Museums, religious objects, and the flourishing realm of the supernatural in modern Asia

This chapter extends outside the museum to consider how people in East and Southeast Asia relate to sacred objects in the context of contemporary popular religion. Except for those acquired archaeologically, the religious objects from Asia now residing in museums have been diverted from their usual circuits within living networks of devotion. Many were captured by Western explorers, antiquarians, and scholars in the course of their own circuits of travel in Asia (Byrne 2016). With few exceptions, once inside museums these objects are quarantined from the devotional practices of believers, and while this does not spell the demise of their efficacious supernatural power it has tended to mean they have become subject to active processes of discursive secularization. Their reputations for miraculous power and their lineal histories of empowerment tend either to be ignored in museum discourse or consigned in the past tense. Religious objects exist very uncomfortably in the secular rational theatre of modernity where objects are not supposed to “behave themselves as subjects,” a realm where people are supposed to be in charge not just of themselves but also of the materiality in their lives (Pels 2010, 613). The followers of popular religion in Thailand, China, and the space of the Chinese diaspora, the areas from which I draw my examples, have in common a conviction that the buildings and objects associated with the spirits and deities they worship are animated by miraculously efficacious supernatural power. “Associated” is perhaps too weak a word: they apprehend the materiality of these places and things to be continuous with the divinities they worship or placate. For these people, who number in the hundreds of millions, the places and objects in question are animated in a manner not incompatible with Jane Bennett’s (2010) understanding of material vibrancy. The scholarly term “popular religion” will be used to describe the beliefs and practices of these devotees, thus distinguishing their worship from the tenets of institutional, text- based, orthodox religion. Popular religion entails a relationship to the material world that departs radically from that endorsed by modern ontologies of secular rationalism. An argument can be made that museums in Asia which exhibit religious objects should draw closer to their “public” by closing the gap between the space of the museum and the space of popular religious practice.