Sam Parker, University of Washington

Imagining Ancient Creativity:

An Ethnoarchaeology of Creative Practice in South Indian Temple Arts

This essay examines the practices and products of Tamil temple construction and image making insofar as they serve as a privileged site for the symbolic, social production of reality. After considering selected visual and ethnographic evidence of creative practice, the essay explores some of its comparative, cross-cultural and ethnoarchaeological implications for contemporary readings of ancient material culture. These implications suggest that modern scholars who write about ancient India may be needlessly hampered by an over-reliance on universalizing theories. While current popular controversy centers on the application of psychoanalysis to ancient Indian texts, broader and more profound issues arise in the application of a modernist, common-sense “realism” often smuggled in through uniform, modular, discipline-oriented histories and systematized methods of analysis. Readings of Indian antiquities that adopt more humble, ethnographically informed, context-sensitive approaches display greater potential. Unless one’s work explicitly aspires to sympathetic identification and is framed in relational terms, only the local realities of ancient Indian “others” will be put at critical risk, not those of the scholarly interpreter. While this may be fair to the former, it is primarily the latter who loses in the bargain.