Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects; Volume I Sacred Roots: Material Entities, Consecrating Acts, Priestly Puppeteers. Edited by Claudia Orenstein and Tim Cusack. New York: Routledge, 2024. 278 pp., 35 b/w illustrations. Hardback $133.00, Paperback $54.99, eBook $49.49.
Puppet and Spirit looks at the many ways puppets, as material objects that perform, often maintain a unique connection to the unseen, to the spirit world. The international roster of authors who have contributed to this book includes both scholars and practitioners in many disciplines and at different points within their career. The essays describe practice, history, culture, and theory relating to puppetry. Central to the book is the premise that understanding performing objects within spiritual practices and beliefs can help aid an understanding of how religion functions in contemporary society.
This book is part of a multi-volume investigation into the relationships between puppetry and spirituality. According to the book’s editors, “volume I leans into research that reflects on long-standing traditions or historically older practices tied to established religions or belief systems. In this sense, the examples here ferret out foundational views and approaches to the topic at hand” (p. 16). Essays focus both on history and contemporary practice. The authors seek to emphasize comparisons across time and place, seeking to avoid creating universals that collapse distinct histories and people.
The approach taken here is deliberately broad, avoiding the creation of rigid definitions for puppets, performing objects, religion, and spirituality; focusing instead on, “points where these divergent worlds meet, the reasons behind these conjunctions, how they are made to occur, and what happens when these meetings take place” (p. 6). The book begins with a useful overview of the different definitions and ways of thinking about puppetry today, including multimedia and AI forms. Drawing from religion, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, performance studies, and science, the introduction provides useful, expansive, frameworks for how the editors considered religion, spirituality, and ritual — each essay engages with these ideas differently, offering case studies for the rich field that is explored in the book.
The seventeen chapters, organized into five sections, explore a wide range of well-known puppet traditions while also introducing several lesser-known practices. Most chapters focus on Asia, with particular attention to Indonesia, but there is also coverage of the Middle East, Brazil, Europe, and Africa. In many instances, puppets serve as representations of, or conduits for, spiritual beings; in others, the relationship between puppetry and spirituality varies. Additionally, puppetry is used as a lens to better understand ritual objects and effigies, for example, in Chapter 17, Joseph Maybloom uses a “puppet perspective” to consider how the Torah is used in ritual to foster a sense of “Jewishness” and community. The religious traditions represented are diverse, encompassing Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and various localized beliefs and practices.
Like all edited collections, the variety of approaches and subjects is both an advantage and a disadvantage. There are several threads, however, that tie the chapters together and provide a reader a path through the work. Each essay examines how puppets form a triangular relationship between “three types of ontological entities: people, spirits, and objects” (p. 4). Descriptions of performances are combined with details about how the puppets are made. Authors also consider the lineages of these practices and how gender or social class impact access to puppetry knowledge. Heritage and efforts to preserve practices from extinction are detailed together with how these performances continue to maintain spiritual meaning in societies that may not have the same connections to religion and ritual as previous generations. In my summary below, I do not try to give coverage of every single chapter but rather point to some representative pieces to demonstrate the dynamic scope of the volume.
In the first section, “Shamanic Lineages,” authors describe relationships between experts or expert-knowledge to puppet performance in spiritual or ritual settings. In Chapter 2, Izabela Brochado describes how the two-hundred-year-old puppet theatre mamulengo incorporated influences from local, African and European cultures and religions by describing key scenes and characters. The relationship she describes between puppets, puppeteer, and spirits reminds me of what I observed in Bali, where tradition, religion, artistry, and audience expectations renegotiate and change. A different relationship between knowledge and practitioner is revealed in Chapter 4, where Nāpali Souza interviews Auli’i Mitchell about efforts to revitalize hula ki’i, or the dance of the sacred image. The interview emphasizes the importance of commitment from the practitioner; the performance begins with prayer and the “students retain the spirit of the story so that it transfers into the character of each hula ki’i” (p. 64).
The chapters in Section II “Communal Celebrations” are about puppet performances that require more than one performer working together. Chapter 5, by Yasuko Senda and William Condee, describes early large-scale animatronics that were part of Japanese Shinto festivals. They come to “life” when three or four puppeteers work together to operate the complex machinery. Matthew Isaac Cohen shifts the focus in Chapter 8 by drawing from decades of field research to look at how the practice and meaning of wayang, especially as related to spirituality, changes in response to community values in West Java to maintain tradition as relevant.
Section III “Powerful Players” looks at how puppets relate to supernatural beings. In Chapter 9, Annie Katsura Rollins focuses on the ghostly legend of Emperor Han Wudi and its spiritual connection to the origins of Chinese shadow puppetry. In Chapter 10, Claudia Orenstein looks at large shadow puppets in Thailand, nang yai, to unpack how “ritual or potent puppets, material objects imbued with power—often by their very ability or perceived ability to be embodied by or connect to some nonhuman, nonmaterial presence or force—while also operated by humans” are said to have power (p. 135). The chapters in this section offer insight into the different ways puppetry’s connection to the spiritual world is understood and negotiated.
Section IV “Doctrinal Dialogues” complicates assumptions that puppetry is an anathema to Islamic or Christian doctrines. Chapter 13 by Salma Mohseni Ardehali and Mir Mohammadreza Heydari and Chapter 14 by Kathy Foley disrupt histories of Islam and puppetry in the Arab World and Java. Puppetry as a way to understand statues of Christ in Medieval Europe is the focus of Chapter 15 by Michelle K. Ong. Each chapter provides rich details and historical evidence.
Section V “Holding Heritage” examines how ritual objects might be better understood through the lens of puppetry. Both chapters look at objects that contain text, Chapter 16 by Nina Sabnani focuses on kaavad, a kind of story box, in Rajasthan, India. Chapter 17 by Joseph Maybloom uses a “’puppet perspective’” to examine the Torah scroll’s positioning in three rituals: its creation, its use in the Seder K’riat Ha’Torah (Service for the Reading of the Torah), and its ritual burial” (p. 225). This section demonstrates the broad utility of puppetry for thinking through the use of sacred objects.
Each chapter does an excellent job of providing enough description and contextual information for readers who might not be familiar with the particular genre or culture it comes from while also offering enough depth to be of interest to those with a more extensive background. I also enjoyed reading about specific case studies or performances that served to illustrate general information. The authors are skilled in writing vivid descriptions of ephemeral performances, and the photographs throughout the book are also useful to help the reader visualize these diverse practices. This book will be of interest to scholars not only in puppetry, performance studies, and theatre, but also to students and scholars in religion, folklore, and anthropology.
Jennifer Goodlander
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
