ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on religious heritage, broadly understood as the sites, buildings, artifacts, and practices that form part of living religions. I exclude specifically those artifacts associated with “dead” religions because I am more interested in the ways that religious and heritage narratives around sites overlap and are sometimes in tension with one another. I am also more interested in general in heritage that is “living” (particularly intangible cultural heritage). As such, while I am wary of drawing binaries that put believers and “society at large” as monoliths operating in opposition to one another, this juxtaposition helps enlighten many of the tensions about how identity and power are created and negotiated through the languages of heritage and religion. These narratives, to restate the matter, sometimes align, but sometimes create an “either/or” effect that can allow for the weaponization of discourse and identity around one or the other.
