Sense and Essence

Birgit Meyer is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University. She is co-editor of Material Religion. Her recent publications include Aesthetic Formations: Religion, Media and the Senses (ed., Palgrave 2009), Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality (ed. with Dick Houtman, Fordham 2012), Sensational Movies: Video Vision and Christianity in Ghana (University of California Press, 2015), and Creativity in Transition: Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe (ed. with Maruška Svašek, Berghahn, 2016).

“This is an extensive and influential collection that whilst reviewing I took with me to the field, twice! It is a book to ponder and to return to. It is cohesively edited…, volume nine in Berghahn’s Material Mediations series and a fantastic and stimulating addition…this powerful and detailed volume on the affective nature of heritage needs to be read and re-read, digested and extensively travelled with.” • Journal of Heritage Tourism“Considering that we all know the world we live in is a ‘construct’, how are we convinced to accept it as real and act accordingly? And how is heritage, which is always a social construct, made real through aesthetics of persuasion and politics of authenticity? By addressing these questions in richly varied ethnographic case studies, this volume not only makes a significant contribution to an issue that is of wider interest to the social sciences, it also makes heritage studies as a field highly relevant to the social sciences.” • Ferdinand de Jong, University of East Anglia

• List of FiguresPrefaceIntroduction: Heritage Dynamics: Politics of Authentication, Aesthetics of Persuasion and the Cultural Production of the RealMattijs van de Port & Birgit MeyerChapter 1. 
Aesthetics as Form and Force: Notes on the Shaping of Pataxó Indian BodiesAndré Werneck de Andrade BakkerChapter 2. Intangible Heritage, Tangible Controversies: The Baiana and the Acarajé as Boundary Objects in Contemporary BrazilBruno ReinhardtChapter 3. Swinging between the Material and the Immaterial: Brazilian Cultural Politics and the Authentication of Afro-Brazilian HeritageMaria Paula Fernandes AdinolfiChapter 4. 'Reporting the Past': News History and the Formation of the Sunday Times Heritage ProjectDuane JethroChapter 5. Scaffolding Heritage: Transient Architectures and Temporalizing Formations in LuandaRuy Llera BlanesChapter 6. Corpo-Reality TV: Media, Body, and the Authentication of ‘African Heritage’Marleen de WitteChapter 7. Heated Discussions Are Necessary. The Creative Engagement with Sankofa in Modern Ghanaian ArtRhoda WoetsChapter 8. Iconic Objects: Making Diasporic Heritage, Blackness and Whiteness in the NetherlandsMarkus BalkenholChapter 9. Ascertaining the Future Memory of Our Time: Dutch Institutions Collecting Relics of National TragedyIrene StengsConcluding CommentsChapter 10. Heritage Under Construction: Boundary Objects, Scaffolding and AnticipationDavid ChidesterChapter 11. Can Anything Become Heritage?David BerlinerChapter 12. Heritage as ProcessCiraj RassoolIndex