Join us for a talk by Ashley Thompson, Hiram W Woodward Chair of Southeast Asian Art at SOAS University of London. 

This lecture will take place at The Physical Sciences Building 120 with light reception to follow in Baker Portico. For questions, contact seap@cornell.edu. To attend via Zoom, please register here.

Established in 1992–93 to honor economist and Southeast Asia scholar Frank H. Golay, the Memorial Lecture reflects his enduring legacy of interdisciplinary research and commitment to the vitality of Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program.

Abstract

There is a revealing episode in the Buddha’s life story, one that, like many others is about the revelation that the vision of the Buddha entails, but which is also about the dubious virtuosity of replication, the revelatory power of return and techniques for expanding territorial dominion – and, that these are all of a piece. Following the successful show of the Twin Miracle at Savatthi, where the Buddha has beaten off rivals by proving his special powers to shoot water and fire from his body aloft in the sky, illuminating the cosmos for the gathered crowds, and twinning this brilliant self to provide at once questions and answers…, he travels to the heavens to teach his mother. The Buddha is missed dearly on earth. Some traditions have it that during his time away a replica was made of him – the first Buddha statue – to soothe a king grieving his absence. Entreated to return, the Buddha is supplied a red ruby ladder flanked by a gold and a silver one for his entourages. As beings watch, expectantly, the progress of the brilliant body down the rungs reveals the cosmos again: all of space and time is there for all to see. This vision is only fleeting, and the Buddha’s return bolsters a certain socio-political order organised around the dissemination of his image.

This talk will contemplate restitution in Southeast Asia today in the shadow of this story and with an anxious eye on our times.  What affects does absence evoke, and how? What expectations arise in the progress of return, on whose part and why? What transformations take place in the comings and goings? How, when and where? Why and how do these processes constitute identifications at shifting scales, from the individual to the communal to the national to the regional to the international to the global to the cosmic, at once closing down histories and borders and carrying the potential for visionary unification? Do they reproduce Hindu-Buddhist hegemonies made as much in the ‘Sanskrit-Pali cosmopolis’ as in colonial knowledge production? Are we witnessing the reconsolidation of the commercial wing of an ever-expanding global conglomerate surveying borders between subject and object? Or are we catching glimpses of another time and space, where ‘animism’ might win the day?

About the Speaker

Ashley Thompson is Hiram W Woodward Chair of Southeast Asian Art at SOAS University of London. She maintains a sustained research focus on premodern Cambodian arts and literatures, and complements this with more punctual work on the contemporary period and the arts of the larger Southeast Asian region. Her research revolves around questions of memory, political and cultural transition, embodiment, sexual difference and subjectivity. She leads Circumambulating Objects: Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art, and is the editor of a special issue of Art History on decoloniality in Southeast Asian arts fields, forthcoming 2025.