Re-Enchantment in the Museum: Gaṇeśa, Hindu Art and the Living Divine

Two statues of the elephant-headed Hindu god Gaṇeśa belong to the collections of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum and New York’s Asia Society. These decommissioned temple idols from India were first displayed according to standard museological standards, but visitors began to make offerings and regard them with devotion. Considering the sculptures religiously, rather than artistically or historically, subverted the disciplined regimen of the museums’ spaces. In this article, I argue against Max Weber’s ‘disenchantment’ of the modern world that proposed a gulf between religious faith and scientific rationality. Instead, the example of these Gaṇeśa sculptures suggests a more intimate proximity between devotion and rationality in current instances of ‘museum re-enchantment’ by which visitors reclaim the spiritual significance of temple artefacts in museum contexts. In turn, curators have created strategies to maintain the conservation of artworks while accommodating practices of veneration.