Anthropology Colloquium

Laurel Kendall

"Beautiful and Efficacious Statues: Magic and Art in Vietnamese Popular Religion" In his provocative rethink of the anthropology of art, Alfred Gell offers the notion that wooden statues function much like spirit mediums as receptacles for the gods and offers the radical suggestion that objects be understood in a manner analogous to social actors enmeshed in relationships with other social actors: the idol obeys the social rules laid down for idols as co-present others and the worshippers observe social rules toward idols.

A discussion of the production and use of votive statues in contemporary Vietnam draws on Gell's insights in the context of a booming market in religious goods where questions of efficacy and commodity value are inextricably intertwined.

Laurel Kendall is curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. She recently worked with the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology to produce the exhibition “Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit,” for which she was awarded a Friendship Medal by the government of Vietnam. She is best known for her many publications on Korea including Shamans, Housewives and Other Restless Spirits (UH Press, 1985) and Getting Married in Korea (U of California Press, 1996).

cosponsored with UHM Center for Southeast Asian Studies and Museum Studies Certificate Program

Event Sponsor
Anthropology Dept., UH Manoa

More Information
Denise Wandasan, 956-7153, wandasan@hawaii.edu

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