heritage of Man” (a different Man from the “yellow warrior”), or to use a phrase from musée imaginaire, the “art gallery [that] shows Man at his most noble.” The statues from Bantay Srei are not just the opposite of the “disintegrating world,” but also a “countercharm.” Just after Malraux describes how the stones were removed from the temple in the midst of the threatening jungle and the “savages,” he writes that “against their sorcery the stones he had secured served as a countercharm.”46

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The continuity among Malraux’s own “rescuing” or “securing” of Khmer sculpture, the novel, and his musée imaginaire is obvious, and the attitude toward art in all of these is essentially the same. He returns to Khmer sculpture in his musée imaginaire with this memorable sentence, worthy of the minister of culture that he became: “In Khmer statuary there were many admirable heads on conventional bodies; these heads, removed from the bodies, are now the glory of the Guimet Museum.”47 Even more than the “cut up pieces” presented by photography, here sculpture is literally cut up in the name of civilization and art. The “land of decay,” the “savages,” and their “fetishes” (shadow puppets might fit here) are construed as the opposite of art and civilization, as darkness is opposed to light. Malraux describes beautifully the human struggle in which the sculptures were cut from the temple and transported through the jungle, and his enthusiasm for photography as something that “overcomes the intransportability of objects” can be seen in a new light. There are lengthy passages on imagination, dreams, and memories in the novel. Near the beginning, there is a long passage about obsession with sex and women, immediately followed by thoughts on archaeological dreams as an “obsession.” An aim of the expedition is “doing things instead of dreaming them.”48 Clearly, Malraux’s musée imaginaire, and also his novel (as novel), are steps back from doing things to dreaming them, though possibly out of necessity and not out of conviction. My aim here is to show Malraux’s musée imaginaire, and the art history it describes so well, in a less idealistic light, to show what is the “doing” of the musée imaginaire, and by extension of the art history vision. Much of Southeast Asian art that we see in museums has come there in the way described by Malraux in the Royal Way. It was in some manner “rescued” from its place and often cut out from a larger whole, in a process often sanctioned by the “civilized world” and in the name of art and Man. The French excursions to Indochina in which Khmer art was rescued from the Khmers were called, significantly, the missions, and much of the art in the Musée Guimet has been collected on these missions. And of course, the “rescuing” of Southeast Asian art — from widespread cutting of sculpture at Angkor to fulfill the orders of the aesthetically oriented rich of this world, to stealing heirlooms and ancestral figures in Indonesia — continues on a large scale today.49 The moral argument that this amounts to “saving” art objects from the difficult world and their irresponsible owners who cannot appreciate them anyway is still popular with collectors and museums. “Imagination makes up for everything,”50 pretends Malraux in his novel, and it could be the motto of his musée imaginaire, but both in the novel and in the real world, dreaming and doing go hand in hand.

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If I am right that the musée imaginaire articulates some basic principles of the ways of seeing of art history, then the history of Malraux’s own obsessions and actions reveal something that is often hidden about art history.

In the Same Storm The similarities between the two visions I have talked about previously, television and art history, are historically conditioned, especially if one considers both as simultaneously social institutions, technologies, and epistemologies, and one can also ponder the complex but close relationship between photography and Western painting, that is, the art history apparatus and its object. In this sense, television and art history are products of Western culture, Western visions that have been imported to Indonesia. However, this view fails to capture the fact that television is now also an Indonesian vision, and that many Javanese experience wayang through television as well as by going to performances. Javanese people see through television not only wayang, but, among other things, images of the West. It becomes difficult to speak simply about “our” way of experiencing (such as television and art history) and “their” way of experiencing because there is not a single Javanese way of experiencing wayang, and because “Javanese” ways interact with “our” ways of experiencing, as in the case of television. Live wayang performances now sometimes include simulcasts using television monitors, and performers incorporate television techniques (slow motion from sports, cartoon sound effects) and popular figures from television (puppets of George Bush, dinosaurs from Jurassic Park) into the performance. Ways of experiencing travel and adapt to new places, and people learn to experience in new ways. As Stan O’Connor has written, “The main thing to grasp is that we are all wandering in the same storm.”51 This does not mean that all differences and distances are annihilated, but there is a complex interaction of experiences, and many crossroads in our experiences. Art history, too, is “wandering in the same storm.” If I were to speak about globalization and homogenization — themes that often come up in writings on television — I could take the case of art history in Southeast Asia as an example. Unlike television, art history and its institutions have still a very marginal presence in most parts of Indonesia (where a majority of the population knows little of museums or art history). While the main interaction in the realm of traditional art seems to be in terms of Western collectors and dealers removing Indonesian art from Indonesia (that side of Malraux is very relevant; the effects have been described on a Balinese case by Kaja McGowan in

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this volume and in the collection of essays Fragile Traditions: Indonesian Art in Jeopardy52), one can nonetheless find traces of art history notions in some Indonesian writings on wayang. For example, an Indonesian author writes that there are several kinds of wayang puppets, including “for puppeteers” and “art wayang.” The latter are meant for art collectors and are made to satisfy different requirements — unlike those “for puppeteers,” the “art wayang” are primarily visually pretty and do not have to function well in performance. A good performance puppet can be held comfortably in the puppeteer’s hand so as to allow particular movements and graceful manipulation. It looks alive when moved and it must survive the handling in a performance. All this is not required from the “art puppet.” This example shows how the wayang puppets are meant to satisfy different needs than an art object, but also that there are wayang puppets that have been made to be collected (even though this practice is marginal), just as there are wayang puppets made specifically for tourists. Similar incursions of the Western idea of the art object are common in other kinds of traditional art, such as in so-called batik painting, a new form of art directed primarily at tourists, in which the batik technique is used to produce “paintings,” such as landscapes, meant to be hung on the wall like a Western-style framed painting. Most puppeteers express frustration with the way wayang is shown on television. When television producers need to reduce broadcasting time, they cut what the puppeteers consider essential parts of the performance and leave in parts that are less essential, or, at a crucial moment in the story, the camera focuses on the female singer rather than on what is happening on the screen, and so on. The puppeteers complain that television producers do not understand wayang and that they are too self-assured and arrogant to try to understand it. Instead, television’s standard techniques are applied when wayang is televised. Television’s failure to transmit its essential aspects — the total experience, the story and its crucial moments, the feelings — the puppeteers say, results in “destroying wayang.” They say that if television producers understood wayang as the puppeteers do, if television producers learned from the puppeteers, television viewers could enjoy and understand a performance better, and television could in fact benefit wayang and people’s appreciation of the art form. Art historians are like the television producers in that they too use standard techniques of “covering” wayang and believe in their technique too much to learn from the puppeteers. Art historians, too, should learn from puppeteers, listen to what the puppeteers have to say, try to engage in a serious dialogue, and, rather than subjecting wayang to a standard gaze, a standard technique of representing art (including “cutting” what they think is unessential but what

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may be essential for the puppeteers), they should shape their “apparatus” and techniques to fit wayang. The same goes for studying any other kind of art; the story of wayang here is merely a parable. As there are different televisions, so there are different art histories. I wish there were more different televisions, and as an art historian I feel that each place in the world needs a somewhat different art history. An openness to changing itself may allow art history to get closer to the world, to different places. This does not mean that scholars of art from different regions have nothing to talk about — on the contrary, they should talk more to each other, and each local art history needs to show its relevance to mainstream art history, or rather what should be a larger dialogue among many art histories. They can talk more about how we are all wandering in the same storm, how we are bound to our ways of experiencing and thinking, and how we can learn new ways, or how phenomena like television and art history penetrate different places differently and are articulated in new ways. This volume is an example. In reflecting on the question “What’s the use of art?” a number of the chapters show how what collectors, curators, and art historians treat as art exists and functions before its art objectification: the deposits in Balinese shrines (McGowan), the paintings in wedding chambers in Bihar (Davis), the Japanese disposable earthenware (Cort), the Balinese keris (Pedersen), or the Indian statues (DeCaroli). These all exist(ed) and figure(d) in human experience in ways that contrast strongly with the being of the modern art object. Just as a wayang puppet is an instrument used in performance and is an integral, essential element of this larger event, all these things are constituent elements of people’s lives and their worlds. They are like what the puppet is to the puppeteer in that they are used to achieve people’s aims and ambitions, or to represent people, and they are often integral elements of specific occasions (e.g., wedding, rituals) and spaces (e.g., shrines, palaces). In contrast to the exclusive visuality of the modern art object, sometimes the images or objects are not meant to be seen (like the contents of the Balinese deposits) or they are not displayed publicly (like the Madhubani wedding painting). The disposable earthenware ceramics discussed by Cort, comparable to the Balinese offerings I discussed earlier and to the temporary wedding chamber paintings in Davis’s chapter in their impermanence — but also performance objects, like puppets, in the way they are integral elements of performative events — are examples of the kinds of objects that do not make it into art history and museums, unlike their well-accepted, more permanent relatives — “China.” Davis traces the process in which the wedding chamber paintings were transformed into “art objects,” an example of the “cutting out”

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of fragments from a larger whole, thus creating transportable, permanent, commodifiable art objects from the impermanent, intransportable, private wall paintings. While in this case art objectification may benefit local people, one can see analogous examples of the rescuing from intransportability in the form of looting, which is not simply a matter of removing objects, but also destroying of the original site, framework, tabula, as discussed by McGowan in the example of the destruction of Balinese shrines and their “internal life.” In this “rescuing” in which the art object is created, what is at stake, and what is hurt, is not dead matter, but personal and communal identities and relations among people — kin, neighbors, ancestors. The chapter by Hevia shows some of the political aspects of looting, in this case the symbolic humiliation of the Chinese emperor by the British and the imperial politics of art objectification. His case is an example of how looting is justified and made to appear lawful and civilized, rather like in the justifications of Malraux’s adventure. I have emphasized that there is not a single Javanese way of experiencing wayang, and that wayang is experienced in different ways in Java in live performances and on television. Similarly, Bogel, Hoskins, and Pedersen discuss kinds of objects that are often considered art in the modern sense but that within Asia and outside the realm of art history and museums have been recontextualized, reconceptualized, re-“wrapped” — reminding us that modern art objectification is not the only case of wrapping and unwrapping of objects. These cases and the transformation of wedding chamber paintings into commercial, portable painting on paper; the different forms of looting and the effects of looting on the affected sites and people; the effects of modern Western notions on Japanese connoisseurship of tea ceramics (Pitelka); the ways in which the traditional meanings and powers of the Balinese keris (Pedersen) and the Sumbanese textiles (Hoskins) continue to figure in the modern world of national politics and commerce, respectively; and of course the fact that we encounter these kinds of objects in private collections and public museums in all parts of the world, including Asia; and, to mention the most bizarre case, that there are people like me, an American-trained Eastern European art historian teaching Southeast Asians about Southeast Asian art in a Southeast Asian city-state with a Chinese majority where Thomas Stamford Raffles is revered as the Founding Father — together these cases evoke the different ways we are all wandering in the same storm, and together these cases show that to understand “art” in today’s world, which is intensely interconnected yet still stunningly diverse, even disconnected, one needs to look beyond any one culture and society. The authors try to understand people and the material world beyond the conventional categories and ways of seeing surrounding the modern

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notions of art, to understand things, not “rescued” from the storm, but in the ways they figure in, and constitute, people’s worlds. Things, like people, are caught up in the same storm. Dialogue, the fusion of horizons, and attempts to understand other people do not necessarily lead to homogenization. It is when one is not open to dialogue and to other ways of experiencing, when one is the prisoner of one’s own way of seeing or the technologies for seeing, that the world may appear homogeneous and flat, clear and clearly framed, without taste or smell or sound, like a photograph in a textbook or the television screen. One may feel that there is no point in trying to touch and feel things because everything is the same to touch anyway.

Notes I would like to dedicate this chapter to my teacher, Stanley O’Connor. 1. For more, see Jan Mrázek, “To Be Or Not To Be There: Watching Theatrical Performances on Television,” in Puppet Theater in Contemporary Indonesia: New Approaches to Performance Events, ed. Jan Mrázek, 333–361 (Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies, The University of Michigan, 2002). 2. “Nonton 3 Wayang kulit,” letter signed by Wirjosuparto, Kedaulatan Rakyat, February 24, 1999. 3. André Malraux, Le musée imaginaire (Albert Skira, 1947), 32. 4. Malraux, Le musée imaginaire, 16. 5. Malraux, Le musée imaginaire, 24. 6. Malraux, Le musée imaginaire, 18. 7. Malraux, Le musée imaginaire, 24. 8. Malraux uses the example of a sculpted face on a column, liberated by photography from the column and the architecture, indeed created as sculpture by photography, and a miniature, “delivered” by reproduction from its inferior size and made the same size as tapestry or stained-glass window. Malraux, Le musée imaginaire, 25–26 and 37–38. 9. Malraux, Le musée imaginaire, 52. 10. Malraux, Le musée imaginaire, 52. 11. Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (Yale University Press, 1989), 72–73. 12. Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, xiv. 13. Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, 73. 14. Malraux, Le musée imaginaire, 28. 15. Yves Michaud, “Forms of Looking: Philosophy and Photography,” in A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot, 737 (Koneman, 1998). 16. Malraux, Le musée imaginaire, 14. 17. Bruce Ferguson, “Exhibitions Rhetorics: Material Speech and Utter Sense,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg et al., 187 (Routledge, 1996). 18. Ferguson, “Exhibitions Rhetorics,” 183.

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19. Philip Rawson, The Art of Southeast Asia (Thames and Hudson, 1967). 20. Maud Gerard-Geslan et al., Art of Southeast Asia (Harry N. Abrams, 1998). 21. Fiona Kerlogue, Arts of Southeast Asia (Thames & Hudson, 2004). 22. Tibor Bodrogi, Art of Indonesia (Academy Editions, 1973). 23. Ward Keeleer, Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves (Princeton University Press, 1987). 24. Jan Mrázek, “More Than a Picture: The Instrumental Quality of the Shadow Puppet,” in Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O’Connor, ed. Nora Taylor (Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 2000). 25. Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Changes (Cornell University Press, 1967). 26. Holt, Art in Indonesia, 139–140. 27. Some books specifically on wayang (usually not by art historians) portray wayang differently from art history surveys. At least some show puppets as a part of the whole performance and the social event, showing the audience, the food, and so on. 28. Stanley J. O’Connor, “Human Literacy and Southeast Asian Art,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, no. 1 (March 1995): 157. 29. Stanley J. O’Connor, “Art Critics, Connoisseurs, and Collectors in the Southeast Asian Rainforest: A Study in Cross-Cultural Art Theory,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14, no. 2 (1983): 400–408. 30. Kerlogue, Arts of Southeast Asia, 25. 31. Kerlogue, Arts of Southeast Asia, 26. 32. Southeast Asian Art Today, ed. Joyce van Fenema (Roeder, 1996). 33. Southeast Asian Art: A New Spirit, ed. Koh Buck Song (Art and Artist Speak, 1997). 34. Helen Jessup, Art & Architecture of Cambodia (Thames & Hudson, 2004). 35. Hiram Woodward, The Art and Architecture of Thailand (Brill, 2003). 36. In Kerlogue’s Arts of Southeast Asia, I found human figures or their parts visible in only five out of 183 illustrations. 37. The scope of the Indonesian Sejarah Seni Rupa Indonesia [History of Indonesian plastic arts] (Departmen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan [1979]) is comparable to Holt’s book except that the focus is on visual art, and on the whole the book presents scattered facts and lacks interpretive discussion. The more recent Indonesian megaproject, Indonesian Heritage, includes the volumes Visual Art and Performing Arts (Archipelago Press, 1998). While richly illustrated, broad in scope, and more up to date, the text is limited to brief vignettes. 38. Malraux, Le musée imaginaire, 17. 39. Pamudji, “Ketika Panggung Ketoprak dan Wayang Diusung ke Televisi,” Suara Merdeka, August 9, 1997. 40. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (The University of Chicago Press, 1983), xix–xxv. 41. Walter G. Langlois, André Malraux: The Indochina Adventure (Frederick A. Praeger, 1966). 42. Langlois, André Malraux, 22.

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43. The quotations in this paragraph are from André Malraux, The Royal Way, trans. Stuart Gillbert (Random House, 1955), 146–147, 171–172, and 175. 44. Malraux, The Royal Way, 93. 45. Malraux, The Royal Way, 72. 46. Malraux, The Royal Way, 114. 47. Malraux, The Museum Without Walls (Pantheon Books, 1949), 27. 48. Malraux, The Royal Way, 31. 49. Paul Taylor, ed., Fragile Traditions: Indonesian Art in Jeopardy (University of Hawai‘i, 1994), shows the impact of collecting on traditional arts. 50. Malraux, The Royal Way, 4. 51. O’Connor, “Human Literacy,” 155. 52. Taylor, Fragile Traditions.

contributors

Cynthea J. Bogel is associate professor of Japanese art and architectural history at the University of Washington, Seattle. In recent publications she turns to famous Buddhist sites and icons with a new lens, bringing into focus the context of the contemporary art historian in equal degree to the ancient setting. These publications include The Icon Looks Back: Mikkyō Visual Culture in Ancient Japan, University of Washington Press, forthcoming, and “Canonizing Kannon: The Ninth-Century Esoteric Buddhist Altar at Kanshinji,” Art Bulletin, March 2002. Bogel has also published on ukiyoe (with Israel Goldman, Hiroshige: Birds and Flowers, George Braziller, 1988, reprinted 2002) and contemporary Japanese textiles (NUNO: Japanese Textiles for the Body, University of Oregon Museum of Art, 1995). Her current research features the ritual, artistic, and cultural status of Buddhist goods imported from Tang China to Japan, including works discussed in her chapter in this volume. Louise Allison Cort is curator for ceramics at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Her interests include historical and contemporary Japanese, Southeast and South Asian ceramics, Japanese baskets and textiles, and the Japanese tea ceremony. She is the author of Shigaraki, Potters’ Valley, published in 1979 and reprinted in 2000. Her other book-length publications include Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics: A Close Embrace of the Earth (with Bert Winther-Tamaki, 2003), Asian Traditions in Clay (with Ann Gunter and Massumeh Farhad, 2000), A Basketmaker in Rural Japan (with Nakamura Kenji, 1995), Joined Colors: Decoration and Meaning in Chinese Porcelain (with Jan Stuart, 1994), and Seto and Mino Ceramics (1992). She received (with Leedom Lefferts) a grant from the Nishida Memorial Foundation for Research in Asian Ceramic History for documentation of village-based production of earthenware and stoneware ceramics in mainland Southeast Asia, and she is continuing that research with a Scholarly Studies grant from the Smithsonian Institution. Richard H. Davis is professor of religion and Asian Studies at Bard College, Annandale, New York. He is the author of Ritual in an Oscillating Universe: Worshiping Siva in Medieval India (Princeton, 1991) and Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, 1997). He has also edited two volumes of essays, Images, Miracles, and Authority in Asian Religious Traditions (Westview, 1998) and Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India (Orient Longman, 2006). Currently he is working on the history and aesthetics of Hindu temple festivals and processions in southern India. Robert DeCaroli is associate professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. A specialist in the art history of South and Southeast

306 | Contributors

Asia, his research has focused primarily on early Buddhist art. He is the author of Haunting the Buddha: Indian Popular Religions and the Formation of Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2004). He was recently awarded a Getty Research Institute grant for work on his next book project, which explores the use of figural imagery in the early Buddhist traditions of South Asia. James L. Hevia is director of the International Studies Program at the University of Chicago. His most recent publication is English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth Century China (Duke University Press, 2003). He is currently writing a book about British military intelligence, the construction of geostrategic Asia, and the origins of area studies. Janet Hoskins is professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange (University of California Press, 1994, winner of the 1996 Benda Prize for Southeast Asian Studies), Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (Routledge, 1998), and is the contributing editor of Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (Stanford, 1996) and Fragments from Forests and Libraries (Carolina Academic Press, 2001). She has spent more than three years doing ethnographic research in Eastern Indonesia and is now studying Caodaism in Vietnam and Southern California. Kaja M. McGowan is associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and Archaeology and Asian Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She is the author of Ida Bagus Made: The Art of Devotion, a volume honoring the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Puri Lukisan Museum in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia, in July 2006. Her articles include “Chasing Sita on a Global/Local Interface,” in The Ramayana Revisited, ed. M. Bose (Oxford University Press, 2004); and “ ‘Seeing . . . as if Through a Sparse Shawl Unraveling’: Ritual Cloth, Commercial Canvas, or a Good Opportunity to Show a Nude in the Transcultural Acoustics of Bali Between the Wars (1930–1950)” in Asian Art in the Twenty-First Century (Clark Studies in the Visual Arts), ed. V. Desai (Yale University Press, 2007). Patronage is one of the chief areas of social context that art historians have traditionally taken into account. She is currently exploring the otherwise overlooked improvisational and intuitive elements involved in patron/client relations in the artisanal village of Kamasan, Klungkung, Bali. Jan Mrázek is assistant professor in the Southeast Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore, teaching about Southeast Asian visual and performing arts. An art historian by academic training, half-trained as a Czech violinist and a Javanese puppeteer and musician, and undisciplined by nature, he is the author of Phenomenology of a Puppet Theatre: Contemplations on the Art of Javanese Wayang Kulit (KITLV Press, 2005) and editor of Puppet Theatre in Contemporary Indonesia: New Approaches to Performance Events (Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of

Contributors | 307

Michigan, 2002). He is finishing a book on the interaction between Javanese theater and television, is learning to play Thai music, and is writing phenomenological reflections on musical instruments. Lene Pedersen is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Museum at Central Washington University, where she teaches cultural and visual anthropology. She is the author of Ritual and World Change in a Balinese Princedom (Carolina Academic Press, 2006). She is finishing an accompanying video on Ancestral Deification in the Highlands of Bali, and she continues her research on traditional forms of governance in decentralizing Indonesia. Morgan Pitelka is associate professor in the Asian Studies Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles. A historian of Japan and a potter, he is the author of Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practitioners in Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005) and the editor of Japanese Tea Culture: Art, History, and Practice (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). He is currently writing a biography of the collection of Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and is editing a book on the social and cultural practices of warriors in premodern Japan. Ashley Thompson is a lecturer in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She is a specialist in Southeast Asian cultural history, with a focus on Cambodian art and literature. Her main research and teaching interests involve questions of memory and cultural transition, particularly as revealed, or not, by language and textuality in the broadest sense. Most of her publications concern Hindu and Buddhist sculpture and painting, cult or ritual practices and texts, as well as issues related to gender and sexual difference. In a deconstructive vein, she tries to gauge her chances of “stepping out” of “the Western tradition” in the name or the direction of something like an “Eastern” one.

index

Abé, Ryūichi, 151 abortion, 100, 103, 124 agency of art, 5, 33, 36; Alfred Gell’s theory of, 101–102, 155, 223; gendering of objects and, 122; imported to Japan from China, 148 Alpers, Svetlana, 294 anthropology, 2–3, 49, 290, 294; theories of art, 101, 264 antiques, 48, 49, 238, 253, 272 archaeology, 15, 49–50, 72, 242–243 Archer, William G., 79, 82–85, 94 architecture, 10, 48, 138, 203, 239, 243, 289, 295 aristocrats/nobles: in Europe, 130; in Indonesia, 101, 102, 106, 116–117, 119, 215–232; in Japan, 50, 66, 157 art historians, 2–3, 22, 146, 245; and Angkor statuary, 182, 185, 194; critiques of, 277, 287, 299–301 art history, 2–5, 89, 129, 136, 146, 276–280 Art Institute in Chicago, the, 293 art object, 2–7, 11, 15, 48, 101, 122, 223, 247, 272 Ashmolean Library, the, 132 batik, 106–107, 288–289, 299 Baxandall, Michael, 4 Bayon temple, 184–185, 193, 198–200 beauty: in Balinese shrines, 239–240, 289; concepts of, 2–6, 15, 268n.25; in ephemeral or folk art, 72–73, 78, 95; feminine, 248–250, 255–257 Berger, John, 4 Bihar earthquake, 82–84, 94 biographical objects, 8, 101, 129, 136, 214 Bodhisattva, 146, 148, 154, 159, 165, 193, 195, 201

Bodrogi, Tibor, 281, 288 Boisselier, J., 183 Brahman: and Cambodian art, 179, 217; priests, 229, 232, 258, 260; in religious texts, 40; and ritual purity, 46, 79–80, 83 Brenner, Suzanne, 116 British empire, 7, 26, 29, 82–84, 130–133, 301 British Museum, the, 7, 134–137 Brown, Carolyn Henning, 80–82, 90 Buddhism, 8; doctrine, 182, 241; early Indian images of, 22–28; and Japanese earthenware, 47, 57, 59; Mahayana, 193; and the state, 197; transmission of, 143–144, 242 Burlington Fine Arts Club, the, 135 Bushell, Stephen, 134–135, 138 ceramics: in Japan, 1, 11–15, 46–52, 300, 301; in Southeast Asia, 288, 296 Chang’an, 142, 147, 159, 165 Christianity, 4, 27, 31, 120; Catholic, 31, 120; Protestant, 22, 26, 31, 120 Christie’s, 137–138 Clark, T. J., 4 Cœdès, G., 183, 192 collections, 9, 129, 301; British, 7; of Charles Lang Freer, 13–15; heirloom, 49, 274; Japanese, 11, 67, 73, 146; of looted Chinese objects, 132–135, 137–138 collectors, 1–3, 79, 214, 297–300; global, 21; of Indonesian textiles, 106; Japanese, 15, 50; of looted Chinese objects, 132–135; Western, 7, 8, 11 colonialism: and collecting, 130, 214, 221, 222; and connoisseurship, 7–8; and discourses about art, 2–3, 25–26,

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29, 31, 295; and encounters with art, 82–84 commercialization: of Balinese shrine contents, 238–239; of indigo textiles in Indonesia, 100, 107–108, 116–117, 121–123; of Madhubani painting in India, 95 commodification, 6, 21; of Balinese shrine contents, 241; in the biography of an object, 122; of looted Chinese objects, 133–134, 137, 139; of Madhubani painting in India, 78, 86, 94–95; as transportable, permanent art objects, 301 Confucianism, 133, 147 connoisseurship, 2, 4–5, 8; analyzed by Stanley O’Connor, 288; of ceramics in Japan, 11–15, 48; Chinese, 134; in response to pillaged Balinese shrines, 238–241; universal, 139 containers, 46, 50–52, 56, 238, 242, 252–257 Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 26–28, 37 copy/reproduction: of Chinese Buddhist texts and objects, 148, 152, 164; of the divine familial triad in Cambodian sculpture, 193; in Hindu images, 34, 36–37, 40, 42; of Japanese tea ceramics, 15; of looted Chinese objects, 138; and Madhubani painting, 95; photographic, 277–278. See also sexual reproduction Devi, Ganga, 81, 90–98 Devi, Shakti, 91–92 dharma: brothers, 148; embodied in sculpture or images, 19, 30, 42, 179, 182, 187–192; mandala, 146; masters, 152–154; as moral merit, 181–182; as term for royal Cambodian statuary, 203, 206; transmission, 165–166 Diamond, Stanley, 240 Durga, 79, 88, 220, 243

Dutch, 106, 108, 119–120, 221–222, 231–232, 294 Eck, Diana, 4 emperors: of China, 7, 129, 132–138, 145, 162, 301; of Japan, 49, 54, 66, 142, 146–147, 166, 150–152; of Majapahit, 219–220, 232 enlightenment (concept), 39, 152–154, 196, 258 Enlightenment (period), 2, 15 ephemerality, 6; in Balinese shrine art, 244–245, 247, 254, 257, 262, 289; of Japanese earthenware, 46; of Madhubani painting, 79, 87; of wealth, 118 Esotericism (Mikkyō), 142; Shingon, 10, 144, 149, 159, 161, 164; Tendai, 148; visual culture of, 150–151, 153–154 European: circulation of Asian art, 136, 138–139; collections, 133; definitions of art, 2, 7–8; imperialism, 129–130; missionaries, 120; modern art, 83–84; monarchs, 132; scholarship, 23, 25–32. See also British empire; Dutch Faure, Bernard, 162 Fergusson, James, 22 fertility, 23, 82, 85, 102–103, 114, 117, 152, 239, 255 Festival of India, 77, 86, 92–93 festivals: in Bali, 289; in India, 35, 78, 79, 90; in Japan, 49, 53, 54, 56, 59, 62 folk art, 6, 78, 79, 83, 86, 90, 93–95, 103 Fontainebleu, 137 Forshee, Jill, 101 Foucault, Michel, 239, 280 Foucher, Alfred, 27, 29, 31 fragments, 50, 61, 198, 253–254, 278–282, 301 Freer, Charles Lang, 11, 13–14 Fujiki Yasuharu, 54–55 funeral/postmortem rite, 107, 112, 115, 215, 248, 253

Index | 311

funerary monuments, 10, 38, 193, 243– 246, 263 Gandhi, Indira, 78, 84, 92, 95 Gauri, 80–81 gaze/seeing, 4, 23, 32, 83, 93, 122, 277– 280, 299 Geertz, Clifford, 247 Gell, Alfred, 6, 101–102, 122, 146, 155, 157, 223 genealogy, 51, 165, 167, 185–186, 194, 221, 235, 278 Gerard-Geslan, Maud, 281 Grant, General Hope, 131 healing, 100, 221, 232, 235 heirlooms: Balinese keris, 9, 215–217, 221–231; collections in Indonesia, 272, 274; collections in Japan, 49; looting of in Bali, 238, 297; with magical potency, 289 Hinduism: and Balinese shrines, 242, 244, 248–250, 257, 261, 266; colonial discourses about, 26; images of, 4, 7, 78, 88; and Megawati Sukarnoputri, 227 Holt, Claire, 285–287, 291–293 Hong Kong, 10, 137–140 ideology, 151, 162, 167, 200, 295 ikat, 102, 106, 108, 110, 116 indigo dying, 100, 102–110, 122 international exposition/exhibition, 133–134 Ise Grand Shrine, 52–54, 62, 64–66 Islam, 7, 26, 31, 107, 112, 115–116, 227, 244, 248 Ivy, Marilyn, 9 Jain, Jyotindra, 81, 90, 92, 95 Jayakar, Pupul, 80, 84–89, 92, 94, 95 Jingoji Temple, 56, 163

Kamigamo Shrine, 47, 54, 56–57, 68 Keane, Webb, 116–117 keepsake. See souvenir Kerlogue, Fiona, 281, 290–291 kings: of Africa, 133; of Bali, 216, 225, 231–232, 243, 244; of Cambodia, 179–181; of Greece, 32; of India, 23, 29, 35–38, 40; of Java, 119. See also emperors Kopytoff, Igor, 7, 129 Krishna, 4, 88–89 Kyoto (also Heiankyō), 47, 50–52, 54, 56–62, 66–69, 72, 147 Laksm‘ī, 199 ˙ Langlois, Walter, 295 legitimacy, 8, 10, 27, 121, 143, 150; and the keris in Bali, 10, 217–218, 223–224, 229–232 “Living National Treasure” (kokuhō), 48, 62, 65, 159 Lombok, 229, 238; and Buddhist art, 8, 143–144, 150, 152–155 looting: of Balinese shrines, 238–241, 246–247, 301; of the Chinese Summer Palace, 7, 129–134 lotus, 191–192; plant design, 81, 89, 157, 198; seat or throne, 28, 263; sutra, 148 Macartney, Lord, 132 magic: and indigo dying, 100–101, 104, 122–123; properties of Balinese keris, 222–223, 226–227, 231; properties of Buddhist objects, 144, 154, 157, 170; properties of Hindu images, 36; properties of Japanese earthenware vessels and pieces, 61; properties of Southeast Asian textiles, 288–289; symbols in Madhubani painting, 78 Malraux, André, 11, 277–280, 293–298 mandala: as a graphic model of power structures, 186, 205; paintings, 142– 143; as ritual artifacts, 149

312 | Index

mantra, 146, 149 Marshall, John, 25–27, 29 memorial, 10, 138, 145, 148–149 Mete, Marta, 6, 86, 100 Metropolitan Museum of Art, the, 293 Mibu Temple, 47, 57–61, 68, 70, 72 mobility, 9, 87, 116, 248, 284 modern art, 83, 90, 94, 232, 261, 263, 278, 291–293, 300–301 modernity, 5, 9, 83–84, 100, 118–123, 203, 292, 300–301 Mona Lisa, 255–257, 279 money, 35, 67, 93; and the keris in Bali, 214; and looting, 131–132; making art for, 4, 63; and women in Sumba, 100, 110, 114–118, 120–121 monuments, 5, 10, 93, 138, 203, 242–246, 261, 263, 293 mudra, 149 Musée Guimet, the, 293, 297 musée imaginaire, le, 277–278, 280, 295–298 museums, 49, 77, 146, 157, 266; and display, 79, 88, 94, 263–264; and the keris in Bali, 221–222, 231–232; and looted objects, 129–130, 133–139; and the objectification of art, 1–9, 21, 73, 276–280, 284–285, 287–289, 300– 301; and Raku ceramics, 11–15 music, 273, 282, 284, 289, 292 nation: art and the invention of, 62, 138, 159, 203, 205–206; and the identity of the artist, 6, 89, 92, 262; and the identity of the consumer, 9–11; in Indonesian history, 216, 222, 225–226, 232 National Museum of Ireland, the, 137 “Never Forget National Humiliation” monument, 10, 138 nobles. See aristocrats O’Connor, Stanley, 5, 238–239, 241–243, 287, 298 Opium Wars, 138

painting, 4, 6, 29, 57, 77, 137, 142–143, 279–280, 285–286, 288 patronage: of Buddhist art, 41, 143, 145, 152, 157, 162, 168; “demonic,” 100, 118; of Madhubani painting, 86, 92; of Shintō shrines, 54 performance: and earthenware usage, 46, 48, 60, 61; of esoteric Buddhist rituals, 155; and kingship in Cambodia, 179, 190; and Madhubani painting, 77; and politics in Indonesia, 215, 223, 230; wayang puppet, 5–6, 271–276, 280–282, 284–289, 298–301 permanence, 40, 87, 138, 179, 282, 300–301 Phnom Penh, 180, 183, 203–206 photography: and art history, 277–282, 284, 286, 288–294, 297–298, 302; and authenticity, 64; of ephemeral art, 84; and the keris in Bali, 233n.11; and memory, 72; and scholarship, 92, 159 portrait: in Bali, 244–245, 252, 254, 256–257; in Buddhist art, 146, 148, 151–152, 154, 164–166; in Cambodia, 9, 181–186, 188–189, 193–195, 198– 200; in India, 38, 40 postmortem rite. See funeral Preziosi, Donald, 278, 280 purification: in Balinese ritual, 216, 219–222, 224, 231, 243, 246, 261; and folk art, 78; in Japanese ritual, 46, 48, 59, 64, 73 Qianlong, Emperor, 132, 137 Queen Victoria, 133 radio, 205, 273 Raku ceramics, 1–2, 12–15, 51–52 Rama, 81 Ramseyer, Urs, 227–228 Rawson, Philip, 281, 287, 290–292 Reid, Anthony, 105 reproduction. See copy ritual: and art, 4–10; in Bali, 214, 216,

Index | 313

221, 223–225, 228, 230–232, 239–240, 242–245, 247–248, 250–254, 258; in the British army, 132; and Buddhist art, 142–146, 148–152, 154–157, 159, 161, 167–170; and Cambodian images, 192; implements, 133, 137; and Indian images, 35, 37-38; and Japanese earthenware, 46–50, 52–53, 56–59, 62–64, 68, 73; and Madhubani painting, 78–81, 87–89, 95; in Sumba, 104, 106, 118–119 sarungs, 7, 101–102, 105–106, 110, 116, 123, 220 seeing. See gaze sexual reproduction, 80, 100, 105, 250 sexuality, 110–111, 116–117, 119, 120 Shiva, 81, 88, 181–182, 185, 188–190, 194, 248, 250–251 shrines: in Bali, 5–6, 10, 216, 223, 238–255; and Buddhist art, 146, 148, 157–162, 164, 170; in India, 30; in Japan, 46–47, 49–57, 62–68, 72 Sita, 81 Smithsonian Institution, the, 13–14, 135 Soekmono, R., 243, 246 Sotheby’s, 137–138 souvenir/keepsake, 59, 142, 148, 152, 155, 157, 162, 169, 272 statuary: Balinese, 10, 238, 242, 244– 247, 250–252, 254, 261, 263–266; Cambodian, 9, 179–183, 185–196, 198–203; Esoteric Buddhist, 9, 148– 155; Indian, 4–5, 29, 32–33, 35, 37–38, 41, 43 Suharto, 114–115, 215–216, 222, 225–226 Sukarnoputri, Megawati, 10, 216–217, 222–236 supernatural, 33, 36, 100, 118, 121, 222 tabula, 239–240, 242, 267n.4 Tanaka, Stefan, 9 tea bowl, 1–2, 11–14, 48–49 tea ceremony, 3, 48, 51, 73

television, 5, 205, 273–277, 279–281, 294, 298–301 temples, 7, 8, 46–47, 142–143, 179, 221, 238, 264–265, 289–290, 295 textbook, 5, 6, 277, 281, 287, 294, 302 textiles: compared to wayang puppets, 290–292; and gender, 121–123, 247; ignored by Malraux, 296; in India, 84, 91; Marta Mete and, 108–111; Southeast Asian, 287–289 tourists, 108, 123, 262, 265; art production for, 86, 93, 100, 106, 264, 299; in the struggle between Cambodia and Thailand, 205; in Sumba, 6, 94, 100–102, 106–108 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 51 Tsuji Nobuo, 49 value, 1, 49, 87, 110, 133, 139, 148, 152, 222, 279, 290 Vequaud, Yves, 78, 89, 91–92 Victoria and Albert Museum, the, 85, 132, 134–137 Wagner, Fritz A., 281, 288, 292 wayang, 3, 5–6; compared to Madhubani painting, 87; as decoration on a keris, 227; introduction to, 272–274; objectification of, 287, 291, 293–294; as performance, 281–287; on television, 274–276, 280 Western: art, 21, 27, 29, 101; connoisseurs and collectors, 5, 8, 11, 14, 87, 287–288, 298; museums, 79, 87, 263, 264; scholars, 155, 244–245, 291–294; support for Megawati, 255; travelers, 134, 138; views of wayang, 273 widows, 6, 38, 90, 111–112, 260 Wiener, Margaret, 216–218, 221–223, 231 witchcraft, 6, 100, 104–106, 116, 121–122 yora (spirit mistress), 117–120

Production Notes for Mrázek and Pitelka | what’s the use of art? Cover and Interior designed by April Leidig-Higgins Text in Garamond PremierPro and display in Angie Composition by Copperline Book Services, Inc. Printing and binding by Edwards Brothers, Inc. Printed on 60# Finch Opaque, 500 ppi