Possessing and being possessed by the past

On the Ambivalences of Heritage as Religious Return

Bibliographic Data

ID2164940
AuthorsColeman (0000-0001-7003-4327, University of Toronto, corresponding author), Simon Coleman (University of Toronto), Evgenia Mesaritou (0000-0001-5312-3467, University of Toronto)
Year2024
Volume38
Issue5
Pages772-793
Publication date2024-09-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0950-2386 • E-ISSN: 1466-4348
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09502386.2024.2363181
OpenAlexW4400217811
LanguageEN
References cited24

This paper explores the politics of religious patrimony by comparing two cases where the heritagization of religious sites results in feelings of loss and estrangement rather than return and restoration. We show how shrines can function simultaneously as public and civic places of religious assembly but also as material and sensorial expressions of ambivalent forms of belonging and un-belonging – to the past, to a territory, to a religious denomination, to a domestic environment associated with childhood or previous generations. One case is of Greek Cypriots as they travel to a renovated monastery located in territory lost to them in 1974 after the island's division. Encounters with the monastery are inflected by a broader, uncanny feeling of reentering a landscape that is familiar yet also estranged, studded by former childhood homes and villages now inhabited by others. The other case follows the experiences of Roman Catholics as they engage with the Christian pilgrimage site of Walsingham in the English county of Norfolk. The site now embodies a fractured heritage and pilgrimage space that recalls spiritual, material and cultural loss extending beyond biographical memory into the time of the Protestant Reformation. In both cases, ambiguities of 'possession' are provoked by forms of heritage restoration that embody but also obliterate memory in ways deemed to be deeply problematic by some populations. We argue that possession in these terms has economic and legal associations, referring to ownership of places and things, but it also points to situations where people are filled with an abiding and at times obsessive sense of the continuing urgency of the unsettled past

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Archaeology · Art · Feeling · Pilgrimage · Political science · Politics · Possession (linguistics · Protestantism · Sociology · Uncanny · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies · Religious Tourism and Spaces · Social Psychology

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