Possessing and being possessed by the past: on the ambivalences of heritage as religious return
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the politics of religious patrimony by comparing two cases where the heritagization of religious sites results in feelings of loss and estrangement rather than return and restoration. We show how shrines can function simultaneously as public and civic places of religious assembly but also as material and sensorial expressions of ambivalent forms of belonging and un-belonging – to the past, to a territory, to a religious denomination, to a domestic environment associated with childhood or previous generations. One case is of Greek Cypriots as they travel to a renovated monastery located in territory lost to them in 1974 after the island’s division. Encounters with the monastery are inflected by a broader, uncanny feeling of reentering a landscape that is familiar yet also estranged, studded by former childhood homes and villages now inhabited by others. The other case follows the experiences of Roman Catholics as they engage with the Christian pilgrimage site of Walsingham in the English county of Norfolk. The site now embodies a fractured heritage and pilgrimage space that recalls spiritual, material and cultural loss extending beyond biographical memory into the time of the Protestant Reformation. In both cases, ambiguities of ‘possession’ are provoked by forms of heritage restoration that embody but also obliterate memory in ways deemed to be deeply problematic by some populations. We argue that possession in these terms has economic and legal associations, referring to ownership of places and things, but it also points to situations where people are filled with an abiding and at times obsessive sense of the continuing urgency of the unsettled past.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.094 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".