MacGuffins and Magical Things

When the MacGuffin is an object, it is an agentive object, something that moves the action, causes things to happen. The Maltese falcon of the eponymous Humphrey Bogart film is the quintessential MacGuffin. The MacGuffin of Mediums and Magical Things sits in the storage vault of the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (VME) in Hanoi—three goddesses with blissful smiles on their faces, carved of wood and covered with gilt and lacquer (plate 1). In anthropology, as well as in fiction, the MacGuffin takes us unawares, but the anthropologist is obliged to provide something in the way of a narrative explanation, which I will, by and by. The goddess statues in question are not “unimportant to the overall plot,” although the plot will eventually overtake them. They are MacGuffin-ish, however, insofar as they administered the motivating nudge for this project. A research path opened imperceptibly, and a scholarly obsession took hold. It happened in 2002, on the morning when Madame Trâ  n Thi. Duyên (Bà Đô ng Duyên) from the Tiên Hương Palace at Phủ Dâ  y, a primary seat of Mother Goddess worship in northern Vietnam, visited the VME. A few years would pass before I recognized that at mid-career, I had been MacGuffined, and was spinning in a new and unforeseen direction, a trajectory involving encounters with empowered images—statues, paintings, masks—that abide under the broad umbrellas of Buddhist and Hindu practice across the map of Asia (figure 1). chapter 1