Geronimo Cristobal

Year: 2023

  • A Stun of Jewels

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    Heritage issues in recent archaeological discoveries on Siniyah Island Map of the Persian Gulf, ’Omān and Central Arabia part of Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia This essay considers discussions of heritage politics around the discovery of three archaeological sites in the United Arab Emirates. In 2022, an ancient Christian monastery dating…

  • The Wisdom of Uz

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    William Blake (1757 – 1827), There Was a Man in the Land of Uz (The Book of Job), 1821 This essay sets directions towards the writing of a material history of the Land of Uz, the setting of the Book of Job, by revisiting textbook historical and archaeological records of the Levant and relevant ancient…

  • The Kingdoms of Israel and Ophir

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    and the power of a fabricated diplomatic history             And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon.                                                                                    — I Kings 9:28.            On July 30th of this year (2023), a most bizarre headline appeared in one of the leading news publications in the…

  • An Archaeology led by Strawberries

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    Atalay, Sonia. “An Archaeology led by Strawberries” in Archaeologies of the Heart. Kisha Supernant, Jane Eva Baxter, Natasha Lyons, and Sonya Atalay, editors. 2020. Springer, New York. xiv + 280. Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516), The Garden of Earthly Delights, central panel inside (left side), detail: People sit around a large strawberry, c.1490 and 1500 A…

  • Death and Mortuary Rituals in Mainland Southeast Asia

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    W. Higham, Charles F. “Death and Mortuary Rituals in Mainland Southeast Asia: From Hunter-Gatherers to the God Kings of Angkor.” Chapter. In Death Rituals, Social Order and the Archaeology of Immortality in the Ancient World: ‘Death Shall Have No Dominion’, edited by Colin Renfrew, Michael J. Boyd, and Iain Morley, 280–300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,…

  • Less is More

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    Unknown Flemish artist, Triumph of Fortitude, ca. 1535 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco In explaining how his practice of writing history operates, historian Carlo Ginzburg turns to architect Mies van der Rohe’s adage: “Less is more.”[1] He explains his method using the metaphor of the dilation of a camera lens: “By knowing less, by…

  • Keyword: Primitivism

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    For a fictional volume called Keywords for Southeast Asian Studies         Abstract This article focuses on the historiography of Primitivism in Southeast Asian Studies, understood as the interest shown in non-Western cultures by the European avant-garde. Emerging with the development of anthropology, this movement instigated a protracted debate between ethnology and aesthetic studies. I present examples…

  • Conversations in the Countryside

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    Countryside is the name of a rundown restaurant along Katipunan Extension in Quezon City. This place has since been demolished and replaced by a stripmall more befitting of the gentrified environs outside Ateneo campus. I mention this hole-in-the wall in relation to Professor Oscar Campomanes, as a testament to the impossible circumstances that gave birth…

  • Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States (Su’ad Khabeer, 2016)

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    Eritrea / Colonia Italiana – Muslim brotherhood PPC Military Post to Italy 1935 Photo: Ebay Su’ad Khabeer’s Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States examines how intersecting ideas of Muslimness and Blackness challenge and reproduce the meanings of race in the US. Confronted by pervasive stereotypes and increased prejudice in post-9/11 America, the group…

  • Rodel Tapaya/ Three Paintings for Macao Biennale

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    Dogs have figured in Rodel Tapaya’s works since his first foray into visually translating the myths and legends of the Philippines. From Donsadat and the Magic Dog (2009) to Cane of Kabunian, numbered but cannot be counted (2011), man’s best friend is depicted as the vicar of divine representation and an intermediary between man and…

  • A Habit of Shores: Seni and Seafaring in Dunia Melayu

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    I am presenting seemingly unrelated variables to tell the story of the SEA and the various shores on which they meet the land. It has been a convention now to present an outline of the presentation and I do so not only to give a semblance of cohesiveness but to trigger your imagination. Warning: We…

  • Forgiveness Work (Arzoo Osanloo, 2020)

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    Photo taken from medieval manuscript by Qotbeddin Shirazi (1236–1311), a Persian Astronomer. The image depicts an epicyclic planetary model. In Forgiveness Work, Arzoo Osanloo offers ways of understanding an Islamic notion of justice by looking closer at experiences and infrastructures that illustrate the centrality of compassion and mercy in Iranian criminal law. She argues how the compulsion to…

  • Rodel Tapaya/ Can’t See the Forest for the Trees

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    Rodel Tapaya Can’t See the Forest for the TreesJack Bell Gallery (London, UK)May 2023 In this series of portraits filled with lush flora and fauna, Rodel Tapaya signals an intellectual turn to the ecocentric, spotlighting nature as the primary actor in the folklore that fuels his artistic imagination. The composition recalls a peculiar Southeast Asian artifact:…

  • What is Islam (Shahab Ahmed, 2015)

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    First page of the manuscript of Hafez Shirazi’s Divan. Preserved in the Treasury of the National Library and Museum of Malek, Tehran Using encyclopedic historical and theological data, Shahad Ahmed criticizes the unsatisfactory ways Islam has been taken as an object and category, and conceptualized in popular and academic discourses. According to Ahmed, a valid…

  • Inscrutable Surface

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    Java – Topeng: Ken Angrok.: Wayang Topeng play “Ken Angrok” performance at Java Institute, Jogjakarta [Yogyakarta]. Photo: NYPL/ Claire Holt Vivian Huang’s first book, Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability, examines the ways in which Asian and Asian American artists have advantageously reconfigured the erstwhile detrimental stereotype of inscrutability as “a dynamic antiracist,…

  • Questioning Secularism (Agrama, 2011)

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    Hussein Ali Agrama’s Questioning Secularism distills the layers of the modern nation and exposes the entrenchment of a ‘deep-state’ that works for a political elite. He describes how revolutionary legitimacy is often undermined in favor of a liberal secularism, which is both the mode in which the state wields power over belligerent citizens and the…

  • Gender / Sexuality / Theory of Power

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    Harry Styles at the Grammy Awards in 2021. Boas are a fashion must-have at Styles’ concerts.(Jordan Strauss / Invision / AP) In “Bodies with New Organs” Jasbir Puar examines the neoliberal appropriation of the trans body to reconstitute the pool of able bodied individuals for economic productivity and the development of the national economy. According…

  • Queer Companions (Omar Kasmani, 2022)

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    Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan An illustration of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine in Sehwan as it was in mid-1800s. Photo: Sindh Culture Department Lauren Berlant writes that unexpected consequences of communicating with meager signs and gestures are the “secret epitaphs” of intimacy. “Often brief and eloquent,” intimate situations also convey an aspiration…

  • Knot of the Soul (Stefania Pandolfo, 2018)

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    Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam The 72nd chapter of the Qur’an entitled Al-Jinn (The Jinn), as well as the heading and introductory bismillah of the next chapter entitled al-Muzzammil (The Enshrouded One). In Knot of the Soul, Pandolfo ties together seemingly disparate areas of study such as madness and cartography to address, among many others, the compatibility of modern psychology and Islamic eschatology. Towards this end, she…

  • Jinnealogy (Anand Vivek Taneja, 2017)

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    Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi Taneja’s plaiting of themes in contemporary Indian politics and vestiges of unsanctioned Islamic practice reveal the multi-layered undercurrents of Islamic sovereignty that shape the present. Her insights into secularism, political ecology, ethics, and religiosity afford us a deeper look of Islamic ethics and its…

  • Rouge (dir. Stanley Kwan, 1987)

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    Critics hailed Stanley Kwan’s genre defining ghost film Rogue during its Criterion Collection release as a beautiful allegorical melodrama, “the likes of which are no longer done in the West”. Bliss Cua Lim offers a reason why this is the case: “ghostly women embody a strong notion of spatiotemporal nonsynchronism—the existence of noncontemporaneous aspects of…

  • Area/ Region

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    Walker Gavin’s article “The Accumulation of Difference and the Logic of Area” tells us that some of Michel Foucault’s ideas on biopower can still be improved. According to Gavin, Foucault didn’t think past the spatial term “territory” to consider the even more ambiguous term “area”, which according to Gavin is more encompassing of the unboundedness…

  • Semicoloniality, Agency and Occupation

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    The Bogor Botanical Gardens was officially established by the Dutch East Indies Government on May 17, 1817, which became an important part in the history of science in Indonesia. (Wikimedia Commons) In Race and the Education of Desire (1995), Ann Laura Stoler writes about the central role of the construction of race and empires in…