Anthropological Notebooks, XXIV/2, 2018
Kapferer, Judith (ed.). 2012. Images of Power and the Power of Images. Control, Ownership and Public Space (Space and Place Series). New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. vi + 155 pp. Pb.: $27.00 / 16.85. ISBN: 9780857455147.
As Judith Kapferer emphasises in the introduction to this volume, symbols of power surround us. These could be symbols of religious power (such as churches), or political power (governmental buildings), or economic power (shopping malls) - they are all concrete expressions of abstract conceptions. These images of power, according to Kapferer, control and own public space, but also dominate our beliefs in order of things. From different perspectives and with different case studies from all around the world, the authors of the chapters examine issues that are taken for granted. Even though, as Kapferer stresses, these symbolic manifestations of legitimated power that are achieved through artworks, architecture, town planning, landscaping, and performance, are easy to find, the problem, and the purpose of this volume in the same time is to unravel the shifting relations between image and reality.
The volume is opened with an editor's chapter in which she suggest that Enlightenment traditions of criticism, rationality, scepticism, and argumentations eroded throughout the twentieth century and have been replaced by material profit and Western acceptance of unequal economic power. She studied the Frieze Art Fair in London from 2006 to 2009, and explored the idea of a ruling class that supports the production, consumption and competition for art-work as a pursuit of financial profit and social status, and the abandonment of art workers' culture-debating role in favour of stock market quotations and journalists' opinion. Kapferer concludes that once critique bourgeois public sphere is overwhelmed with culture-consuming society of corporate directors, oligarch and celebrities (p. 23).
The first chapter is followed by section of chapters that, in a way, all discuss 'concrete'. Penelope Harvey examines the aesthetic of state power and concrete as the key material used for the demarcation and ordering of public space (p. 28). In her highly engaging research, she analyses the appeal of concrete, the values attached to it, and the forms that are built from it (p. 29). Harvey is primarily concerned with the role of concrete in the transformation of public space in provincial Peru and argues that concrete is a form of matter that has the potential for both social and material transformation (p. 42).
Miles Glendinning continues with this idea and gives a brief overview of mass housing projects (that also used concrete as a material). He starts with examples from around the world, and then focuses on a case study from Great Britain and the tensions between municipal and national state agencies, and also between professionals oriented toward production or design (p. 48).
As a highlight of this section and discussion of the practical and symbolic meaning of the concrete, Don Handelman analyses cityscape of divided Jerusalem and architectural forms that do not have physical relations to each other, but together, according to Handelman, they create 'vector of force' in which vector refers to a line in space that has both the magnitude and direction of a quantity (p. 61). These architectural forms are different in origin and function: from a bridge, new historical museum of Holocaust,
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buildings, to 'separation barrier' between Palestinian East Jerusalem and its hinterland (p. 62). Handelman argues that all these constructions shape Jerusalem's cityscape and influence how the city is being shaped and practiced.
The next two chapters deal with the body as a material but also as an agent that interact and influence the world. Uli Linke opens this topic by analysing an exhibition on human anatomy designed by a German anatomist Gunther von Hagens. The corpses that are part of this exhibition are aestheticised to suppress any evocations of violence, victimhood or history. The bodies, argues Linke, are depersonalised and in that way dead people are transformed into 'living' corpses, artistic sculptures (p. 92). Mortality is denied, temporality negated, and in this way the dead are viewed as enduring monumental body architecture (p. 92). Laura Verdi continues this discussion when writing about the symbolic body and rhetoric of power. She starts with the image of Corpus Mysticum Christi (belief that considers all of Christendom to be a holy body of Christ), and then she moves to the body as represented in present-day celebrities.
In the next chapter, Allen S. Weiss picturesquely illustrates how the centuries old impulse of Kyoto residence to have a small garden cannot be neglected in contemporary image of Japan. In one of the shopping malls in Kyoto, in front of one shop, author finds a small stone placed alongside a clear bowl of water with plants floating in it surrounded by six potted plants on the floor (p. 116). He uses this example to criticise landscape theory, which according to Weiss, 'suffers from a narrowly construed sense of representation, where rhetorical tropes figure gardens as pictures to be seen rather than fields to be entered, and analytic forms promote a static ontological model based on perspectival projections rather than a dynamic one found on kinaesthetic transformation' (p. 121).
In the last chapter, Dinesan Vadakkiniyil analyses ritual connected teyyam or deity of Muttappan, from North Malabar, India. Teyyam is vital in symbolic representation of community. It is an image of power that unsettles all other images of state power and caste hierarchy. In the post-colonial period, teyyam is reduced to art, which makes it a part of the structure of the state. The sacred space of teyyam was usually a courtyard of joint families, but due to social, cultural and economic changes the sacred locale of the new teyyam, Muttappan might be a taxi stand, shopping complex or a household of small family.
The main concepts arising from these chapters are art, architecture (closely connected to material of concrete), body and ritual. However one could conclude that, in the end, it all comes down to the body. Body is defined as an agent in making art, building architecture or performing rituals, or body as a material being used. In this sense 'body' is becoming both agent and receiver of processes connected to power, i.e. the main topic of this volume. However, these ideas and conclusions, which this reviewer draws, are not discussed by editor. In her introduction, Judith Kapferer suggests various forms of representation and technical construction on her mind: 'since these both embody and refract dimensions of the socio-political orders in which they achieve expression' (p. 1). These different readings of the same texts are what makes this volume interesting. The volume is comprised with diverse case studies, from decidedly different geographical areas, and based in different historical and cultural contexts that everyone can draw
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something unique and connect that with her or his recent research. This diversity and complexity of volume is simultaneously its main weakness. All in all, this is a proper collection of fascinating ethnographies, quality analysis and inspiring questions that could be of use to researchers and students interested in power relations and the symbolic meaning of material phenomenon.
MARIO KATIC
University of Zadar (Croatia)
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