Managing Sacralities

What happens when religious sites, objects and practices become cultural heritage? What are —religious or secular—sources of expertise and authority that validate and regulate heritage sites, objects and practices? As cultural heritage becomes an increasingly popular and influential frame, these questions arise in diverse and challenging manners. Managing Sacralities addresses these questions.

The question of who controls, manages, and frames religious heritage, and how, arises with particular urgency. Managing Sacralities: Competing and Converging Claims of Religious Heritage presents case studies from Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and the United Kingdom that provide an analysis of the paradoxes and challenges that arise when religious sites are transformed into heritage.

Managing Sacralities is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from the Dutch National Research Council (NWO licence), the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, and the Meertens Institute.

About the editors

Ernst van den Hemel is a Researcher at the Meertens Institute, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and NL-Lab. Oscar Salemink (1958-2023) was a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Irene Stengs is a Professor by special appointment ‘Anthropology of Ritual and Popular Culture’ Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a Senior Researcher at the Meertens Institute/Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.