Book by Laurie Margot Ross
Brill, 2016
The Encoded Cirebon Mask: Materiality, Flow, and Meaning along Java’s Islamic Northwest Coast sit... more The Encoded Cirebon Mask: Materiality, Flow, and Meaning along Java’s Islamic Northwest Coast situates masks and masking along Java’s north littoral as an original expression of Islam. Ross's interpretation is distinctive from many other scholars, who argue that canonical prohibitions on reproducing living beings situates masks as relics of indigenous beliefs that Muslim travelers could not eradicate, rather than an original contribution to Islam. Making use of archives, oral histories, rituals, and the performing objects themselves, Ross traces the mask’s trajectory from a popular entertainment and objets d'art to a stimulus for establishing a deeper connection to the Divine in late colonial Java, and its subsequent association with nationalism in post-independence Indonesia. Beyond expounding upon religious boundaries of knowledge, the author underscores objects as encoded in the pleasures and anxieties of their makers, custodians, and communities, making them vibrant articulations for embodiment.
Articles by Laurie Margot Ross
Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 84: 2019-20, 2021
When Governor General Daendels built the Jalan Raya Pos along Java’s north coast or pasisir (1808... more When Governor General Daendels built the Jalan Raya Pos along Java’s north coast or pasisir (1808-1811), he intended to improve the flow of traffic between Dutch-run plantations and their administrative Regents, the products of the colony, and circulating laborers. Floating entertainers from the Cirebon region were part of the work force. Many were wet-rice farmers who walked from village to village to perform between harvests. Some traveled southwest into the highlands, while others walked eastbound along the pasisir as far as Pekalongan. By studying colonial travel routes, this paper offers an ethno-historical account of how the mask specialists, many of whom trace their lineage to a Sufi saint, protected their craft for future generations.
This dissertation concerns topeng Cirebon, an old, virtuosic masked dance that once flourished a... more This dissertation concerns topeng Cirebon, an old, virtuosic masked dance that once flourished along Java’s northwest coast, and the realities of today. It asks how the Cirebonese people reconcile the growing prevalence of conservative Islam in the region with the idea of public performance. The orthodox Muslim world’s doctrinal injunctions on human representation have only recently impacted this gendered form, in which women may wear masks and portray male and female characters. Islam’s resurgence has inspired a debate, with artists now questioning their allegiance to a form seemingly at odds with their faith. Some dancers have modified their costumes to suggest conformity with local views of piety. This seemingly radical shift, in fact, is consonant with topeng’s long history of adapting to political and religious tensions that are traceable to Dutch hegemony in the region and later fortified under Indonesia’s first two presidents, Sukarno and Soeharto. The eventual ban on itinerant performance in the region after 1965 depleted topeng of much of its interiority, while forging a secular landscape where it came to symbolize Indonesian nationalist identity, domestically and abroad. I argue that topeng’s sacred topography hinges on the master performer’s fine-tuned capacity to translate and adapt to her surroundings, even when the conditions are inhospitable. The material culture associated with topeng is central to the story. Topeng’s longevity has been dependent upon its geographical and functional mobility. While this form has long been associated with ritual in the Cirebonese imaginary, the mask’s trajectory in Java has enjoyed an even longer affiliation as a popular entertainment. This accessibility made the mask multivalent, as an entertainment and an instrument of proselytizing during conversions to Islam in sixteenth century Java. How this translation occurred and how it is understood today is the basis of this study.
Asian Theatre Journal, Jan 1, 2005
Indonesia and the Malay World, Jan 1, 2011
This article examines the role of state intervention on itinerant artists in the Cirebon region o... more This article examines the role of state intervention on itinerant artists in the Cirebon region one year before and after Suharto's 1965 coup d'état (Gestok). Two artist identification cards from Majalengka are central to the study: the first one was inaugurated six months before the coup, the second card anticipated Gestok's first anniversary. Although the registries were launched by two political regimes with disparate agendas, both were issued by the Regency of Majalengka's Education and Culture Department.
Asian Theatre Journal, Jan 1, 2011
Talks by Laurie Margot Ross
Panel: Sea Currents: The 19th-Century Ocean World
Laurie Margot Ross
Cornell University
SSRC... more Panel: Sea Currents: The 19th-Century Ocean World
Laurie Margot Ross
Cornell University
SSRC 2012-2013 Transregional Research Fellow
The sea has special significance in Sufism, residing in its non-material essence; in its reflection of the spiritual being. The sea is infinite. Dry land is substantial. Sufism co-exists in the real and spiritual worlds defined by God. It is not surprising, then, that aboard a Netherlands East Indies ship traversing the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, Muslim peasant artists who were scheduled to perform at the 1893 Chicago colonial fair were busy, secretly destroying magic amulets on the versos of dozens of masks with appropriated found materials they discovered on the ship. The vast, luminous waters were the agent of metamorphoses. Not only did they allow the products of the Dutch colony (chiefly coffee and tea) and its Native arts to reach a global audience; they also gave agency to the subalterns on board. This paper looks at two synergistic dyads that existed in tangent to each other: first, the material/spiritual connection and, second, the outer surface/ inner meaning of the masks. Although their exterior aesthetic was not destroyed, defiling the inner faces vitiated the objects’ inherent powers. I will show how the Sufic act of effacement, fanāʾ (passing away)—a concept pertaining to humans and non-humans alike—occurred through the available materials and means that only the ocean world could provide.
The late folklorist Alan Dundes lamented a popular misconception about the trajectory of elite ar... more The late folklorist Alan Dundes lamented a popular misconception about the trajectory of elite arts in South and Southeast Asia. While acknowledging that borrowing occurs between elite, popular, and folk artists, he stressed "the direction of transmission is almost always from the folk to the popular/mass or the élite, rather than the other way around." Topeng Cirebon, a virtuosic mask form from Java's northwest coast, whose stars are day laborers who trace their lineage to a Sufi saint, is often presumed to have a similar trajectory. Their participation in one of the oldest extant performance modalities in the Malay world suggests more is here than meets the eye. It is, in fact, the eye that I wish to invoke in this talk, metaphorically and representationally, by looking thoughtfully at the Cirebon mask-a piece of lifeless matter frozen in its expression that is brought to life when placed over the human face. In it, two opposing worlds exist tangent to each other: the outer visage viewed by the audience; and the inner one, a mystery known only to its wearer. The audience responds to an expressive face, but for these pedigreed dancers, emotional and spiritual content is accessed through the inner face. A variety of amulets executed on the verso of some masks delineate the flexibility of these artists from the margin in adapting to the needs of the day. With the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), more Javanese Muslims performed the haj than ever before. Upon their return home, freshly minted hajis traveled the countryside interpreting the Quran and teaching basic Arabic to village scribes. This paper shows that the blending of Arabic with older, indigenous amulets was an original synthesis of Islam that elegantly bridged the form's outer (zahir) and inner (batin) dimensions.
Book Chapters by Laurie Margot Ross
Performance, Popular Culture, and Piety in Muslim Southeast Asia. Timothy P. Daniels, Ed.
Conference Presentations by Laurie Margot Ross
“The Mask as Conduit for Knowing God in Indonesia”
This paper describes parallels between dzikir ... more “The Mask as Conduit for Knowing God in Indonesia”
This paper describes parallels between dzikir and masks through the prism of Muslim dancers who trace their lineage to a Sufi saint in rural Java, Indonesia. These pedigreed women and men dance to the musical accompaniment of a percussion ensemble (gamelan) led by the drummer. Music plays an important function in this rural tradition. So, too, does prayer; however, not in the usual sense of al-sama or other uttered communal forms of remembrance. Rather, the masked dancers privilege the intimate, silent dzikir that emanates from the heart. Understanding this contradiction requires turning our attention to how emotions are embodied and expressed when the most plastic part of the human body—the face—is covered with a mask. It also speaks to the power of internalized prayer in public spaces.
Abstract
The “material turn” in anthropology, religious studies, and related fields brings magic ... more Abstract
The “material turn” in anthropology, religious studies, and related fields brings magic back into the conversation about statues, masks and other manifestations of things otherwise unseen. Armed with a new theoretical tool kit, students of material religion are again attentive to the ways that these objects were made to “work” as magical, agentive, animated, or empowered things and to how empowerment is a function of the sacred and mundane technologies and material substances deployed in their manufacture, veneration, and use. Where once-sacred objects now inhabit secular museum spaces as objects of art or ethnography, an appreciation of their active former lives broadens the possible scope of exhibitions and bridges the divide between museum protocols and popular religious practice.
Asianist writing about magical things usually addresses specialist audiences, either by area or discipline. This roundtable is intended as a larger conversation, bringing together five scholars working in different parts of Asia, whose work draws upon anthropology, art history, religious studies, Asian Studies, and museum practice. Sarah Horton explores the agency of “secret buddhas” in Japan: empowered statues despite the fact that they are enclosed in box-like shrines (zushi) and cannot be seen. Joyce Flueckiger articulates an indigenous Indian theory of the agency of materiality through performative and ethnographic analysis of a range of different kinds of material that are not usually included in the study of religion. James Robson’s decoding of the diverse materials used to animate Chinese local religious statuary ranges from textual and genealogical analyses to questions of botany and zoology. Another magic is at work in the masks Laurie Margot Ross studies from coastal Java, Indonesia, whose amulets often interface with the inner eye chakra, synthesizing indigenous, Hindu-Buddhist, and Islamic meaning along the Indian Ocean rim. Chia-yu Hu, a specialist on Taiwan Aborigine culture, found herself organizing a wedding for a Paiwan wooden ancestral post preserved in the Anthropology Museum of National Taiwan University, engaging in the Paiwan community’s sense of the pole as an active presence.
Each participant will introduce a PowerPoint image of an object that helped to open a particular path of intellectual inquiry.
Organized by Laurel Kendall (President, Association for Asian Studies). Discussants: Sarah J. Horton, Laurie Margot Ross, James Robson, Joyce B. Flueckiger, & Chia-yu Hu
Hofstra University will be presenting a symposium on November 3, 2016 that unites scholars from t... more Hofstra University will be presenting a symposium on November 3, 2016 that unites scholars from the disciplines of anthropology, ethnomusicology, folklore, theater and Asian studies to sacred traditions of South and Southeast Asia. Through the participation in workshops given by scholar-practitioners, performances of a central Javanese Gamelan orchestra, Sundanese rod puppetry theater, Sikh religious hymns, academic lectures, and a one-day installation of an exhibit of Malay puppets, costumes, instruments, and ethnographic photos of healing performances, participants in this symposium will gain insight into complex performance forms and explore the paradoxical issues currently facing the traditional arts and their definition as intangible cultural heritage in South and Southeast Asia.
Book Reviews by Laurie Margot Ross
Inside Indonesia 136: April-june, 2019
Alit Djajasoebrata's visual and cultural history of Indonesian textiles, emphasizing those of Jav... more Alit Djajasoebrata's visual and cultural history of Indonesian textiles, emphasizing those of Java and Sunda.
Djajasoebrata, Alit. Flowers from Universe: Textiles of Java.(Volendam, The Netherlands: LM Publishers, 2018). Intro: Toeti Heraty N Roosseno. English translation of the original Dutch-language version: "Bloemen van het Heelal: De kleurrijke wereld vande textile op Java," Amsterdam," Luitingh-Sijtoff BV, 1984.
Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkunkunde/Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia (BKI), 2019
Along Java's Islamic Northwest Coast. Leiden / Boston: Brill. [Studies on Performing Arts & Liter... more Along Java's Islamic Northwest Coast. Leiden / Boston: Brill. [Studies on Performing Arts & Literature of the Islamicate World 2], 2016, xvii + 374 pp. ISBN: 9789004311374, price: EUR 103.00 (hardcover); 9789004315211, EUR 103.00 (ebook). Topeng Cirebon is a masked dance tradition of West Java. It is a popular symbol of local identity today, but in the second half of the twentieth century it went from being an important form of entertainment and ritual to nearly dying out. Laurie Ross's detailed study explores these shifts in fortune through an engrossing narrative that takes us far beyond emblematic culture and delves into the complex histories and meanings of Topeng. This book speaks not only to the study of the performing arts, but also to Islam and the social history of Indonesia. Ross firmly imbeds her history of Topeng in Cirebon's complex mes-tizo culture, which includes Javanese, Chinese, and Arabic elements, along with European colonial influences. A wealth of information is catalogued and multiple paths explored. Tropes of flow, confluence, and hybridity inform the work as she traces threads of performance practice, cultural meanings, mask forms, Sufi practices, commerce, and politics. She shows how traces of these connections remain in Topeng practice even as it changes. These paths extend through complex networks from Cirebon to other parts of Indonesia, Asia, and across the globe. This exploration ultimately provides insights into how contemporary performance practice remains grounded in place, time, and society. Of the many topics covered in this book, two major themes are the mystical and the political. Ross explores aspects of Sufi or tasawwuf practice, in particular dzikir-the use of breath, song, and memory to fix God in one's heart-finding many parallels with Topeng practice. The experience of wearing the masks aligns with tasawwuf principles, in particular 'a rigorous adherence to navigating the world while sustaining the inward journey' (p. 141). Restricted sight and holding the mask by biting on a tab combine to make a dancer intensely aware of their body, their surroundings, and the breath that connects them. This experiential aspect of Topeng performance links to tasawwuf awareness of one's place in and relation to the world. This in turn, precludes a trance state, unlike some other masked dance traditions. One older dancer, Miska, said in relation to the most refined character, 'Panji is the stillness of our heart, he teaches us how to live among the noise of life through internal stability' (p. 139). As Ross points out, this is clearly in sync with Sufi ideas of 'solitude within society.' One physical locus of both mystical and demographic flows is the cape, which, especially for those from familial dance lineages, is often an antique silk batik scarf with a distinctive animal and floral motif known as
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Book by Laurie Margot Ross
Articles by Laurie Margot Ross
Talks by Laurie Margot Ross
Laurie Margot Ross
Cornell University
SSRC 2012-2013 Transregional Research Fellow
The sea has special significance in Sufism, residing in its non-material essence; in its reflection of the spiritual being. The sea is infinite. Dry land is substantial. Sufism co-exists in the real and spiritual worlds defined by God. It is not surprising, then, that aboard a Netherlands East Indies ship traversing the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, Muslim peasant artists who were scheduled to perform at the 1893 Chicago colonial fair were busy, secretly destroying magic amulets on the versos of dozens of masks with appropriated found materials they discovered on the ship. The vast, luminous waters were the agent of metamorphoses. Not only did they allow the products of the Dutch colony (chiefly coffee and tea) and its Native arts to reach a global audience; they also gave agency to the subalterns on board. This paper looks at two synergistic dyads that existed in tangent to each other: first, the material/spiritual connection and, second, the outer surface/ inner meaning of the masks. Although their exterior aesthetic was not destroyed, defiling the inner faces vitiated the objects’ inherent powers. I will show how the Sufic act of effacement, fanāʾ (passing away)—a concept pertaining to humans and non-humans alike—occurred through the available materials and means that only the ocean world could provide.
Book Chapters by Laurie Margot Ross
Conference Presentations by Laurie Margot Ross
This paper describes parallels between dzikir and masks through the prism of Muslim dancers who trace their lineage to a Sufi saint in rural Java, Indonesia. These pedigreed women and men dance to the musical accompaniment of a percussion ensemble (gamelan) led by the drummer. Music plays an important function in this rural tradition. So, too, does prayer; however, not in the usual sense of al-sama or other uttered communal forms of remembrance. Rather, the masked dancers privilege the intimate, silent dzikir that emanates from the heart. Understanding this contradiction requires turning our attention to how emotions are embodied and expressed when the most plastic part of the human body—the face—is covered with a mask. It also speaks to the power of internalized prayer in public spaces.
The “material turn” in anthropology, religious studies, and related fields brings magic back into the conversation about statues, masks and other manifestations of things otherwise unseen. Armed with a new theoretical tool kit, students of material religion are again attentive to the ways that these objects were made to “work” as magical, agentive, animated, or empowered things and to how empowerment is a function of the sacred and mundane technologies and material substances deployed in their manufacture, veneration, and use. Where once-sacred objects now inhabit secular museum spaces as objects of art or ethnography, an appreciation of their active former lives broadens the possible scope of exhibitions and bridges the divide between museum protocols and popular religious practice.
Asianist writing about magical things usually addresses specialist audiences, either by area or discipline. This roundtable is intended as a larger conversation, bringing together five scholars working in different parts of Asia, whose work draws upon anthropology, art history, religious studies, Asian Studies, and museum practice. Sarah Horton explores the agency of “secret buddhas” in Japan: empowered statues despite the fact that they are enclosed in box-like shrines (zushi) and cannot be seen. Joyce Flueckiger articulates an indigenous Indian theory of the agency of materiality through performative and ethnographic analysis of a range of different kinds of material that are not usually included in the study of religion. James Robson’s decoding of the diverse materials used to animate Chinese local religious statuary ranges from textual and genealogical analyses to questions of botany and zoology. Another magic is at work in the masks Laurie Margot Ross studies from coastal Java, Indonesia, whose amulets often interface with the inner eye chakra, synthesizing indigenous, Hindu-Buddhist, and Islamic meaning along the Indian Ocean rim. Chia-yu Hu, a specialist on Taiwan Aborigine culture, found herself organizing a wedding for a Paiwan wooden ancestral post preserved in the Anthropology Museum of National Taiwan University, engaging in the Paiwan community’s sense of the pole as an active presence.
Each participant will introduce a PowerPoint image of an object that helped to open a particular path of intellectual inquiry.
Organized by Laurel Kendall (President, Association for Asian Studies). Discussants: Sarah J. Horton, Laurie Margot Ross, James Robson, Joyce B. Flueckiger, & Chia-yu Hu
Book Reviews by Laurie Margot Ross
Djajasoebrata, Alit. Flowers from Universe: Textiles of Java.(Volendam, The Netherlands: LM Publishers, 2018). Intro: Toeti Heraty N Roosseno. English translation of the original Dutch-language version: "Bloemen van het Heelal: De kleurrijke wereld vande textile op Java," Amsterdam," Luitingh-Sijtoff BV, 1984.
Laurie Margot Ross
Cornell University
SSRC 2012-2013 Transregional Research Fellow
The sea has special significance in Sufism, residing in its non-material essence; in its reflection of the spiritual being. The sea is infinite. Dry land is substantial. Sufism co-exists in the real and spiritual worlds defined by God. It is not surprising, then, that aboard a Netherlands East Indies ship traversing the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, Muslim peasant artists who were scheduled to perform at the 1893 Chicago colonial fair were busy, secretly destroying magic amulets on the versos of dozens of masks with appropriated found materials they discovered on the ship. The vast, luminous waters were the agent of metamorphoses. Not only did they allow the products of the Dutch colony (chiefly coffee and tea) and its Native arts to reach a global audience; they also gave agency to the subalterns on board. This paper looks at two synergistic dyads that existed in tangent to each other: first, the material/spiritual connection and, second, the outer surface/ inner meaning of the masks. Although their exterior aesthetic was not destroyed, defiling the inner faces vitiated the objects’ inherent powers. I will show how the Sufic act of effacement, fanāʾ (passing away)—a concept pertaining to humans and non-humans alike—occurred through the available materials and means that only the ocean world could provide.
This paper describes parallels between dzikir and masks through the prism of Muslim dancers who trace their lineage to a Sufi saint in rural Java, Indonesia. These pedigreed women and men dance to the musical accompaniment of a percussion ensemble (gamelan) led by the drummer. Music plays an important function in this rural tradition. So, too, does prayer; however, not in the usual sense of al-sama or other uttered communal forms of remembrance. Rather, the masked dancers privilege the intimate, silent dzikir that emanates from the heart. Understanding this contradiction requires turning our attention to how emotions are embodied and expressed when the most plastic part of the human body—the face—is covered with a mask. It also speaks to the power of internalized prayer in public spaces.
The “material turn” in anthropology, religious studies, and related fields brings magic back into the conversation about statues, masks and other manifestations of things otherwise unseen. Armed with a new theoretical tool kit, students of material religion are again attentive to the ways that these objects were made to “work” as magical, agentive, animated, or empowered things and to how empowerment is a function of the sacred and mundane technologies and material substances deployed in their manufacture, veneration, and use. Where once-sacred objects now inhabit secular museum spaces as objects of art or ethnography, an appreciation of their active former lives broadens the possible scope of exhibitions and bridges the divide between museum protocols and popular religious practice.
Asianist writing about magical things usually addresses specialist audiences, either by area or discipline. This roundtable is intended as a larger conversation, bringing together five scholars working in different parts of Asia, whose work draws upon anthropology, art history, religious studies, Asian Studies, and museum practice. Sarah Horton explores the agency of “secret buddhas” in Japan: empowered statues despite the fact that they are enclosed in box-like shrines (zushi) and cannot be seen. Joyce Flueckiger articulates an indigenous Indian theory of the agency of materiality through performative and ethnographic analysis of a range of different kinds of material that are not usually included in the study of religion. James Robson’s decoding of the diverse materials used to animate Chinese local religious statuary ranges from textual and genealogical analyses to questions of botany and zoology. Another magic is at work in the masks Laurie Margot Ross studies from coastal Java, Indonesia, whose amulets often interface with the inner eye chakra, synthesizing indigenous, Hindu-Buddhist, and Islamic meaning along the Indian Ocean rim. Chia-yu Hu, a specialist on Taiwan Aborigine culture, found herself organizing a wedding for a Paiwan wooden ancestral post preserved in the Anthropology Museum of National Taiwan University, engaging in the Paiwan community’s sense of the pole as an active presence.
Each participant will introduce a PowerPoint image of an object that helped to open a particular path of intellectual inquiry.
Organized by Laurel Kendall (President, Association for Asian Studies). Discussants: Sarah J. Horton, Laurie Margot Ross, James Robson, Joyce B. Flueckiger, & Chia-yu Hu
Djajasoebrata, Alit. Flowers from Universe: Textiles of Java.(Volendam, The Netherlands: LM Publishers, 2018). Intro: Toeti Heraty N Roosseno. English translation of the original Dutch-language version: "Bloemen van het Heelal: De kleurrijke wereld vande textile op Java," Amsterdam," Luitingh-Sijtoff BV, 1984.