Spirits in a Material World

Abstract

Abstract This article is about woodcarving and the role it plays in religion. It is an attempt to grapple with the idea of heritage as partnership — involving “persons in action,” that is between human and non-human persons — focusing on the work of an artist, Lepten, and the seven themed wooden pillars he and others carved in Mopungchuket village in Nagaland, India. It demonstrates, in this case, how heritage as a process opens up conversations between representing the past and the present in the religious grammar of Baptist Christianity and its relationship with materiality through the medium of wood. It also sheds light on the multiple meanings of heritage that are about openings and pathways for people to discuss how they experience memory and change, renewal and loss. It suggests that what is represented as the “past” in heritage is never dormant but is perpetually being animated through the relations that revise, form, and re-embed in new ways. In this sense, the problem of heritage and the different forms of mediation must take into account how carvings are viewed in Ao Naga society, drawing on both Christian and indigenous Naga concepts that continue to push where the boundaries of heritage as an idea and practice begin and where they end.

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