Essentialist assumptions that sectarian identities are fixed and primordial—and thus the primary drivers of conflict in the Middle East—have been widely critiqued. Scholarship increasingly shows that divisions between Sunni and Shiʿa Muslims are socially and historically produced. While the role of state actors and geopolitical forces in processes of “sectarianization” has received considerable attention, less explored are the everyday, embodied, and material practices through which sectarian boundaries are enacted and contested. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey, this article examines how food practices on the Day of Ashura—an important day for both Sunnis and Shiʿa—serve as a site of gastro-political negotiation. For Shiʿa communities, Ashura commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Husayn through mourning rituals, including the preparation of halva, a flour-based sweet symbolizing loss. Sunni interpretations, by contrast, frame Ashura as a day linked to multiple prophetic events, marked by the preparation of ashure, a pudding made with grains, fruits, and nuts. In Eastern Anatolia, where Sunni and Shiʿa communities live in close proximity, the sharing of these foods constitutes not only an act of religious devotion but also a medium through which intra-Muslim relationships are shaped, strained, and reimagined. This study foregrounds the material and sensory dimensions of religious practice as critical to understanding sectarian dynamics in everyday life.

Christian missionary collections have contributed much to the development of the exhibitionary complex, but have received significantly less notice than imperial states using violence to acquire collections, and subsequent demands for restitution. This introductory essay argues that researching missionary collecting and exhibiting requires a broad approach to the materiality of collections, to recognize the multilayered biographies of artifacts, the coeval relations between missionaries and (future) converts in the mission field, as well as how archives and collections form part of technologies of empire. This “unpacking” leads to a recognition, firstly, of the salient position of religion in those processes of collecting and exhibiting; secondly, the realization that converting people was accompanied by multitemporal and multidirectional processes of converting goods; and thirdly, that despite public assertions of Christian iconoclasm, these conversions always also included turning artifacts into desecrated, secular, or even commercial goods. We conclude by arguing that these processes, including their potential reversal, need to be taken into account when considering the future of these collections.

This paper investigates the complex interplay between living religious traditions in Nepal and global decolonization efforts through a critical examination of Newar Buddhist devotional art from the Kathmandu Valley. By focusing on both repatriated artifacts and those held in Western museums, it explores the intertwined issues of indigeneity, temple theft, and heritage within this context. It foregrounds the experiences of Newar Buddhists through concrete ethnographic examples, emphasizing the socio-religious embeddedness of Buddhist art and reflecting on the implications of its absence, as well as the meanings of its return.

This article surveys Nahuatl uses of tlamcazqui in the Florentine Codex and Bernardino de Sahagún’s translations, complicating the language of “priest.” While a tlamacazqui was a ritual specialist, Nahuatl-language texts also reveal the term referred to deities and idiomatic expressions for fauna and flora. The article questions how far Western language can express uniquely Nahuatl-language concepts.