Continuity as Care: Devotional Maintenance, Renewal, Accumulation, and Disposal in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist Material Religion

Abstract

This paper draws from the author’s direct experience with material care, adaptation, renewal, and disposal made while working within Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist practitioner communities as a museum professional, conservator, and object-based researcher. It considers the function and utility of Buddhist tantric religious objects in terms of their care and capacity for practitioner engagement. In addition to exploring specific examples of what is referred to here as ‘devotional maintenance’, this paper will discuss how these strategies for object custodianship are related to Tibetan and Himalayan religious life and the specific epistemological and soteriological paradigm in which these actions are performed. Working from the perspective of a non-practitioner and material specialist, this research builds on observations of material care-taking to engage with local concepts of continuity, value, and longevity, including practices of accumulation, renewal, or disposal. Thinking critically about the methods and standards of heritage preservation provokes a discussion of how they can be interpreted as acts of care. At the same time, this paper will explore material custodianship through the cultivation of merit and an object’s capacity to transmit ‘blessings’ or the gift of beneficial influence (byin rlabs).

1. Introduction

I can smell the museum guard making his way towards the back office before I hear or see him. The doors of the galleries at the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology in Sikkim have just opened, and—as he does every day—the guard is burning incense for the deities and teachers on display in this collection of painted scrolls, manuscripts, and sculpture. He leaves his shoes at the entry to the museum, as have all the other visitors and staff. As a specialist in conservation and heritage risk management, I notice that though the action is mostly intended to demonstrate respect for the collection—the accumulated wisdom and merit in the library of Buddhist works on the first floor, for example—it also keeps the noise and dust down in a busy public gallery space. The building is a former temple (Tibetan lha khang) located within the monastic complex at Do Drul Chorten, just below Gangtok, yet primarily administered by employees of the regional government. Here and at other sites across the Himalayas and Tibetan cultural sphere, these daily practices of care can be seen across social, religious, and cultural institutions, as well as within homes, offices, and even private vehicles. From museum directors to cleaners, local householders, and religious authorities, concern for the well-being of significant objects or materials in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist communities is often expressed in a number of routine ways which are idiosyncratic to the region and yet indicative of its social, ritual, and geo-cultural complexities.

As a conservator and material historian who was largely educated in the US and UK, I have learned—and unlearned—a great deal by observing acts of what I think of as ‘devotional maintenance’ in Tibetan and Himalayan contexts. Using the practice of conservation as a method for documentation and platform for knowledge exchange, the following paper will discuss devotional maintenance and material custodianship through illustrated examples of renewal, accumulation, disposal, and/or adaptation into a new application or setting. Though many of these practices can be understood in relation to Buddhism as a pedagogical tradition, this research hopes to demonstrate as well some of the different bodies of knowledge through which they are activated including environmental well-being, pest management, and multi-sensory engagement.

This discussion is framed in part by a professional interest in how the handling, care, and preservation of objects is conditioned by different settings for cultural practice. In a Tibetan or Himalayan Buddhist context, considerations of material longevity can quickly move from the practical to the soteriological as concepts of attachment, impermanence, ego, and the consequences of dependent origination come into play. Using case studies drawn from professional experience in the Himalayas and south Asia—and work with Buddhist tantric materials in museum collections—the following paper explores how object-based knowledge production can engage interdisciplinary networks, methods, and narratives in the study of material religion. Rather than working from a textual or theoretical precedent, this research is built primarily from participation in and observations of the handling, repair, and treatment of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist objects, as well as a consideration of their contexts.

2. Context, Epistemology, and the Goals of Material Care

Conservation is an inherently interdisciplinary field, and my own work is a combination of chemistry, material engineering, creative practice, hand skills, risk management, and ethnography. Finding a language or shared body of knowledge to communicate across audiences can be challenging yet activities like cleaning, handling, moving, repairing, and maintaining significant objects can often generate learning and articulate values at a scale ranging from the individual to the intergenerational, historic, and even cosmic. While abstract discussions of ‘materiality’ can be used to resolve object-making to various academic disciplines and theoretical languages like archeology, anthropology, or religious studies (e.g., Ingold 2007), text-based articulations often fall short of capturing the ontological parameters of object custodianship as both a process of identification and form of knowledge transmission. In my experience, people perform acts of material care out of a sense of craft, duty, or obligation, as well as the embodiment of a tradition of knowledge or habitus, to work from the older but usefully abstract language of Marcel Mauss ([1935/1973] 2006) and Pierre Bourdieu (1972). As this paper suggests, caring for objects is often used to express or renegotiate a practitioner’s understanding of time and its relation to the material world.

Within museums and heritage professional networks, discussions of time, care, and the study of material religion are often centered around historically Eurocentric, sometimes colonial and frequently institutionalized priorities for knowledge production (see Smith 2006). In my own formal training as a conservator—in many professional settings, a necessity for being recognized as ‘qualified’—I was taught to promote the ‘integrity’ and ‘stability’ of material heritage by upholding standards like the International Council of Museums’ (2017, Section 2.25) Code of Ethics. This document was written using a technical language for the longevity of objects first proposed in the earlier Venice Charter (International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments 1964). Though both intended as global standards for conservation practice, they were written by European specialists in a specific social, cultural, political, and material setting. Global heritage organizations have come to acknowledge that determining the parameters of an object’s integrity and stability—and therefore its standard of care—should be conditioned by the culture or system of knowledge production in which it is constructed or maintained (UNESCO 1994). Yet professional attempts to create universal guidelines for expertise in material care have in fact ‘paradoxically, led to [their] abstraction and decontextualisation’, as one heritage scholar writes, with potentially poor consequences for maintaining active intellectual and emotional relationships between people and objects (Winter 2014, p. 135).

Rather than supporting connections between practitioners and historic materials or encouraging local forms of material expertise, there is a common expectation in heritage conservation that restricting access and extending the life of an object is working to the highest standard of practice. In the custodianship of material religion or religious sites, this can create tension between practitioners and heritage authorities, as illustrated in Figure 1 at the site of Buddha’s first sermon in Sarnath Deer Park where pilgrims and visitors have applied gold foil to the brick monuments despite the local heritage managers’ prohibition on the sign in front of it. Though this site may be experiencing unprecedented human traffic and economic pressure due to increased tourism in recent years (Times of India 2024), at almost 3000 years old, both these monuments and their caretakers have proven to be incredibly resilient. And despite conservation professional standards as they have developed in the past 100 years, I have come to understand the gold foil in Figure 1 as evidence of care and a performance of material continuity, rather than a threat to object integrity. As suggested by the conservator Sanchita Balachandran, choosing to document or interpret alterations to cultural objects as ‘damage’ or ‘evidence of use’ is an epistemological distinction, never an objective fact (Balachandran 2020).

Working across various social, cultural and institutional contexts and no longer pre-occupied with material longevity or stability as in a heritage context, conservation skills and vocabularies can be used across disciplinary perspectives to articulate, document and interpret the lives of objects through their accretions, stains, alterations and repairs as evidence for use, and further, to engage with various historiographic systems through which they can be interpreted. This method has been tested during doctoral research at SOAS University of London on the use of human remains in Tibetan and Himalayan ritual objects (Fuentes 2021) while studying a collection of four shallow bowls made with human crania in the Wellcome Collection in London (registration numbers A20948 A-D). There was very little information about the objects in the museum record at the time but an area of polish near one side and a pattern of accumulated grime on the rest of the surface of the object suggested how it might have been repeatedly held in one hand by users in another context. Having shared a photo of these objects in hand as suggested by its construction and condition, Buddhist tantric practitioners encountered on fieldwork in the Himalayan region were quick to identify them as implements for the performance of ‘chams, or masked ritual dance. Not only did the technical assessment of the objects’ material history lead to their re-integration within a tradition of liturgical performance that is over 1000 years old (see Cantwell 1992), by sharing these images digitally, it also became possible for specialists currently within the region to reflect on how these materials have gradually been replaced with other substrates like plastic and how this relates to changing values, resources, and priorities for use.

As this paper will further explore in the next section, by reading and documenting specific traces, treatments, deposits, material identities, or alterations, it is possible to narrate the social, economic, and historical lives of objects and re-animate the ‘regime of value’ in which they have been used, circulated and therefore maintained (Appadurai 1994). More specifically to Buddhist tantra, this paper will build on James Gentry’s study of 17th century scholar and ritual master Sokdokpa Lodro Gyaltsen by similarly examining how material efficacy is established and maintained as a dynamic continuum between participants, instruments, and networks (Gentry 2017). Furthermore, this short study hopes to contribute to a growing understanding of the complexity of Tibetan and Himalayan material knowledge, as emphasized elsewhere by William McGrath in his studies of Tibetan medical traditions informed by textual precedents in combination with practical, context-specific decision-making and skilled handling (McGrath 2019). Building on these related discussions of Tibetan and Himalayan material expertise yet working primarily from the professional methods and observations of a conservator and fellow (non-Buddhist) object caretaker, the remainder of this paper presents examples of maintenance, disposal, renewal and accumulation in order to engage with them as traditions of material care, devotional practice, and knowledge transmission.

3. Continuities of Care: Devotional Maintenance, Renewal, Accumulation, and Disposal

The following images and examples have been collected over a decade of professional and research experience with Tibetan and Himalayan material religion, often working alongside heritage colleagues within the region in a diversity of social, cultural, and religious settings, including governmental museums, monastic collections, domestic altars, and private archives. While this research has been informed by the interdisciplinary perspectives and vocabularies briefly introduced above, it is more directly shaped by personal and professional experiences of day-to-day acts of object handling, maintenance, and/or material care. This includes lowering the curtain on a deity image, wrapping a metal statue in fabric, or handling highly valued objects with a silk scarf (kha btags) over the hands in much the same way a museum worker would wear disposable gloves.

3.1. Practitioner Care and Museum Function

To understand and identify acts of material care, it is helpful to first consider the role of objects within a collection and the relationship of the custodian to the object. At these sites, museums are competing with existing public institutions for the display and interpretation of cultural objects, viz., Buddhist tantric material religion. Appropriate standards for custodianship are founded on common gestures of respect drawn from other areas of lived experience, yet often expressed as devotional practice. This paper opened with a description of a Sikkimese Buddhist museum guard burning incense for the institution’s collection of deities, teachers, and other manifestations of Buddha-nature and its many forms (sku). Experienced by many museum visitors as painted images on hanging scrolls (thang ka) or metal statues, these sku are greeted every morning with smoke offerings, their surroundings are purified, and shoes are removed in their presence, as in a temple or domestic altar (mchod bsham). The role of sku on display can be reinforced the language used to describe the museum: At Hemis Monastery in Ladakh, I have heard the museum referred to specifically a place to encounter sku (sku rten khang) rather than the more widely used ‘exhibition hall’ (‘sgrem ston khang), where the former is more explicitly religious. Moreover, I once heard a monastic caretaker from Hemis use this distinction as justification for asking visitors to remove their shoes on entering the museum despite the freezing temperature of the concrete floor.1 At the Royal Heritage Museum in central Bhutan, conservator Dechen Cheki describes confusion when older members of the local community first visited the museum—the first and only in the area since 2008—with many removing their shoes at the entrance as they would at a lha khang or when visiting a home, though in this case the museum does not require it.

The ways in which devotional practice can be built into museum infrastructure in the Himalayas are indicative of how material care corresponds with a broader social arena for religious custodianship. As in Gangtok, the Royal Heritage Museum in Trongsa, Bhutan, has religious officials who work on site, with two temples on the roof—one to Gesar, another to Maitreya—and bla ma at each to perform daily rituals for the benefit of the institution and its collection, as well as for the local community, natural environment, and regional deities. At the National Museum of Bhutan in Paro, by contrast, there is currently no designated religious official, and offerings are made at the altar in the administrative building by various members of staff including the cleaners, security guards, curatorial assistants, and director of the institution (Figure 2). Elsewhere in the same institution, a large sku of Vaiśravaṇa is provided with a receptacle for cash offerings due to its prosperous relationship with the community in the valley and popularity amongst local practitioners. In consultation with nearby religious authorities, the museum has extended hours for visiting this sku on key astrological dates; collected offerings are used to support the maintenance of the collection. Finally, nearby at the Textile Museum in Thimphu, ritual and religious proceedings like the display of large images in order to facilitate liberation (mthong ‘grol) are scheduled to correspond with the rotation of objects in the collection, a strategy for care that increases the visibility of material heritage while simultaneously protecting it from over-exposure to the strong sunlight characteristic of the region.

There is at least one key distinction between these public institutional spaces and most religious settings in the same region: As in museums elsewhere, touching objects is generally discouraged. Like the removal of shoes, this can be a source of confusion for some visitors and a source of conflict, as at Deer Park in Figure 1 above. In a religious setting, interacting with sku is often more discursive and multi-sensory than simply burning incense or removing one’s shoes in its presence. It is not uncommon to greet or pay homage to a sacred Buddhist site, object or even text by touching it with the hands or forehead, a practice that is often explained to me in terms of an object’s capacity to transmit byin rlabs—often translated simply as ‘blessing’—through contact. As a scholar of Tibetan medical materials, Barbara Gerke summarizes byin rlabs as a concept shared with non-Buddhist traditions as ‘the blessing-power inherent in sacred sites, objects, landscapes, and deities… [It is] not solid but can be absorbed into the body through a substance, through touch, or across a distance physically’ (Gerke 2011, pp. 231–32). Capable of being cultivated or manipulated through ritual action, byin rlabs is transmissible to materials and people by multiple sense pathways. In my experience, the maintenance of an object’s capacity to transmit byin rlabs is the often a top priority for practitioners when discussing the long-term preservation of material religion; a close second would be the continued ability of the object or site to illustrate essential lessons of Buddhism.

3.2. Devotional Maintenance in Practitioner Contexts

As seen in Figure 1 and Figure 3, the function of religious images, sites, or objects as platforms for sharing or cultivating the merits of Buddhism can result in a model of material custodianship which is different to a museum or heritage professional setting, even within the region. Rather than consistently restricting direct interaction by members of the public, religious acts of material custodianship in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist communities are often multi-sensory actions and offerings made with the goal of cultivating merit and reinforcing connections between people and deities.

Unlike in a museum, religious objects can become more effective through their accretions and alterations as evidence of accumulated merit or byin rlabs, even when they alter or obscure details in the historic substrate. This suggests a concept of objectivity which is more often conditioned by interactivity than by material integrity. This discursive, dynamic relationship has been noted elsewhere in Tibetan religious life, for example, in Cathy Cantwell’s work on the production of accomplished medicine (sman sgrub) and the ways in which touch and physical contact are used to establish ontological continuity between ritual elements and compounded ingredients (Cantwell 2015). She identifies this as phab gta’, a fermenting agent or material lineage which is characteristic or immanent to an object that must be cultivated through ritual action in order to remain effective.2 Phab gta’ can be transmitted or cultivated through contact, ritual maintenance and practice and it can be neglected, though not necessarily created or destroyed. Similarly, Barbara Gerke notes that the potency (nus pa) and social value or ‘preciousness’ of certain stones in the Tibetan medical tradition can be cultivated through handling, processing, cleaning, and ritual action (Gerke 2019). This dynamic continuity between materials and their religious, ritual or social function shapes how they are valued and, therefore, maintained as part of Tibetan and Himalayan religious life.

This same active, relational principle is suggested in the number of different materials used in practitioner context to make kapāla, or skull vessels, including coconut shells, plaster casts, wood, metal, and plastic bowls (see Fuentes 2021, pp. 152–91). Not always out of necessity, practitioners make choices about the substrate for kapāla based on a number of factors including security, durability, and ease of transport, as well as ritual setting, participants, audience, or intended outcome. Though one vessel may be a human cranium and another a plastic bowl painted to look like a skull as in Figure 4, both are used and maintained equally as ritual objects. While the kapāla in Figure 4 is full of bdud rtsi, or nectar, in many Himalayan Buddhist practitioner contexts many liturgical vessels are stored turned down or covered. Where they are stored turned up, grain, oil, or dried fruit might be placed in them in order to maintain their phab gta’ or capacity to transmit byin rlabs, depending on its specific intended ritual use. Like the well-known tale of a man who brings his mother a dog’s tooth from India (rGya gar), and which begins to produce ring bsrel (pearl-like concretions) due to her faith in it as a genuine Buddhist relic, the identity of a material or integrity of an object is often less consequential than its capacity to continue to function as a platform for devotional practice.

3.3. Renewal and Accumulation

It is through this dynamic relationship with material religion that other strategies for devotional maintenance can be understood as techniques for care in Tibetan and Himalayan contexts. While some of these actions result in alterations to historic surfaces and structures, they also reinforce heritage materials and build connections with supporting communities according to the needs and resources of the setting. In Figure 5, a fresh coat of limewash had been recently applied at Boudhnath Stūpa in Kathmandu—as seen in the traces of white liquid on levels in between—as has been common for millennia in the care of rammed earth or brick structures like stūpa (mchod rten) across the Himalayas, Asia and most of the world (see Carran et al. 2012). While this practice not only protects against weathering from the region’s strong sun, wind, and seasonal moisture, it demonstrates an investment by donors, practitioners, and community members towards the well-being and continuity of the monument and reinforces its efficacy as a site of Buddhist practice.

Similar renewals occur with sku in religious settings, where gold paint or gilding is reapplied to the face of statues, or they are periodically given new clothing, jewelry, and other forms of adornment.

This collective demonstration of continuity, longevity, and devotional labor is also an essential component of various practices of accumulation found in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist religious life, including the deposition of tsha tsha (clay votive tablets, see Figure 6), inscribed stones (ma ni rdo) and various printed textiles often referred to as ‘prayer flags’ (lung rta).3 Like the periodic renewal of surfaces for monuments or the faces of sku, practices of accumulation require regular and collective participation, with new donations or depositions needed regularly to replace older, weathered material, especially at outdoor religious sites common to historically embedded Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist communities. Through this type of maintenance, one can see evidence of what Kati Fitzgerald—in conversation with the current Gyalsey Trulku—has explored in eastern Tibet as bag chags, the karmic recognizability of a sacred site or monument through collective effort (Fitzgerald 2021, p. 7). Rather than a unique textual precedent, historic event or ritual achievement as the origin for a topical or material expression of religious significance, bag chags suggests how the cumulative devotional labor can maintain or even establish an object, site, or monument as a platform for Buddhist practice.

Like renewal, offerings towards sites, deities, teachers, or other significant intermediaries, accumulation uses fabrication, alteration, addition, and deposition as a form of maintenance that reinforces continuities between practitioner effort and the social, material, and soteriological context in which it is supported and made effective. As a technique for material custodianship, accumulation, moreover, promotes community engagement through practical investments that can be made at any scale, from placing a single inscribed stone to erecting sets of prayer flags or a commissioning an entire series of mchod rten. Many of these practices have a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the Tibetan Plateau and Himalayan region in both rural and urban areas. In this strategy for material care, it is the continuity of effort that is prioritized rather than the integrity, or even singularity, of an object.

3.4. Disposal, Deposit, Reintegration

One final strategy for material custodianship uniquely shapes the roles of objects in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist religious life, and since it is often interrelated with demonstrations of accumulation, the landscape and built environment of practitioner communities. As seen in both Figure 6 and Figure 7, tsha tsha and other objects resulting from devotional use have been left exposed as offerings intended to weather and deteriorate at religious sites and monuments of significance. Often explained as a demonstration of religious intention and devotion—as well as a platform for the cultivation of merit—this strategy for material care not only contributes to the legibility of sacred sites and landscapes in the Tibetan and Himalayan region, but it also further demonstrates bag chags as a collective institution. Moreover, disposals or depositions in this setting have the capacity to engage with entire watersheds by maintaining relationships with protective deities like klu, (water protectors or naga), and often evoke units of time which exceed a single human incarnation (e.g., cyclic rebirth). Sometimes explained according to fundamentally Buddhist lessons of impermanence or traditions of exposure burial, leaving objects like tsha tsha or personal items at religious sites can also maintain specific regional histories, narratives, and identities, as seen at a site associated with Gesar in Figure 7.

In this image, the remains of practitioner effort can be seen in circular sections of shell (drung) used as washers on hand-turned prayer wheels. These are worn down until they no longer function to temper the friction between the stationary handle and turning wheel, then collected as evidence of repeated, cumulative effort, e.g., wheel turning and verbal repetition (ma ni don)—to be left as an offering at sites of historical, social, or religious significance.4 In recent decades, these types of deposits are sometimes having a detrimental effect on the surrounding ecosystem and its communities, especially—in an increasingly commodified material religious life—where they incorporate plastics as polyester prayer flags or polythene containers (see Brox and Williams-Oerberg 2022). Yet, many of these offerings are intended to benefit and reinforce larger social, material, and soteriological networks. Concern for these larger environmental issues of custodianship in the southern Himalayas has caused a new generation of practitioners and cultural caretakers to question the adoption of synthetic fabrics for lung rta, kha btags, and other textile offerings in order to promote a healthy custodianship of the Himalayan watershed (Bhutia et al. 2024). Similarly, as seen in Figure 8, for example, craftspeople in eastern Tibet are preserving a tradition of producing earthenware jars (bum pa) from local clay to encourage placing more environmentally sympathetic, non-plastic offerings at religious sites.

Issues of disposal, like questions about cleaning or renewal, evoke a classic, context-based concern for social anthropologists, as well as conservators and other material caretakers: What is dirt or disposal? What is worth keeping, and what is worth revising or adapting into the next iteration of an object, site or monument? As Mary Douglas has noted, ‘there is no such thing as absolute dirt’ (Douglas 1996, p. 2) and as someone who cleans and repairs cultural objects as a research methodology—and a specialist in archeological and ethnographic collections—making decisions about what is or is not ‘dirt’ is a daily re-negotiation. In 2024, I was asked to clean the shoes in Figure 9 by a prominent and historically significant local family in the southern Himalayas in their private lha khang.5 Worn by an important Buddhist teacher and ritual master who was active in the region during the 17th century, they remain in the care of his present incarnation (sprul sku), who was concerned about insect damage and wanted them cleaned with advice on managing humidity and long-term storage conditions. In contrast to many other settings where I have worked as a conservator, on removing historic insect debris and dust, local religious custodians asked that I keep what was removed from the shoes so that it might be compounded into medicine (sman) or otherwise adapted to re-distribute the accumulated merit or byin rlabs that this material has absorbed in contact with the shoes and therefore, indirectly, with the teacher. I have seen this done elsewhere in Tibet and the Himalayas when cleaning sku, where dust, old paint from the faces of statues, even damaged threads from an embroidered thang ka are collected and returned with the object to be reintegrated into new forms. Rather than waste that might be discarded in another setting, the ontological continuity of byin rlabs, accumulated merit, and devotional practice in these powders and accretions is both maintained and cultivated, even after they are removed from the object through which they were first established.

As the examples and illustrations given above have explored—however briefly—acts of material custodianship can be used to interpret, document, and engage with Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist ritual life and the ways in which faith or devotion (dad pa) supports the continuity and caretaking of valued sites, objects and traditions of making. Though these practices may not always promote what a trained heritage professional like myself would otherwise prioritize as integrity or stability for historic materials, they can nevertheless be understood as practical, economic and collective investments in a material ecology that is specific to Tibetan and Himalayan religious settings.

4. Conclusions

Returning again to the Sikkimese museum guard and his daily offering of incense, this paper has tried to describe the potential complexities and entanglements that become navigable through questions of material custodianship in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist religious life. In this case, the images, deities, sku, and other materials in the care of the guard and other museum staff can be understood as both objects in a public display and as a platform for devotional practice.

By working from direct experiences of handling, renewal, accumulation and disposal in the Tibetan cultural region and Himalayas, it becomes possible to work beyond textual sources and engage with the various entangled identities of both the materials and their caretakers as practitioners, government employees, pilgrims, householders, etc. Moreover, as noted in Fitzgerald (2020), despite the emptiness of all forms that is inherent to many Buddhist interpretations of the material world or lived experience, the work of custodianship has the capacity to engage across social settings and educational backgrounds. As the incorporation of an effort that is both physical and karmic, devotional acts of material custodianship make soteriological schemes accessible to all types of actors including women, the economically disenfranchised, those who are illiterate, even to non-Buddhists like myself. As I am constantly reassured by my colleagues and friends in the region, by working with these objects and investing in their care—and especially by doing so in context—I have, nevertheless, participated in the accumulation of merit and cultivation of byin rlabs for the benefit of all sentient beings.

As individuals, institutions, or collectively, acts of material care in Tibetan and Himalayan religious life can be understood as devotional practices, as a form of professional expertise, or as investments in the continued valorization of sites, monuments, and objects. At the same time, many of these practices serve to establish or reinforce these continuities as material networks of efficacy. As this article has attempted to explore using examples and images, this research can engage with what various practitioners do, at present—as well as what they say they do—in order to navigate the complexities of their experiences and relationships to the material world.