Material Acts: Agency of Materiality in India

FAIN: FT-61455-14

Joyce B. Flueckiger
Emory University (Atlanta, GA 30322-1018)

This project will articulate an indigenous Indian theory of the agency of materiality through performative and ethnographic analyses of material associated with religious practices. The title, Material Acts, plays off J.L. Austin's term "speech acts"--utterances that do/create something. In an Indian worldview, both animate and inanimate things/beings have the potential to act--to transform and create (meaning, identity, theology). I will listen for how people talk about and use particular materialities, focusing on: female guising by male festival celebrants, women's ornaments, material abundance of Hindu ritual, cement figures who are not worshipped, and goddess shrine architecture. I conclude by abstracting from these examples a broad Indian/Hindu theory of material agency that will expand the boundaries of "what counts" in the study of religion and offer new ways to think about materiality in the wider study of religion, contributing to NEH's Bridging Cultures initiative.

Associated Products

Standing in Cement: Ravana on the Chhattisgarhi Plains (Article)
Title: Standing in Cement: Ravana on the Chhattisgarhi Plains
Author: Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger
Abstract: Framed by recent interest in the agency of materiality, this essay analyzes,through a performative-ethnographic lens, possibilities created and questions raised by the cement images of Ravan, the antagonist of the Ramayana epic tradition, found throughout the central plains of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. While in Ramayan verbal narratives, Ravan dies, here in Chhattisgarh, materially he stands and is much more visible than the hero-god Ram. Why is this so? I suggest that the materiality of Ravan images creates the possibility of a spectrum of (often unarticulated) Ravan-dominant ideologies/theologies and identities: Ravan’s images stand as neighbours, boundary watchmen, or simply part of the landscape, often barely noticed; he is honoured as a Brahmin, a wise man, and a Gond ancestral king; he is integrated into a Gond cosmology unrelated to the Ramayan; and his material presence questions dominant variants of the Ramayan narrative.
Year: 2017
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: South Asian History and Culture
Publisher: Taylor & Francis

---