Review: Cyril Isnart & Nathalie Cerezales, The religious heritage complex: Legacy, conservation, and Christianity London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020 (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
The Religious Heritage Complex examines heritage-making of Christian-related legacies led by secular and clerical institutions. It argues that the relationship between public policies and spiritual practices is not as clear-cut as some might think. In fact, the authors show that religious activity has always combined care for the past with conscious practices of heritage-making, which they term “the religious heritage complex.” The book considers the ways patrimony, religion, and identity interact in different Christian contexts worldwide and how religious objects and sites function as identity symbols. It focuses on heritage-making as a religious and material activity for the groups in charge of a sacred inheritance and considers heritage activities as one of the forms of spiritual renewal and transmission. Case studies explore various Christian traditions located in Europe, the Americas, and Africa, investigating the longstanding and tightly-enmeshed connections that weave together religion and cultural heritage. Through comparing ecclesiastical and civil heritage institutions, this book allows us to consider the ambiguity of religious heritage.
The struggle for sustaining religious heritage in a time of change
Historically churches used to be the centre of life. Churches did not just meet religious needs, but societal needs as well. The whole life cycle revolved around the church building. The complete life cycle was elevated and celebrated in the church: children were baptised and confirmed there, adults got married and deceased got buried. And in the meantime, from the cradle to the grave, life was lived according to a daily, weekly and yearly religious rhythm. The classical example of the church service on Sunday which was followed by a visit in the nearby pub, structured the weekly life of the community and brought the worldly and spiritual life organically together.
Unmasking the Sacred: an alternative approach to the archaeology of religion (ENGLISH TRANSLATION)
Today, ‘the sacred’ is one of the most widely-used terms in archaeological discussions of religion. However, although the word ‘sacred’ is an adjective, it often appears as ‘The Sacred’, and in this way, is found masquerading as a noun. I use this grammatical distinction to demonstrate how the notion of sacrality is currently flawed, but nonetheless, can be transformed into a useful cross-cultural, and therefore archaeological term if rehabilitated. My argument rests on the idea that ‘the sacred’ can be more usefully viewed as: the quality of being set aside, marked off, or forbidden, rather than some holy essence of spiritual power. This revised meaning is well suited to archaeology because features like boundaries, walls, ditches and other forms of physical barriers/borders are visible in the material record. Although it is a simple idea, it is also a powerful one because social relations are both represented by and reproduced in spatial relations (Moore 1996: ix). That is, acts of defining a space using exclusion and inclusion are also strategies of social construction. I use the example of Thracian tumuli to show that by applying a sociological notion of sacrality to understanding them, it can be suggested that the main purpose of these sites may not have been to house the dead, but they were rather a generic form of marking off an area or feature as sacred, that is, set-apart or forbidden. Thus, this paper suggests how a re-modelled idea of sacrality can throw new light on the significance of ritual sites.
The change in use of Christian religious buildings raises various issues, and establishing a context for them means dealing with core conservation themes while at the same time examining the relationships between shape and content in architecture. For several decades, the debate around this subject was focused on the dichotomy between figurative and historical (material) values. Today, theoretical reflection vacillates between the pre-eminent attention paid to the architecture itself, and to the meanings that we can derive from it. Architectural forms gather together and transmit different concepts. These can be spatial, constructive, structural, technological, material; but also social, economic and, in general terms, cultural. If the first group of qualifications defines the properties of the architecture in itself, the second group refers purely to its functional and symbolic dimensions. Confronting the issues that arise from proposals that show new weak functions conflicting with strong ancient symbols, the solutions, yet again, must not derive from the uncertain path of extra-architectural significance, but in the potential for the building itself to show its own specific essence. If it is true that architectural questions from the past reach us as answers through their objectivation, our answers, to retain credibility, should not avoid the need to build a deep relationship with that same physicality
Ethnologia Europaea, 2020
This article addresses the combined dynamics between traditional religious manifestations and cultural heritage processes in order to better understand the reconfiguration of certain religious rituals, sometimes coined as local religion. After examining the entanglements of cultural heritage and religions in southern Europe, often silenced or minimized, I present recent case studies demonstrating that uses of religious traditions as cultural heritage are not uncommon and that the theoretical framework of secularization needs to be nuanced. At state or community level, religious practices seem to be enchanted, and at the same time enchant the region in which they take place. This analysis helps to understand the processes of contemporary social and cultural reconfiguration of the ways people think and what they make of their religious "traditions".
Religious Studies Review, 2006
Religious Studies Review / 101 determined by, current theories-or, more generally, by the conditions that prevail in the industrial world, which make it appear that "desire" is more important than "need"? The following chapters are devoted to a discussion of prestigious goods and conspicuous consumption, the phenomenon of exchange, and the genesis of sacral objects, based on Israelite, South Pacific, North American, Australian, African, and Greek materials. The last chapter focuses on collecting, from antiquity to the appearance of the modern museum. Kohl asks whether museum pieces are the sacral objects of modernity and then proceeds to a most insightful reversal of W. Benjamin's dictum about the auratic character of the work of art by asking whether it is not its multiplication that endows the original work with an "aura." This is a book that, because of its interdisciplinary character, will be read with profit by scholars in a number of specialties. Recommended.