Irene Stengs

Meertens Institute Amsterdam/Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam · Ethnology/Social Anthropology

The proliferation of religious heritage seems to flow self-evidently from the processes of de-churching and secularization taking place in many European societies. Although having become redundant or outdated, certain religious buildings, objects or practices may be revalued as religious heritage. This selective setting apart of religious places or...

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‐inf...

This open access Handbook provides state-of-the-art scholarship on religious heritage in contemporary Europe, aimed at scholars, practitioners and policy makers. It contains articles by both scholars and heritage practitioners, and explores the key challenges facing organizations, churches, and governments, as well as academics studying religion an...

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. T...

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...

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 Carnival in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands. What binds the ch...

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-evi...

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 c...

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...

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 h...

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...

This article aims to encourage the interdisciplinary study of ‘languaculture,’ an approach to language and culture in which ideology, linguistic and cultural forms, as well as praxis 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...

This chapter addresses the role of mass-produced portraits of the Siamese King Chulalongkorn (Rama V, r. 1868–1910) in a personality cult that emerged in the 1990s among the urban Thai middle class in response to hopes and anxieties about Thai identity in a globalizing world. The portraits are understood as having sought out their owners themselves...

Roadside memorials as material expressions of changing mourning culture Over the past decades commemorating the victims of an untimely or unnatural death in the public domain has become more self-evident, in Europe as well as elsewhere in the world. Evidence of this 'new public mourning' (Walter 2008) is to be found in an increasing number of roads...

The objective of this article is to address the significance of craftsmanship in the production and decoration of royal images in present-day Thailand, especially portraits of King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868-1910). In the 1990s, King Chulalongkorn became the object of a nationwide personality cult and as a consequence portraits of the king flooded the...

Nieuw in Nederland: Feesten en rituelen in verandering levert een bijdrage aan het publieke debat over immigranten, cultuur en nationalisme. Het boek stelt het idee ter discussie dat in Nederland migrantenculturen bestaan met elk hun eigen traditionele feesten en rituelen. De onderliggende aanname dat migranten vastomlijnde gemeenschappen met eigen...

This contribution focuses on the power of commemorative ritual with special attention for bodily matters. It relies on empirical material from a sequence of ceremonies in commemoration of Dutch singer André Hazes (1951–2004). All celebrations were staged performances and widely mediated events. In the Dutch context, they were of an unusual form, co...

This paper addresses the specific capacities of portraits as objectifications mediating religious experience (cf. Meyer 2006). It will be argued that portraits of a divine being—in this case of King Chulalongkorn, king of Siam from 1868 until 1910—enable worshipers to establish a direct link with the divine while producing its direct presence at th...

Since the mid-nineties, in The Netherlands quite a number of cases of violent death have given rise to intense, short-lived attention from media and public, 'senseless violence' being their common denominator. It is argued that the responses of media and public evolve along the lines of a ritualised pattern, one of the material expressions being an...

On November 2, 2004, the provocative film director and publicist Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim fanatic. The assassination occurred in Amsterdam, in the context of Van Gogh's habit of commenting bluntly on just about everything, including Muslims, and his film Submission, which highlights the relation between the abuse of Mus...