Alexandra Antohin explores the museum-ification of churches in Ethiopia, Russia and the
U.S. and how exhibitions and tours of religious significance establish active
reference points for new forms of public engagement. Antohin draws upon her
experience of these sites as well as contextualization theory to explore how
religious media are included in the interpretative space of ‘church-museums’.
She suggests that in Ethiopia, where tourism is still a new industry, multiple
subjectivities and modes of interpretation may emerge through the display and reception
of religious media in a public context.
Jacqueline Cieslak artfully describes the complicated relationships between sanitation, reverence, and political contrivance in contemporary India. Cieslak focuses on the phenomenon of ‘The Toilet’ and its objectification as artefact and cultural institution. She argues that officials have not simply recruited religious imagery but that sanitation itself has become an object of worship.
Rane Willerslev reviews Yukaghir notions of personhood in this excerpt from his book, Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Yukaghir hunters have sophisticated knowledge of the behaviors of the many species of animals they interact with in northeastern Siberia which helps them characterize these beings along a continuum of personhood; humans being just one among many varieties of persons. These rich and varied conceptualizations ramify more basic ideas about animism, demonstrating how indigenous traditions can be labeled "animistic" as a useful generalization, though this rarely means the same thing across different societies.
Dimitris Xygalatas suggests here, in the final section of his book, The Burning Saints, that rituals can be deeply transformative. In this case, a person suffering from a mood disorder is cured by virtue of her participation in a traditional fire-walking ritual in the town of Agia Eleni in Northern Greece. Agia Eleni is one of five villages that celebrate the tradition of the Anastenaria, a group of Orthodox Christians who practice a fire-walking ritual. These rituals are performed at a konaki, a place where icons and other religious objects are stored and venerated. This passage is evocative of an important excerpt from Durkheim's classic, The Elementary Forms of Religious Ideas, where he wrote: “the real function of religion is not to make us think, to enrich our knowledge…but rather, it is to make us act, to aid us to live. The believer who has communicated with his god is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger. He feels within him more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them.”
