Many cultural traditions are, to the surprise of many, actually protected under human rights law. This chapter reviews the jurisprudence of cultural rights including dress codes, language policies, foodways, call to prayer, sacred sites, and others. Whether individuals whose traditions clash with the national law should be allowed to invoke a cultural defense is also considered.

The main domains of Indian politics intersecting with religion are communal riots, elections and secular laws. To respond to ‘why and how’ religion matters in Indian politics, the chapter analyses the national habitus shared by all political and religious elites which was conceived both as Hindu and secular, therefore clashing with the people’s identification at the local level where class, cultural and religious allegiances were at play. The redefinition of the local communities along religious lines introduced by the nation-state is a critical factor in the rise of riots and of the BJP. The rise of Hindu nationalism, the contestation of national history, the sacred sites, and the status of women are analysed as main sites of politicization.

After a generation of academic critique and legal and political transformation, the field of law-and-religion stands in the midst of a crisis. Theorists in disciplines ranging from religious studies and anthropology to international relations and law have problematized the category of “religion” from a variety of perspectives. To be sure, these theorists have rarely, if ever, sought to do away with the category, either as an empirical descriptor or as a tool of analysis. Rather, they have shown its historically contingent, politically constructed, and perennially contested nature.

Post-colonial theorists, for example, have argued for the Eurocentric genealogy of “religion” and its global diffusion through colonialism and its aftermath. Legal critics have undermined the perennial protestations of theological agnosticism by courts in the West; in the United States, such criticism has revealed an implicit strand of “low-church” Protestant presuppositions.

This book explores three contemporary women’s movements in and around Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade: Women for the Temple, a messianic Jewish Orthodox women’s movement campaigning for access to Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif; Murabitat, pious Muslim women activists mobilizing for the defense of al-Aqsa Mosque from Jewish claims; and Women of the Wall (WOW), a Jewish feminist organization working against restrictive gender regulations at the Western Wall. Using these cases, the book demonstrates how attention to gender and to women’s engagement in conflict over central sacred places is essential for understanding the intra-communal processes that make contested sacred sites appear increasingly “indivisible” for parties in the inter-communal context. More broadly, the book argues that a gender analysis of contested sacred places enriches and sharpens both our description of the “choreographies” of such sites and our analytical understanding of the contemporary dynamics of conflict in these sites; in particular the processes that give rise to the problem of “indivisibility.”

This chapter explores the transformations of Chinese and Balinese sacred objects into heritage, against the background of centralisation efforts and the state-supported reconstruction of the Siva temple at Prambanan (Central Java) across regime changes. It explains the relation between stronger centralisation and the strengthening of local heritage dynamics. Next, it discusses the impact of the Pacific War and decolonisation on local and centralised heritage practices, as well as on long-term foreign engagements with sites located in Indonesia. Gauging the colonial nature of post-colonial heritage politics, it shows how in colonial times professional and state-supported archaeology led to the consolidation of certain structures and methods of heritage formation in such a way that subsequent regimes could easily take over. An important related topic is the way in which research, collecting, conservation, and reconstruction activities were intimately connected to the development of social hierarchies and processes of (racial) marginalisation.