Beyond museums: religion in other visitor attractions

Museums offer three very different things: public entertainment, public education and scholarly research. In all three areas museums have, over the past generation, transformed the ways they understand, use and present religion. This transformation in museums worldwide has forged new correspondences with other kinds of visitor attraction, like places of worship, libraries, pilgrimage centres, theme parks or zoos. The barriers that once separated museums from other institutions that welcome visitors have broken down, perhaps especially in the field of religion. In this short note I shall look briefly at some of the approaches museums have come to share with other attractions that present religion to visitors, and at some of the motives they share.Les musées offrent trois choses très différentes: le divertissement public, l’éducation publique et la recherche scientifique. Dans les trois domaines, les musées ont, au cours de la dernière génération, transformé leur façon de comprendre, d’utiliser et de présenter la religion. Cette transformation dans les musées du monde entier a forgé de nouvelles correspondances avec d’autres attractions publiques, tels que des lieux de culte, des bibliothèques, des centres de pèlerinage, des parcs à thème ou des zoos. Les barrières qui séparaient autrefois les musées des autres institutions accueillant les visiteurs se sont effondrées, peut-être surtout dans le domaine religieux. Dans ce court article, j'examinerai quelques-unes des approches que les musées sont venus partager avec d'autres attractions qui présentent la religion aux visiteurs, ainsi que les motivations qu'ils partagent

End of organised atheism. The genealogy of the law on freedom of conscience and its conceptual effects in Russia

In the current climate of the perceived alliance between the Russian Orthodox Church and the state, atheist activists in Moscow share a sense of juridical marginality that they seek to mitigate through claims to equal rights between believers and atheists under the Russian law on freedom of conscience. In their demands for their constitutional rights, including the right to political critique, atheist activists come across as figures of dissent at risk of the state's persecution. Their experiences constitute a remarkable (and unexamined in anthropology) reversal of political and ideological primacy of state-sponsored atheism during the Soviet days. To illuminate the legal context of the atheists’ current predicament, the article traces an alternative genealogy of the Russian law on freedom of conscience from the inception of the Soviet state through the law's post-Soviet reforms. The article shows that the legal reforms have paved the way for practical changes to the privileged legal status of organized atheism and brought about implicit conceptual effects that sideline the Soviet meaning of freedom of conscience as freedom from religion and obscure historical references to conscience as an atheist tenet of Soviet ethics

Change—But Not Enough Yet

Many museums are now taking religion much more seriously, and there is a lot of academic interest in the subject. But many of the changes are very slow, and many museums are still ignoring religion