YOU ARE WHAT YOU WEAR: LITURGICAL GARMENTS AS BEARERS OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY The Reformation drove Catholics in the Northern Netherlands to the margins of society between 1580 and 1650. The symbolism of the liturgical garments reveals how Catholics clung to a glorious past and at the same time renewed their religious identity.

Current research on secularity no longer understands the secular as the decline of the religious. Rather, secularity refers to a particular configuration of religion, state, society, and science. By retracing configurations of secularity in contemporary India, the proposed research will contribute a much needed empirical and cross-cultural perspective to a largely theoretical debate focused on Europe and North America. Taken as an analytical category, secularity permits to uncover the cultural foundations of contemporary forms of religion and non-religion alike. For this purpose, anthropological fieldwork in the environment of a south Indian centre for atheism will be combined with philological analyses of the as yet hardly researched literary genre of Indian spiritual non-fiction. With recourse to new institutional theories it will be possible to fathom not only the ideological, but also the pragmatic and material aspects of secularity and retrace how they translate into concrete practices of individuals.

After the start in which Pressing Matter also learned to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, the project has intensified, it formalised its structure and deepened its understanding of the four perspectives. This cohesion promotes teamwork and also supports overseas researchers to feel at home. Results: a) Pressing Matter has partnered in citizen science, as with, for example, Imagine IC, which is exploring the meaning of collections for diasporic citizens in the Netherlands; b) art practice-based research projects are in full swing; c) Pressing Matter has attracted a lot of academic, public and policy interest; d) provenance research is progressing.