Abstract

In this article I explore the contemporary practice of establishing garden shrines in Buddhist rural Java. While on the surface the placement of shrines follows the demands of environmental upgrading and beautification strategies, often in accord with eco-tourist imaginaries, the practice reveals a complex aggregation of material and discursive threads. The article situates the project, ethnographically, as a sensorial practice in which environmental awareness and a sense of “atmosphere” are directly involved. This perceptual domain, particularly the relationship of the villagers to the Sakyamuni statuettes, is simultaneously articulated in continuity with the religious field of Javanese Buddhism, as it encompasses notions of sacralization and rituality. I recover the idea of aesthetic practice in order to bring these sensorial stems on a common platform. In blending discursive and materialist approaches, the article converses with the idea of strata as devised by Deleuze and Guattari as a pivotal image in their work on rhizomes. Through the concept of stratification, I argue, it is possible to apprehend Buddhist shrines as cultural formations in which “everything is involved,” that is, as multiplicities in which layers of materiality and discourse are intertwined in meaningful and generative ways.

摘要

在这篇文章中，我探讨了在佛教乡村爪哇建立花园圣地的当代实践。虽然从表面上看，神社的安置遵循环境升级和美化策略的要求，通常符合生态旅游的想象，但实践揭示了物质和话语线索的复杂聚合。这篇文章从民族志的角度将该项目定位为一种感官实践，其中直接涉及环境意识和“大气”感。这个感知领域，尤其是村民与释迦牟尼雕像的关系，同时与爪哇佛教的宗教领域保持连续性，因为它包含了神圣化和仪式化的概念。我恢复审美实践的想法，以便将这些感官茎放在一个共同的平台上。在混合话语和唯物主义方法的过程中，这篇文章与德勒兹和加塔里设计的地层概念进行了对话，将其作为根茎研究中的关键形象。我认为，通过分层的概念，可以将佛教圣地理解为“一切都涉及”的文化形态，也就是说，物质性和话语的层次以有意义和生成的方式交织在一起的多样性。