Manufacturing relics: the social construction of the ‘sacred things’

Belief involves a network of relationships whose materiality is an aspect to be highlighted in order not to mistake beliefs for the world that forged them. If one understands belief materially as the configuration of things, practices, individual bodies and social bodies, the study of the use of the “material things” becomes crucial to define the human labour that manufactured them as sacred. The study of the use of religious relics within the practices of Christianity is linked to the study of the ideas that religiously authorise their status, value, and power. Such an approach shows how the sacred can be culturally constructed and determined by individual choices. The ways to conserve human relics involve complicated cultural processes. Conservation, exposition and transfer of religious relics are at the centre of strategies, politics, intentionality. Relics can be composed of human remains of a martyr, a saint, or objects that were used by him/her in life or were in contact with his/her dead body. In this last case, the contiguity between the martyr or saint and the objects constitutes their semiotic value and provides them with sacrality, that is, an additional value that is foreign to their standard use or their inner qualities. Religious relics are given extra-human power or propriety that is presumed to influence and determine the particular spheres of life. Relics are subject to specific procedures for the definition and social recognition in order to be accepted and used at a community level and in a devotional sense. Relics require validation processes that introduce them within the practices, forge their use and function within the context to which they belong. This paper aims to analyse how religion, specifically Christian religion, happens materially, a process that is intended to be distinguished from the ways religion can be expressed in material forms.