Faith in Museums: On the Confluence of Museums and Religious Sites in Asia

Over the past decade the critical study of museums has matured, as the number of books, journals, and conferences devoted to all facets of museum studies has dramatically increased. While many approaches to the topic are possible, I would like to examine how museums in Asia function in religious ways and how religious sites, such as temples, have come to function as museums. Pursuing this tack might seem puzzling, or even controversial, to those familiar with Theodor W. Adorno's now well-known essay inveighing against the immuration of objects in museums, in which he emphasizes the unpleasant overtones of the German word museal (“museum-like”), used to describe “objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying…. Museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art” (175). Adorno's essay articulates a sentiment about museums that was born in the past and has persisted down to the present. We hear echoes of Adorno's disdain and feelings of dehumanization, for example, in James Boon's recent essay “Why Museums Make Me Sad,” which expresses his own melancholic reaction to museums. If museums are merely mausoleums where dead objects are housed, how could they possibly function as religious sites? How could their contents ever provide religious inspiration?