Shrines and Altars that Happen, Do, and Cease

This introduces a special issue looks at shrines and altar-rooms simultaneously as places that manifest and generate spiritual power, and as places to access, negotiate, and garner that power. Contributors explore how shrines and altar-rooms, more than being spaces that contain and display an assemblage of objects with symbolic and esthetic value, "live" and "work" in transforming the significance of the things and people that interact with them. As such, altars and shrines are dynamic points of spatial and temporal convergence and conversion, a feature that facilitates spirit manifestation and transformation.