ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we return to Glasgow Cathedral to explore the “everyday dissonance” associated with significance, faith and care. We start by exploring how significance assessment creates a seductive sense of order from a messy and unruly assemblage of people and things. This constitutes the Cathedral as a national heritage object and reconfigures its sacred and spiritual dimensions as principally located in the medieval past. However, tensions are created with those for whom the Cathedral is imbued with a sense of the numinous and seen as an embodiment of faith. We show how HS staff and Cathedral “stakeholders” mobilise perspectivalism in negotiating this disjunctive situation and the tensions that arise from it. In examining how perspectives are made and managed, we explore the multiplicity of what they materialise. Inspired by post-human approaches to care, our account shows that the Cathedral is assembled by different people as differing matters of concern, eliciting specific affects and worries. In the process, the building and its care is constituted in different ways highlighting the ethical and political dimensions of the object of conservation.
