Event: WebinAAR on Religion and Museums
Co-Sponsored by The Association for Public Religion and Intellectual Life (APRIL)
with
SB Rodriguez-Plate, Sarah Dees, Erika Gault, and Hussein Rashid
This is the second of our “Religion and America at 250” webinAAR series that will engage central questions around the meaning of religion, the meaning of America, and the intersections of those terms and with special consideration of the 250th anniversary of the United States.
Description:
Museums are booming throughout the world, as archaeological, anthropological, historical and regional art museums are filled with ritual objects and sacred artifacts that have been vital to indigenous and global traditions throughout the centuries.
Museum construction has also become a part of nation building, via heritage building. If Benedict Anderson (1983) famously stated that newspapers and novels created an “imagined community” in the nineteenth century, we might also fold in the ways nation building has occurred via museum construction in the nineteenth and into the twenty-first centuries. This is crucial to the “imagined religiosity” of any nation, including the past 250 years of the United States.
Even as museums reckon with the lingering legacies of colonialism, cultural imperialism, the underground antiquities market, tainted donor dollars, gender dynamics, and other fraught power relations, they still offer rare places of inter-cultural and inter-religious re-connection and re-enchantment, where people of different religious backgrounds may encounter the practices and beliefs of others, their sacred artifacts, and traditions.
Event Guidelines
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Original site: https://aarweb.org/event/representing-religion-in-museums-religion-and-america-at-250-2/
