On the Entanglements of Heritage—Afterword to the Special Issue Sacred Heritage: Religions and Material Culture

A sign of a productive sub-field is that it can develop ramifying links with other areas of research whilst retaining the distinctiveness that first brought it into being. We see such expansiveness on display in the well-argued papers that make up this Special Issue. Contributors present detailed and specific examples of “sacred heritage” while also showing how, as a topic, it touches on wider theoretical debates over secularization and post-secularization, colonialism and post-colonialism, majority and minority religions, and religion and materiality. Much has been written about the development of religious heritage by Western institutions, but this collection covers cases from West Africa and Thailand as well as Europe; however, it becomes clear that projects purporting to celebrate “local” culture often touch on transnational impulses and influences. For instance, Irene Stengs’s (2024) striking account of the instantaneous heritagization of the Rescue of a Thai youth football team traces a heroic narrative that has been circulated worldwide, so that constituencies across the globe become stakeholders in its shaping and interpretation.

While varieties of Christianity—Catholic, Orthodox, and even Pentecostal—feature strongly in these articles, contributors also examine the interweaving of heritage discourses and projects with Judaism, Buddhism, and Indigenous religion. Indeed, we see the ways in which such processes permit interactions between ostensibly different religious traditions; Anna Niedźwiedź (2023), for example, shows how Catholic forms of Pentecostalization enable “African spirituality” to retain powers as a living resource in Ghana. In addition, alongside the other authors in this issue, she demonstrates how heritage media of expression take highly disparate forms, each with their own affordances; the papers cover museum objects but also a former battlefield, a cave, a branded symbol, an icon, ritual processions, and so on. Such material diversity leads to temporal depth. Heritage is shown not only to refer to past events, but also to display shifting histories of its own, exemplified by Cyril Isnart’s (2023) subtle account of the evolving uses of a medieval synagogue as exhibition space in the Portuguese city of Tomar—uses that reflect shifting patterns of political as well as religious influences.

A further sign of intellectual maturity in a sub-field is the promotion of nuanced perspectives rather than rigid binaries, and it is this generative blurring—or relational complexity—that lies at the heart of this Special Issue. We certainly do not need to assume, as is sometimes implied in relevant literature, that heritage and the sacred are engaged in a zero-sum game where the authority of one cancels out the other. Negotiated processes of heritagization and sacralization are emphasized by the authors as much as discrete existences of “heritage” and “the sacred”. As Dorota Zaprzalska notes in her piece on the various framings of an icon in the Panagia Amirou Monastery in Cyprus, authenticity itself—a staple of heritage discourses—can profitably be seen not “as a stable value but instead as dynamic and relative” (2023, p. 2). Therefore, while much of the literature on (especially Christian) pilgrimage has been devoted to identifying its distinctions from tourism, heritage emerges as a significant third term to be placed into this classificatory mix; it is one that reminds us that sociological categories are useful to think with when they encourage us to consider overlaps as well as differences between human activities. In this vein, Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska’s (2023) tracing of the rendering into heritage of the Battle of Warsaw shows how historical re-enactment becomes intimately conjoined with religious liturgy under the auspices of the Polish Roman Catholic Church.

The analytical and ethnographic tendency towards blurring so evident in this Special Issue resonates with a current social scientific openness to metaphors that depict the penetration or even dissolution of boundaries between persons, places, and objects. There is much talk nowadays not only of assemblages but also of porosities (Taylor 2007; Rousseau 2023), dividualities (following e.g., Strathern 1988), and what Andrew Pickering (2010, p. 195), writing in the Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, has memorably termed the “dance of human and non-human agency in which activity and passivity on both sides are reciprocally intertwined”. These papers offer a range of possibilities for ways in which sacrality and heritage, as well as religion and material culture, can become mutually “entangled” (to deploy another blurring metaphor, mentioned by Niedźwiedź [2023] in her Introduction), but they also clarify that it is not enough to simply point out that such entanglement is occurring; they demonstrate, by example, that we must go on to investigate precisely how this happens, through what media, and according to whose criteria of legitimacy. In the following, I do not propose to explore all the variations that are discernible. Rather, drawing on contributions to the Special Issue, I highlight three interrelated forms of entanglement that both resonate with, but also ramify beyond, studies of sacred heritage. I call these “Traces”, “Double Visions”, and “Tangled Temporalities”.

Traces: On Semiotic Ideologies and the Politics of Translation

In his influential analyses of materiality and language, the anthropologist Webb Keane has characterized “semiotic ideology” as highlighting the culturally specific assumptions that people may display in the interpretation and deployment of signs (e.g., Keane 2018, p. 67) as they distinguish between subjects and objects and reflect on the relative status of words and things (Keane 2003, pp. 410–11). Illustrating such themes, much of Keane’s work has been dedicated to examining the effects of Calvinist mission in the colonial Dutch East Indies, and he has drawn attention to Protestant anxieties over the regulation of verbal and material practices in contexts of often troubled interaction between different cultural worlds. Indeed, he notes that assumptions underlying semiotic ideologies often come to the fore and become subject to risk during religious and/or political conflict. As examples, he cites atheist attacks on religious shrines, such as those that occurred during Bolshevik secularization campaigns in Russia and the Cultural Revolution in China, and refers to historical cases where “people may agree on the existence of the object, but bitterly dispute the exact nature of its signs” (Keane 2018, p. 67). The latter occurred most notably during early Reformation attacks on Catholicism in Europe but also emerged in disputes among Reformers themselves in relation to the ontological status of sign vehicles including liturgy, Latin, the Eucharist, and religious iconography (ibid.; cf. Keane 2007).

Heritage practices are not normally seen as overtly missionizing or iconoclastic per se, but they may well emerge in contexts where very different assumptions about the uses and powers of words and things and the ontological status of sign vehicles are used, with the semiotic and ideological stakes likely to be especially high in situations where religious “matters” are being handled. While not explicitly aimed at highlighting difference, the heritagization of sacred events, institutions, and discourses often entails processes of translation in two senses of the word: both the literal, physical movement of objects from one location to another, and the practice of transferring “meanings”, as far as is possible, between languages and/or communities (or, we might say, between religious practitioners and heritage constituencies). Shifts in both objects and meanings between spatial or cultural realms are likely to contain ontological and semiotic risks or confusions, given that much might be lost in translation in ethical, linguistic, or ritual terms. Nonetheless, while some processes of heritagization, most obviously in the form of the creation of certain museum displays, appear to neutralize the performative powers of objects and practices by placing them, literally or metaphorically, within decontextualizing boxes, more complex and entangled relationships between semiotic ideologies are certainly possible.

These reflections have certain parallels with Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska’s (2023, p. 3) account of debates over whether religious objects and rituals lose their original values when placed within the realm of heritage. However, the issue is addressed most directly by Cyril Isnart (2023) in his account of the “written remains” of the Jewish past in Portugal, and the attempts around the middle of the twentieth century by Francisco Garcês Teixeira and Samuel Schwarz to promote the cultural renewal of a religious minority’s history through the medium of Hebraic written stones placed in Tomar’s medieval synagogue. The details of this case study can be found in the paper itself, but here I am most interested in what it reveals about heritage as a potential mediator between semiotic ideologies. Isnart shows how stones with letters functioned as both archeological material and, effectively, synecdoche of Jewish religious practice—all within the context of a place of potential worship. Reading and interpretation were placed “at the core of the visitor’s experience” (Isnart 2023, p. 5), thus making use of elements of reading, writing, and interpretation that form powerful parts of Jewish tradition, even if visitors were not themselves members of the faith. As Isnart puts it (ibid., p. 12), the mid-century “revivalists” (and I use the term advisedly) were not so much representing Judaism as actively reinserting such an experience within Portugal’s history. Visitors might not have had the possibility to adopt the assumptions of a notional Jewish semiotic ideology, but they encountered traces of religious practice that went beyond mere display and were indeed organized according to established devotional purposes. The power of such materialized language to bring Jewish experience into the public realm seems particularly significant in the context not only of the power of reading and writing for Judaism, both medieval and modern, but also of the widespread history of crypto-Judaic practice, given the frequent need to conceal rather than celebrate such worship. It also, of course, took on a special poignancy in the context of mid-twentieth-century European politics. At least for a time, heritagization brought traces of Jewish materiality and worship to a degree of wider recognition through the medium of letters that acted as both objects to view and language to construe—and indeed to value.

Double Visions: Foregrounding and Backgrounding in Heritage and the Sacred

The forms of entanglement analyzed by Isnart assume certain distinctions between religious and heritage practices, as well as between minority religion and wider culture—after all, such differences must exist for them to be subsequently rendered open to translation. However, other case studies in this Special Issue explore entanglements where heritage is already more comfortably placed within “mainstream” culture. Under these circumstances, the relationship between heritage and the sacred may entail not so much overt mediation between worlds, but rather co-existence of multiple frames of interpretation of the same entity or action. In fact, such cases may move in the polar opposite direction to Keane’s example of how agreement on the existence of an object may lead to conflicts over the nature of its signs; instead, a more peaceable form of interpretative co-habitation is possible, encouraging latent and complementary possibilities of framing and interpretation that can come to light at various times. In making this somewhat abstract point, I have in mind broader theoretical perspectives examining the “foregrounding and backgrounding” involved in encounters with phenomena that come to be regarded as religious. For instance, drawing on authors ranging from Keane to Derrida to Deleuze, Andreas Bandak and Jørgensen (2012) refer to complexities of figuration involved in ways in which Christianity is ongoingly emergent through the temporary but also patterned bundling of images, thoughts, expressions, material objects, and so on (ibid., p. 452). I cannot give Bandak and Jørgensen’s argument the attention it deserves, so it will have to suffice to hold on to the idea of examining shifting processes of figure and ground in the entanglements of heritage and the sacred. How might such processes be discerned in this Special Issue, and with what social or political consequences?

I begin with Stengs’s (2024) depiction of “The Wild Boars Cave Rescue” as a religious and heritage event whose staging has occupied a number of material spaces but also latent frames of interpretation. The instantaneous sacralization of The Rescue Heritage (TRH) did not display direct links with official, UNESCO-authorized discourses, but it drew on a significant reservoir of Thai myth and ritual. The location of the Rescue invoked broader perceptions of caves as imbued with powerful, potentially dangerous spirits, and as spaces of both ritualization and transition. In turn, the exhibition art depicting the rescuing “Heroes” was flanked by images depicting traditional styles of sacred commemoration (ibid., p. 10). In other words, the apparent immediacy of heritage framing seems to have been reinforced by older narratives and imageries. As an event and myth, as well as media spectacle and ritual, the Rescue did not necessitate translation between heritage and the sacred so much as their mutual implication as figure and ground. Struggles between local and national attempts to own TRH occurred, but the latter’s relatively monolithic character—aided by the apparent compliance of the rescued children in their transition from everyday boys into iconic “boars”—entailed a simultaneous silencing and symbolic stereotyping reminiscent of the Catholic Church’s construction of saints as mute exemplars. Ultimately, TRH was able to appeal to three different (but entangled) scales of narrative elevation of the Rescue: local, national, and global.

Questions of scale and the ability of objects to contain heritagized and sacralized inflections at one and the same time are also evident in Zaprzalska’s (2023) account of the Panagia Amirou Monastery in Cyprus, and its famous icon. The latter has an important miraculous function but has also become “the symbol of the monastery outside the realm of religion” (ibid., p. 1), enabling processes of community construction for a local constituency that extends beyond an enclosed space of piety. A key point is that heritagization does not entail a loss in sacred value or aura for the icon; rather, it has the capacity to reinforce the object’s symbolic and ritual status, even as it reveals—following (Niedźwiedź and Baraniecka-Olszewska 2020, p. 5)—that boundaries between sacred and secular must be understood as contextual rather than fixed (Zaprzalska 2023, p. 6). We might say that we are granted a double vision of the icon as it encompasses heritage and the sacred as mutual figure and ground, with one or the other emphasis highlighted at any given point according to the social frame or expectations of observers.

Of all the case studies in this Special Issue, the work of Baraniecka-Olszewska (2023) most challenges the idea of blurred interactions or oscillations between heritage and religion, instead suggesting the full encompassment of the former by the latter through the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church. In reflecting on the implications of this perspective, it is vital to acknowledge the specificities of its religio-political context: a Polish Church that, especially in the post-Communism period, enjoys a deeply “privileged” status in public and political spheres (ibid., p. 2) and is allowed to merge representations of human conflict with assertions of Marian intervention.1 In such entanglements between heritage and the sacred, Father Ignacy Skorupka, chaplain of the Polish Army, occupies pride of place. As martyr and mediator, he is both priest and warrior—becoming an icon where seemingly no gap, semiotic or otherwise, still needs to be bridged between Church, State, and Nation.

Tangled Temporalities: Laboring Between History, Heritage, and Time

I have left myself little space to discuss my final example of entanglement, but it remains worthy of brief mention since it refers to a subject that is obvious though still under-theorized in studies of heritage and the sacred: the relationship of both not just to history but to temporality as a whole, particularly as the latter is enacted through sacralizing action. James Bielo (2016) highlights this issue in a piece called “Replication as Religious Practice, Temporality as Religious Problem”, where he takes two American cases—Mormon Trek re-enactment and a creationist theme park—to present replication as a ritualized strategy that expels divisions between past and present through developing affective affinities between the two. What interests me here are less the specifics of Bielo’s argument and more his explorations of temporal labor as a topic to be explored comparatively across examples of replication, and one that asks how communities “construct relationships with the complex, conflicted, and multi-directional field of time” (ibid., p. 131).

In this Special Issue, we are granted multiple examples of the affective entanglements of multiple temporalities in the enactment of sacralized heritage. I am struck, for instance, by the frenetic density and intensity of activities recounted by Stengs, as historical “event” is crafted into replicable narrative and performance that results in a public re-enactment forcing those rescued to relive their original ordeal (Stengs 2024, p. 16). Baraniecka-Olszewska’s account of the sacralization of the Battle of Warsaw illustrates the encompassing powers of Catholic deployments of temporality, as the past is rendered both transcendent and regularly accessible through a powerful re-enactment that is preceded and framed by a solemn Mass. But probably the most complex account of temporal labor is provided by Niedźwiedź’s (2023) fascinating presentation of “embodied continuity”, whereby Ghanaian Pentecostal discourses emphasizing rupture from the past simultaneously express a much more continuous religious style and habitus (ibid., p. 14). A striking example is provided by the Corpus Christi celebration, where a recalling of global, Catholic styles of processing is combined with charismatic ecstasy as well as elements of long-standing Yam Festivals. Corpus Christi draws together multiple ritual perspectives alongside “tangled temporalities”, and in doing so it also invokes what I have been saying with regard to “traces” and “double vision”. It seems fitting to end these comments with an image of varieties of entanglement themselves becoming mutually entangled—yet remaining discernible through careful ethnographic observation.