Dynamics of Religious Things in Museums: Introduction to a Research Area and a Cooperative Alliance

We are entering an area of public controversy: the field of museums. Our focus is on a topic that is equally the subject of much critical reflection in the academic arena: religious things and how they are handled in museums. Museums are currently receiving a lot of public attention with regard to the material objects they host, and the historical and contemporary handling of said objects. Museums are both places of memory and education, and places of leisure and tourism. According to TripAdvisor, two of the world’s ten most popular sights are museums, one of which is closely intertwined with a religious site and institution: the Vatican Museums, with their papal art collection and the Sistine Chapel (ranked third in 2019). Overlap and fluid attributions of meaning between religious places and tourist sites (in this case, museums) are not uncommon, and become particularly evident in the case of museums run by religious institutions, such as the Catholic Church in the case of the Vatican Museums. There are global public debates about the origins, paths, and futures of museum things/objects. Since at least 2018, with the report on the restitution of African cultural heritage, which Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy presented to the French president, the legitimacy of objects from colonial contexts in museums and collections in the global north has been widely debated around the globe, both in academia and among the general public. In Germany, this debate has mainly been ignited by the repositioning of the ethnological collections in the newly established Humboldt Forum in Berlin. But of course, such objects are not only located in Berlin, and the problem also affects objects of other geographical provenance