Description

I am going to focus on attempts to make the visible invisible by destroying it as well as how virtual presence complicates the seemingly straightforward boundary between the visible and the invisible. I will first examine some important cases of religious iconoclasm in modern India and China. The prominent visibility of religion in India will not surprise anyone, but it can help us to highlight the ways it is made invisible in China. Secondly, I will examine the destruction of ‘the past’ and the construction of ‘the new’ (破旧立新,po jiu li xin in Maoist language) in the building of modern cities and the visualization of ‘the modern’ in India and China.

Both India and China have historically experienced campaigns of iconoclasm which can be glossed as ‘violent destruction of sacred objects’. Besides destruction of icons and objects one also finds complex narratives of subjugation, incorporation and transformation of icons in rival visual regimes of signification. Such histories testify to the power of the icons and raise the question of the afterlife of images after destruction or transformation. Destruction is often not total; traces remain and what has been destroyed can be remade. This reminds us that visual regimes show a continuum between total visibility and total invisibility with a dynamic ‘in-between’. In the modern period a major competitor for visual dominance is secular modernity which aims to encompass the sacred icon and give it its limited space. These longue durée histories have therefore not ended with the coming of modernity. In fact, the sacred life of the image and its employment or destruction is today part of major cultural narratives and contestations in India in China.

Peter van der Veer is Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity at Göttingen. He taught Anthropology at the Free University in Amsterdam, at Utrecht University and at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1994 he was appointed as Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University, a position he continues to hold. He received the Hendrik Muller Award for his social science study of religion. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Van der Veer works on religion and nationalism in Asia and Europe. He has just published The Modern Spirit of Asia (Princeton University Press 2014) on the comparative study of religion and nationalism in India and China.

Among his major publications are Gods on Earth (LSE Monographs, 1988), Religious Nationalism (University of California Press, 1994), and Imperial Encounters (Princeton University Press, 2001). He was editor or co-editor of Orientalism and Post-Colonial Predicament (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), Nation and Migration (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), Conversion to Modernities (Routledge, 1997), Nation and Religion (Princeton University Press, 1999), Media, War, and Terrorism (Routledge-Curzon, 2003), Patterns of Middle-Class Consumption in India and China (Sage 2007), The Globalization of Religious Networks (MacMillan 2012). In 2013 he delivered the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester on the Value of Comparison.