Tag: soas
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Lozano’s Letras y Figuras in the FDR Museum for Mapping Philippine Material Culture (SOAS)
While researching visual representations of port cities, I encountered an unexpected object at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum: a nineteenth-century letras y figuras painting by the Manila artist José Honorato Lozano (1815/1821–1885). The Roosevelt Library—best known for presidential papers, wartime correspondence, and family memorabilia—is not the first place art historians would think…
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The Agimat as Matrix: Conceptualizing Islamic Rematriation
In an early twentieth-century catalogue from the Field Museum in Chicago, a Qur’an-inscribed agimat—a talismanic belt from Mindanao—is marked “difficult to obtain.” Composed of cloth, baroque pearls, plant matter, and sacred text, the object was classified as an ethnographic specimen, stripped of its cosmological function and ritual charge. This paper uses that object as a…
Geronimo Cristobal 