Thoughtful study across the full range of human cultures has always been central to the Museum's mission. Franz Boas founded the Division of Anthropology on the premise, controversial at the time, that there is no such thing as a "primitive" or "civilized" culture, and that all are equally worthy of respect. Recent exhibitions—"The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou" and "Body Art: Marks of Identity"—exemplify the Museum's effort to help visitors move beyond stereotypes and to break free of an older tradition that exoticized people from other cultures as very different, "or trapped in the pages of National Geographic magazine," as Laurel puts it. "Exhibits are a great way to do this because they're so immediate. They celebrate our multiple diversity while showing that all humans share a common space and moment in time."

An Idea Leads to an Exhibit
A few years ago, anthropologist and photographer Stephen Huyler came into Laurel's office with a box and an idea. Huyler had previously curated a show called "Puja" at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington D.C. about objects used in Hindus' daily ritual offerings. Now he was proposing a show that shifted the emphasis from the object to the act of devotion itself. The box contained not just the anthropologist's wonderful photographs of Indian deities, but also some of the shrines in which he envisioned displaying them. Not real, consecrated shrines—"because people in various states of impurity couldn't touch them," Laurel explains—but small, decorative wooden boxes that could be opened by visitors to reveal the God or Goddess within. "The idea is that by opening the shrine door, the visitor might appreciate a central experience of Hindu practice, darshan, the focus of Hindu acts of devotion." Darshan translates literally as "meeting God," the title of the exhibition that opened in September 2001 with Laurel as the in-house curator and Stephen Huyler as the guest curator.

Engaging the Visitor in Multiple Ways
"Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion" uses spectacular objects, images, sound, and color to convey the many ways in which religion, particularly Hinduism, enriches the daily lives of devout Hindus. It takes the visitor from the home to the community to the temple to festivals in the surrounding streets, giving teachers many discussion points. "It encourages the visitor to understand religious practices that are sensate—what you see and feel, the gestures your body makes, the scent of incense—all of which are forms of prayer," Laurel explains. This exhibition was a great opportunity to share some treasures from the Museum's standing collection, only a small percentage of which is on display. The objects on view, such as dippers for water and lamps for oil, are all the more precious because they are worn with use.

As an anthropologist who studies religion, "albeit in a different corner of Asia—Korea," Laurel is aware that Westerners tend to learn about religion as abstract doctrine presented in a book or a lecture hall. "They're less comfortable learning about the acts of devotion that many people perform, such as lighting candles, dressing votive images, and bringing material objects into the place of worship, and that's when prejudice creeps in," she observes. Prejudice against people whose devotional practices seem utterly alien can be countered by information and by studying the beliefs that underlie such practices, "but an exhibition such as 'Meeting God,' as a visual experience, has an even greater potential to convey the spiritual and aesthetic qualities of non-Western religious practices," Laurel comments.

Connecting With the Local South Asian Community
Village trees are very important sites for community worship in India, and a tree in the center of the exhibition helps to create an immersive experience. "The tree suggests an authentic physical environment so powerfully that one of our security guards asked if she could leave a votive offering at the base," Laurel recounts. "She was excited that the show was conveying her tradition." The guard is one of the approximately 425,000 Asian Indians who live in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut area, and the curators envisioned the show as a way of bringing this community into the Museum. "We wanted the community to participate in putting the exhibit together and to reassure them that this is a place where their traditions are being celebrated, shared, and communicated to a larger community," Laurel says. Laurel and the exhibition team connected with two temples in Queens, New York, who reviewed new video footage and invited the Museum crew to film one of their festivals, "so when you enter the temple section of our exhibit, you see members of our New York Hindu community."

This re-created Banyan tree in the "Meeting God" exhibition depicts a South Indian tree shrine wrapped with cloths containing offering or prayers from devotees. Throughout India, hundreds of thousands of ancient trees are focal points for the worship of community deities, or gramdevatas. © AMNH

Laurel's team also created an ancillary exhibition, "Portraits of Worship", an installation by Magnum photographer Steve McCurry, that captures the local Indian population at prayer in offices, stores, and homes. In the captions, New Yorkers explain in their own words what it means to be a Hindu and practice these devotions. "We try to get away from the sense that if you see it in a museum, it's removed from the present," Laurel explains. "This show is all about people living in the here and now, the vitality of their religious experiences."