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New Approaches to Shiʿi Materiality and Material Religion
Beyond Karbala examines material and multi-sensorial expressions of Shiʿi Islam in diverse, understudied demographic and geographic contexts. It engages with conceptual debates in religious studies, material religion, anthropology of religion, and sociology of religion, and makes several propositions that push the frontiers of religious studies and scholarship on material religion. The contributions presented in this volume demonstrate how material ‘things’ and less-thing-like materialities make the praesentia and potential of the sacred tangible, cultivate intimate relations between human and more-than-human beings, and act as tangible links and gateways to the Elsewhere and Otherworldly. The volume posits that materialities of religion are integral to processes of heritagization shaped by competing actors involved in the construction and canonization of religious—in this case, Shiʿi—heritage.
New Approaches to Shiʿi Materiality and Material Religion
Beyond Karbala examines material and multi-sensorial expressions of Shiʿi Islam in diverse, understudied demographic and geographic contexts. It engages with conceptual debates in religious studies, material religion, anthropology of religion, and sociology of religion, and makes several propositions that push the frontiers of religious studies and scholarship on material religion. The contributions presented in this volume demonstrate how material ‘things’ and less-thing-like materialities make the praesentia and potential of the sacred tangible, cultivate intimate relations between human and more-than-human beings, and act as tangible links and gateways to the Elsewhere and Otherworldly. The volume posits that materialities of religion are integral to processes of heritagization shaped by competing actors involved in the construction and canonization of religious—in this case, Shiʿi—heritage.
Series:
East and West, Volume: 16
Contests over heritage in Asia are intensifying and reflect the growing prominence of political and social disputes over historical narratives shaping heritage sites and practices, and the meanings attached to them. These contests emphasize that heritage is a means of narrating the past that demarcates, constitutes, produces, and polices political and social borders in the present. In its spaces, varied intersections of actors, networks, and scales of governance interact, negotiate and compete, resulting in heritage sites that are cut through by borders of memory.
This volume, edited by Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings, and with contributions from scholars across the humanities, history, social sciences, and Asian studies, interrogates how particular actors and narratives make heritage and how borders of memory shape the sites they produce.
This volume, edited by Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings, and with contributions from scholars across the humanities, history, social sciences, and Asian studies, interrogates how particular actors and narratives make heritage and how borders of memory shape the sites they produce.
Series:
East and West, Volume: 16
Contests over heritage in Asia are intensifying and reflect the growing prominence of political and social disputes over historical narratives shaping heritage sites and practices, and the meanings attached to them. These contests emphasize that heritage is a means of narrating the past that demarcates, constitutes, produces, and polices political and social borders in the present. In its spaces, varied intersections of actors, networks, and scales of governance interact, negotiate and compete, resulting in heritage sites that are cut through by borders of memory.
This volume, edited by Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings, and with contributions from scholars across the humanities, history, social sciences, and Asian studies, interrogates how particular actors and narratives make heritage and how borders of memory shape the sites they produce.
This volume, edited by Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings, and with contributions from scholars across the humanities, history, social sciences, and Asian studies, interrogates how particular actors and narratives make heritage and how borders of memory shape the sites they produce.
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Abstract
In the late twentieth century, former industrial warehouses throughout the globe have found a new lease of life as ideal spaces for the exhibition of contemporary arts. Following the diversification of artistic practices at the turn of the 1960s, abandoned factories offered ideal opportunities for the development of new artistic forms such as installation and performative works. In parallel, former military and surveillance sites have on occasion encountered a similar fate. In Southeast Asia, the transformation of former military barracks and compounds into exhibition spaces runs parallel to the regeneration of industrial buildings. In the cultural repurposing of military infrastructures, however, a question arises as to the remaining visibility and agency of their former function. To what extent, in what manner, does the weight of history transpire within the walls of the gallery? This chapter aims to reflect on the repurposed functionalities of different types of former military sites in Southeast and East Asia, and the manner through which military history and heritage survives in these places, visibly and invisibly. Repurposed military and surveillance sites offer an opportunity to consider the changing textures of geopolitics, and the ongoing interrogations they ask of our contemporary societies.
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This chapter examines the postwar fate of Japan’s Asia-Pacific war relics and sites through the example of the Imperial Japanese Army 16th Division garrison in Kyoto’s Fushimi Ward. Since its move to Kyoto in 1907, the 16th Division played a major part in the Asia-Pacific War including some of its darker episodes such as the 1937 Nanking Massacre. After the war, the 16th Division garrison was repurposed as schools and residential areas, while various veterans and war bereaved groups sought to memorialize and commemorate the former Japanese Army there. Yet in the process, much of the site’s ruinous past was forgotten or downplayed. This changed in the 1980s when groups of civic activists and historians sought to reinsert critical memories and histories at the garrison, as well as to use the site to teach about the horrors of war and the importance of peace. But these efforts were met with fierce resistance from some of the former garrison’s other stakeholders, and the issue of how to narrate and remember the past remains contested at the site today. This chapter argues that the roots of this contestation lie in the underlying tension between memory, history, and heritage. While no longer a simple ‘site of memory’, the garrison remains averse to being incorporated into critical histories of its past, and is thus stuck at the border of memory and history.
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In the official narrative of the postcolonial Singaporean state, Chinatown is the cradle of Chinese community development, but such a claim can be made only retrospectively. The maintenance of Chinatown in Singapore demonstrates the official desire to establish cultural, ethnic, and historical links between a lived present and an imagined past. By extension, Chinatown is defined as a Chinese cradle on the basis of a constructed and highly essentialized Chinese identity in Singapore. This chapter suggests that an essentially new Chinatown has resulted from the state’s urban redevelopment plans. No longer organic in its growth and composition, the new Chinatown nonetheless has the symbols – pagodas, red lanterns, stone lions, and Chinatown arches – that would strike the casual tourist as being intuitively Chinese. At the national level, the mere existence of the new Chinatown has reduced or simplified the diversity of Chinese communities in Singapore, subsuming the various dialect groups under the Chinese label. The transformation of Chinatown is best exemplified in its Chinese New Year celebrations, which feature the participation of other ethnic groups in Singapore, notably the Indians and Malays. The site and festivities have become multiracial, in line with the official narrative that Singapore is a multiracial and socially harmonious nation. In effect, the new Chinatown has evolved into not only a transnational heritage site but also a multiracial showroom of cultural diversity contributing to nation-building in Singapore.
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The conclusion brings together the themes of the volume, and emphasizes the heuristic value of using borders to think through how heritage comes into being, and the significance of a multiplicity of borders to its creation, contested nature, and maintenance. The cases presented across the volume demonstrate the varied geographical, physical, political, generational, temporal, psychological and cultural borders that come to shape the meanings accorded to sites of heritage being preserved into the future. The conclusion then moves on to discuss the heritage-related imaginaries which may be necessary for sustaining interest in specific heritages, and which should therefore be analysed when reflecting on what the future holds for the sites featured in this book. The borders of memory approach offers a powerful framework through which to chart the potential trajectories of heritage status and survival into the future. By identifying where borders of memory lie and how contestations at those meeting points run through processes of heritage creation, preservation and disappearance, a more nuanced picture emerges of what the past means in our present-day lives.
Abstract
The disasters of March 11, 2011 washed away whole villages on the coast of Northeast Japan and destroyed the lives of thousands. Meskell (2012, 558) describes such impacted places as ‘negative heritage, a conflictual site that becomes the repository of negative memory in the collective imaginary.’ As the recovery of the Tōhoku region in Northeast Japan continues, debates have arisen about which disaster ruins, or shinsai ikō, should be kept as memorials. Most places chosen to be preserved represent cases of good evacuation practice. However, some survivors have fought for also keeping those places in which their relatives died and the evacuation procedures failed to save them. In this chapter, we explore the construction of the narratives surrounding two schools preserved as memorials in Miyagi Prefecture. While Arahama Elementary became a safe haven for 320 people, Okawa Elementary became an example of bad evacuation practice that led to the death of 74 children and 10 teachers.
Drawing on the analysis of these ‘exhibitions’, the preservation efforts, and first-hand accounts offered at the two sites, we aim to contribute to the understanding of the importance of negative heritage in disaster education. Examining the process of framing negative heritage within the collective memory of these communities is also crucial to understanding the effects of the disaster on local identities.
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This chapter explores the transformation of Japan’s 22nd World Heritage property ‘Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region’ into a touristic destination and the borders of memory that have emerged from the decade-long nomination process. The cultural property consists of one archeological site, ten villages and a cathedral, spread across Nagasaki
Abstract
This introduction describes the heritage boom that has gripped Asia and the Pacific in recent decades, a result of socio-political change, globalization, and cycles of economic expansion and decline. In this region, too, the rise to prominence of heritage has brought to the fore local, national, and global contestations over the historical narratives and memories which inhere to heritage sites and practices. The intersection of varied actors, networks, and scales of governance at individual sites gives rise to a heritage cut through by borders of memory, which emerge and are redefined over the course of contestation which arises at specific heritage sites, and the larger narratives through which their meaning is made. Drawing on insights from the interdisciplinary border studies field, this introduction asserts the importance of reflecting on heritage as a process within which borders are demarcated, constituted, produced, and policed between different social actors and memory communities. The editors then outline and contextualize the contributions of the individual chapters that make up this volume, which collectively look to interrogate how the significance of heritage sites and practices comes to be contested along their borders of memory.