The three papers in this panel discuss the presidential theme for 2023 AAR, La Labor de Nuestras Mano (The work of our hands). The first paper on a handsewn prayer book from 20th-century Hungary explores questions of devotion, agency, and subjectivity through a single object: suggesting the study of devotion needs not to be a study of the devoted and arguing that through conscious, intentional practice, a space comes into being where the devotee encounters the divine and in so doing displaces the self. The second paper on the Palkaran Textiles community and their narratives in contemporary Tamil Nadu, India, examines how the Palkaran community embraces the theology of their textiles, utilizing the language and labor to divinize their art practice, as a response to growing violence garment laborers experience in South Asia. Finally, the third paper explores the metalworks of blacksmiths and sculptors who re-purpose weapons by transforming objects of destruction into objects with creative purpose, generating possibilities within the intransigent reality of interlocking systems that produce and distribute guns, and illustrating metalwork to provide a context for critical reflection on the dangers of normalizing the constraint and romanticizing the moral agent.
This paper explores questions of devotion, agency, and subjectivity through a single object: a handsewn prayer book from 20th-century Hungary. Though devotion is often explored through the individual lives, words, and actions of devotees, in this paper I suggest that the study of devotion need not be a study of the devoted. Attending to its content and to the material object itself, I examine the physical and intellectual labor of devotion and argue that devotion demands not subjectivity but multiplicity. Beyond the content of the prayers, the marginalia, handwritten notes, and the stitches themselves attest to the jumble of people and hands and lives that have passed through the life of this book. This prayer book shows how devotion itself is a labor-intensive process. I argue that through conscious, intentional practice, a space comes into being where the devotee encounters the divine and in so doing displaces the self.
This paper explores moral agency under constraint through the metalwork of blacksmiths and sculptors who re-purpose weapons. By transforming objects of destruction into objects with creative purpose, they generate possibilities within the intransigent reality of interlocking systems that produce and distribute guns. They illustrate moral agency under constraint because they claim creative power to pursue a good under conditions that thwart its realization. Through their vision and artistry, these metalworkers generate possibilities within structures of violence that do not change. Metalwork also provides a context for critical reflection on the dangers of normalizing the constraint and romanticizing the moral agent.