Demons and Gods on Display: The Anthropology of Display and Worldmaking

TY - BOOK

T1 - Demons and Gods on Display

T2 - The Anthropology of Display and Worldmaking

AU - Swancutt, Katherine

N1 - Funding Information: Both this introduction and the special issue as a whole emerged from panels held at the Association for Asian Studies in Asia annual conferences over the course of two years. Our endeavor started with a double-panel session in 2019 called “Popular Religion on the Rise? (I): New Gods, New Demons, New Times” and “Popular Religion on the Rise? (II): New Landscapes, New Gods, New Cosmologies,” which Laurel Kendall and I co-organized in Bangkok, Thailand. We continued with another panel in 2020 devoted to “Demons and Gods on Display: The Pageantry of Popular Religion as Crossroads Encounters,” which I organized in Kobe, Japan. I am grateful to all who participated in the panels. Especial thanks go to Janet Alison Hoskins, Laurel Kendall, and Kari Telle for stimulating comments on this introduction, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their generous remarks. This article is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 856543). Publisher Copyright: © Nanzan University Anthropological Institute.

PY - 2023/7/18

Y1 - 2023/7/18

N2 - Across Asia, display is central to the creative process of worldmaking. This issue introduces “the anthropology of display” as a subfield in its own right that illuminates how people, spirits, gods, demons, ghosts, and their ritual props, offerings, effigies, or emblems manifest their powers and presence. A display is not just the static or unmoving framing of an image that invites contemplation rather than participation; it may unfold as one of the many moving, lively, and performative parts in a public event that generates deeply recursive imaginaries of the cosmos. Bringing the anthropology of religion, magic, exchange, art, and performance into conversation with museum anthropology, this issue shows that display is often used to push at the edges of the social and cosmic order. People and spirits may harness the power of display to steer rituals, ceremonies, and festivals in their preferred directions. Displays of this sort may unleash moral ideals of cultural heritage and plurality, aesthetic deliberations about the future, and new anthropological ways of envisioning the human and otherworldly.

AB - Across Asia, display is central to the creative process of worldmaking. This issue introduces “the anthropology of display” as a subfield in its own right that illuminates how people, spirits, gods, demons, ghosts, and their ritual props, offerings, effigies, or emblems manifest their powers and presence. A display is not just the static or unmoving framing of an image that invites contemplation rather than participation; it may unfold as one of the many moving, lively, and performative parts in a public event that generates deeply recursive imaginaries of the cosmos. Bringing the anthropology of religion, magic, exchange, art, and performance into conversation with museum anthropology, this issue shows that display is often used to push at the edges of the social and cosmic order. People and spirits may harness the power of display to steer rituals, ceremonies, and festivals in their preferred directions. Displays of this sort may unleash moral ideals of cultural heritage and plurality, aesthetic deliberations about the future, and new anthropological ways of envisioning the human and otherworldly.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85166275519&partnerID=8YFLogxK

M3 - Book

SN - 1882-6865

VL - 82

T3 - Asian Ethnology

BT - Demons and Gods on Display

PB - Asian Ethnology

ER -