Heritage and religion are similar but at the same time conflicting value systems (Meyer and de Witte 2013). Heritage entails a process of selection of ‘fragments of culture’ (Bendix 2009) to which added value is then applied through the label of ‘heritage’. These objects, sites or practices are made to stand as icons of, and identity markers for, nations, diaspora groups or minority communities. In that sense, heritage-making resembles a kind of sacralisation, inasmuch as the label ‘heritage’ lifts up, sets apart and places those objects, sites and practices beyond the ordinary, perhaps even in a numinous realm. At the same time, though, the ‘vibrancy' of religion (Byrne 2019) seems to undergo a process of desacralisation when heritage becomes involved: heritage tends to ‘freeze’ religious practices and sometimes even obscures or erases the supernatural forces that religious actors attach to their own practices, places of worship and objects. In South Asia, for instance, the notion of ‘heritage’ as we know it today, has developed hand in hand with the formation of postcolonial states, national identities and notions of citizenship—processes that sometimes entailed attempts to ‘modernise’ Asian religions through the marginalisation or even erasure of certain popular religious practices.
Nonetheless, a variety of actors in South Asia and the South Asian diasporas—including politicians of authoritarian and religious nationalist regimes and grass-routes activists who resist those regimes—increasingly and creatively appropriate the language and motifs of global and institutional heritage in vernacular contexts. Consequently, they transform and popularise heritage and, to do so, they often advance specific demands precisely about religious objects, sites and practices. This seems to indicate that heritage-making is increasingly seen as a path to recognition and visibility for a religion or at least that religion is increasingly shaped through recourse to heritage. (‘Religion’ here is understood to include both normative frameworks and lived, vernacular practices while ‘Heritage’ is understood to include institutional heritage frameworks as well as popular conceptions.) As a result, meanings of heritage and religion, and the relationship between them, are continuously transformed and reconfigured.
How do heritage and religion redefine each other, and what role do they play in postcolonial societies and for postcolonial subjects? Through a discussion of empirically and ethnographically grounded material and case-studies from South Asia and its diasporas, this workshop aims to pinpoint the recurring contradictions and challenges prompted by frictions or productive entanglements of heritage and religion in this region, and as enacted by people from this region elsewhere.
The workshop will deal with a set of specific questions:
• How do religion and heritage interact in, and contribute to reconfiguring, postcolonial societies in South Asia and its diasporas?
• How and by whom are heritage and religion mobilised together and to what ends?
• To what extent do South Asian people themselves reconfigure religion vis à vis heritage and vice versa?
• And what does this tell us about global and postcolonial heritage?
Enrollments are to be sent to Vera.Lazzaretti@iscte-iul.pt with the academic affiliation and shortly explaining the reason of interest in the course.
