berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

List of Figures

Editors’ Introduction: Emplaced Belief: A Multivocal Introduction
Jay Johnston, Marion Gibson, Jamie Hampson and Nicola Whyte

Chapter 1. (Dis)placed Heritage: Memory, Museums, and Ecologies of Agency
Mariska van der Velde and Kocku von Stuckrad

Chapter 2. The Religious Dimensions of Britain’s New Holocaust Heritage
David Tollerton

Chapter 3. Visible Religion in a Museum Context
Marie Vejrup Nielsen

Chapter 4. Indigenous Rock Art Sites as a Locus of Emplaced Belief
Jamie Hampson

Chapter 5. The Geography of Mbira Music: The Mbira of Zimbabwe as a Forgotten Diplomat
Ashton Sinamai

Chapter 6. Social Remembrance, Social Forgetting and Commemoration: The Public History of Witch Trials in Divided Societies with Contested Pasts
Andrew Sneddon

Chapter 7. Locked but Not Forgotten: Secular Pilgrimage and the Love-Lock
Ceri Houlbrooke

Chapter 8. Hiking and Heritage: The Creation of American Pilgrimage Routes
Giselle Bader

Chapter 9. Encountering Remains of Charnel and Saints Inside Historic British Churches
Ruth Nugent, Thomas J. Farrow, and Katherine Foster

Chapter 10. Sacred Heritage, Spiritous Waters and the Subterranean Imagination in Early Modern Britain
Nicola Whyte

Chapter 11. Sacred Species and Biocultural Heritage: Systems of Value and Practice in Conservation Assessment and Education
Jay Johnston

Afterword
Jay Johnston, Marion Gibson, Jamie Hampson and Nicola Whyte

Index

Emplaced Belief

Heritage and Religion Reconsidered

Edited by Jay Johnston, Marion Gibson, Jamie Hampson and Nicola Whyte

276 pages, 7 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-83695-293-0 Hb Published (January 2026)

eISBN 978-1-83695-294-7
web ISBN 978-1-83695-294-7

Details

Emplaced Belief is an innovative interdisciplinary volume that explores the conceptual and lived relations between the academic fields of religion and heritage. The Contributors adopt a holistic approach to consider emplacement — a broad interrelation of objects, peoples, histories and places — in the analysis of relations between religion and heritage. To be ‘emplaced’ is to be situated, yet such positioning is the result of multiple conscious and unconscious forces, agencies, discourses, and epistemologies. The volume’s title refers not only to physical locations of import, but also to the role of cultural practices and religious epistemologies in the establishment of religious heritage: the act of emplacement. That is, the religious, social, political and cultural practices that denote ‘heritage’ and the dynamics that revise, reinforce, or remove any such attribution.

Jay Johnston FAHA is Honorary Professor in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Recent publications include Amulets in Magical Practice (Cambridge Element 2024) andStag and Stone: Religion, Archaeology and Esoteric Aesthetics (Equinox 2021).

Marion Gibson is Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials (Simon and Schuster, 2023), and The Witches of St Osyth (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Jamie Hampson is an Associate Professor of Rock Art and Indigenous Heritage at the University of Exeter. Recent books include Visual Culture, Heritage and Identity: Using Rock Art to Reconnect Past and Present and Powerful Pictures: Rock Art Research Histories Around the World.

Nicola Whyte is Associate Professor of landscape and history at the University of Exeter where she is co-Director of the Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities.

Series: Volume 12, Explorations in Heritage Studies

Subject: Heritage Studies Anthropology of Religion History (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Area:

LC: CC135 .E475 2026

BISAC: HIS037000 HISTORY/World; SOC026000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/General; SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social