This course presents some important vignettes of a complex, highly diverse India that is also witnessing unprecedented changes since its formal independence in 1947 from Great Britain. The lectures revolve around social dimensions of change, the continuing influence of ancient texts on contemporary India, political democracy, economic transition from the state to the market, gender relations, India's economic globalisation and changing world view. While one of the objectives is to capture the multifaceted process of change, the course also critically examines some of the tensions inherent in these changes. For example, how does gender inequality play itself out in a changing Indian society, how do the modernist conceptions of art entailing market valuation challenge the more socio-centric values found in South India, what are the politics linguistic identities, and how might India address its myriad development challenges such as poverty and unemployment. No specific prior knowledge is required. However, it would be helpful if students are aware of the socio political dynamics at play in contemporary India and keep themselves abreast with current affairs and debates in the country to fully appreciate the various dimensions and contours if the subject matter in the course. This course is taught in English. View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/hx8mhxb
7.4 Essentialism, fetishization & museumization
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Do curso por The University of Melbourne
Contemporary India
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The past in the present: traditional art forms in today's India
We will use arts as a lens to look at some of the general transformations in today’s India. The focus in this section will be to negate the modernity/tradition dichotomy and instead argue that traditions in India are constantly changing. These traditions adapt to the prevailing conditions, which present its own complexities. To understand them, specific concepts and tools will be introduced to better explain the realities of contemporary India, which simultaneously remains connected to its ancient past.
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Anthony D'CostaProfessor
School of Social and Political Sciences
Welcome back.
In this next part of the lecture, we're going to be talking about essentialism,
and two types of essentialism.
Though could, one could be called fetishization.
And another type of essentialism that we could call museumization.
Essentialism is really an aspect of a modernist world view,
in which things are not really seen as defined by their relationships.
So much as they're defined by some sort of inherent, internal, essential property.
Who I am, and what any thing is, based on its own independent nature.
Something internal to itself, independent of its
relationship to the world around it.
So this is an aspect of a kind of modernist worldview.
A modern it's built into the assumptions that are
you know, embedded in our practices and in our institutions,
these mythopraxises that we've been talking about.
So we're going to be looking at two types, types of essentialism here.
fetishizing and museumizing.
So essentialism describes an aspect of a world view in which
things are determined by their own internal independent essences.
I'm an independent individual.
All of things around me are all independent of each other.
And each thing is driven or shaped,
or its identity is based on its own inherent essence.
The alternative is characteristic of more traditional societies.
Traditional general, traditional societies tend to see people and
things as defined by their relationships to each other.
By their relationships to their context.
But if I'm defined by relationships, by my roles and
by my responsibilities and by my duties, then I am not independent.
I'm not free.
And the modern mythology insists on my freedom, and the freedom of everything.
Everything is independent.
Everything is self determining.
Everything has its own own internal essence.
And a closely related concept to essentialism is fetishization.
Freud, Lacan, Marx and many other people who have talked about
the rise of the modern world, explain fetishizing, explain
fetishization as the displacement of value.
Where you know, the value of the commodity for
example is rooted in labour.
It's rooted in the people who, you know, in natural world and
the resources of the natural world and the activities and
the efforts of the labourer to turn these natural materials into a commodity.
Then the commodity, when it's transformed by the market system of exchange
takes on a kind of quality of inherent value that is detached or independent
of the maker, and of the producer, and of the process of consumption.
So fetishization in general refers to the
displacement of value from one domain to another.
And in relation to art it's expressed in the concept of art for art's sake.
Which was a slogan that arose in the early 20th century as a way of
defining what modernity was all about.
That art exists for its own sake as a kind of fetish
rather than for the sake of diverse human purposes.
Art used to be made for aristocrats.
It used to be for the representation of family relationships, of nobility
or made to represent the glories of God, or the church, or something like that.
But art for its own sake
turns art into a kind of essential nature that is inherent in the object itself.
And it fetishizes the object as if it's an end in itself.
As if it doesn't exist for a human being, but it exists in its own terms.
In terms of its own inherent nature.
And in a similar way, academic knowledge about art
also is taken as something that is valuable in its own sake.
So, for its own sake.
That the image produced has some sort of essential inherent value in it.
And that value is to be extracted by a scholarship that
also has its own inherent value.
It's not necessarily in the service of any purpose other than
the knowledge for its own sake, art for its own sake.
But of course, this isn't really true.
This is a displacement of value.
The fetishized object and fetishized meanings that are fixed on the labels of
the museum, for example, are written about in the catalog, the art catalog that
describes all of the miniature paintings on this wall, for example.
This fetishized meanings and fetishized objects really do rest on something else.
Another value system that is being, in a sense, it's being concealed but
it's a sort of open concealment.
Everybody can see it but ultimately, the symbolism here is economic symbolism.
That these are precious objects.
And that the value of these things lies in their authenticity,
which is part of what this scholarship has to determine.
Because the difference between a genuine miniature painting of
the Congress School of the 17th century, for example, or 18th century.
The genuine article, the authentic article and
a copy or a fake is going to be immense.
It's huge.
That significance, that value is economic in nature.
Scholarship serves this economic value.
The scholar is the authenticator that tells you that you're getting value for
money if you're buying, if you're a museum and you're buying this precious object.
So the fetishizing of the object and the fetishizing of meaning
displaces the value from the sacred domain,
where these objects were mostly produced for religious purposes, for
sacred purposes, even if they're miniature paintings are produced for
an aristocracy, it's an aristocracy that is dedicated to Bhakti, to devotion.
And it displaces those values through the economic sphere, but
tends to conceal it, tends to deny it.
And it denies it by pretending as though the value
is really intrinsic in the object itself.
It’s not really economic value, it's the value of these inherent quality of art.
And the value of knowledge in and of itself, knowledge for its own sake,
art for its own sake.
In this image for example we see a type of mythopraxis,
of an aspect of mythopraxis.
Many scholars have called the museum gaze.
The museum gaze is very different from traditional
types of gazing which have been theorised in India.
They are concepts of Darshan, of having the, you know, which is sacred in nature.
Or Drishti, having the, the gaze of some sacred object or
sacred being directed towards you.
There's a give and take, a relational sense of a connection
between the devotee and the sacred object in traditional forms of gazing.
The museum gaze is something else.
It's based on the assumption, assumptions of a singular,
fetishized art object that is independent.
That is completely separate from me.
The dualistic way of looking at things, that the subject and
object are two entirely separate things.
And that I exist as an experiencer of art in a kind of
as a solitary, independent subject.
I'm independent of it, and it is independent of me.
So this assumption,
these sets of assumptions are embodied in a form of mythopraxis that
is expressed in a silent kind of psuedo-sacred mode of museum gazing
where the proper attitude of reverence is displayed for these objects.
That at one time, did have some
sacred significance but they're not really in worship in the museum.
They are fetishized, and what is…so
it no longer feel like really sacred gazing.
It feels like a kind of pseudo-sacred gazing.
A sacred gazing in which
you're gazing at these objects as something that
contains some mystical value in its own right.
But that, those mystical, essential values
that are presumed to exist in a work of art, serves to mystify
what is lying underneath this in an entire set of economic practices.
That have to do with leisure activities that are consumed by a cosmopolitan
middle class and upper class practices of collecting objects.
Practices of auctioning objects.
Of buying them, of displaying them, of donating them to museums,
of exhibiting them.
And insuring them.
All of these things rest on an economic foundation.
And the fetishizing of the art,
of the art object helps to mystify this whole practice.
Helps to obscure the economic foundation now which it rests.
So this is complicated in India because temples are
lots of, most temples are still in worship.
Lots of ancient temples that are celebrated in art
history are still in worship.
And and people visit these temples
in the context of cultural tourism, foreigners and Indians alike.
But there are also type there's also a type of traditional visiting.
A type of traditional travel that is related to sacred functions,
sacred purposes, pilgrimage.
So temples that are, that are still in worship, even temples that are in worship,
famous temples, don't escape the forces of economic imperialism.
They tend to be essentialized and fetishized and even museumized by the,
reclassification of the temple as a great monument, as a work of fine art.
So here in this photograph, you see they ambiguities between a temple.
This a portion of a famous temple in South India.
The Madurai Meenakshi Temple.
And the people who are visiting,
this portion of the temple has been transform into a museum, and
the people who are visiting this museum, some of them are foreigners, like me,
but the people that I'm taking a photograph of here are pilgrims.
And you could tell that they are pilgrims.
They're dress in a particular they're wearing these black and orange and
white vaisties that indicate that they are on a pilgrimage going to Kerala,
to the Temple of Sabarimala.
And on the way to that temple,
they visit a lot of other famous temples in Tamil Nadu and in Kerala on the way.
And so they are visiting this museum.
So here, it's quite ambiguous.
What is the, are they cultural tourists or are they pilgrims?
Well in a sense, they're both.
And they are gradually internalising and
and dealing with the notion that this temple contains fine
art by shifting their frame of reference.
In one context, they're visiting a museum, and they're looking at these objects, and
they're considering them to be works of art.
Although, they're interested primarily in the stories that are being told in these
paintings.
Which is something quite different from the way
an art connoisseur might look at these paintings and visit them.
Visit the museum in order to look at form, and shape, and colour, and various
aspects of the object as if it's a, you know to be valued in formalist terms.
And in this image,
we see the entrance to the temple museum at Madurai Meenakshi Temple.
The temple itself has been transformed into into a museum for certain people.
So if you are a foreigner,
you're not going to be allowed to go into the sanctum.
But you are going to be allowed into the temple if you pay a fee and
you go into the temple primarily seeing it as a museum.
And then within the temple, there is this portion
the Thousand Pillared Hall that's no longer used for rituals any more.
That hall has been transformed into this museum.
So you pay another fee to go into the museum, and
you see various things that are that make use of the museum form.
So with the rise of tourism as an important market sector in India, and
the reclassification of the material forms
of the sacred world, of the temples and Hindu imagery as art.
The temple itself is being transformed into an aesthetic fetish.
But it's not an aesthetic fetish for everybody.
For some of the people who come to this temple, they are just pilgrims,
or they devotees.
They don't have to pay a fee.
And they also have access to the sanctum
which foreign visitors don't have access to.
And they are able to use the temple in its own traditional terms.
So we can see that the ambiguity of art and
and sacred value, sacred functions, is
mediated by a kind of context sensitivity, a sort of compartmentalisation.
Depending on who you are and what your role is, and what your purpose is for
coming to the temple.
You may have to pay a fee, or you may not have to pay a fee.
And if you're a fee-paying foreigner,
then you're going to be only allowed access to certain parts of the temple.
And there's a museum that's provided specifically for you within the temple.
But if you are a devotee then, you know, more traditional types of arrangements and
traditional values are are activated.
So in this brief section,
we've looked at two types of essentialism that are relevance, relevant to the arts.
fetishization or fetishizm, and museumization.
So in the final concluding section,
we're going to consider two more manifestations of modernist essentialism.
That are expressed in practices or aspects of mythopraxis that are,
are embedded in routine routine activities of art conservation,
and the heritage-ization of traditional Indian art.
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