Chapter 5 Resurrecting the Numinous: Museums and the Art of Recognising Blessings

In: Numinous Fields: Perceiving the Sacred in Nature, Landscape, and Art
Author:
Wendy M.K. Shaw
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Chapter
Pages:
143–159
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004687387_007

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Abstract

The maḥmal is an empty palanquin used in Islamic pilgrimage processions. Placed in a museum, its preservation comes at grave cost: its visibility as an object renders the numinous value it held during the procession invisible. How might one instead enable the voice of the Other to transcend the physical and articulate numinous experience? How might paradigms of knowledge less reliant on subjective individualism, materialism, or paradigms of value rooted in historicism desacralize the boundaries imposed by secular knowledge? Reflecting on pilgrimage, processional, and reliquary devotional objects of Islamic cultures in the context of parallel practices in other traditions, this article suggests what practices of secular, rationalist scholarship stand to learn from persisting contemporary affective devotional traditions that have normally been marginalized under the ideology of the modernist episteme. It thus compliments the postcolonial corrective gesture of canonical inclusion with the decolonial gesture of epistemic multiplicity.

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Cover Numinous Fields: Perceiving the Sacred in Nature, Landscape, and Art
E-Book ISBN:
9789004687387
Publisher:
Brill
Print Publication Date:
06 Mar 2024

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