Engendering Magnificence: Marble Buddhist Image Polishing and Women’s Religious Labor in Contemporary Myanmar

ABSTRACT This article foregrounds women’s labor in shaping religious materiality by shifting attention from iconography, style, and ritual efficacy to magnificence in the study of Buddhist images. Drawing on my embodied apprenticeship and insights from Burmese artisans and Chinese workshop owners in the Myanmar-China marble Buddhist image trade, the article examines how Burmese women artisans physically and mentally engage in polishing, a form of highly gendered labor that is essential to achieving the desired magnificence of marble Buddhist icons yet is often overlooked in scholarship, and how they interpret polishing as meritorious labor of soteriological significance. By analyzing polishing as a quotidian yet religiously meaningful form of labor that demonstrates the productive agency of Buddhist women, this article highlights unacknowledged gendered dynamics in the material construction of religious worlds and advocates for more sustained attention to women’s everyday labor in the broader studies of craft, value, and religion.