From Collecting History to Iconography: Southeast Asian Shadow Puppets in the British Museum

In the field of Southeast Asian shadow theatre, the performance and social side of the topic has been addressed, but there have been relatively few publications that examine puppet iconography. The trend has been for studies of the social contexts, political associations, performance traditions, and so forth, which are all essential for comprehending iconography, yet which have left a lacuna in shadow theatre studies. Here, I propose to initiate an exploration into shadow puppet imagery to begin to address this issue within the frame of collecting history. I explore the British Museum’s shadow puppets in comparison with other collections of similar material in order to expand the historic picture of puppet development. The focus in this paper is upon the Thai and Malay shadow puppets, because of their iconographic similarities that date to at least the 19th century and the fact that they have been less well studied than Javanese and Balinese examples.