Essays

Essays are narratives of varying lengths that engage in extended analysis of multiple images, objects, monuments, buildings, or spaces.

A special issue guest edited by Laura Levitt and Oren Stier. 

Lilly Lax Wedding Dress, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Essays Wedding Dresses: Soft Landings, a Ritual Garment, and the Promises and Perils of Life After Laura Levitt

In 2014, when the author first visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s original offsite storage facility, they saw a semblance of a series of wedding dresses under wraps, too delicate to be on display. In that dark space, the author came to learn about how one of these wedding gowns was made out of a repurposed parachute. So enchanted and intrigued by this story, the author vowed to return to these dresses and their promise of renewed life at least for some of those former concentration camp inmates who survived and were able to wear them.

Photo of an open page in Pál Szegö's diary Essays Two Layers of Text, Many Layers of Meaning: The Materiality of the Pál Szegö Diary Emily Klein

This article conducts a codicological analysis of Szegö’s Holocaust diary written in a holy book, examining the manuscript as an object and the significance of its material features. While the diary entries are a rich text that deserve more scholarly attention, examining the diary as a unique bound object that preserves traces of the diarist’s interactions with it and some of the experiences detailed in the entries is equally important. Doing so foregrounds Szegö’s individuality and agency amid changing circumstances, offers insight into his complex identity as a devoted Christian convert persecuted for being Jewish, and emphasizes the significance of the diary as a survivor object.

Cover Page of Beatrice Muchman’s missal and mass card Essays Sacred in Function, Sacred in Memory: A Rosary and Missal from the Holocaust Robert M. Ehrenreich, Suzy Snyder, and Jane E. Klinger

This article examines a rosary and missal. These objects were given to a Jewish Holocaust survivor for her confirmation while she was hiding in a small French town as a child. Although the survivor returned to her Jewish faith, she still revered the objects, as demonstrated by her decision to keep them long after donating the rest of her Holocaust-related materials to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) for safekeeping. In this article, the authors explore these multiple layers of sacredness. They also consider how a federal, non-denominational institution such as the USHMM should curate and display such objects.

Greta Perlman's bracelet, featuring many pendants of different sizes Essays Objects of Witness: Holocaust Jewelry Constructed in Camps and Ghettos Aubrey Kim

In comparison to the considerable scholarship on drawings, prints, and photographs of Holocaust-era ghettos and camps by prisoners, the jewelry that prisoners created for themselves or other prisoners remains less investigated. Covertly constructed from scrap or excess metal in forced labor factories and workshops, pendants, pins, bracelets, and other metal objects were largely given as gifts to friends and family or exchanged for food or other resources. This essay is a survey of select jewelry objects constructed in the ghetto-camp Terezín of the Nazi-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (current-day Czech Republic) and the Łódź ghetto of Nazi-occupied Poland. Using a bracelet owned by Terezín prisoner Greta Perlman, jewelry constructed by Terezín prisoner David Grunfeld for fellow inmates, and various link bracelets and pins found in the ruins of the Łódź ghetto after its liquidation, this essay examines how prisoners understood the conditions they were living in and represented them in material culture, and by doing so asserted some form of material agency amid confinement and forced labor. 

Detail of Maria and Maximilian Wortman's letter from the Umschlagplatz to their relative, Ludwik Essays From the Umschlagplatz to The Wiener Holocaust Library: Maria and Maximillian Wortman’s Last Letters Christine Schmidt

In September 1942, in the Warsaw ghetto in German-occupied Poland, Maria and Maximilian Wortman hastily wrote a letter to their daughter, Dziunia, from whom they had become separated; they also wrote to a relative, Ludwik, whom they hoped might deliver Dziunia’s letter. The couple had been selected for deportation to the death camp Treblinka, and they were gathered on the Umschlagplatz, the railway siding from where the deportation trains departed. Their final words to their daughter are written on the reverse of a scrap of paper, a list no larger than 11 x 15 cm. The size of the two letters and the reuse of scraps of paper speak to the desperation, violence, and urgency of the genocidal context in which they were penned as well as the severe material shortages in the ghetto.

The Iwasaki bag with its archive of family documents Essays Transporting the Past: Suitcases, Briefcases, and Histories of Displacement Koji Lau-Ozawa

The suitcase’s proximity to migrants and the ability of museum visitors to intrinsically connect the images of suitcases to people make them ideal for teaching, speaking, and understanding histories of movement. However, the materiality of such items is less discussed. Suitcases, and their smaller cousins, the briefcase, hold things. They are both object and container, possessing a range of physical properties and material connections. Such items are also inherently material in their demands for care and curation, creating challenges for institutions that hold them to make sense of pasts of violence and trauma. 

Examples of objects held by the Arolsen Archives, including a brown envelope, a selection of pens, rings, pennies and a chain. Essays In(ani)mate Objects: Between the Sacred and the Everyday Dan Stone

Objects shape and legitimate human identity, especially in terms of interpersonal relations. In this article, Stone compares and contrasts how the Arolsen Archives (AA, Bad Arolsen, Germany) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM, Washington, DC) treat the objects in their possession. Stone picks up Ewa Domańska’s claims about how things should be incorporated into history and consider how the ways in which USHMM and AA treat objects leads to different sorts of knowledge about the past, and what this treatment of objects tells us about contemporary understandings of Holocaust museum curatorship and Holocaust memory.

Volume 9: Issue 1
A reddish hued temple is shown brightly illuminated by sunlight against a clear blue sky. Essays In Search of Beijing's Tibetan Buddhist Past and Present: Religious Heritage, History, and Identity in Modern Beijing Benjamin J. Nourse

Beijing's Tibetan Buddhist temples have always been places through which diverse groups of people moved. During the Qing, these were spaces where elites from different backgrounds met, collaborated, and enacted the multicultural character of the empire within the capital. The temples themselves announced the pluralistic nature of the Qing dynasty, as well as its grandeur, through their public display of signs and stelae aimed at the multi-ethnic audiences of the empire.

Volume 8: Issue 1
Detail image of a painting of a fair-skinned man with a beard, wearing a hooded cloak, sitting in a lotus position levitating amongst clouds Essays In Search of Multiple Colors of Christ: Daniel J. Fleming and the American Protestant Encounter with Asian Christian Visual Arts, 1937-1940 Satoru Kimura

Fleming’s trilogy illustrates the complex dynamics of race, religion, and visual arts in the interwar United States. Though the extant scholarship highlights the increasing Anglo-Saxonization of Jesus’s body in American visual culture in this era, Fleming’s story reveals a virtually opposite impulse in liberal Protestantism: to search for multiple colors of Christ.

Volume 6: Issue 3 Characterizing Material Economies of Religion in the Americas

A special issue curated by Kati Curts and Alex Kaloyanides

Blue sky with a silver sculpture of connected letters Essays Characterizing Material Economies of Religion in the Americas: An Introduction Kati Curts and Alex Kaloyanides

Kati Curts and Alex Kaloyanides introduce this special issue of MAVCOR Journal devoted to examining four key categories: “Material,” “Economies,” “Religion,” and “America(s).” The ambition of this issue is that the collective inquiries of its authors, which span various interpretive histories and genealogical fragments, can offer ways to better understand their assorted conveyances, as well as the powerful grip of their critical conjunction.

Silver medal with a European soldier and an Indigenous man of Turtle Island shaking hands Essays Medals, Memory, and Findspots Pamela E. Klassen

For many Indigenous people of Turtle Island, also known as North America, treaty medals are material reminders of sacred promises made between their nations and the British Crown or the U.S. Government. Settlers and colonial officials, by contrast, have often treated these medals as mere trinkets.

Volume 6: Issue 2 Material Islam

A special issue guest edited by Kambiz GhaneaBassiri and Anna Bigelow. 

Essays Introduction to the Special Issue: Material Islam Anna Bigelow and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri

Anna Bigelow and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri introduce this special issue of MAVCOR Journal devoted to Material Islam. It explores devotional objects, the Islamic sensorium, the book as a material object, the Muslim body, and the various roles of the mosque as a social, political, and spiritual space. Taken together, its varied essays demonstrate an incredibly wide-ranging, rich, and exciting arena of study.

img Essays The Transcontinental Genealogy of the Afro-Brazilian Mosque Ayodeji Ogunnaike

This article examines the genealogy of Afro-Brazilian mosques, answering some of the most immediate and puzzling questions that they force all who see them to ask. The answers to these questions demonstrate the fluidity of categories such as European, African, Islamic, and Christian, and how West African Muslims effectively drew on an architectural vocabulary with connections to three continents to forge an emergent cosmopolitan identity.

image Essays Senses of Belonging: Materiality, Embodiment, and Attunement at Sufi Shrines in India Anna Bigelow In exploring the multiple modalities of Muslim belonging and unbelonging in India, the arenas in which Muslims and non-Muslims interact, especially at shared holy places, are extremely illuminating locales. This essay explores the ways in which material and somatic forms of interreligious encounter at a Sufi dargah (درگاہ), or tomb shrine, in Bengalaru (Bangalore) exemplify everyday as well as spectacular practices of shared piety that also reimagine the possibility of collective belonging in a time of precarity.
Essays Adorning the King of Islam: Weaving and Unraveling History in Astarabadi’s Feasting and Fighting Ali Karjoo-Ravary

This article traces a fourteenth-century Persian history from Anatolia, Bazm wa Razm (Feasting and Fighting), written by ʿAzīz al-Dīn Astarābādī, from its presentation copy to its various recensions down to the modern period, examining how each era visually refigures this textual manifestation of its original patron, Burhān al-Dīn Aḥmad (r. 783-800 AH/1381-1398 CE), for a new purpose.

alt Essays On the Material and Social Conditions of Khalwa in Medieval Sufism Nathan Hofer

Ubiquitous across the medieval Islamic world, khalwa is the practice of self-isolation, typically in a small cell, in order to focus on pious devotions. This article offers one possible approach to theorizing the heterogenous elements of khalwa coherently by insisting that we take the material and the social as seriously as we do the human and the spiritual.

Volume 6: Issue 1
img Essays Depicting Kongo and Angola in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Cécile Fromont

As part of their activities in Kongo and Angola Capuchin Franciscan friars created dozens of images and wrote hundreds of pages of text in works that they called "practical guides." These Capuchin didactic images form an exceptionally important corpus that enriches our knowledge of central Africa and dramatically multiplies the European-format visual record about the African continent before 1800.

poster Essays Nature, Culture, and Faith in Seventeenth-Century Kongo and Angola Cécile Fromont

Early modern central Africa comes to life in the images that Capuchin friars. This Capuchin central African corpus consists today in four extant manuscripts connected by form and content. This essay offers additional visual material from the corpus by featuring details of each individual vignette that comprise the 1650s poster now in the Museo Francescano, as well as the unpublished versos of the Parma Watercolors that feature text.

Essays Models of a Bygone World: Popular Nineteenth-Century Nativity Scenes as a Representation of Chilean Society Olaya Sanfuentes

Embracing the belief that the humblest of individuals participated in Jesus’s birth with their presence and their gifts alongside the wisest, Christians of every era have wished to display their own participation and contribution to this foundational Christian event. This article describes the ways in which a traditional, rural-inspired society like that of Santiago, Chile at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries expressed itself through its nativity scenes.

Volume 5: Issue 2 Material Religion of High Altitude Ecologies

Guest edited by Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa and Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia in collaboration with MAVCOR Journal Editor Emily C. Floyd. The call for papers for this special issue invited scholars coming from diverse disciplines (religious studies, anthropology, archaeology, history of art, visual studies, etc) and working across a range of high altitude ecologies, from the Andes to the Himalayas and beyond, to consider how the specificities of these regions impact material and visual aspects of religious practice. This special issue is published on a rolling basis.

Essays Flying Conches in the High-Altitude Oceans of the Himalayas: Displaced Objects and Multiscalar Relations in the Mountains of Sikkim Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia and Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa

Conch shells frequently appear as objects in religiously inspired artwork and shrines in Sikkim, west India. Their frequent appearance in material culture and invocation in Classical Tibetan-language literary culture is indicative of a rich repository of connections. This essay explores some of their many resonances, in particular their significance as indicators of ecological change in the Himalayas.

img Essays The Ritual Ascent at Mount Tlaloc, Mexico Catherine H. Popovici

Bridging ecology, ethnohistory, linguistics, and art historical inquiry, this article argues that the various forms of vegetation encountered along the slope of Mount Tlaloc during the ascension of the tlahtoque were of ritual significance within Nahua worldview.

Essays Gold Palaces: Merit, Beauty, and Perfection in the Cremation Structures of Monks in Northern Thailand Rebecca S. Hall

Cremation structures serve the utilitarian purpose of incinerating a corpse to aid transition from life to death, but in contemporary practice in Northern Thailand, opulent, golden-colored cremation structures called prasat sop also create a stunning sight that give local viewers a deeper understanding of all sentient beings’ connection to death.

Essays The Book as a Generative Agent: The Buddhist Canon as a Community Member in Book Procession Rituals of the Himalayas Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa

Known as the Bumkor, the books that make up the Bum are not just objects, but are generative, active agents that are capable of producing and renewing auspiciousness in the local human and nonhuman community that reside in the landscape.

img Essays Purifying Multispecies Relations in the Valley of Abundance: The Riwo Sangchö Ritual as Environmental History and Ethics in Sikkim Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia

The Riwo Sangchö is a ritual exchange that facilitates smoky relations between humans and spirits resident in landscapes around the world.