What role do objects play in crafting the religions of Southeast Asia and shaping the experiences of believers? The Spirit of Things explores religious materiality in a region marked by shifting boundaries, multiple beliefs, and trends toward religious exclusivism. While most studies of religion in Southeast Asia focus on doctrines or governmental policy, contributors to this volume recognize that religious "things"—statues, talismans, garments, even sacred automobiles—are crucial to worship, and that they have a broad impact on social cohesion. By engaging with `religion in its tangible forms, faith communities reiterate their essential narratives, allegiances, and boundaries, and negotiate their coexistence with competing belief systems. These ethnographic and historical studies of Southeast Asia furnish us with intriguing perspectives on wider debates concerning the challenges of secularization, pluralism, and interfaith interactions around the world. In this volume, contributors offer rich ethnographic analyses of religious practices in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Burma that examine the roles materiality plays in the religious lives of Southeast Asians. These essays demonstrate that religious materials are embedded in a host of practices that enable the faithful to negotiate the often tumultuous experience of living amid other believers. What we see is that the call for plurality, often initiated by government, increases the importance of religious objects, as they are the means by which the distinctiveness of a particular faith is “fenced” in a field of competing religious discourses. This project is called “the spirit of things” to evoke both the “aura” of religious objects and the power of material things to manifest “that which is fundamental” about faith and belief.

The material embeddedness of the divine in the objects and sites of popular religion in Asia establishes the grounds for a conflict between devotees and heritage practitioners – the same objects are central to the practice of each but each hones in on them via a radically different ontology. While in principle offering an even-handed consideration of all aspects of a thing’s meaning, the secular-rationalist underpinning of the practice of significance-assessment in heritage management acts to marginalise or even efface the eruptively miraculous qualities of divine sites and objects. It serves, in other words, as a regime of insignificance. Against this background, I argue that the posthuman turn in the humanities and social sciences, and in particular its openness to forms of agency, vibrancy and vitality in the object world, offers prospects for a kind of heritage practice newly comfortable with the vibrancy that belief in the supernatural lends to the things of popular religion. There has, I suggest, never been a better time for heritage practice to get over its problem with the supernatural.

This article reconsiders sites, practices, and ideas about the physical remains of the special dead in South Asian religions. Questioning the common notion of “relics” as a point of distinction between “Buddhism” and “Hinduism,” it explores the constellation of ideas and practices surrounding the remains of gods, demons, people, and animals in South Asian religions. Archaeological and literary evidence for liṅgas, stūpas, and related sites and structures are used to explore shared discourses and practices among Buddhists and Śaivas in particular. Through such test-cases, it shows how bones and other physical remains of the special dead could become areas of engagement, especially when linked to sacred landscape. Attention to these contact zones reveals sharing, borrowing, and competition among ancient and medieval groups that modern scholarship has studied primarily in terms of assumed differences between “Hinduism” and “Buddhism.”

Southeast Asia is a region of great religious diversity. A variety of ethnic religions interact with world religions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, all of which, with the exception of Judaism, are still flourishing there. While advocates of secularization thesis previously deemed religion to be an antithesis to modernity, recent scholarship has shown that religion succeeds in adapting itself to the modernization process, and that it continues to shape personal beliefs, moral values, and faith practices in Southeast Asia today. The 13 essays in The Spirit of Things vary in research scope and interest. The contributors are committed to analyzing the religious material culture from historical and ethnographic perspectives. They explore how religion manifests itself in different forms of material culture ranging from icons and liturgies to architecture and artifacts. These material forms not only make doctrinal teachings easily accessible to commoners but also define the world of beliefs and practices. The opening essay by Julius Bautista and Anthony Reid conceptualizes the overlapping relations between materiality and religiosity in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia. Using the materiality of religion as a theoretical framework, they argue that religiosity is closely linked to collective rituals and sacred objects, and deeply embedded in local society. Because religious material culture covers a spectrum of sensory experiences and emotional sentiments, it is important to examine how certain icons, commodities, and acts come to be identified with devotional meanings in specific temporal and spatial contexts. Therefore, belief and material culture are not independent variables. Rather, they constantly interact with each other in both sacred and secular domains and shape the religious landscape. The first two chapters highlight the effects of marketization on piety in Vietnam and Malaysia. Laurel Kendall, Vũ Thị Thanh Tâm, and Nguyến Thị Thu Hương investigate the widespread circulation of sacred objects in contemporary Vietnam. Although the late twentieth-century Vietnamese reformers attacked organized religion and the devotional and liturgical practices of commoners, religious practitioners never remained passive subjects in the state-building process. They reacted to top-down institutional change by shifting their bargaining strategies, which in turn affected the socialist government's anti-religion policies. As a result, popular religions continue to flourish, providing people with moral guidance in a fast-changing world and enabling them to access the cosmological power of gods, ghosts, and ancestors for protection. Johan Fischer studies the efforts of middle-class Malay Muslims to reconcile next-worldly piety with worldly concerns like wealth and health (p. 31). As automobiles become a major marker of socioeconomic status in Malaysia, many middle-class Muslims favor the ownership of locally-manufactured Proton cars as a moral and patriotic choice against the purchase of Western luxury cars.

The anthropological theory of religious meaning proposed in this paper is based on a multimodal approach to human communication. According to this approach, meaning originates not in a set of propositions about the world but in modes of experience of and engagement with it. These modes of experience include different forms of communication in which their performative component trumps their propositional content, modes of communication that are normally defined as‘symbolic languages ’when religious scholars try to translate them into explicit verbal statements, that is,into a set of propositions. Of all these modes of communication or symbolic languages, in this article the focus is on sacred objects,that is, objects that evoke their absent signifieds by being simultaneously objects of thought and instruments of thought.

The first few chapters in the volume have overlapping historical narratives of the Sikhs in the region, and the editors should have tackled the repetition. A thematic organisation of the chapters could have also made the publication more connected and interesting. However, in spite of its limitations, this volume makes an important contribution to the discourse of sub-ethnic transnational identities in Southeast Asia. Once upon a time the modern academic study of Asian religions meant primarily the collection and close textual examination of the major scriptures in order to uncover the underlying tenets of the religion. Religion was held to be principally about the next world, rather than the material world. This view gained influence during the colonial period when scholars of religion under the influence of Weber saw Asian religions, unlike their Protestant counterparts in Christian Europe, as incompatible with modern-ity as exemplified by the 'secular' colonial powers. Following decolonisation and independence, attention shifted to religious practice — in particular, how religion was an obstacle to economic modernisation and rational gov-ernance. The expectation was that religion would steadily become confined to the private realm, if it did not die out altogether. More recently, however, scholars are discovering the importance of religion to economic prosperity. Why has this happened? Put simply, the capitalist transformation of Asia over the last three to four decades, and the improved material well-being of many Asian citizens, has led to the stubborn persistence, if not flourishing , of religion in this region. As a result the material aspects of modern religious life in Asia are increasingly drawing the attention of scholars. It is this phenomenon that is the subject of this timely publication, The spirit of things: Materiality and religious diversity in Southeast Asia. The spirit of things is an ambitious attempt to study the religiosity of a range of material objects associated with the various religious traditions throughout contemporary Southeast Asia. The volume tries to do justice

Sacred objects that were revered and preserved as heirlooms were known as pusaka in Java and most parts of the Malay Archipelago. These objects were considered as possessing ‘power’ which has been thought to be something concrete and can be contained. The power contained within these objects can be benevolent or malevolent depending on the creation and appeasement process. The fate of its bearer lies in the manner that these objects have been appeased through rituals that has been considered by some as indigenous forms of preservation. Unlike objects of worship that was meant to represent the divine, God or its various manifestations, pusaka are revered and respected in much the same way as revered and respected members of Javanese society. Pusaka are given honorific titles and names which reflect its status and entitlements in society. They received the utmost care and priority in preservation due to their important role in rituals. Observers of such practice of veneration towards sacred objects have attributed this possibility to the supposed syncretic nature of Islam within some Javanese communities. This paper/presentation seeks to share some observations of how pusaka has been used in royal rituals and appreciate the way that some Javanese Muslims have rationalised their reverence and veneration of sacred objects. In these circumstances, the veneration of sacred objects can occur without reference to and in the absence of God.