Individual Paper
7. Multiple Ontologies: Religiosities, Philosophies, Languages and Society
The following feedback stems from the author's participation in the specialization course 'AMA - Museum and Art Anthropology' (University of Milano Bicocca).
As an art historian and Sanskritist, the author's first approach to studying the Indian goddess Chinnamastā through textual and iconographical sources highlighted some gaps she believes she must fill to understand this peculiar goddess. The current ritual practice, contemporary artworks, and regional variants, for example, need to be analyzed from an anthropological and sociological point as well. Authors Perera and Pathak (2019), in the volume Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia. Decoding Visual Worlds, reiterate the need for an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to study contemporary South Asian art. To codify a work of art, the scholar cannot ignore its anthropological and sociological aspects, along with the art-historical one. Although these scholars refer to contemporary (South Asian) art, the author believes a similar approach should be applied to any disciplinary field, especially Indology. This intersection of different disciplines will allow an all-encompassing knowledge of the figure of Chinnamastā, not detached from the historical, social, and cultural reality but fully inserted in it.
In this author's opinion, the study of the goddess Chinnamastā requires intense ethnographic research to highlight the creative processes that generated this cult and its impact on the lives of the adepts. The research aims to enhance the human, what lies behind the divinity and substantiate it, as it is made explicit in the innovative discipline of anthropological aesthetics (Mathuk 2022).
Camilla Cibele
Independent Researcher, Italy