Interdisciplinary journal focusing primarily on sociological, political science and historical perspectives on the issue of long-term social processes and trends, modernization, globalization tendency and impacts.
The journal creates a broader platform for researches in the historical social sciences. Epistemological field is not strictly bounded, it is also meant to overlap with civilizationalism, cultural sociology and other related fields.
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Published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press, cooperated with Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague.
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HISTORICKÁ SOCIOLOGIE, Vol 11 No 2 (2019), 53–67
Interaction Between the Secular and the Religious: The Exhibition Latvia’s Century at the National History Museum of Latvia
Anita Stasulane
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/23363525.2019.16
published online: 02. 12. 2019
abstract
The paper focuses on the interaction between the secular and the religious in the exhibition Latvia’s Century, dedicated to the centenary of the Republic of Latvia, with its narrative being developed by the National History Museum of Latvia. When analyzing the qualitative data obtained through collecting visual information, and undertaking face-to-face in-depth expert interviews and observations, the author explains how the curators have positioned religious objects chronologically in a specific social and political context by using storytelling as the exhibition’s primary interpretative strategy. Compared to the previous period of activity (1945–1990), when the museum was an institution of Soviet ideology, the National History Museum of Latvia has currently developed a new paradigm for the evaluation and interpretation of religion and religious objects. Alongside ethnicity, politics and language, the curators have identified religion as the most important element in Latvia’s formation process. Religion is interpreted as one of Latvia’s constitutive elements in the exhibition, emphasizing that it was society’s major cohesive force in the past, influencing the development of national identity and defining the territorial borders of the Republic of Latvia.
keywords: religion; secularity; national identity; National History Museum of Latvia; national identity; religious objects; secularism
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Interaction Between the Secular and the Religious: The Exhibition Latvia’s Century at the National History Museum of Latvia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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