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Paper short abstract

This paper explores Buddhist material culture as trace-substance in contested landscapes, examining how traces accumulate, erode and endure beyond polarized mobilizations that seek to claim them for divergent futures

Paper long abstract

This paper explores Buddhist material culture as trace-substance in contested landscapes, examining how traces accumulate, erode and endure beyond polarized mobilizations that seek to claim them for divergent futures. Through colonial archives and contemporary commemorations of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas, and ethnographic engagement with rock-cut Buddha’s and “mini Bamiyans” in Muslim-majority Kashmir, I develop trace an experimental analytic for understanding accommodation rather than appropriation.

In 19th century travelogues the Bamiyan Buddhas appeared as “colossal idols,” successively re-named through an accretive archive of myths, stories, speculations and wonder (ajaib). This metonymic imbrication created conditions for assimilating strange objects into landscapes, causing them to simultaneously erode and endure – a process I conceptualize as trace-substance of shifting meanings, neither fully present nor absent, neither heritage nor cult object nor ruin. Shifting analytical gaze from their spectacular destruction (the 2001 iconoclasm) to prolonged, heterogeneous entanglements reveals how traces operate as mercurial presences that resist definitive claims. Taking cues from this archival analysis, the paper then explores implications for understanding Buddhist material culture – including rock cut Buddhas and “mini Bamiyans” in Kashmir – that move beyond Hindu nationalist archaeology, Islamic identity politics or secular heritage preservation. Here, trace becomes both method and provocation for attending to how communities live with rather than mobilize traces for particular futures. I argue that trace-as-substance – possessing material presence while holding absences – offers resources for anthropological inquiry that dwells with rather than resolves contradiction, revealing relational horizons where “strange objects” erode and endure simultaneously.