ABSTRACT
Making Temples/ Making Selves: Essentialism and Construction in the Identity of the Traditional South Asian Artist
Samuel K. Parker
Within essentialist models of identity (and culture), the phenomena to be known are treated as sharply bounded categories defined in relation to a collection of more-or-less static characteristics deemed to be inherent to its members. This perspective was relentlessly undermined in the twentieth century by ethnographic evidence, which exposes endless exceptions, and by political abuses associated with group stereotyping, which is facilitated by essentialist approaches to social reality. In recent decades it has become popular to correct the fallacies and troubling pragmatics of essentialism with constructivist models of identity (and culture), in which identity is seen as a mutable, fabricated semiotic phenomenon defined not by internal essences, but by shifting patterns of relationship among diverse and changing internal and external factors. But in resolving one set of problems a new set emerges. How does a constructivist anthropologist (like me) sympathetically represent the explicitly essentialist identity claims of consultants? Here I attempt to explore a positive role for essentialist clams within the semiotics of identity construction as practiced by traditional Tamil temple architects and image-makers.