This article considers the often overlooked, or looked through, museum display case. Glass cases provide physical barriers between museum exhibits and visitors. Their efficacy is what keeps them hidden. But when the case obstructs a visitor-object interaction, their presence becomes strikingly obvious. The usually discerning cases are blamed for disrupting, distancing and inhibiting museum experiences. Yet, cases can facilitate many encounters that aid visitors' abilities to connect devotionally with exhibits. To explore the active role that glass cases play, this article employs an actor-network approach to examine interactions at an exhibition on medieval Christian relics, where the cases acted as channels and barriers within the process of veneration, as well as the means to erase traces of religious practices. Situated in debates about materiality and lived religion, this article considers the role of mundane material objects in visitor-object encounters and the mediated nature of religious experiences in non-devotional spaces.
This article examines a campaign to save, protect and convert a once-forgotten paupers' graveyard in South London into a remembrance garden for the "outcast dead. " A vital component of this campaign was the materializing and maintenance of a roadside shrine on the graveyard's periphery. This campaign therefore raises questions about nonhuman agency (in terms of the materials that form the shrine, graveyard and garden) and its role in the making and protecting of a contested site. At the crux of this article stands the co-constitutive relationship between people and objects, including the gates and offerings, the supporters and gardeners, the local flora and fauna and, of course, the human remains. To explore how these heterogeneous assemblages helped to defend the graveyard, this article draws on ethnographic research, paying particular attention to discussions and activities concerning the site's boundaries, visibility and permanence.
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