Divinely significant: towards a postsecular approach to the materiality of popular religion in Asia.

The material embeddedness of the divine in the objects and sites of popular religion in Asia establishes the grounds for a conflict between devotees and heritage practitioners – the same objects are central to the practice of each but each hones in on them via a radically different ontology. While in principle offering an even-handed consideration of all aspects of a thing's meaning, the secular-rationalist underpinning of the practice of significance-assessment in heritage management acts to marginalise or even efface the eruptively miraculous qualities of divine sites and objects. It serves, in other words, as a regime of insignificance. Against this background, I argue that the posthuman turn in the humanities and social sciences, and in particular its openness to forms of agency, vibrancy and vitality in the object world, offers prospects for a kind of heritage practice newly comfortable with the vibrancy that belief in the supernatural lends to the things of popular religion. There has, I suggest, never been a better time for heritage practice to get over its problem with the supernatural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]