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- Convenors:
-
Ferdinand de Jong
(Freie Universitat)
Rasmus Rask Poulsen (University of Copenhagen)
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- Stream:
- The Future of 'Traditional' Art Practices and Knowledge
- Location:
- Thomas Paine Study Centre 0
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 4 September, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how the secularization of religious heritage informs the construction of temporalities in which the sacred and the secular intersect. Amongst other aspects, it explores to what extent heritage futures incorporate religious temporalities in secular practice.
Long Abstract:
In our secularizing world, religion has become increasingly subject to heritagisation. But whilst legacies of religion become subjected to heritage regimes, religious practices are not at all over-determined by heritagisation. Christian Cathedrals, witch covens, and ancient pilgrimages, provide experiences of the sacred that elude heritage regimes. This posits an interesting inquiry for our post-secular age: How does the heritagisation of religion in contemporary religious practices affect experiences of the sacred?
One of the defining features of religious thought and practice is the concept of renewal. Informing Christian eschatology and its expectations for the future, this temporal notion is incorporated in the resurrection of Christ. Ideas of renewal also inform other religious and secular formations. To what extent is the idea of renewal, so pivotal to religious and secular ontologies, present in heritage? Thinking about the temporality of re-enactment, can heritage practices of re-enactment be conceived as incorporating religious time in secular practice? How is the promise of renewal translated into new temporalities of the future?
In this panel, religious heritage is understood as both legacy from the past and promise for the future. We explore how the intersection of secular and sacred time in heritage practices informs constructions of the future. The interference of religious and secular time asks for an inquiry into the temporalities of the sacred in our post-secular age.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 4 September, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
In Bury St Edmunds, a rumour circulates that the remains of St Edmund lie buried in the ruins of its former Benedictine abbey. This paper demonstrates that the bureaucratic heritagisation of the ruins transforms affects of loss into heritage futures.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2012 a rumour has circulated in Bury St Edmunds that the remains of St Edmund are buried under the derelict tennis courts in the ruins of its former Benedictine abbey. A Heritage Partnership, set up to improve the interpretation and conservation of the legacy of St Edmunds and the abbey ruins, currently makes provisions to enable archaeological excavations in the abbey ruins. That such excavations will enhance the attractiveness of Bury St Edmunds as tourist destination, is never far from anyone's mind, and they are indeed conceived as part of a wider policy to promote Bury St Edmunds.
In keeping with Historic England guidelines, the Heritage Partnership has commissioned a Heritage Assessment and a Conservation Plan, which have identified the histories, archaeologies, ruins and monuments of the abbey. In line with the guidelines, these reports have attributed the heritage assets different heritage values. What we witness, then, is a transformation of ruins into heritage assets. But whilst this process is enacted in bureaucratic time, the popular demand for the excavation of St Edmund's bones requires instantaneous gratification.
This paper addresses the different temporal demands that the Heritage Partnership faces in addressing the popular interest in the remains of St Edmund. It argues that the longing for Edmund is articulated in temporalities of loss and nostalgia, whilst the process of heritagisation offers bureaucratic temporalities of anticipation. The Heritage Partnership faces the challenging task of matching the longings for return with procedures of anticipation, transforming affects of loss into heritage futures.
Paper short abstract:
What is contemporary status of old funeral spaces in postmigrant territories of Poland? What meanings are attached to them? Sacred or secular? What values prewar cemeteries represent and what practices they evoke nowadays?
Paper long abstract:
In the presentation the results of qualitative field research in the postmigrant territories of Poland are discussed. The context of broken social continuity caused by mass, forced migrations and shifts in national borders after the WW II, and the heritage practices taken by the third generation after the migrations, show the temporality of values attached to the cemeteries of "the others".
The cemeteries that have been destructed and forgotten for around fifty years, since 1990's are the subjects of restoration and commemoration practices. These practices include religious rituals as well. What is interesting the rituals are not of religion of the deceased and buried ones but of religion of the ones who manage the spaces currently. Sometimes it is the combination of both, while ecumenical prayer meetings, with the catholic priest and evangelical pastor participating. After over fifty years of being secular spaces - the researched cemeteries regained their religious meanings, however, among many other, secular as well, resulting in a complex new set of meanings.
In the presentation I focus on questions of symbolic domination, and cultural and religious apropriation that are part of the heritage process taking place with reference to the cemeteries nowadays.
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnography of a project for the construction of a new square in Lisbon (the Moorish square), the objective of this paper is to address the relations between religion, heritage making and the articulations of different temporalities
Paper long abstract:
Based on an ethnography of a new urban project, the objective of this paper is to address the ways heritage regimes and lived religion produce distinct temporalities and futures.
In 2011, the Lisbon city hall announced the construction of a new square in downtown Lisbon. Its name - the Moorish square - evokes the heritagization of the Arab Islamic past of the city, a process connected with larger economic dynamics associated with tourism and urban renewal. Simultaneously, this new square will also include the relocation of an existing mosque, created in the early 2000s, and managed by the Islamic Community of Bangladesh (ICB), a Bangladeshi-Portuguese Islamic association. For the ICB, this relocation is also their recognition as key institutional actors within public Islam in Portugal and a major waqf (good deed) for all Muslims.
Thus, overall, this paper will show how a project for the construction of a new square in downtown Lisbon draws different, albeit articulated, futures: one centered on heritagization, secularities and urban renewal, and another, on religious temporalities.
Paper short abstract:
This paper introduces the notion of pre-enactment to study how emotions related to heritage and the future memory of our time are made to 'stick'. Analyzing two case studies, from the Netherlands and Thailand, we investigate how heritage-claims involve unruly, passionate practices of pre-enactment.
Paper long abstract:
Arguably, all heritage claims are aimed at the future: heritage is that which is felt to be worthwhile to inherit. But what makes heritage-claims work? This paper argues that heritage-claims mobilize emotions and affective projections of a shared future. We ask how authoritative voices succeed or fail in invoking and controlling heritage-sentiments. How are emotions connected to heritage and the future memory of our time made to 'stick'?
Basing ourselves on Sara Ahmed's focus on how emotions are produced and on how 'objects of emotion circulate, rather than emotion as such', we focus on production and contestation of emotions regarding heritage. To make the production of affects related to heritage tangible and researchable, this paper suggests the notion of 'pre-enactment.'
We use the notion of pre-enactment to capture the 'dramaturgy of emotion' involved in setting up heritage-claims. Pre-enactment are practices that aim at prescribing the correct emotions related to a certain object of heritage. Yet this dependence on emotion brings along a certain volatility. We investigate how heritage involves unruly and passionate practices of pre-enactment.
Using two ethnographic case studies we study the affordances and limits of pre-enactment. The first, situated in the Netherlands, involves the popularity of Passion plays. How do Passion plays pre-enact the Christian future of the Dutch nation? The second case study involves the dramaturgy related to the coronation of king Rama X in Thailand. How do national sentiments and heritage-claims pre-enact what should be felt about the future of the kingdom?
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses how religious temporalities are used to reinforce Kraków's religious heritage. Reenactment and actualization of the Christ's Passion not only create a temporality affecting the faithful, but also reveal universal and timeless values ascribed to the city's heritage.
Paper long abstract:
The Salesian Passion Play is performed in the congregation's house in Kraków several times during the Lent and is attended by around two thousand people. It forms a part of the Roman Catholic heritage, but by its participants it is described also as Kraków's heritage, constituting - for dozens years now - one of many religious attractions in the city.
The relation of the religious performance with city's heritage is strengthened by the Roman Catholic image of Kraków, which is perceived as "Pope's city", a pilgrimage centre (Niedźwiedź 2017). From such perspective Kraków's heritage appears as thoroughly permeated by Roman Catholicism. The Salesian play contributes to this image promoting and preserving values presented as common, stemming from the universality of the story of Christ.
In the Salesian congregation's house visitors each year are presented a different scenario organized around Christ's Passion which refers to the problems of the contemporary world. Evangelical story is reenacted, reframed and reinterpreted in multiple ways, creating its own temporality with its own values exceeding worldly time. Religious ritual, and consequently a religious story, is repeated, replicated (see Bielo 2016) and reappears in performative againness (see Schneider 2011). Passion play organizes heritage's timeline. It sets religious heritage goals (i.e. preserving Roman Catholic values and emphasizing certain universalism of the Christ's Passion) in the present and for the future through pointing out to their timeless validity. Consequently, in some aspects religious heritage might be perceived as ahistorical and framed in a different temporality
Paper short abstract:
Amidst heritagization of its townscape, a Protestant congregation in Denmark, tackles its own and others' engagement with its past, present and future. This paper examines how Moravians of Christiansfeld produces and authorizes its religious practices and knowledge of its past as heritage.
Paper long abstract:
In the summer of 2015, Moravian Christiansfeld in Denmark was inscribed to UNESCO's World Heritage List. The prestigious recognition meant that not only did the historic environment of the village become an object of outside attention from state agencies, cultural experts and tourists, so did the religious practices and values of the local Moravian congregation. Based on ethnography from Christiansfeld, the paper examines how heritagization affects religious practices and knowledge production about the Moravian Brethren's past. By showing how Moravians reject the idea of re-enactment, the paper reflects that Moravians constituents in Christiansfeld distinguish between performances of "enactment" and "re-enactment" where they affirm a more general attitude towards religious engagements with the past. This distinction is made by the community in the face of actual and potential expectations of tourists and heritage professionals. These are attitudes and arguments which stem from a general Pietist privilege of religious experiences posited in Christiansfeld against staged experiences as sources of knowledge about Moravian identity and pasts. Here the paper considers that the rejection of re-enactment may be read as a rejection or resistance by Moravians against being seen as objects of heritage and tourist gazes.
As a matter of control and affirmation of identity, these claims against re-enactment engage increasingly challenged conceptions of time, knowledge and religious practices of the community. In the end, the paper suggests that by rejecting re-enactment, during processes of heritagization, the community demarcates a "sacred remit of practices and relations" that belong only to itself.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how Palestinian Christians take up secular conceptions of religious heritage as a substitute for church ritual. It argues that in identifying Christianity as a 'heritage', Palestinians tie the experience of divine presence to particular ways of imagining the Christian past.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the ways in which Palestinian Christians take up secular conceptions of religious heritage as a substitute for church ritual in the Old City of Jerusalem. Jerusalem's Christian holy sites have been controlled by European monks for centuries, though the majority of the Christian population is Palestinian. Major religious and historical sites are kept open for public visitation while local congregations worship in separate parish churches. At certain times of the year, however, the more famous sites - usually occupied by tourists, pilgrims, and monks - take on a different role. Annual festivals celebrating saints and miracles, which feature rituals performed by clergy but also historical traditions led by lay Palestinians, provide the latter with a way to experience a link to the generations of indigenous Christians who lived in the city before them, all the way back to the first Christians. The paper compares the different ways in which this link is articulated, ultimately arguing that the festivals produce a slippage between re-enactment and ritual. In doing so, they grant marginalized Palestinian Christians privileged access to major shrines and allow them to recognize their own social history in the universal Christian heritage. Their collective experience of the past is thus grafted onto their ritual experiences of the divine, providing them with a sense of continuity that informs the way they act in the present and prepare for the future.
Paper short abstract:
What can the comparative study of 15th century tapestries and the proposals of the museums that exhibit them contribute to the examination of the ideas of renewal? How to reflect on the transformation of such concept regarding future expectations?, are some of the questions developed in the paper.
Paper long abstract:
Through a comparative study of masterpieces of the fifteenth century tapestry, namely, "The Unicorn Tapestries" and "Dame with Unicorn" and, of the reflection on the proposals of the museums exhibiting these tapestries, the aim of the paper is to explore the ideas of renewal present in each of these sets, with emphasis on those that can be detected from the examination of the limits, specificities and intersections between sacred and secular dimensions. From the examination of the exhibitions, activities and practices proposed by The Cloisters (New York) and the Musée Cluny (Paris), I will reflect on the transformations that the concept of renewal presents with regard to future expectations, considering -this concept- in relationship with renewal ideas examined in the focused tapestries.
The specific forms of sociability that distinguish each of said tapestries are examined in their interrelation with nature and the materials, objects and significant instruments, through the study of different planes. The examination of the horizontal and vertical directions of the "threads", on which, I will reflect based on elaboration by Tim Ingold (2007) will deserve special attention in the analysis of the tapestries.
Considering the relevance of the senses and, that of the logic that underlies said ordering in the Middle Ages (Taburet Delahaye 2010) methodologically the study of the senses will contribute to the detection of sacred and secular dimensions. The conceptualizations of Fabian (1983) on sacred time and secular time as well as those related to transformations processes, will be considered in said analysis.
Paper short abstract:
By analyzing discourses and singing practices in an Anglican traditional parish church in London, I show how heritagisation of religious music affects the ways in which worshippers fashion themselves as Christian selves.
Paper long abstract:
The space of Anglican sacred music is no longer solely the space of the church. Concert halls, professional musicians and meticulously performed pieces bring in sync both religious practitioners and non-religious music lovers reveling in the beauty and complexity of this music. For members of St Anne's, a 'traditional, middle-of-the-road' Anglican parish church in London, the sacred time and space afforded by this repertoire has now become punctured by an increasingly limited potential for the future. This paper addresses how, in trying to ensure a future for their church, worshippers seek to integrate sacred music within a secular framework by appealing to the aesthetic qualities of the repertoire.
I illustrate that for members of this church, the process of heritagisation of musical repertoire becomes a problematic dimension when seeking to appeal to new potential members as much of the decline in the numbers of 'traditional' Anglican churches stems from a reaction of new generations of worshippers and Christians from other ethnic backgrounds against a 'mere' enactment of Anglican ritual and music heritage. At the same time, for these church members, this process also effaces the 'sacred' in sacred music. By analyzing St Anne's worshippers' discourse, the music choices and choristers singing practices, I show that heritagisation of religious music affects experiences of the sacred by shaping how worshippers fashion themselves as Christian selves.
Paper short abstract:
The paper will look at the secular time of post-socialism experience and the sacred time of Sainthood heritage to discuss the role of historicity on the construction of religious truthfulness in Orthodox Christianity.
Paper long abstract:
In the lead up of the Soviet collapse, Eastern Christians seemed to elude from the hardened core of atheist Marxism and religion was vindicated by history. The spirit that spawned from the Romanian democratic revolution attempted to glorify the anti-communist resistance. Prisons which hosted the regime's dissidents were transformed in heritage sites, displaying the hypostasis of political and religious oppression. Deceased prisoners became "martyrs of communism" and Saints for a large group of Orthodox Romanians. Their historicity was incorporated in the production of religious truthfulness.
The paper will discuss truthfulness as the moment of selection within the array of the possibility of specific elements, facilitating "decision-events" to form a certain individuality, and converting from one subjectivity to another within the same tradition. Secular temporality becomes a part in the matrix of faith, creating a rupture within a discursive tradition of continuity.
Historicity of martyrs of communism can be creatively beared by influencing the formation of religious truth. The ethnographic material will show how in constructing religious truth affectivity of the past prevails over the reference, or historicity prevails over historicism. The believer neutralizes the causality of political time by claiming the agency of religious formation. The memory of the past is enacted, creating frameworks for certifying the Sanctity by concomitantly experiencing intimate relation with the divine in the present and give a verisimilar vote for eschatological discourses of the near future. Martyrs of communism, as Saints, can fusion the past-present-future through their intercessory power.