Colonial monument restoration drained sacred sites of living religious use
Evidence
More and more Europeans were being born in Southeast Asia, and being tempted to make it their home. Monumental archaeology, increasingly linked to tourism, allowed the state to appear as the guardian of a generalized, but also local, Tradition. The old sacred sites were to be incorporated into the map of the colony, and their ancient prestige (which, if this had disappeared, as it often had, the state would attempt to revive) draped around the mappers. This paradoxical situation is nicely illustrated by the fact that the reconstructed monuments often had smartly laid-out lawns around them, and always explanatory tablets, complete with datings, planted here and there. Moreover, they were to be kept empty of people, except for perambulatory tourists (no religious ceremonies or pilgrimages, so far as possible). Museumized this way, they were repositioned as regalia for a secular colonial state. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 674
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the author’s interests in material culture and ritual: the state’s appropriation of sacred sites parallels themes in Jane Eyre (enclosure and possession) only weakly; better parallel is the museumizing logic in the ADDENDUM articles on sacrifice and trees-as-infrastructure. — connects to: Environmental degradation of sacred land constitutes a recognition injustice — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 236
- ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s theme of how infrastructure repositions living things — here, how museumization repositions sacred monuments as secular state regalia.