The Sacred

Catalog description

What can different notions of the sacred teach us about human relations throughout the world, throughout time? How do sacred sites, artworks, and practices illuminate the deepest possibilities for human connection, healing, and reconciliation? And how do they represent what we stand to lose through environmental extraction and degradation? Historically and today, the sacred has been located within nature, within built environments and material culture, and within the dynamic actions of the human body. As ancient myths reveal, the sacred is a precious - and sometimes tragic - contact zone between gods, peoples, and animals, and it is also a contested place of ideologies and identities. Sacred art and culture also present ethical tensions for research and collecting practices of museums and ethnographers. This colloquium explores case studies from Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and draws on religious studies, sociology, art and architectural history, film, literature, historic preservation, museum theory, and performance to help us understand the global implications of endangered, thriving, and ever-evolving worlds of the sacred today.