BSAS: Matt Tomlinson

Drawing on examples from research in Fiji, Samoa, and Australia, plus planned research in Norway, I explore the creative, multimodal, multisensory ways in which people define particular places as sacred. Following Jonathan Z. Smith’s argument that sacredness is a type of “emplacement,” I examine the range of ways and sites in and at which people do this kind of work. The sites people sacralize can be as local and intimate as one’s body, or as grand and inclusive as the nation. Yet sacred place-making, while astonishingly open-ended in its methods and scope, has its limits; in this seminar, I also consider the various ways in which places are explicitly marked as non-sacred: deconsecration, desecration, and disinterest. Understanding how sacred places are made, remade, and unmade is an anthropological project standing at the crossroads of politics, religion and ritual, economy and language. 

Bio

Matt Tomlinson is Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University where he studies the relationship between language, politics, and religious ritual. At the heart of his work is the question of how people organise themselves to communicate with 'extrahuman' figures (including God, ancestors, and spirits) and what social effects such ritual communication has. He has conducted fieldwork in Fiji, Samoa, Australia, and published widely, including two recent books: Speaking with the Dead: An Ethnography of Extrahuman Experience (Punctum Books, 2024) and Making Places Sacred: New Articulations of Place and Power (with Yujie Zhu, Cambridge University Press 2025).