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Sense and Essence

Sense and Essence

Birgit Meyer | Mattijs van de Port

(2018)

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Abstract

Contrary to popular perceptions, cultural heritage is not given, but constantly in the making: a construction subject to dynamic processes of (re)inventing culture within particular social formations and bound to particular forms of mediation. Yet the appeal of cultural heritage often rests on its denial of being a fabrication, its promise to provide an essential ground to social-cultural identities. Taking this paradoxical feature as a point of departure, and anchoring the discussion to two heuristic concepts—the "politics of authentication" and "aesthetics of persuasion"—the chapters herein explore how this tension is central to the dynamics of heritage formation worldwide.


“Considering that we all know the world we live in is a ‘construct’, how are we convinced to accept it as real and act accordingly? And how is heritage, which is always a social construct, made real through aesthetics of persuasion and politics of authenticity? By addressing these questions in richly varied ethnographic case studies, this volume not only makes a significant contribution to an issue that is of wider interest to the social sciences, it also makes heritage studies as a field highly relevant to the social sciences.” • Ferdinand de Jong, University of East Anglia


Birgit Meyer is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University. She is co-editor of Material Religion. Her recent publications include Aesthetic Formations: Religion, Media and the Senses (ed., Palgrave 2009), Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality (ed. with Dick Houtman, Fordham 2012), Sensational Movies: Video Vision and Christianity in Ghana (University of California Press, 2015), and Creativity in Transition: Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe (ed. with Maruška Svašek, Berghahn, 2016).


Mattijs van de Port is Professor of Popular Religiosity at VU University Amsterdam and Associate Professor in the anthropology department of the University of Amsterdam. His publications include the monographs Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild: Civilization and its Discontents in a Serbian Town (Amsterdam University Press, 1998) and Ecstatic Encounters: Bahian Candomblé and the Quest for the Really Real (Amsterdam University Press, 2011).

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Sense and Essence iii
Contents v
List of Illustrations vii
Preface xi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Aesthetics as Form and Force 41
Chapter 2. Intangible Heritage, Tangible Controversies 75
Chapter 3. Swinging between the Material and the Immaterial 109
Chapter 4. ‘Reporting the Past’ 136
Chapter 5. Scaffolding Heritage 158
Chapter 6. Corpo-Reality TV 182
Chapter 7. ‘Heated Discussions Are Necessary’ 212
Chapter 8. Iconic Objects 236
Chapter 9. Ascertaining the Future Memory of Our Time 266
Concluding Comments 289
Chapter 10. Heritage under Construction 291
Chapter 11. Can Anything Become Heritage? 299
Chapter 12. Heritage as Process 306
Index 313