Displaced Forms: Assyrian Reliefs, Ecological Intentionality, and the Ethics of Perception

Twenty years ago (2006), my first book, Asia Has Claims Upon New England: Assyrian Reliefs at Yale, was published by Yale University after my time there as a graduate student working at the Yale University Art Gallery. It’s a short study of how carved stones from the palace of Assurnasirpal II at Nimrud came to New Haven and entered the religious, educational, and institutional imagination of nineteenth-century America. That earlier work focused on Assyrian palace reliefs, Protestant missionary culture, biblical archaeology, and the strange afterlives of objects once they are removed from the worlds that formed them. The original publication is available here, with catalog records available through Yale/WorldCat and the Smithsonian Institution.

This new work, “Displaced Forms: Assyrian Reliefs, Ecological Intentionality, and the Ethics of Perception,” returns to that earlier project from the standpoint of my current doctoral work in ecology, spirituality, and religion at CIIS. I ask what happens when a form is separated from its world, whether that form is an Assyrian relief, a sacred tree carved in gypsum, a black walnut in a Spartanburg yard, or a river translated into capacity. The essay brings the Assyrian reliefs into conversation with ecological phenomenology, Edith Stein’s account of form, and my ongoing work on ecological intentionality. Its central claim is simple, I think… displaced forms continue to make claims upon us, and to perceive them rightly requires more than possession, preservation, or admiration. It requires learning to receive the worlds still speaking through them.