 OK, so I think we'll begin. Thank you all for coming. I am very happy, honored, to welcome Alex and all the rest of us here, so as this evening. And of course, to celebrate the publication of Dr. Alexandra Green's new monograph, Buddhist Visual Cultures, Rhetoric and Narrative in late Burmese Wall Paintings, which was published with Hong Kong University Press. The book, you'll be hearing a lot more about it. But in short, I can say it is a unique and comprehensive study of Burmese wall paintings from the late 17th to the early 19th centuries in the central region of Burma. It's also a very broad-ranging examination of relations between image and space, image and text, and Burmese Buddhist devotional practices and lots of other things that you'll be hearing about. I think that Alex needs very little introduction in an event run by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. She's well-known in Southeast Asian art circles, but I will give you some of the basics. After completing her PhD here at SOAS, she pursued what has become quite an illustrious curatorial career, landing her most recently at our doorstep down the street at the British Museum, where she is currently Henry Ginsburg Curator for Southeast Asia. She has a very long list of publications, including a series of edited volumes, Burma Art and Archaeology, co-edited with Richard Blurden, Eclectic Collecting, Art from Burma in the Denison Museum, and Rethinking Visual Narratives from Asia, Intercultural and Comparative Perspectives. So you can see the themes building up to the monograph that we'll be discussing this evening. Alex has also curated two exhibitions at the British Museum, the first being Pilgrims, Healers and Wizards, Buddhism and Religious Practices in Burma and Thailand. That was in 2014. And then in 2016, Shadow Puppet Theater from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. She's currently working on a history of Southeast Asia seen through the objects in the British Museum collection. Also a study of relations between word and image in Burmese popular posters. And she's currently also developing an exhibition on raffles, which will open at the ACM, I believe, in January 2019 in Singapore. And then we'll continue, again, to our doorstep in September 2019. So a busy colleague indeed. I'm also very honored to welcome three other colleagues who will act as respondents to Alex's book this evening. We'll begin with Dr. Sarah Shaw. She's a specialist of Kali literature, a member of Wolfson College and the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford, where she's also a fellow at the Center of Buddhist Studies. Sarah has published extensively on Buddhist narrative and image and text, including a 2006 book entitled Jadaka Stories, Birth Stories of the Bodhisatta, a 2013 co-authored volume illuminating the life of the Buddha, an 18th century Siamese chanting manual with the Bodleian, and a 2015 co-authored volume with silkworm books, the 10 Great Birth Stories of the Buddha. After Sarah's response, we'll move on to Dr. John Clark, who is a specialist in the art and culture of the Himalayas and of Southeast Asia. He is currently curator of Himalayan and Southeast Asian art at the V&A. He has published widely on the art of both regions with various publications I won't go through in great detail. I also want to say that he acted as lead curator for the Robert N. Ho Family Foundation Galleries of Buddhist Art, which opened at the V&A in 2017. We'll finish this evening with my colleague Professor Shane McCausland. He's a historian of visual arts and material culture with a particular focus on the painting and calligraphy produced in dynastic China. He also curates Chinese contemporary art. And his most recent monograph, I believe, is the 2014 The Mongol Century, Visual Cultures of Yuan China with Reaction Books. And I believe Shane is currently working on a book entitled The Art of the Chinese Picture Scroll, Text, Image, Medium, which will also appear with Reaction Books. So that's who you have on your plate this evening. Thank you all for coming. And we will open with, just to give you a sense of the order of affairs, we'll open with Alex speaking a bit on her book. Then we'll move through our speakers. Alex will then have the opportunity to enter into the conversation on her book with them. And then we'll open it up to you guys, to the audience. So, that's where we are. So thank you, Alex. So thank you to you, Ashley, and also to the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at SOAS. I'm really grateful to have this opportunity to launch my book, which is very exciting. And also I wanna say thank you to Shane and John and Sarah for agreeing to put out the effort to read the book and then write something about it. And I also, of course, want to thank Hong Kong University Press for publishing it. And then last but not least, there have been just so many people who've helped me with the book over the years. Some of whom are in this room, so I just would like to say thank you to all of them and you as well. So my book is basically about narratives. I was very curious to have an understanding of what they look like in 18th century Burma. They're lovely, they're captivating. Well, it's not very, if we could lower the blind here a bit more. But also, thanks, thanks, that's a bit better. So anyway, so my book's about narratives. So what they look like in 18th century Burma, what their purposes were, how they achieved them, and their possible forms of reception. But in addition to presenting this material, which is relatively unknown, even in Burma, so I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to look at, I wanted to engage with narrative theory. And I'm really seeking ways to understand how visual narratives work on their own terms. I think so much of visual narrative literature in the past that I'd write has been very much about how visuals relate to text. And I really want to see how visuals actually stand on their own. So what I argue in this book, the overarching argument is that space and location are really essential components of visual narratives. Whether your narrative is on a fan, whether it's on a music box, whether it's in a wall painting, whether it's in a scroll painting, how is it actually presented? And that I think is an essential component, as I said. And time has been the aspect that's been considered a defining characteristic. And this I think is what most strongly links visual narratives to textual narratives. And so in a sense we need to pull that apart in order to get to the heart of what visual narratives do. And that's not arguing that time is not important. I just feel that it's sort of one component. It's not the defining characteristic. And so basically this is, this is necessitated re-examination of word and image relationships. And it's a topic and I'll end up with an image of a project that I'm working on right now. And it's basically a topic that I'm still engaged with. So just to show you a little bit of what the wall paintings look like and to where they are located. So that's an image obviously of the central part of Burma. And you can see that most of the sites are around the confluence of the Chindwin River and the Irawati River. So if you draw sort of a circle around that Y shape, that's the area where you get most of these wall paintings. There are a few images outside of that region, but they tend not to be this particular late 17th to early 19th century tradition. And part of the reason you get them located in this region is that the sites were part of a secondary religious network. So not the religious networks developed entirely by the court, but you get these secondary centers outside the capital area. The temples tend to be small. They're usually square. And they're oftentimes, they're mostly donations by individuals or families. So it's not the larger buildings that you got at the Bagan period, which were a combination of many people contributing. These are small personal sites. And as I said, they're all in the central dry zone, which is meant that the paintings last longer than they would if they were in some of the wetter regions. And then this is what a typical interior looks like. You have a layout usually of one through your four entrances. Most of the temples face east with the Buddha image seated against the west wall. And the interiors are approximately, I measured all the ones that I went to, they're approximately three meters square. So there's really very standardized size for these buildings. And as a donation, they would confer considerable social status upon the family, the individuals and families making the offering. And it would help them not only achieve status in the contemporary period, but also in future lives, they would have a good future rebirth. And eventually they would be reborn in the time of Maitreya. And therefore they would become awakened beings as well. What we tend to see is a very standardized format. So sorry, some of the buildings aren't in great condition, but I really like this image of the person coming with a large lacquer container. So what we see in the entrances are donors. And oftentimes the images are very specific. So I don't think they're portraits, but they probably do represent the donors to the temple themselves. You also get health scenes. You get other scenes associated with karma. And of course then on the ceiling of entrances, oftentimes you have footprints pointing in towards the main Buddha image. And then when you get inside, this is a very nice layout. So internally the wall paintings wrap around the Buddha image and as they go round and round, they wind their way up. So it's basically sort of a spiral up the temple. And the materials organize hierarchically. So the further from enlightenment you are, the lower down the story is. And the images at the top are the Buddhas of the past. And as I said, the mural arrangements are standardized. And that's not what I mean when I say standardized is not that every temple is exactly the same, but that they draw on basically a core of material and arrange that material in a specific type of format. So the topics that you find are Buddhist biography. And all the types of Buddhist biography that you get, there's the Buddhas of the past. You have the 28 Buddhas of the past. And they're important of course because of the prophecies that they made to Gautama Buddha that he would become a Buddha in the future. You also have scenes of the life of the Buddha and the Buddhas of the past are the highest up on the walls. Underneath that are the images of the life of the Buddha. And these are laid out and cause and effect strips with captions. And again, they wind their way round the temple walls. And they tend to emphasize these life of the Buddha stories tend to emphasize the events leading up to the enlightenment of the Buddha. So once the Buddha becomes enlightened often times enlightenment itself isn't represented in the wall paintings, but is represented by the main Buddha image. And occasionally you have seen the few scenes after his enlightenment, particularly the seven weeks. But as I said, most of it relates to the run up to his awakening. And this of course, and again I go into this in more detail, this connects to literary material from the Shaan states and Northern Thailand which was brought into central Burma when the Burmese took control of that region in the 16th and 18th centuries. And then beneath the lives of the life of the Buddha you have the 10 great Jataka stories which of course represent the 10 virtues that are necessary for awakening. And these are also arranged hierarchically. So the first of the 10 great Jatakas is lowest down on the floor and it moves up so that the final one, the Visantra Jataka is right below or even on the same level as the life of the Buddha. Basically in focusing upon Buddhist biography the murals, I argue that the murals make the Buddha present and it provides a setting in which the practitioners can engage with the Buddha and his community. Everything is set within, the lives of the Buddha are all set within contemporary Burmese dress, hairstyles, architecture and so it makes it absolutely as if it's happening right now. And what we also see here are vernacular literary developments. So there's a push towards translating polymaterials into Burmese and we see that in the wall paintings and we also see these literary embellishments that develop during the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries. We start seeing those also not only in the texts, in the captions, but also in the detail that you find in the paintings themselves. And then on the ceilings, above all this biographical material you usually have a lotus form but this is laid out in such a way that it replicates Indian trade textile patterns. And basically, Indian trade textiles were luxury goods and in Burma at the time. And so what we see here is an effort to make a visual offering to the Buddha and also it very clearly indicates the donor's access to such luxury items. So it performs a dual function in both honoring the Buddha but also promoting the status of the donors. So my main, my overarching argument for the book is basically that the painted imagery was particularly selected and organized to present coordinated themes and a cohesive program within the temple spaces and that these were replicated for more than 100 years. So what we see during this time, significant stylistic changes but actually the format, the scenes selected and the ways in which the stories are represented remain the same. So we see quite substantial visual changes yet the structure remains largely the same. And so what I see is that the imagery is basically shaped by the architectural forms and it's posited in relationship to the sculpture. So all these aspects of the temple are working together. They form basically a platform to create the Buddha's presence and I argue that it does is that the architecture with its basic layout of an odd number of entrances into a usually single interior space contains a field of merit that's created by the Buddhist biography and also by having images of karma and donors and people paying homage in the entrances creates a frame for the Buddha's presence and so basically you have the practitioners can then see themselves as part of this community. And so when you enter the temple the sculpted Buddha image is a focal point and it's also the focal point obviously for devotions that people would make in the temple but because that moment of enlightenment that's represented by the main image is not usually shown in the paintings itself this main image provides closure for the painted narratives so we see here again as I said all these pieces working together. And what you have with the biography on the walls wrapping around the image it's as if the image is the Buddha is telling these stories of course presentation or presentation of narratives was very important during the Buddha's lifetime and often as he taught quite complex concepts through narrative so that's what we're seeing here we're seeing him explicating the perfection of the virtues and there's also practice in Northern Thailand whereby Buddha images are consecrated by the monks chanting the life story to the image the Buddha's life story to the image so I think these images can function in a number of ways basically as the community creating the Buddha image here through his stories but then also the Buddha responding and teaching the practitioners so not all the elements of course the wall paintings are narrative but I would argue that shown in conjunction with the sculpted focal point the overly narrative murals and framing architecture these patterns unite the images into a whole that replicates the luxury offerings to the Buddha and emphasizes the narrative of honoring the Buddha and the imagery as a whole contributes to and reconfirms a world view about the Buddha and social and economic status that is tautologically reinforced by the biographical material so what we see when we enter temples from this late 17th to early 19th century period is to enter a cohesively articulated and represented Burmese Buddhist world to which the devotee belonged by performing ritual activities within the space but of course I don't what I did want to say is that when I was writing this book it had morphed over time I rewritten it a number of times and one of the things I wanted it to do was for it to sit nicely within studies of visual narratives in Asia I mean there are quite a number of them we have Stanley Abe's and Sonya Lee's work on Dunhuang both of them have talked about the roles of architecture sculpture and imagery and shaping the meaning of a narrative in actual space and so that's been a significant factor in how I've approached this material but then also Janice Liashko who's worked on Indian narratives from Bodh Gaya and although in quite a lot of her work she talks about images of the Buddha she addresses structure as a means of transmitting concepts and practices and she argues that the manner of presentation is part of the intended message and I think that's a huge part of my argument and of course Shane and Sarah have both looked at cross-media interactions between textual narratives and the visual arts and what we see in all of these studies is they explore word and image and spatial relationships in expanded and nuanced ways in other words they look beyond the limitations of rigid concepts of form and content and to come up with a real sense of how these words and images and space all really function together and then I feel that I've just completed an article or a draft of an article looking at the representation of word and image in some Burmese popular posters that we have in the British Museum collection and although you could say this what has this got to do with wall paintings in multiple spaces I would say that actually it has quite a lot to do with it that what I'm looking at here and what I argue here is that we see an amalgamation of visual conventions with the tradition of condensing oral and written texts in poly-oriented Buddhism so what we see here is a fully embodied image text it's neither word nor image and and that this actually has a lot to do with the concept of space because how do I explain this nicely and succinctly but basically if we're looking at understanding how images function in themselves you have to look at how they function and I argue that they function in space and that in order to get images to stand on their own you have to look at that aspect of them so basically I see my work as part of a larger discussion about the relationship between word and image it's part of the visual turn and academic circles it's also an acknowledgement of the variety and fluidity of word image relationships and I pulled up these couple of images because I was reading an article in the Times literary supplement yesterday about comics and how talking about the relationship between words and images in comics and how graphic novels are really coming into their own and of course it's been a long standing tradition in manga and we're actually having a manga exhibition at the British Museum next year but even though it's been a long standing tradition in Japan it's only fairly recently that they've become important and a subject to study elsewhere as well and I was thinking that now the images are being given more credence is operating separately from text in our own terms and not only in relationship to verbal and textual structures which of course brings me back like a broken record to the concept of space and how the format of the image is part of the message thank you well that's actually for inviting us and I was on for writing for the book and for everyone coming to enjoy thinking about it and delighted to be able to participate for me this book sets a bar for a new understanding of the relationship between text art chart and ritual practice in a given period and location and in this period there was indeed a great flower over his artistic expression indicative of the great richness of the person and public devotion so one of the first things I want to say is this book is likewise very generous in all sorts of ways to do with annotation and footnotes so I'm delighted to do this so I felt as a book I could look up anything to do with any of my fields I was interested in there's extensive citation of primary and secondary sources it's careful in its examination of the evidence specific to each context but most importantly it's highly appreciative and as well as being analytic in its account of this wonderful art so it really creates for us a sense of the location the background and the whole imaginative world of 17th century Burma onwards and of course I'm not an art historian and I need this when I go to a temple I can appreciate the art but I need to be filled in with all the references and the background just to give me some sort of context as to how to understand it and I was very appreciative of the way the book does this and we have a sense of these people these merchants and these peasants and the workers and royalty and monastic some educated and some not who would all be using the temple and find through the narratives their own relationship with this enclosed space because Majatika's a story about the past lives of the he aims for awakening and he's reborn in many spheres different kinds of animals and humans and gods and so anybody who goes in to a temple and is imprisoned in this space would also feel that they could move anywhere in this very organized cosmological space but there is a sense that a wholesome action and offering gives them an opening to any area of this wonderful world and as Alexandra says temples and their contents operate as a whole with the memorials infolding the sculpted images in a space designed for personal interactions so as you walk into this still centre of the Buddha walking through these narratives I'd just like to talk about two areas really which I particularly interested me in this book amongst many but one area I particularly wanted to address was the dedicated care with which the chanting traditions are examined and explained and this really is worthy of note because the all actual the way and the mode and the context but not chunks it has often been neglected in the Buddhist studies and Alex has examined these very closely Buddhist practice, ritual and education has since the earliest times have been perpetrated by chanting so repetition, rhythm and the enumeration of lists and elements repeat and repeat and repeat are the lifeblood of this these memory devices such as matikas root lists endlessly repetitive sitters were specifically designed so that people could remember them and you find them as ways of using repetition and reiteration as a way of keeping something in your mind and I feel this is addressed very well indeed in the book because of course any meditation if you take the Buddha anasati the recollection of the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha it requires again this element of repetition and reiteration of things happening again and again so I like the way that Alex explores these chunks in a way complex and highly organized memory systems that you can order space and you can order material through this arrangement of the charts and the book includes a great deal of this and also what I really like is it has suggested that the reiteration of emblems and motifs from the textiles also have a kind of they're like the heartbeat of the temple as you go through you feel this sense of repetition of very beautiful motifs which will remind you again and again to come back to the presence of the Buddha and although these temples are filled with protective diagrams patterns, zodiacal injury cosmology of vast and magnificent scope this whole imaginary is organized through patterns and repetition and I'm very much like where Alex has emphasized this and the second point I'd like to say is really about the stories which are the jatakas and they're completely trans-regional and trans-cultural so that anybody from any area around know the stories they would be the same and it's very interesting looking at the same stories. Again the ties felt that the jatakas took place in some sort of wonderful presence so that you see the stripes, trousers, Portuguese sabers in Burmese and in Thai jatakas jatakas does happen in the kind of present, ongoing present and I very much like where this book has examined this sort of cultural world as a kind of a way of being inclusive and there's a whole universe really because the beings are always chatting to each other in these stories very unusually in the literary culture of the world they all converse with each other and argue and debate so this temple is a field where these beings can meet and I very much like the way Alex has shown this so I think other points that I would like to make is it seems very interdisciplinary to me and necessarily so and I was very pleased to find that and it seemed very accessible too I think that's all I have to say except I think it's a wonderful book the only time I ever heard a respondent speak about a book they were very very rude I couldn't think of anything thank you very much thank you Alex for inviting me thanks everyone for coming there's always a danger of repeating some of the same points but in a way we may be repeating some of the strengths of the book I think and that will come out to say something really obvious that this this book is really the first well-rounded study of a subject which is not hitherto really being studied in as much detail for example as the earlier paintings that began that are much better known usually from the 12th and 13th century and Alex brings meticulous and rigorous scholarship to this study of this relatively unstudied phenomenon this efflorescence of painting in the long century essentially 150 years from the late 17th century to the early 19th century so this is really the first in-depth study of this vibrant artistic tradition the remain religious themes have already been given by Alex and so I won't labour those points but these scenes include within them all these other details that are so wonderful the scene of the palace life depictions of luxurious Indian trade textiles and just to mention a few the protective and auspicious diagrams such as interlinked in Argus 136 animals that represent the Buddha's past lives as an animal lotus pools, the Buddha pada also the religious and folk figures the earth goddess, the eight lords the arahant cult zorgies or alchemists and their fruit-making trees and that is not an exhaustive list but Alex has critically analysed this interwoven mass of visual imagery I think in a wonderfully cogent well-rounded I would say holistic way it's really making a similar point to the last speaker thoroughly interdisciplinary also very sophisticated in the methodological approach she draws methodologies from a number of disciplines religious and historical studies anthropology, art history and as touched on quite a lot theories of the meanings of narrative for this reason as Janice Lyosco has remarked the work goes a long way to creating a sort of template that could be used for analysing other late Buddhist painting traditions so in what ways does she give this well-rounded picture well in the introduction she surveys the state and distribution of surviving paintings from the Bagan period through to the paintings that she's discussing the historical, political and economic context that produced the late paintings which survived within around 160 small temples these painting programs were the results of a period of economic population growth in the central region and she unpicks this nexus of events which led to this upsurge which coincided with increased historical stability centring on a newly reestablished capital of Ava and during this long century this so became a major centre of monasticism also critically this was a time when religious governors and village headmen were establishing more power locally and some were becoming rich enough to actually commission these temples as has been discussed a major facet of this work is a detailed analysis of painting programs themselves done in a number of ways the narratives are examined using theories of narratology and Alex has already spoken about this looking at varied interpretations of meanings derived from structure, form and visual modes she shows how narrative functions in interlinked religious and secular terms act in both didactically storytelling and as an invitation and an exhortation to generate merit and engage in the Buddhist path for the onlooker and worshipper in a certain sense they also act in an iconic manner the point again that Alex has already made but I think is worth making again the paintings are looked at as a unified whole unfolding the main three-dimensional Buddha image at the point of enlightenment in the stories of the previous and past lives so that the sculptural image was the culmination of the path described by the narrative paintings and as has already been said this creates the unified field of merit in the interior for the artist, the patron the worshipper and in a sense for the Buddha presence and the Buddha image itself the book also looks at this close interaction between narrative religious painting and other popular art forms over time in these late paintings extended narrative storytelling replaces the earlier visual forms of Pagan where Ajataka is often represented in a single episode from a story and this finds a parallel in 18th century Burma in a move towards embellishment of stories and the vernacular retelling in prose or verse of Ajataka stories from the Pali scriptures at this time long poems were also be written by monks on similar themes and there was a growth in court and popular theatre performances and there is even a parallel between the tablo that one finds staged in provincial theatre performances and in the narrative scenes that one finds in strip paintings and Alex beautifully brings out these juxtapositions and links between different art forms for worshippers the three main themes depicted in the paintings merit protection and a path to enlightenment connected both secular and religious worlds so this connection was really cemented together through the driver an instigator which was the karmic or karmic Buddhism of Southeast Asia and Alex again very centrally points out the role of karma in the production of art and as the reason for the creation of these works the law of spiritual cause and effect stresses the link between good rebirths and acts of merit such as making offerings and donations and this of course also includes major acts of merit such as commissioning, temples and wall paintings donors are shown frequently making offerings or doing other good works seemingly secular scenes such as the palace scenes and the palace interiors showing many jatikas are integrally related to karma since high rebirths particularly as a king are the result of excellent karma and hence good moral conduct kings were also seen as bodhisattvas linking and this links back again to the religious part so these scenes inspire people to the highest conduct to making donations to showing what they can become and in a similar role one finds the depictions as Alex has mentioned of colourful Indian trade textiles the luxury trade textile imports from Bengal, Gujarat from the Coromandel coast shown on the ceilings the narrative scenes which of course are also permanent offerings to the Buddha so this is by no means an exhaustive list of the aspects of the subject covered it's a really multifaceted and I think multi-dimensional study and I'm making the same point as the last speaker about the excellence of references bibliography and footnotes really you have got a sort of inside of pedic work just in themselves I mean I'm interested for another project that I'm doing in research in Xorges or Alchemists and the Wysar or Wizard come Marsilla figures you go to the rock page and you find references for the last 20 years so it's an absolute joy for anyone who is interested in Verney's art and culture on many levels so to sum up really I think in terms of depth of historical artistic and religious scholarship and understanding and the clarity of expedition Alex's book will surely be on the bench now for this emerging subject for a considerable time to come Thank you so much So Shane Thank you Well let me also voice my thanks to Alex for writing this book and therefore giving us all the opportunity to read it and it's actually a book that's literally from the pages as you're kind of looking through the first chapter you realise that actually this is a really intelligently crafted book so chapter one kind of starts out as a kind of organic model of development in which she's looking at moral standardisation and also exceptions to norms but it's actually you suddenly realise what she's very cleverly doing is she's giving you a survey that she's going to study without giving you a survey or while building in this organic model so she effectively argues that the gradual standardisation of these programmes in the 18th century lead then to a very rapid variation by the 19th century which effectively dismantles or deconstructs the standardised vision so that's really cleverly done she also works in the first chapter a lot of the the kind of methodological issues and questions that she's going to pick up later on particularly things about the agency of painters and patrons just sort of drops that in and so to an eye that is looking for that kind of thing you're oh god ok you need to read on it's cleverly done and I can reiterate Sarah's comments John's that the levels of detail the clarity of the structure the consistency of the argument these are all to be praised and yeah they are there's also another thing there's a real honesty about the limits of what you can understand there's a part where Alex is accepts that our understanding or the access that we can get to long 18th century terms of that codes of understanding and viewing expertise what was the expertise among audiences we don't really know you just you state as much without trying any fancy footwork and then obviously the other point the last general point I make I'm going to come on to talk about psychology and iconology in a second is that it really is deeply embedded in the contemporary critical discourses that are relevant not just in the opening critical framework but throughout there's almost you get a passage and then suddenly you'll drop into a kind of critical discussion so it's obvious that Alex is a very deep reader as she travels back and forth on the coach from Oxford and as I come on to say in a minute I think she's in a number of places critically she's right on the money especially with one of the kind of themes or terms that she uses of unified spaces and I'm going to come back and talk about that in a minute so let me think aloud for a moment about the narratology the narratological analysis narratology I come to think of it I remember reading it in the title of an essay in an edited volume that I was editing and I thought what on earth is that that was in 2002 by the way and anyway now it's kind of settled at the end a little bit but you are clearly embedded in that critical literature and all of the various and multifarious modes of narrative both historically and globally and that underpins what then emerges which is a very sophisticated analysis of the visual arts of the long 18th century Burmese temples it also raises a slight conundrum for me on page 12 for example which is narratology is the logical starting point this is where she is discussing her critical framework narratology is the logical starting point basically because the majority of the images that you are looking at are the biography of the Buddha or jatakas I wonder I pose that as a question to you can you unpack that a little more for us I kind of also wonder would all of these Mitchell and various of these other people and Hayden White which are meticulously noted in your footnotes what would they all make of this study couched in their language but situated in a to them must be a very alien place and so some people might wonder to what degree was it necessary for you to have situated this regional study within that critical framework was it necessary to do that to quote unquote validate the material that's just a question I put there to validate the material culture that you are looking at and just when you think Alex is kind of going down one methodological critical route she is a flea to foot she does for example then bring in Renfrew and others on how material culture is the materialization of the mind so she slips into a more anthropological set and so this interdisciplinary facility is very impressive the other point the other general point on narratology is that obviously this book builds on the edited volume which Ashley mentioned rethinking visual narratives from Asia into cultural perspectives or something I can't remember the full type although I contributed an essay to it in which narratology you deal with narratology not at all in a dogmatic way but regarding it more as a toolkit or what you call at one point a fuzzy set and that echoes the practice of some of the most imaginative theoretical thinkers in for example in Chinese art history Jonathan Hale or someone like that would be proud of that let me think for a moment about iconology so actually for a non-specialist like me the structure of a monograph is becomes much a sort of meta narrative of it becomes much more significant because the actual material is very unfamiliar to me and so I was very interested in the narrative of the visual narratives as it were where you're going over this period that you're looking at and very impressed as others have been by how you link it to so many things to social discourses to historical change to liturgical development all things that enable you to discern patterns and changes going on across the period that you're looking at and in particular highlighting shifts of emphasis in the way that the ensembles are put together and being able to interpret those for example the shift from earlier having a greater number of mono-senic illustrations to more extended narrative modes later on and also the way that you're for example able to unpack the way that pre-enlightenment visual narratives tend to get more mono-senic illustration whereas as closer you get to enlightenment and enlightenment they tend to get much more elaborate and these are the iconological analysis is very clever in that you link that to the way that there's a potential for viewers to change you know what's in the past is in the past but what's in as it were in the present is what activates or enables the viewer and so you do as has been said a lot of linking of these changes to oral and to telling to presentation and preaching linking the Jataka illustrations of the life of the Buddha tales to these oral modes maybe a couple other points on this before I'm going to come to some my final questions there's one concept that I find very interesting in the mono-senic illustrations and that's seeing them as enumeration and Alex links this very cleverly to knowledge categorization and transmission how the way that one can create a narrative in the present when it's activated or when it's actualized through audience participation and also the way that that echoes contemporary monastic practices and the pedagogical structures of monastic practices of the time and she neatly weaves this in to explore it as a partly as an issue of memory let me come on to the final two questions one fairly short one is a bit longer so the first one is about I was kind of thinking what ultimately what are the drivers what are the drivers of change because I mean in my reading you you know early on you cite for example gel and therefore art and agency becomes a bit part it's not a major part in it because narratology is seemingly much more important but I've left wondering you know okay it's objects that have agency but it's patrons monks artists and others who you know have a say in the creation and the formulation of it which who how why among those is it that's really driving it and I mean at one point you say that these stories so you say what we have here are quote new renditions of old stories participating in contemporary cultural practices so I kind of wonder are they just participating or are they actually also driving cultural practices and from my reading of your book it's actually very difficult to pinpoint where they sit on that scale so maybe that's why you didn't take it on more and the other point that I thought of just elaborate on a little more is that I think this is a critically edgy the idea of unified spaces and so this is the idea that that you need to link everything in the temple space in order to understand it so you're viewing murals you're viewing scale you're viewing position of the a Buddha figure as a phenomenological hole so murals have various registers as Alex explains they are those relate to the placement of the Buddha figure in the middle and there's a particular scale and function which enables charting or circumambulation these are all in other words they're ensembles that create spaces of as you say devotion memorialization ritual enactment etc. now I know on the cover it says that it's a study of wall paintings but what I was left wondering is can you not just take this one little step further and go outside the building and think about the architectural and the sort of land planning issues so and the sort of precincts in which these temples sit so for example what is the relationship between the murals inside and indeed the architectural depictions within the murals to the buildings themselves and to where those buildings sit in relation to the people the society who are the patrons of the buildings and who are presumably coming to use it and I thought this might this might be quite an interesting area to look into further I mean there are various other things I might say but I think I will just draw it to a close there thank you well that's quite a few questions to answer I'm happy to say I feel that I can answer all of them unpack narratives as a logical starting point what would Mitchell and White make of this approach I started basically looking at narratives because when I first went to Burma obviously I didn't know what the paintings were about so I took lots and lots of pictures and John O'Kell very kindly helped me translate the captions and I slowly figured out what these images were and I mean they were all the writing is clearly a caption these were all stories of the time that I was doing my PhD I didn't really look at the peripheral material which obviously have changed in the book and so stories that I need to start by looking at narrative theory and so but then as of course as I got more into it and of course I started looking more at Buddhist studies then you see obviously how narratives are so essential to transmission of Buddhist concepts I mean the Buddha used narratives to teach his major concepts and actually of the three baskets of the Tripitaka the first two the Sutta Pitaka and the Vinaya Pitaka are basically narratives and it's only in the third one that you get onto these lists and enumeration so intensively and it's again structured very much for memory and and enumeration in order to be able to remember it easily and I think that that narrative really is it really has to be where you start not only is it visually a narrative but then culturally it's coming out of very much a narrative tradition as well so in Burma at this time there were people who went round and presented jataka plays you have people preaching jataka stories not only monks but also lay people so all these features narrative is such an essential component I think it seemed just obvious to me that I had to start there so that's what I did what would Michelin White make of it well I think this is part of what I've been trying to do and part of what I tried to come across in my talk here was that we have really considered images to be secondary art history gets knocked on frequently and words and texts are everything and I really think that by looking at this material you see how the two work together you've done of course a lot of work on texts and images as well and of course Sarah has too and I think that and then with this work I'm doing on the posters you can really see that there's so many ways in which words and images interact and that images actually function on their own they're not necessarily dependent on words they can be dependent on words but it's not a necessity and the result is that you end up with you need a larger or more holistic exploration of the topic and I think Michelin White very much look at texts so I'm not sure that they would be that interested but I think if we can persevere in presenting this material and demonstrating how images are significant that then I don't know maybe get people to come around so I hope that answers your initial question and then your question about what are the drivers of change yeah there were so many drivers of change and that was hard to to integrate in a clear fashion in the book obviously the patrons or drivers obviously what's happening socially are drivers obviously the monks are drivers the monks supervise the paintings the patrons came they wanted a ritually efficacious building and so they're going to want to you know maintain that the standardized form but then you have all these outside inputs you have the Indian trade textiles which are luxury goods you have people who are being relocated to the heartland of Burma because Burma of course was a very aggressive colonial power in the region bringing back people from the Sean states bringing back people from Northern Thailand from Laos, from Manipur and of course from Rakhine state so then of course in bringing all these people back into the central heartland and relocating them and integrating them in the Portuguese of course were brought back in the early 17th century up to the heartland and so you end up with all these ideas but one of the things that really struck me about the paintings is that as time progressed and I talked about this briefly where you had all these outside ideas coming in you had a very significant stylistic change you have new types of imagery brought in but that structure is really constant over this long 18th century this is more than 150 year period and I think it's because you have this stable structure which relates very differently to fundamental religious concepts and because you've got that you can bring in all this new stuff and the new stuff is of interest and can be explored because it doesn't fundamentally alter what's actually going on in the paintings so in terms of the drivers of change you have all that stuff which is driving change at one level but not at another level and of course the patrons want to be up to date they want to show their wealth and status the monks were as I said were part of this larger secondary monastic network and with very strong links and you can see that there are certain sort of bodies of style so you get a particular type of style that will be in a few villages and then you have a different style in other villages but then you also have styles that are trans-regional in that central area and so I think clearly there were artists that were also moving around groups of artists that were moving around and then they of course would circulate ideas but the paintings themselves and also are drivers you know they're trying to get people they're a carrot to what you're going to get if you behave in an appropriate way you're going to have a life where you have access to luxury textiles you are going to have a life where you have access to the goods and material benefits that a king would have a beautiful palace to live in and so forth so I think there are so many things that are pushing it and then in terms of the unified spaces going outside the I think that's a really interesting question and thank you the murals the buildings in which the murals are housed again tend to be very similar so they tend to be as I said a central usually a square central chamber occasionally with a small circumambulatory corridor and then with a stupa superstructure this becomes a very typical format again from the 17th century onwards and what you see with these buildings is they're clustered together in groups so you'll go to a village yes a joe or a nae or a min and you'll have a cluster of these buildings and they all tend to be near monasteries so and what I think is actually happening in terms of looking at them outside is that you tend to get larger clusters in centers that were particularly famous as secondary as secondary monastic centers so obviously you know oh you know a famous monk is there or famous groups of monks are there therefore we want to donate there because that is that's going to get us the most merit so that's you end up with these sites scattered across the landscape and they kind of trace that monastic network as a whole in terms of land planning again they tend to be in specific compounds next to a monastery and again as I said I think it really very much has to do with these and the names of the monks there and I know there's another work coming out on late Burmese wall paintings that involves the Buddhism scholar Alexi Kirichenko and I think that will probably help us understand a bit better because Alexi's gone into all these monastic libraries and he can read these old Burmese and he's just an amazing linguistic and Buddhist scholar so he may be able to link some of these sites more specifically to particular monks in a way that I haven't and I haven't done so I'm not sure if that answers your question but that's kind of how I see it that it ties in very much with what people are trying to achieve and what you find what sites, important sites you find where I don't think if you're talking more specifically about the immediate landscape I don't think there is that they are a little bit too random to be that and it may have to do with again the possibility of purchasing a piece of land and again that's not something I've... I'll notice the future tense coming in a little bit while we're talking about the luxuries and the beautiful heaven realms things and I wonder the extent to which the temples would be perceived as sort of most in the prison tense provided for that luxury and where they seem as very pleasant places to go to because that's what strikes me when I go to them I just think how precious and it's wonderful and the sense of some promissory sort of contract in fact I don't actually I know this is often said in books about the the day of romance and cosmologies but I actually wonder how much the luxuries are almost there at the moment it's kind of a pleasant environment I think so I mean certainly in the inscriptions most of the inscriptions were written in the doorways so they've gone but the few that we've got I mean they definitely are looking to the future but of course it's going to provide you with a lot of social capital now you know it's going to provide you with social status now and but I'm not sure how much they're used beyond the initial donation often as when you make an offering I mean then that's done it's generated the merit for you in a sense it's finished and there are some records that I came across that basically said within sort of a generation or two these buildings were derelict already so I suspect that they were a donation yes they may be used or swept for a while and flowers put in but after a while then it's just it's let slide maybe his family's moved away or you've made a new offering I think they really are in a sense of the present even though while looking towards the future I've got a question art historians like styles you mentioned for particular main styles and you analyzed them but I didn't get a sort of clear sense of I mean maybe there isn't a sense where they could be linked to a particular number of bodies or times perhaps I've missed something but I couldn't get that no I mean the thing is with the styles is they all overlap with each other and again some of them seem to be in a specific area group of villages others seem to be more pan-regional and we don't have that we don't have information about the artists and so then I think it's very difficult to say it's basically impossible to answer your question the only style that we have sort of clear connections with is the one that emerges after the Burmese Sacked at UT on 1767 and brought all these artists back you start to see Thai stylistic elements in the paintings you start seeing gold leaf in the paintings seeing the use of this particular type of turquoise blue and so then we and because those are elements that are in Thai paintings we can make that connection but otherwise we can't be more specific than that unfortunately and oftentimes the paintings were done by teams when they describe paintings in the royal order the production of paintings in the royal orders they always talk about the 500 painters obviously you're not going to have 500 painters working on a temple that's 3 meters square and this is a kind of a typical number that's used in Buddhism and so I think it's it's much more that but obviously I mean it's done very specifically by groups of artists and I think they traveled around but other than that I can't say more Taking notes Thank you all I think we've spoken a lot and now it's your turn I'm really interested in the temporality of these cosmological spaces as you noted they kind of collapse the Jataka tales we've done the contemporary is Burmese Thai and I was wondering one if the presence is tied to the early temporality is tied to the presence of the Buddha the past Buddha, the present Buddha in the space the future Buddha might try it but also what are the limits of these two distinct times of religious secular time in this space I don't know if this goes back to this idea of unified space because there seems to be kind of a blurring of lines of time and space through the narratives that you've discussed I mean I would say that they're not that the past has been made present so I would think that I mean I would say that you've got the Buddhas of the past, the 28 Buddhas of the past I mean they're very much there to affirm the worthiness of Gautama Buddha that's their role the life of the Buddha of course shows you how he got to where he is but again it's set in contemporary time so I think they're less concerned about they're not trying to record a history as much as present again narratives to explain why the Buddha became enlightened but also to enable the practitioners, the local practitioners to be part of his community there's a whole concept of that's been developed by a man named Jonathan Walters of communal karma that basically you pass through your various rebirths with the people that you're with now so you know your spouse or your family now is actually going to be your spouse and your family in your next life as well hopefully that's okay but so again the community that you're in will be your community in the next life so I think they're not worried about the past they're looking at making a community indicating how the Buddha is part of their current community and then of course will be part of their they'll be part of that community in the future and therefore will be able to become enlightened or will become awakened in the future after having passed through various rebirths so it's a collapsing of time thank you, I look forward to reading the book am I correct in supposing that the narratives are moving clockwise yes I don't think one of these images you showed us everyone was moving in a left hand there so does each sort of frame link into the next one and then following from that you referred to it as a spiral but does that imply, is it more like can step rings on top of each other or does it actually move from one layer into the next layer no it actually yes it is probably a bit more like rings as you say yes and there was one image where it goes except for that temple there was exceptions I showed the wrong image yes obviously, it's a very nice painting so I showed it but most of them do go clockwise there is the odd occasion when it moves counterclockwise but you still have most of the stories even if some of them go the wrong way most of the stories are still going clockwise and the whole thing still spirals or piles up to be honest I haven't spent time looking at that particular temple and why it goes the other way so I can't answer your question but I think sometimes it has to do with the arrangement of space so again it's not they're not so worried about temporal issues but they're worried about spatial issues so if it linked I'd have to go back and look at the temple if it linked well with the end of the previous story then they would reverse it so for example in some narratives you have your strip it is mostly going clockwise but then some of the scenes will all be jumbled up inside the narrative and that again is where they conflate space for example if you have a large palace scene sometimes they'll put it there before proceeding with the rest of the story on so I mean I suspect it has something to do with that as opposed to anything religious or ritual that it's kind of a practical use of space so they did like to emphasize very particular types of scenes so scenes of pomp and circumstance so palace scenes are very large anytime you have a kind of a procession it's always very large I mean there's some temples where you'll have the narrative squished into say about 40% of the space and the other 60% of palaces and processions so they tend to really bring those aspects out and again I argue that that it has to do with you know the carrot you know this is what you're going to have in future lives if you participate in in this type of ritual behavior sorry I didn't see sorry when you showed the photos of the inside of the shrine it's actually quite dark in there and the structure seemed like to go quite a couple of meters up at least three meters I mean in that case you wouldn't as a worshiper be very difficult to see the paintings the wealth of your head too dark and you're too far away so is there a limit to at least from the point of the view of the kind of day-to-day worshipper in these shrines the limit to understanding of their etology is there an iconic function that these paintings are more playing for everyday worshippers and you know as art historians the project's obsessed with every detail and they're meticulously done but is there a limit from an ordinary worshipper's point of view is there really an iconic function of images and to stay for the whole the answer to the question is that wasn't a very good picture and I think it's probably more of a photography than anything else because the buildings are being only three meters square and probably not more than three meters high they really aren't they aren't actually as dark sorry that was at the beginning there I think that's mostly the angle of my picture because you can oh yeah no you can't see it all up there no in the picture you can actually see the ceiling and you can see the designs on the ceiling I'm sorry that wasn't a very good image to choose but so what's the difference between these later temples and the earlier ones the early ones were very large and they were extremely dark the buildings inside and so then you couldn't actually see the narratives so the narratives clearly weren't there for the worshipper or the devotee they were obviously there in order to enhance the sanctity of the building and to perform other functions here I would say that they really are part you know they're very clearly setting contemporary times and you can actually see the imagery so that it does make you feel and folded and enclosed can I have another question yes so the donatory instructions so basically there was a single donor for the entire structure of building the statues or a family so how do they refer to it I give this what what is the what is the term that is used to refer to this structure or to forgive itself what term do they use they'll say temple they'll say peya they'll say the temple and occasionally peya is only used for the word temple that's a Buddha image it's a general term for a no no no but we have occasionally been lucky enough to have the person explain why they had it painted so they were talking very specifically about beautifying space to honor the Buddha but again these are usually quite scrappy I forgot I really had a specific term what is a peya a begon I don't know I would have to go back and look at early donative inscriptions I don't know if they're using John do you know if they're using peya in the begon period are they using the word peya to refer to temples and Buddha images during the begon period like when they make donations of inscriptions what is the how specific are they in terms of the meaning of David they say who the statue or something very general peya this shrine this bihara the ones I remember you generally give a this I built this temple and it cost so much I dedicated these slaves I dedicated these fields I built a wall around the temple and the Buddha image and and they use where did I go the go yeah yeah yes of course they also use it during the begon period okay yes now what you get by the later time period 17th and 19th century is they don't list so much what they've built as to what they list a great deal of what they want to get so I want a beautiful voice and you know I want to be free from danger and so on and so forth so it's a shift in it's a shift from an offering to a desire exactly are there any connections between the walking and the landscape from the same period so I discuss the relationship between wall paintings and manuscripts basically they follow a manuscript format so if you manuscripts tend to be folded concertina style or at least the illustrated ones and so if you stretch them out it would basically look like a strip of the wall paintings so I argue actually that the paintings in addition to functioning overall as a textile pattern they also look like a whole bunch of manuscripts that have been pulled open and hung around the walls so definitely so I mean there's many layers of giving in these images not only do you see images of giving but then of course they mimic manuscripts and they mimic luxury trade textiles I mean that's one of the points I didn't make but it seems to me that that's one of the ways that they become real because they echo actual practices of real life in multiple different ways and that's one of them and also you're bringing in all this material everyday materials or materials that you would use to make offerings as well as you say it makes them real it makes them material well the book is available for sale you will all be happy to know next door well in B104 we have a reception and we do have I think six copies of the book that are available for a discount this evening so speak to Alex and otherwise it's also it will be available at the moment for order through the SOAS bookshop downstairs and I think we'll stop there thank you all very much for coming and thank you to Alex and to our speakers thank you