Material Culture and Asian Religions

Text, Image, Object

Benjamin Fleming, Richard Mann, Benjamin Fleming, Richard Mann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135013721
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Asian Religions

Traditionally, research on the history of Asian religions has been marked by a bias for literary evidence, privileging canonical texts penned in 'classical' languages. Not only has a focus on literary evidence shaped the dominant narratives about the religious histories of Asia, in both scholarship and popular culture, but it has contributed to the tendency to study different religious traditions in relative isolation from one another. Today, moreover, historical work is often based on modern textual editions and, increasingly, on electronic databases. What may be lost, in the process, is the visceral sense of the text as artifact – as a material object that formed part of a broader material culture, in which the boundaries between religious traditions were sometimes more fluid than canonical literature might suggest.

This volume brings together specialists in a variety of Asian cultures to discuss the methodological challenges involved in integrating material evidence for the reconstruction of the religious histories of South, Southeast, Central, and East Asia. By means of specific 'test cases, ' the volume explores the importance of considering material and literary evidence in concert. What untold stories do these sources help us to recover? How might they push us to reevaluate historical narratives traditionally told from literary sources? By addressing these questions from the perspectives of different subfields and religious traditions, contributors map out the challenges involved in interpreting different types of data, assessing the problems of interpretation distinct to specific types of material evidence (e.g., coins, temple art, manuscripts, donative inscriptions) and considering the issues raised by the different patterns in the preservation of such evidence in different locales. Special attention is paid to newly-discovered and neglected sources; to our evidence for trade, migration, and inter-regional cultural exchange; and to geographical locales that served as "contact zones" connecting cultures. In addition, the chapters in this volume represent the rich range of religious traditions across Asia – including Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto, and Chinese religions, as well as Islam and eastern Christianities.

1
Introduction

Material Culture and Religious Studies¹

Benjamin J. Fleming and Richard D. Mann

Truth does not “inhabit” only “the inner man,” or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself. When I return to myself from an excursion into the realm of dogmatic common sense or of science, I find, not a source of intrinsic truth, but a subject destined to the world.

(Merleau-Ponty 1961 [1945]: xi)

Writing in postwar France of the 1940s, Maurice Merleau-Ponty thus gave voice to the dilemma of the relationship of experience, knowledge, and the material world. Resisting the traditional isolation of abstract and rational discourse from embodied perception, he stressed that materiality and perception are one and the same and should not be distinguished:

[W]e cannot apply the classical distinction of form and matter to perception, nor can we conceive the perceiving subject as a consciousness which “interprets,” “deciphers,” or “orders” a sensible matter according to an ideal law which it possesses. Matter is “pregnant” with its form, which is to say that in the final analysis every perception takes place within a certain horizon and ultimately in the “world.” We experience a perception and its horizon “in action” …

(Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 12)

The challenge he poses is to consider the embodied human being as a functioning locus, a collection of gestures and actions that manifest within a gestalt or matrix of idea, experience, and form. He pushes us to rethink objects as a signifi-cant part of this matrix—not just as passive subjects for interpretation but also as active agents in shaping perception.²

Recently, scholars across the humanities have begun to return to questions of this sort,³ seeking to recover the integrated place of materiality in human culture and history through research under the rubric of “material culture.” To be sure, Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about objects have been explored for decades among artists and philosophers of art (e.g., Rosenberg 1964; Krauss 1977; Hobbs 2001). Disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, and art history, moreover, have long traditions of analyzing material data. It is in the interdisciplinary field of material culture studies, however, that the theorization of materiality has been brought to bear on the use of material data. John Kieschnick (2013), for instance, notes that this “relatively young discipline… examines artifacts as well as ideas about, and practices related to, artifacts, with artifacts defined as material objects created or modified by people”; as a result, “studies in material culture approach the subject from a different perspective, focusing on areas not necessarily emphasized in” anthropology and archaeology.

Such integrative approaches are particularly promising for the discipline of religious studies, which has traditionally focused on texts and downplayed or even denigrated material data. By virtue of a long-standing focus on belief, doctrine, and law in research on religion, there has been less attention given to sacred objects, sites, and structures—even despite their prominence in the ritual practice of many cultures.⁴ Attempts to integrate material data into the study of religion, moreover, have tended to read them through the lens of ideas and doctrines found in canonical texts. Even today, archaeological, architectural, and artistic evidence are often considered worthy of integration into religious histories only inasmuch as they reinforce evidence known from literature. Within religious studies, recent calls to engage with material culture are rooted in the understanding that there is more to know about religion, and its place in history and social life, than is revealed by the traditional focus on texts alone.⁵

The present volume contributes to this task with a focus on Asian religions, broadly conceived to include Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese religions, as well as Islam and Christianity. Building on trends in the specialist study of these traditions, we endeavor to study the “stuff” of Asian religions from perspectives that embrace more than the abstract ideas, beliefs, theologies, and doctrinal systems of any particular tradition. Rather than focusing on material aspects of Asian religions in isolation from texts and ideas, however, this volume explores their intersections with textuality—including but not limited to the physical forms of texts themselves.

In our view, a focus on material culture in Asian religions does not mean that one should simply elevate artifacts or inscriptions above literary sources and discourses.⁶ Such a polarizing approach only serves to reinforce the older dichotomy in religious studies between belief and practice, spirit and matter, soul and body, etc. Considerations of religious objects, sites, and structures ideally open the way for a more integrative approach of the sort that Merleau-Ponty invokes; such an approach can include texts, even canonical ones, by examining the ways that texts and other objects are systematized and utilized in relationship to one another within specific moments and contexts. Accordingly, this volume includes articles on temples, statuary, pilgrimage sites, coinage, amulets, and inscriptions. Yet it also includes articles on manuscripts and newspapers. In the case of manuscripts, some of our contributors are as concerned with the physical appearance, design, and production of texts, as they are with the beliefs, narratives, and doctrines recorded therein.

At the same time, this volume brings different areas of specialization in the study of Asian religions and material culture into conversation with one another. Through close analysis of specific examples, our contributors bring materiality to bear on the histories of individual religious traditions in East, South, and Southeast Asia. Taken together, they help to expand the definition and analysis of material culture to include texts as objects and objects in texts, as well as the definition and analysis of Asian religions to include Islam and Christianity along with Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese religions.

“Religion” and the Denigration of Materiality

The relative neglect of materiality in religious studies results, in part, from the roots of the modern concept of religion in the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment (W. C. Smith 1963: 32–50; Asad 1993: 40–48; Lopez 1998: 21–35). Anti-Catholic polemics famously involved a call to reject the sacred efficacy of external institutions and objects, figuring attention to rites and objects as “false” religion or “idolatry”; likewise, the rhetoric of Reformers like Luther promoted their own visions of “true” religion as rooted in the primacy of Scripture, read apart from the material trappings of art and ritual (W. C. Smith 1963: 35).⁷ With this textualization of piety came an understanding of religion as an internal, spiritual pursuit, for which any external supports and practices were secondary or corrupting (Kieschnick 2003: 20).

It was this ideal of piety, broadly speaking, that became reified in the Enlightenment separation of religion from the secular, which constructed religion as distinct from politics, economics, science, and other materialist pursuits. Even among Enlightenment thinkers who trumpeted rationality, however, idolatry continued to serve as a primary category of cultural and social critique. “In the lexicon of the Enlightenment,” David Morgan (2005: 130) suggests, “superstition is another word for idolatry,” and as such, it was imagined to stand in the way of the intellectual and social freedom that came with progress toward Reason. The distinction of religion and superstition, in turn, was predicated on the assumption that the attribution of power to an object was exemplary of the “primitive” thought, which was superseded by Christianity and secularism alike (Tambiah 1990: 6–12, 82; Kendall 2010: 95).

This distinctively modern definition of religion—constructed in contrast to the materiality of idolatry and to the materialism of secularism—shaped nineteenth-and early twentieth-century scholarship. Early research on the history of religions, for instance, employed categories like “idolatry,” “totemism,” and “animism” to deem some non-Western cultures as arrested in more “primitive” stages of development than the spiritualized Christian piety imagined to lie at the culmination of religion’s evolution (Kendall 2010: 96). Despite the abandonment of such evolutionary approaches, Robert Sharf (2001: 11) notes their lingering aftereffects even today:

The Cartesian metaphysical distinction between the sentient and the insentient continues to inform both theology and secular religious scholarship to the present day. Virtually all parties view the phenomenon of idolatry as resulting from some sort of metaphysical confusion…

There is a long-standing and continued tendency to read the materiality of religion as a mark of primitivity or corruption, in contrast to a disembodied spiritual or intellectual ideal. “Scholars of religions have been generally more comfortable with ideas than with things,” Gregory Schopen (1998: 256) stresses, and “have been particularly uncomfortable, perhaps, when people touched or rubbed or hugged or kissed things, especially when those things were themselves somewhat disconcerting—dead bodies, bits of bone or cloth, dirt or fingernails, dried blood.”

The devaluation of the material objects and practices of religion has been amplified in the case of Asian traditions, in part due to the origins of their modern study in missionary and colonial contexts. For instance, Jesuit rhetoric against Japanese and Chinese uses of ritual images and objects abounded (Sharf 2001: 1–2; Rambelli and Reinders 2012: 66–68, 89–99). “For the Europeans,” Sharf (2001: 2) observes, “the proliferation and veneration of images constituted incontrovertible evidence that Buddhists were benighted and idolatrous.” In the case of early modern Japan, Western attitudes toward religious images were also communicated through the association of conversion to Christianity with the destruction of Buddhist material culture.⁸

A similar dynamic is found in South Asia. Debates between Protestants and Catholics over the use of images in religious contexts were still current in nineteenth-century Europe and, as Robert DeCaroli (2008) has shown, informed the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarly interpretation of some South Asian religions as “idolatry.”⁹ Even the director of the archaeological survey of India, Sir John Marshall (1876–1958), regarded sculptural images in South Asia as a result of religious decline—away from Reason and toward idolatry (Marshall and Foucher 1982 [1940]: 152–53). This interpretation, in turn, was mapped onto evolutionary models of the development of religion. The history of South Asia was imagined as a line of deterioration from an idealized intellectual height, based in texts and philosophy, to the corruption of later “idolatry” and “superstition” (DeCaroli 2008: 25–26, 31). This scholarly narrative, not coincidentally, justified the perceived need for the civilizing effort and influence of British colonialism. The material culture of South Asian religions was thus viewed not as valuable historical data, but as a sign of cultural inferiority—openly denigrated even by a figure like Marshall, one of the colonial officers charged with collecting and analyzing it.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the Western study of Asian religions has been slow to incorporate material data. Prior to the end of the twentieth century, if one were to examine most studies of Asian religions, one would be hard pressed to find much attention given to art, sites, or objects.¹⁰ What tended to dominate the field of study, rather, were doctrines, mythologies, and institutional histories. Even though present-day visitors to places like India, Thailand, Korea, and Japan encounter a proliferation of religious images, this richness of material culture was strikingly absent from traditional research on the religious histories of these same regions (Eck 1985; Sharf 2001: 1–3; Rambelli and Reinders 2012: 3–4).

Materiality in the Discipline of Religious Studies

It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that departments of religious studies came to be a common feature of secular universities, especially in North America. This new institutional status sparked the concerted rethinking of religion as a category and the defense of religious studies as a discipline distinct from theology; both entailed, among other things, fresh efforts to move beyond Protestant ideas of spirituality as defined by text and belief. Some groundwork for the recovery of ritual and material elements was laid already by founding figures in the field like W. C. Smith (1963: 172–92) and Mircea Eliade (1971) by virtue of their call to consider religion as understood and experienced by believers. W. C. Smith’s (1963: 15–50, 172–74) critiques of the Protestant underpinnings of the very category of religion, for instance, were explicitly connected to a call for scholars of religious studies to pay more attention to art. Also influe...