Ancient Southeast Asian Hindu and Buddhist Art: Supporting Methodological Innovation

Convenors: Ashley Thomson and Tran Ky Phuong
This session aims to bring together early career researchers with ambitions to develop innovative methodologies in the study of ancient Southeast Asian Hindu and Buddhist art. This field has long been accessory to the discipline of History, with iconographic analyses defining styles and forms of influence as a means of supporting the scholarly establishment of chronological developments across the Southeast Asian and neighbouring regions. Building on the historical and art historical knowledge developed through this long-established approach, scholars are now able to expand our horizons, in for example, attending to close material analyses, bringing anthropological methods into dialogue with art historical findings to sound the nexus of form and function, exploring aesthetic dimensions of the materials, or turning a critical eye to the political and ideological frameworks of art historical analyses… The broad goal is to support early career scholars in developing thicker, more diverse histories of Southeast Asian Hindu and Buddhist art, where exploring the art is deemed a worthy goal in and of itself, rather than a path to supposed higher forms of scientific knowledge.