This article addresses the making of heritage and the processes of sacralisation involved by inve... more This article addresses the making of heritage and the processes of sacralisation involved by investigating the heritage created after the rescue of the “Wild Boars”, a Thai youth football team, from a flooded cave in July 2018. The unfolding story of this “epic rescue operation” was followed with tremendous engagement, locally, nationally and worldwide, an example of what I capture as “high-density events”. Cave diver specialists and rescue equipment were flown in.Thousands of volunteers, mainly from Thailand but also from abroad, assisted. In Thailand, schools participated massively in nationwide Buddhist prayer sessions. Renowned holy monk Khruba Bunchum Yansangwaro directed his prayers to the boys and predicted they would be found alive. The massive involvement with the 18-days rescue operation generated a multiplicity of memes, photographs, books, documentaries, paintings, and statues. As religious and national heritage, this material lives on in various forms and exhibitions, including the cave, which was declared to become a “living museum” immediately upon the completion of the rescue. The analysis concerns three interrelated issues: First, I focus on the “instantaneous heritagization” of the event, asking: how to understand the processes that transform people, objects, and places into heritage overnight? Second, I bring in the role of emotions and moral imagination to shed light on the secular and religious sacralities produced and reproduced in the making of heritage. Third, I am interested in the impact of the heritage on the cave and its vicinity, bringing in issues of ownership and power over the event’s legacy.
This ethnography contributes to the field of Holocaust heritage studies by exploring the paradoxi... more This ethnography contributes to the field of Holocaust heritage studies by exploring the paradoxical tendencies of memorial proliferation and oblivion. The topic of investigation is the genesis and multiplications of the so-called 'Anne Frank Tree', the horse chestnut tree behind the Secret Annex that Anne Frank wrote about in her diary. Fungus-infected, the tree fell in 2010. The Anne Frank Tree testifies to both the terrible fate of the European Jews and the shelter offered to some. Therefore, its eventual safeguarding, whether by conservation or multiplication, became a topic of concern worldwide. Following the roots and routes of the Anne Frank Tree legacy (stump, seedlings, grafts, wood, and chestnuts), this article examines the processes of sacralization that have stirred the material's vivid proliferation and, importantly, the burden which the accumulating material subsequently imposes on the people in charge of it. The case sheds light on the tendency of the sacred to proliferate, often to the extent of excess. Paradoxically, this tendency threatens to undo the sacrality. Sint-Oedenrode, 11 March 2019 Seventeen black containers, each with a horse chestnut tree, are awaiting another 25 to arrive in the coming days to be all planted in the open ground by the Dutch tree nursery Van den Berk. To the eye, these trees are just horse chestnut trees. What sets them apart, however, is their progeny. They are descendants (nazaten) of the so-called Anne Frank Tree, the horse chestnut tree that stood in a garden behind the Secret Annex where Anne Frank, her family and four others had been hiding during WW II. The descendants therefore are 'trees with a story' and will receive, in the words of the Senior Purchaser 'a well-deserved VIP treatment'. From here, they may go to a new owner, but only when planted in a public place, and within an educational context. As formulated on the nursery's website: 'While the stories often reach back into time, the planted trees will carry them along into the future. Resisting time, the trees are "monuments in green"'. 1
Anthropological Notebooks, special issue Space and Religious Heritages, 2020
This paper investigates the revaluation of the Christian past as heritage in settings that are ge... more This paper investigates the revaluation of the Christian past as heritage in settings that are generally regarded as secular and entertaining. Empirically, my focus will be on the roles given to the Saint Servatius Basilica in Maastricht and the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in the musical performances of the world's "King of the Waltz", André Rieu. By incorporating religious heritage in his concerts, Rieu taps into the nowadays well-established conviction that such heritage is relevant for society as a whole. "Moving presence" is intended in both senses. The churches move along with the orchestra through the transnational space of the André Rieu performances, which is, as I argue, an affective space: the churches tend to move people in one way or another, generating affective or emotional involvement. Asking how the emotive potential of religious heritage is mobilised, and by virtue of what means Rieu succeeds in making the iconicity of the local and transnational heritage act in concert, the paper shows how Rieu's "techniques of magnification" work in tandem with the maestro's affective recollections of his religious past, to create a performance that is both spectacular and persuasive.
After the death of King Bhumibol Aduljadej (13 October 2016), the entire nation turned black-and-... more After the death of King Bhumibol Aduljadej (13 October 2016), the entire nation turned black-and-white. For Thailand and the rest of the world alike, the images of massive gatherings of people in black, carrying portraits of Bhumibol were both expression and proof of a nation unified in grief and love for their great monarch. Rather than a self-evident ritualized way of expressing sorrow, gratitude or respect, these mourning rituals, however, sprang from a carefully designed mourning policy charged by a strong royalist nationalist ideology. Introducing the notion of 'competitive mourning', this contribution highlights the entanglement of coercion and competition for understanding the processes that shaped, intensified and magnified the mourning rituals. In addition, the chapter focusses on the significance of the secular administrative state structure in disseminating and reproducing the Thai 'system of royal rituals'. These rituals, whether of 'religious' or 'secular' origin, all contribute to the sacredness of the king. Twenty-first century Thailand, Stengs argues, is ever more moving towards an inextricably intertwined secular-sacred of king, nation and state.
The Secular Sacred: Emotions of Belonging and the Perils of Nation and Religion, 2020
How do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled across the world? In exploring ... more How do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled across the world? In exploring this theme, The Secular Sacred focuses on diverse topics such as the dynamic roles of Carnival in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria, and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands.
The contributions focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce, and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. The Secular Sacred will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, political scientists, and social psychologists, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies and semiotics.
Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
The Secular Sacred. Emotions of Belonging and the Perils of Nation and Religion, 2020
How, in various places across the world, do religious emotions and national sentiment become enta... more How, in various places across the world, do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled? In exploring this theme, this book focuses on such diverse topics as the dynamic roles of Carnaval in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands. What binds the chapters in this volume is the focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. At this moment in time, it has become somewhat of a stale repetition to criticize the secular-religious divide. We are very much part and parcel of a world in which these boundaries overlap, are claimed, contested, reclaimed and re-contested in new and dynamic ways. If the debate on the postsecular has taught us anything, it is that the tools with which we work are implicated in these contestations. The notions ‘secular’, ‘sacred’ and ‘religion’ are as much part of our conceptual toolbox as objects of investigation. In order to illustrate how we are always in the middle of things, and in order to see how we should, if we are to understand the entanglements of sacrality, religion and secularity, think our way up from praxis, we opt for a start in medias res. We therefore open this introduction in Bangkok, Thailand, 26 October 2017 to be precise, when the mourning rituals for the recently deceased king are about to reach their apex.
The global interest in the search for and rescue of the Thai youth football
team ‘the Wild Boars’... more The global interest in the search for and rescue of the Thai youth football team ‘the Wild Boars’, or the nationwide interest in the non-stop fundraising swimming-tour of Dutch swimmer Maarten van der Weijden, are examples of what in this lecture is called high density events: intense, often emotional occurrences, of an almost entertainment-like character, followed continuously by many. High density events shape and articulate ideas about who belong or do not belong to the (national) community. During such events, cultural forms, objects and practices are popularized, transferred and exchanged at a high pace, processes in which virtually anybody may become involved.Taking high-density events as object of research implies a focus on the making of heritage. In the repetitious, ritualized contexts of such events, certain cultural forms, practices and objects may become magnified and sacralised, to become heritage. Although any object or practice may be made heritage, the analysis should situate this making in its societal context, asking such questions as who were involved in the selection process, and why certainpractices or objects are self-evidently attributed a heritage status and othersnot. With cultural identity becoming an ever more explicitly political issue,research into the making of heritage is the more urgent.
In: the Sociolinguistics of Place and Belonging. Perspectives from the margins (Edited by Leonie Cornips and Vincent de Rooij) John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2018
This contribution focusses on the languagecultural politics played out in
performances of André R... more This contribution focusses on the languagecultural politics played out in performances of André Rieu, the World’s King of the Waltz. At stake are stereotypical oppositions made within the Netherlands between ‘the nation’s center’ (‘Holland’) and the ‘peripheral’ province of Limburg. During his concerts in the Limburgian capital Maastricht, Rieu’s hometown, Rieu negates the Hollanders-centered, taken-for-granted, perspective that foregrounds Standard Dutch and its speakers as the normative neutral. Presenting himself as a global-cum-local performer alternating local language with English, Rieu marginalizes Standard Dutch as irrelevant, in the Dutch language-scape usually the position of dialects. Rieu’s languagecultural political messages are persuasive because of his strategic, jocular use of various linguistic and cultural resources, all to highlight his belonging to Maastricht.
This article addresses the making of heritage and the processes of sacralisation involved by inve... more This article addresses the making of heritage and the processes of sacralisation involved by investigating the heritage created after the rescue of the “Wild Boars”, a Thai youth football team, from a flooded cave in July 2018. The unfolding story of this “epic rescue operation” was followed with tremendous engagement, locally, nationally and worldwide, an example of what I capture as “high-density events”. Cave diver specialists and rescue equipment were flown in.Thousands of volunteers, mainly from Thailand but also from abroad, assisted. In Thailand, schools participated massively in nationwide Buddhist prayer sessions. Renowned holy monk Khruba Bunchum Yansangwaro directed his prayers to the boys and predicted they would be found alive. The massive involvement with the 18-days rescue operation generated a multiplicity of memes, photographs, books, documentaries, paintings, and statues. As religious and national heritage, this material lives on in various forms and exhibitions, including the cave, which was declared to become a “living museum” immediately upon the completion of the rescue. The analysis concerns three interrelated issues: First, I focus on the “instantaneous heritagization” of the event, asking: how to understand the processes that transform people, objects, and places into heritage overnight? Second, I bring in the role of emotions and moral imagination to shed light on the secular and religious sacralities produced and reproduced in the making of heritage. Third, I am interested in the impact of the heritage on the cave and its vicinity, bringing in issues of ownership and power over the event’s legacy.
This ethnography contributes to the field of Holocaust heritage studies by exploring the paradoxi... more This ethnography contributes to the field of Holocaust heritage studies by exploring the paradoxical tendencies of memorial proliferation and oblivion. The topic of investigation is the genesis and multiplications of the so-called 'Anne Frank Tree', the horse chestnut tree behind the Secret Annex that Anne Frank wrote about in her diary. Fungus-infected, the tree fell in 2010. The Anne Frank Tree testifies to both the terrible fate of the European Jews and the shelter offered to some. Therefore, its eventual safeguarding, whether by conservation or multiplication, became a topic of concern worldwide. Following the roots and routes of the Anne Frank Tree legacy (stump, seedlings, grafts, wood, and chestnuts), this article examines the processes of sacralization that have stirred the material's vivid proliferation and, importantly, the burden which the accumulating material subsequently imposes on the people in charge of it. The case sheds light on the tendency of the sacred to proliferate, often to the extent of excess. Paradoxically, this tendency threatens to undo the sacrality. Sint-Oedenrode, 11 March 2019 Seventeen black containers, each with a horse chestnut tree, are awaiting another 25 to arrive in the coming days to be all planted in the open ground by the Dutch tree nursery Van den Berk. To the eye, these trees are just horse chestnut trees. What sets them apart, however, is their progeny. They are descendants (nazaten) of the so-called Anne Frank Tree, the horse chestnut tree that stood in a garden behind the Secret Annex where Anne Frank, her family and four others had been hiding during WW II. The descendants therefore are 'trees with a story' and will receive, in the words of the Senior Purchaser 'a well-deserved VIP treatment'. From here, they may go to a new owner, but only when planted in a public place, and within an educational context. As formulated on the nursery's website: 'While the stories often reach back into time, the planted trees will carry them along into the future. Resisting time, the trees are "monuments in green"'. 1
Anthropological Notebooks, special issue Space and Religious Heritages, 2020
This paper investigates the revaluation of the Christian past as heritage in settings that are ge... more This paper investigates the revaluation of the Christian past as heritage in settings that are generally regarded as secular and entertaining. Empirically, my focus will be on the roles given to the Saint Servatius Basilica in Maastricht and the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in the musical performances of the world's "King of the Waltz", André Rieu. By incorporating religious heritage in his concerts, Rieu taps into the nowadays well-established conviction that such heritage is relevant for society as a whole. "Moving presence" is intended in both senses. The churches move along with the orchestra through the transnational space of the André Rieu performances, which is, as I argue, an affective space: the churches tend to move people in one way or another, generating affective or emotional involvement. Asking how the emotive potential of religious heritage is mobilised, and by virtue of what means Rieu succeeds in making the iconicity of the local and transnational heritage act in concert, the paper shows how Rieu's "techniques of magnification" work in tandem with the maestro's affective recollections of his religious past, to create a performance that is both spectacular and persuasive.
After the death of King Bhumibol Aduljadej (13 October 2016), the entire nation turned black-and-... more After the death of King Bhumibol Aduljadej (13 October 2016), the entire nation turned black-and-white. For Thailand and the rest of the world alike, the images of massive gatherings of people in black, carrying portraits of Bhumibol were both expression and proof of a nation unified in grief and love for their great monarch. Rather than a self-evident ritualized way of expressing sorrow, gratitude or respect, these mourning rituals, however, sprang from a carefully designed mourning policy charged by a strong royalist nationalist ideology. Introducing the notion of 'competitive mourning', this contribution highlights the entanglement of coercion and competition for understanding the processes that shaped, intensified and magnified the mourning rituals. In addition, the chapter focusses on the significance of the secular administrative state structure in disseminating and reproducing the Thai 'system of royal rituals'. These rituals, whether of 'religious' or 'secular' origin, all contribute to the sacredness of the king. Twenty-first century Thailand, Stengs argues, is ever more moving towards an inextricably intertwined secular-sacred of king, nation and state.
The Secular Sacred: Emotions of Belonging and the Perils of Nation and Religion, 2020
How do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled across the world? In exploring ... more How do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled across the world? In exploring this theme, The Secular Sacred focuses on diverse topics such as the dynamic roles of Carnival in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria, and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands.
The contributions focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce, and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. The Secular Sacred will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, political scientists, and social psychologists, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies and semiotics.
Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
The Secular Sacred. Emotions of Belonging and the Perils of Nation and Religion, 2020
How, in various places across the world, do religious emotions and national sentiment become enta... more How, in various places across the world, do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled? In exploring this theme, this book focuses on such diverse topics as the dynamic roles of Carnaval in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands. What binds the chapters in this volume is the focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. At this moment in time, it has become somewhat of a stale repetition to criticize the secular-religious divide. We are very much part and parcel of a world in which these boundaries overlap, are claimed, contested, reclaimed and re-contested in new and dynamic ways. If the debate on the postsecular has taught us anything, it is that the tools with which we work are implicated in these contestations. The notions ‘secular’, ‘sacred’ and ‘religion’ are as much part of our conceptual toolbox as objects of investigation. In order to illustrate how we are always in the middle of things, and in order to see how we should, if we are to understand the entanglements of sacrality, religion and secularity, think our way up from praxis, we opt for a start in medias res. We therefore open this introduction in Bangkok, Thailand, 26 October 2017 to be precise, when the mourning rituals for the recently deceased king are about to reach their apex.
The global interest in the search for and rescue of the Thai youth football
team ‘the Wild Boars’... more The global interest in the search for and rescue of the Thai youth football team ‘the Wild Boars’, or the nationwide interest in the non-stop fundraising swimming-tour of Dutch swimmer Maarten van der Weijden, are examples of what in this lecture is called high density events: intense, often emotional occurrences, of an almost entertainment-like character, followed continuously by many. High density events shape and articulate ideas about who belong or do not belong to the (national) community. During such events, cultural forms, objects and practices are popularized, transferred and exchanged at a high pace, processes in which virtually anybody may become involved.Taking high-density events as object of research implies a focus on the making of heritage. In the repetitious, ritualized contexts of such events, certain cultural forms, practices and objects may become magnified and sacralised, to become heritage. Although any object or practice may be made heritage, the analysis should situate this making in its societal context, asking such questions as who were involved in the selection process, and why certainpractices or objects are self-evidently attributed a heritage status and othersnot. With cultural identity becoming an ever more explicitly political issue,research into the making of heritage is the more urgent.
In: the Sociolinguistics of Place and Belonging. Perspectives from the margins (Edited by Leonie Cornips and Vincent de Rooij) John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2018
This contribution focusses on the languagecultural politics played out in
performances of André R... more This contribution focusses on the languagecultural politics played out in performances of André Rieu, the World’s King of the Waltz. At stake are stereotypical oppositions made within the Netherlands between ‘the nation’s center’ (‘Holland’) and the ‘peripheral’ province of Limburg. During his concerts in the Limburgian capital Maastricht, Rieu’s hometown, Rieu negates the Hollanders-centered, taken-for-granted, perspective that foregrounds Standard Dutch and its speakers as the normative neutral. Presenting himself as a global-cum-local performer alternating local language with English, Rieu marginalizes Standard Dutch as irrelevant, in the Dutch language-scape usually the position of dialects. Rieu’s languagecultural political messages are persuasive because of his strategic, jocular use of various linguistic and cultural resources, all to highlight his belonging to Maastricht.
This ethnography contributes to the field of Holocaust heritage studies by exploring the paradoxi... more This ethnography contributes to the field of Holocaust heritage studies by exploring the paradoxical tendencies of memorial proliferation and oblivion. The topic of investigation is the genesis and multiplications of the so-called 'Anne Frank Tree', the horse chestnut tree behind the Secret Annex that Anne Frank wrote about in her diary. Fungus-infected, the tree fell in 2010. The Anne Frank Tree testifies to both the terrible fate of the European Jews and the shelter offered to some. Therefore, its eventual safeguarding, whether by conservation or multiplication, became a topic of concern worldwide. Following the roots and routes of the Anne Frank Tree legacy (stump, seedlings, grafts, wood, and chestnuts), this article examines the processes of sacralization that have stirred the material's vivid proliferation and, importantly, the burden which the accumulating material subsequently imposes on the people in charge of it. The case sheds light on the tendency of the sacred to proliferate, often to the extent of excess. Paradoxically, this tendency threatens to undo the sacrality. Sint-Oedenrode, 11 March 2019 Seventeen black containers, each with a horse chestnut tree, are awaiting another 25 to arrive in the coming days to be all planted in the open ground by the Dutch tree nursery Van den Berk. To the eye, these trees are just horse chestnut trees. What sets them apart, however, is their progeny. They are descendants (nazaten) of the so-called Anne Frank Tree, the horse chestnut tree that stood in a garden behind the Secret Annex where Anne Frank, her family and four others had been hiding during WW II. The descendants therefore are 'trees with a story' and will receive, in the words of the Senior Purchaser 'a well-deserved VIP treatment'. From here, they may go to a new owner, but only when planted in a public place, and within an educational context. As formulated on the nursery's website: 'While the stories often reach back into time, the planted trees will carry them along into the future. Resisting time, the trees are "monuments in green"'. 1
What happens when religious sites, objects and practices become cultural heritage? What are —reli... more 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. The question who controls, manages, and frames religious heritage, and how, arises with particular urgency. Case studies from Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom present an analysis of the paradoxes and challenges that arise when religious sites are transformed into heritage.
In musea, archieven en instituten hoopt het erfgoed van de toekomst zich op: van een sigarettenpe... more In musea, archieven en instituten hoopt het erfgoed van de toekomst zich op: van een sigarettenpeuk van de Theo van Gogh-herdenking tot kastanjes van de Anne Frankboom. Het gaat om objecten die verbonden zijn met intensieve, emotionele gebeurtenissen. Maar niet alles wordt bewaard. Welke processen bepalen wat wel en wat niet tot erfgoed gemaakt wordt?
Jahrbuch für Europäische Ethnologie Dritte Folge 12–2017, 2017
This article aims to encourage the interdisciplinary study of ‘languageculture’, an approach to l... more This article aims to encourage the interdisciplinary study of ‘languageculture’, an approach to language and culture in which ideology, linguistic and cultural forms, as well as practices are studied in relation to one another. An integrated analysis of the selection of linguistic and cultural elements provides insight into how these choices arise from internalized norms and values, and how people position themselves toward received categories and hegemonic ideologies. An interdisciplinary approach will stimulate a rethinking of established concepts and methods of research. It will also lead to a mutual strengthening of linguistic, sociolinguistic, and anthropological research. This contribution focuses on the province of Limburg and the linguistic-political context of this Southern-Netherlands region where people are strongly aware of their linguistic distinctiveness. The argument of the paper is based on a case study of languageculture, viz. the carnivalesque song ‘Naar Talia’ (To Italy) by the Getske Boys from the city of Heerlen.
The global interest in the search for and rescue of the Thai youth football team ‘the Wild Boars’... more The global interest in the search for and rescue of the Thai youth football team ‘the Wild Boars’, or the nationwide interest in the non-stop fundraising swimming-tour of Dutch swimmer Maarten van der Weijden, are examples of what in this lecture is called high density events: intense, often emotional occurrences, of an almost entertainment-like character, followed continuously by many. High density events shape and articulate ideas about who belong or do not belong to the (national) community. During such events, cultural forms, objects and practices are popularized, transferred and exchanged at a high pace, processes in which virtually anybody may become involved. Taking high-density events as object of research implies a focus on the making of heritage. In the repetitious, ritualized contexts of such events, certain cultural forms, practices and objects may become magnified and sacralised, to become heritage. Although any object or practice may be made heritage, the analysis shou...
The Secular Sacred Emotions of Belonging and the Perils of Nation and Religion, 2020
How do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled across the world? In exploring ... more How do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled across the world? In exploring this theme, The Secular Sacred focuses on diverse topics such as the dynamic roles of Carnival in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria, and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands.
The contributions focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce, and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. The Secular Sacred will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, political scientists, and social psychologists, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies and semiotics.
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The contributions focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce, and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. The Secular Sacred will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, political scientists, and social psychologists, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies and semiotics.
Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
At this moment in time, it has become somewhat of a stale repetition to criticize the secular-religious divide. We are very much part and parcel of a world in which these boundaries overlap, are claimed, contested, reclaimed and re-contested in new and dynamic ways. If the debate on the postsecular has taught us anything, it is that the tools with which we work are implicated in these contestations. The notions ‘secular’, ‘sacred’ and ‘religion’ are as much part of our conceptual toolbox as objects of investigation. In order to illustrate how we are always in the middle of things, and in order to see how we should, if we are to understand the entanglements of sacrality, religion and secularity, think our way up from praxis, we opt for a start in medias res. We therefore open this introduction in Bangkok, Thailand, 26 October 2017 to be precise, when the mourning rituals for the recently deceased king are about to reach their apex.
team ‘the Wild Boars’, or the nationwide interest in the non-stop fundraising swimming-tour of Dutch swimmer Maarten van der Weijden, are examples of what in this lecture is called high density events: intense, often emotional occurrences, of an almost entertainment-like character, followed continuously by many. High density events shape and articulate ideas about who belong or do not belong to the (national) community. During such events, cultural forms, objects and practices are popularized, transferred and exchanged at a high pace, processes in which virtually anybody may become involved.Taking high-density events as object of research implies a focus on the making of heritage. In the repetitious, ritualized contexts of such events, certain cultural forms, practices and objects may become magnified and sacralised, to become heritage. Although any object or practice may be made heritage, the analysis should situate this making in its societal context, asking such questions as who were involved in the selection process, and why certainpractices or objects are self-evidently attributed a heritage status and othersnot. With cultural identity becoming an ever more explicitly political issue,research into the making of heritage is the more urgent.
performances of André Rieu, the World’s King of the Waltz. At stake are stereotypical oppositions made within the Netherlands between ‘the nation’s center’ (‘Holland’) and the ‘peripheral’ province of Limburg. During his concerts in the Limburgian capital Maastricht, Rieu’s hometown, Rieu negates the Hollanders-centered, taken-for-granted, perspective that foregrounds Standard Dutch and its speakers as the normative neutral. Presenting himself as a global-cum-local performer alternating local language with English, Rieu marginalizes Standard Dutch as irrelevant, in the Dutch language-scape usually
the position of dialects. Rieu’s languagecultural political messages are persuasive because of his strategic, jocular use of various linguistic and cultural resources, all to highlight his belonging to Maastricht.
The contributions focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce, and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. The Secular Sacred will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, political scientists, and social psychologists, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies and semiotics.
Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
At this moment in time, it has become somewhat of a stale repetition to criticize the secular-religious divide. We are very much part and parcel of a world in which these boundaries overlap, are claimed, contested, reclaimed and re-contested in new and dynamic ways. If the debate on the postsecular has taught us anything, it is that the tools with which we work are implicated in these contestations. The notions ‘secular’, ‘sacred’ and ‘religion’ are as much part of our conceptual toolbox as objects of investigation. In order to illustrate how we are always in the middle of things, and in order to see how we should, if we are to understand the entanglements of sacrality, religion and secularity, think our way up from praxis, we opt for a start in medias res. We therefore open this introduction in Bangkok, Thailand, 26 October 2017 to be precise, when the mourning rituals for the recently deceased king are about to reach their apex.
team ‘the Wild Boars’, or the nationwide interest in the non-stop fundraising swimming-tour of Dutch swimmer Maarten van der Weijden, are examples of what in this lecture is called high density events: intense, often emotional occurrences, of an almost entertainment-like character, followed continuously by many. High density events shape and articulate ideas about who belong or do not belong to the (national) community. During such events, cultural forms, objects and practices are popularized, transferred and exchanged at a high pace, processes in which virtually anybody may become involved.Taking high-density events as object of research implies a focus on the making of heritage. In the repetitious, ritualized contexts of such events, certain cultural forms, practices and objects may become magnified and sacralised, to become heritage. Although any object or practice may be made heritage, the analysis should situate this making in its societal context, asking such questions as who were involved in the selection process, and why certainpractices or objects are self-evidently attributed a heritage status and othersnot. With cultural identity becoming an ever more explicitly political issue,research into the making of heritage is the more urgent.
performances of André Rieu, the World’s King of the Waltz. At stake are stereotypical oppositions made within the Netherlands between ‘the nation’s center’ (‘Holland’) and the ‘peripheral’ province of Limburg. During his concerts in the Limburgian capital Maastricht, Rieu’s hometown, Rieu negates the Hollanders-centered, taken-for-granted, perspective that foregrounds Standard Dutch and its speakers as the normative neutral. Presenting himself as a global-cum-local performer alternating local language with English, Rieu marginalizes Standard Dutch as irrelevant, in the Dutch language-scape usually
the position of dialects. Rieu’s languagecultural political messages are persuasive because of his strategic, jocular use of various linguistic and cultural resources, all to highlight his belonging to Maastricht.
The contributions focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce, and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. The Secular Sacred will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, political scientists, and social psychologists, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies and semiotics.