This paper explores how anthropological theories of waste can illuminate contemporary reconfigurations of value and worthiness at the intersections of religion and heritage. Drawing on ethnographic research with Roman Catholics in southern Mexico and England, I examine how historic churches and devotional objects are integrated into heritage regimes that prioritise particular ideas of use and demonstrable public value. Within these regimes, sacredness is often reframed as excessive, restrictive, or wasteful, particularly when it challenges priorities around resource allocation and non-religious forms of use.
Rather than interpreting these experiences as the “secularisation” of religious space or its reverse, the “migration of the sacred” into heritage, I argue that religion and heritage in many places today form a borderland: a relational field of overlapping moral orders, uneven power, negotiated authority, and symbolic and material indeterminacy. In this borderland, heritage and religion operate as porous social orders (Gershon 2019) through which objects and persons move, and which constrain and enable one another. Waste emerges here not as a material condition, but as a moral and temporal discourse through which inconvenient sacredness is restrained or held in reserve, without ever attempting to fully displace it.
By tracing moments of withholding, locking away, and non-engagement with objects and spaces, alongside frustrations about underuse and wasted potential, I show how the sacred is not erased under heritage governance, but selectively contained according to the specific legal, financial, and aesthetic frameworks at play in a given place. Attending to ideas about waste in this context allows us to see how value and meaning are managed under conditions of material and financial risk, and how heritage and religion together produce new regimes of worth.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Hilary Term 2026
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close).
Convened by Chihab El-Khachab and Paola Esposito.
