Abstract
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s vision of cultures as heaps of ashes and spirits hovering over them 1 provokes a simple question: when cultures fade away (provided they exist in the first place), what is left over? To turn this question on its head, what place and meaning do the acts of destruction have in different cultures, both past and present?
Fabio Rambelli and Eric Reinders’ new book casts light on the complex and multifarious relations between religion and violence in the cultural contexts of East Asia, namely China and Japan. Moving away from a narrow definition of iconoclasm, the authors attempt instead to study the instances of iconoclasm that do not so readily conform to the above definition. In doing so case-by-case, and from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, the authors argue that if the term itself can be re-framed to include acts of violence against sacred images, bodies and cultural meanings historically encountered in East Asia, such re-formulation would allow unprecedented access to the terrain of concepts related to culture and human agency, not only in East Asia, but in principle.
Discarding the distinctly Western notions of opposition between sacred and material, in Part 1 the authors point out that, just as the Buddhist icons were produced and experienced as ‘living images’, the Buddhist bodies, too, could be ‘crafted’ by the means of monastic precepts and symbolic projection of the patriarch’s images onto the monks’ bodies. The Buddhist strategies of sacralisation aimed at objects, places and people, in particular the rhetoric of animation that permeates a whole variety of ritual acts and doctrines, work towards creating a Buddhist habitus (a notion derived from Bourdieu by the authors) that represents a certain order. Material objects (ritual implements, robes, icons, sacred images and texts) are therefore reflections of such order; they act as vessels to convey a certain notion of power, or signs and tools of empowerment. 2 And this, the authors argue, can create a strong incentive for iconoclasts and acts of violence against Buddhist objects, bodies, places and ideas that aim to deny or attempt to destroy their cultural meaning.
Part 2 supports this opening by presenting case studies of the many forms of iconoclasm and religious destruction in Japan and China. Fabio Rambelli outlines different forms of destruction in medieval and early modern Japan, up to the Meiji Restoration. Much has been said about how the Buddhist sacred places are constructed and how they operate, but little attention has been devoted so far to the processes and acts of their destruction, despite the dramatic history of these temples in Japan. If temples can be seen as representing certain notions of order, their destruction can also rightly be assessed as an act of iconoclasm. Rambelli demonstrates that Buddhist temples had a number of strategies and technologies to cope with such destruction, not in the least, the rationalisations to explain it, which in turn, enabled them to initiate campaigns for collecting funds and further restoration. It is significant how Buddhist temples in Japan now present their own history in tourist leaflets and brochures—some choose to omit or downplay the very fact of past destruction, while many impose a language specific for the Western sensibilities and history of art, and emphasise instead their old age and the value of their sacred objects as cultural heritage.
The proposal here is that iconoclasms in East Asia should be approached as ‘positions on a continuum of iconoclastic attitudes’, rather than several completely distinct ways of breaking sacred objects. In doing so, the authors argue that the historical events such as the destruction of Buddhist institutions by sixteenth-century military leaders and Christian daimyo, the anti-Buddhist persecutions of the early Meiji period and the eradication of the forms of traditional religiosity can thus be defined as acts of iconoclasm. By extension, the modern re-signification of Buddhist objects as the ‘objects of art’ is equally suspicious; the subtle conversion of items’ previous meaning and their display in the museum settings alter their perception and imply a more dramatic paradigmatic shift than appears on the surface.
Chapter 3, written by Eric Reinders, concentrates on the topic of Western iconoclasm and Chinese modernity. It shows how the Western notions of iconoclasm, namely those related to the Protestant Reformation and Western discourses on idolatry, combined with the world-wide expansion of European power and knowledge, had shaped and affected the development of religion in modern East Asia and the conceptions of Chinese modernity. 3 In fact, these processes, fraught with tension and cultural misapprehension, resulted in a whole cluster of semiotic struggles aimed at assertion, demotion and re-definition of multiple master narratives. Reinders points out that, prior to its arrival to China, iconoclasm had a long history in the West, and that Western accusations of idolatry among the Chinese were inextricable from Protestant–Catholic polemics, nineteenth-century Victorian visions of ‘masculine Christianity’ and construction of metaphors of the ‘foreign bodies’. 4
In this chapter, Reinders offers a persuasive interpretation of many violent periods in China’s history; he finds that while many acts of destruction and confiscation were economically motivated, some were staged and conducted as forceful attacks on previously important symbols. In his analysis, Reinders encounters the ‘playful’ or theatrical qualities of some acts of destruction and makes a potent case for iconoclasm not as a simple elimination of certain objects, but as performances that are themselves symbolic acts. The notion of ‘playfulness’ is far more difficult to digest (not that the author proposes to do so) when the discussion moves on to the violence and destruction initiated during the Cultural Revolution. The disfigurement or erasure of previous identity, forceful manipulation of signs, the homogenising of bodies through clothing, or their iconising through torture: the catalogue of terrors is brought here to demonstrate that, although such violent acts are undoubtedly and utterly despicable, from the semiotic point of view, radical iconoclasts appear to be actively involved in the production of the objects of their venom, often through public rituals of humiliation.
From the analysis of concrete historical events, Chapter 4 proceeds to the theoretical discussion, testing ideas as to how iconoclasm functions as a front line for the redefinition of cultural meanings in East Asia and Europe. Here, the authors analyse the various strategies for displaying sacred images, which are aimed at enhancing their value in some ways, but in altering their meaning, often verge on iconoclasm, as for example, in museums or as part of tourist itineraries.
The commodification of gaze is shared in both museum displays and tourism (particularly, in creating a certain spatial logic and mechanisms of drawing attention that are different from the natural settings of temples). Although museums to a certain degree attempt to reconstruct the original context, it is done without an intention to give a platform to religious actions and results in a radical alteration of the relationship between icons and their viewers. Tourism employs a similar process of re-signification, casting the world as an ‘ultimate theme park where the tourist follows pre-assigned paths, with their gaze consuming and yet uninvolved, moving through an ideal itinerary of treasures or sights’ (pp. 157–58). One of the effects of tourism is the homogenisation of experience, through which famous sites such as Xuanzang’s ‘heritage’ site in Xi’an or ‘Yōkoso Japan!’ are offered for consumption as a kind of colourful pastiche.
Having considered these examples of iconoclastic acts in the historical and contemporary settings of China and Japan, in Part 3 the authors offer a systematic rethinking of the relations between the sacred and destruction from a semiotic perspective. Chapter 5, a reflection on the previous ideas by Umberto Eco and other, predominantly European, thinkers, maps out the orders of destruction by dissecting its obvious and more contextual modes through the notions of iconoclasm (destruction of sacred images), semioclasm (destruction of the semiotic structure of objects) and hieroclasm (destruction or denial of sacred meaning). As a result, from a semiotic point of view, the acts of destruction emerge as not so chaotic as they may initially appear. Moreover, it is proven that such acts have diverse cultural meanings and, by extensions, they are a form of cultural activity and cultural production.
Since iconoclastic situations as well as specific contexts and impacts of iconoclastic and destructive acts are found to be complex and open-ended, the authors boldly propose to establish a new discipline of Destruction Studies. Such a discipline would embrace theoretical and contextual academic analysis of a whole host of phenomena: from the studies of disasters 5 —to the studies of agents of destruction, and cultural interpretations and rationalisations of destruction (particularly, religious). From this point of view, the book’s strength is that without falling into over-schematisation or Western logocentrism, the authors propose a certain vocabulary for talking about iconoclastic actions and discourses that surround sacred objects before and after the iconoclastic act. Such a vocabulary, combined with methodological vigour and sensitivity towards the analysis of historical events involving iconoclasm, religious violence and destruction is indeed very much needed.
It is somehow ironic that a study of historical acts of iconoclasm in East Asia ought to rely so much on a body of works by the usual set of well-known French cultural theorists who have long become iconised in Western scholarship. The response to this would have to be that one has to truly know their icons in order to destroy them. Given that a significant portion of the study’s argument depends on the conceptualisations of embodiment, habitus, order, and iconoclastic acts as a semiotic response to them, for the purposes of the book’s current exercise, admittedly, this might be one iconoclasm too much.
On the other hand, works by the art historians and museologists (Freedberg, Michalski, Preziosi, Boldrick and Clay), social anthropologists (Gell, Høbjerg), philosophers, cultural historians and theorists (Pomian, Besançon, Lincoln and many significant others), make up for an impressive and flexible collection of theoretical tools. Used imaginatively, these tools help to cast new light on the logic and workings of destruction that, at first, may not be entirely obvious or are in danger of being overlooked.
As a result, Rambelli and Reinder’s expanded use of the term iconoclasm and consideration of East Asian cultural and historical contexts, provides a wealth of thought-provoking ideas and bold suggestions for future study. In viewing the acts of iconoclasm as re-inscriptions of values, their study helps to identify an ‘obscure substratum of violence that seems to animate many religious practices’ (p. 184) and initiates further discussion about the polemical approach to the studies of cultural change. This book makes an important contribution to the fields of cultural and religious studies, East Asian history, art history, and semiotics, and will be thoroughly enjoyed by both specialists and senior graduate students.