Collecting, Curating, Exhibiting: How Museums Make the Sacred

Museums are sacralizing institutions. They make decisions about what material culture will be preserved, set apart, and narrated as valuable, special, irreplaceable, priceless. Museums make the sacred throughout various forms of frontstage and backstage labor: from forming and maintaining collections to managing research access, curatorial choices and practices, and designing public exhibitions. The sacralizing work of museums is capacious, transecting contingent binaries such as religious-secular, religion-culture, religion-science, religion-heritage, and religion-politics. This pre-conference workshop invites participants who are interested in collaboratively exploring the ways in which museums perform sacralization.