How do museums manage the heritage of confessional groups and the source communities whose cultures they present? What are the convergences and tensions in the relationship between museums and religions? How does lived religion enter secular museums, and what can we make of its presence there? The issue explores these questions through case studies from post-colonial and post-socialist contexts. In these diverse but in many ways comparable configurations, various museums increasingly take into account the voices of source communities and confessional groups. Originally secular institutions, museums have become more permeable to spiritual, cosmological, and confessional perspectives. We argue here that changes in practices of display and conservation are connected to major political and epistemic transformations, such as decolonisation and the return of religion to public life after the end of socialism.

The mummy of the Altaian Princess is one of the best-known cases of repatriation of human remains in Russia. Drawing on a comparative ethnography of two Siberian museums that conserved her body before and after the return, this article approaches the museums as arenas of affective relations to heritage and as key sites of the enactment of heritage social values. It unpacks the museums' politics in the Princess's display to show how and why some affective relations are transformed into "front values" available to audiences, while others remain on the back stage of museum life. It also argues for a more symmetrical approach to sending and receiving museums, which provides important nuances to the analyses of repatriation in terms of power structures and colonial legacies.

Cet article porte sur la découverte récente de reliques sacrées du bouddhisme dans une statue de Bouddha Shakyamuni, conservée depuis des décennies au musée national Aldan-Maadyr de la République de Touva (Sibérie, Russie). A partir de l’ethnographie de la salle du bouddhisme, il analyse les opérations de contextualisation qui ont permis aux conservateurs du musée et aux lamas bouddhistes de « mettre les reliques au travail » et de leur rendre une vie spirituelle. Devenues objets de dévotion, les reliques ramènent aujourd’hui la pratique rituelle dans le musée d’état fondé en URSS à l’époque du sécularisme. La salle du bouddhisme apparaît alors comme un espace rituel hybride. Sa conception et son fonctionnement montrent la porosité et l’instabilité historique de la frontière entre le séculier et le religieux dans la Russie post-soviétique.

The article deals with the problematic of sacred objects in museums. It analyzes the political and intellectual reasons for the transformation of museum ethics in Western countries, and provides examples of the difficulties in dealing with sacred objects. The first section of the article summarizes the historical reasons for the marginal position museums had until recently allocated to religion as a living phenomenon. The second and third sections analyze the reasons for the growing presence of religion in Western museums in the last few decades: first, the rethinking of the relationship between indigenous peoples and their heritage within the framework of decolonization; and, second, the epistemological shifts in the social sciences that have shaped a new understanding of "museum pieces" as social agents. The new museum ethics is therefore based on both the principle of respect for the objects themselves and the recognition of indigenous peoples' rights to a living relationship with their heritage, especially with "sensitive materials", such as religious objects and human remains. Nevertheless, implementing these principles often reveals contradictions between the universalist values of museum work, such as the conservation and the access to heritage, and the particularistic logic of religious and ethnic groups. The fourth part of the article provides examples of some of the difficulties encountered by Western museums in exhibiting, storing and repatriating sacred objects, and describes how they have been dealt with. Finally, the conclusion elaborates on the special position of regional museums in Russia’s autochthonous republics in rethinking the religion in museum space and in implementing new museum ethics in dealing with sacred objects.