Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
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who are not close family members – there are particular spatial considerations to be borne in mind, as well as those political ones which lead Islamist and feminist exponents to debate hijab and its importance for women.
The prominence and widespread nature of this debate has created a fertile ground for the discussion of other items of religious dress and bodily adornment, particularly the Christian cross and Sikh turban. The urban geographer Margaret Walton-Roberts, in an article on Sikh identity in the Vancouver area of Canada, critiqued essentialising notions of identity by examining the multiple meanings of the turban, whether in racialising discourse, as a strategic choice for a positive multiculturalism, or to affirm an ethno-nationalist agenda (1998). The turban in such cases may become a focus for scholars interested in the geography of body and identity, but also in the adorned body as part of a changing urban landscape (see also Knott 2005a: 40–2).
Death and dying
A spatial focus follows bodies through the dynamism of life to dying and death. As Park suggests, ‘geographers have devoted more attention to landscapes of death than to landscapes of worship’ even to the point of developing a new technical term, ‘necrogeography’ (1994: 213). This has occurred, at least in part, because religions themselves are so interested in the meaning of death, in the rituals that surround it, in its capacity to affect emotions and social relations, and in what happens afterwards – both in terms of disposing of the body and of any continuity of spirit or resurrection of the body. All of these aspects of death have spatial effects that are open to geographical study, the most common of which have been burial practices (see Park 1994: 213–26). The different ways in which religious groups have disposed of the dead – through burial, cremation or, in the case of Zoroastrians, exposure to sunlight and birds of prey – and what they do with the remains have been fertile subjects for study, with a particular focus on cemetery landscapes, their size, form and architecture. But beliefs and practices change, and in some Western societies – particularly in urban contexts where space is under pressure – cremation has become the norm and has produced its own geography. Furthermore, environmental issues have led to changes in the materials used for transporting bodies for cremation or burial, and to the sites selected for the scattering of ashes or internment, with woodland sites often favoured.
The mapping of deathscapes, the statistical and demographic study of socio-cultural patterns of death and dying (in relation to disease, accidents, old age, etc.) and the distribution of different religious practices vis-à-vis death and disposal all contribute to a complex necrogeography. But there are new areas too that are ripe for development, such as a shift of interest from the spaces of death to those associated with dying, bereavement, and relationships between the living and those who have ‘passed over’. For example, the geography of the hospice movement, the architecture of hospices, and the movements of the terminally ill and those who take the journey with them provide a new focus. Another is the geography of belief and practice around contact with ancestors and other deceased people.
Holloway, in his work on Spiritualism and the geography of the séance, changes the focus from the fact of death to the spirit of vitality, to continuity beyond the grave and connections with the living. He considers the affects and sensations felt by those participating in the séance and the way in which they were touched by, possessed and haunted by ghosts and spirits (185). He charts the idea of ‘enchanted space’ and its possibility for focusing on bodies, feelings and vitality across the borderland between the living and dead, and in so doing
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contributes to reorienting the contemporary geography of religion, moving it away from its fixation on traditional subject matter.
Religion in secular context
A key change in geographical studies of religion has been in the scholarly attention now given to the engagement between religion and its secular context. The distribution of religious people, their beliefs and practices and impact on the landscape is interesting in and of itself, but is nonetheless best understood in relation to the relations between religion and state, and
– in many countries – between religion and the secular conditions of modernity. Religious organisations and individuals have to negotiate their relationship with secular government and other agencies, sometimes seeking recourse in human rights legislation which protects religious as well as other interests. In terms of space and geography, this process of negotiation is often witnessed in the planning process and built environment, as well as in relation to public ritual, proselytising, processions, and matters of external symbols, dress and individual behaviour. As Stump suggests, however, the relationship works in the other direction too with religious bodies seeking to resist or protect themselves from secular society by constructing firm boundaries, or by seeking to extend their influence in public matters by challenging secular laws and policies, or through the activities of faith-based organisations (2008: 268– 79). Public space, health and education are key arenas in which both religious and secularist exponents may seek to ‘gain ground’. This metaphor is not inappropriate as success may well be measured territorially, in terms of the colonisation of public places and the recognition of the right to own or build property, and to mark the landscape. Pnina Werbner, with reference to the sacralisation of space by British Muslims, calls this process ‘stamping the earth with the name of Allah’ (1996: 167). Other writers in Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe (Metcalf 1996) refer to the ‘islamization of space’, to ‘new Medinas’ as well as the traditional socio-religious process of da’wa or propagation.
But secular spaces are interesting in their own right for geographers of religion, first, because such scholars have relevant tools and skills that enable them to examine these spaces with reference to the beliefs, practices and values that inform and shape them or that issue forth from them. Secondly, secular spaces are worthy of study precisely because they are places where religion is not present or which religious bodies are forced to negotiate or contest. In my own work with Myfanwy Franks on the location of religion in an English medical centre (Knott and Franks 2007), in addition to finding some surprising references to religion, we delved deeply into the range of secular values expressed and practised in its physical, social and discursive spaces. We saw how medical workers contested each other’s interpretations of professional principles and practices, notions of vocation and code of conduct, sometimes drawing on metaphors of ‘faith’ and ‘fundamentalism’ for support or critique, and on notions of the ‘sacred’ to express those aspects of their work or working environment which were non-negotiable for them.
Sophie Gilliat-Ray, in her studies of what might be called ‘secular sacred places’ in British public institutions (such as hospitals and the Millennium Dome), considered the role they had for the people who use them, many of whom had not been nurtured in religious communities and have no formal religious affiliation. She suggested that,
[S]ites of spiritual activity that are in some senses generic or universal and where there is an absence of explicit religious symbols or architecture associated with one single faith
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community, allow space for people to explore their own sometimes muddled beliefs (or lack of them) … People can undertake their own private interpretive work … Such spaces are thus perfectly suited to the needs of an increasing number of people who have forgotten (or who may have never known) the protocols of visiting religious buildings.
(2005: 364–65)
Her examination of the affinity between such unconventional sacred sites and the needs of the people who may pass through them raises questions about both the nature and function of secular sacred space and the process of sacralisation in late-modernity that form a new context for debates in geography of religion and the wider study of religions about sacred space.
Summary
The spatial turn evident in the work of social and cultural theorists from the late 1960s to the end of the twentieth century had an impact on the geographical and spatial study of religion and the sacred, broadening the interests of scholars and increasing the focus on theory and method. Traditional themes, such as pilgrimage and deathscapes, were revisited and developed; new themes emerged as a result of global developments, population movements, the politics of identity, awareness of the importance of gender and embodiment, and the need for secular agencies to engage with religious institutions and to express their own beliefs and interests. Small and large scales were considered: from body and locality to transnational movements and the new scapes of globalisation.
After giving examples of the many reasons for the study of religions to be concerned with spatial and geographical data and issues, this chapter focused on the small scale by considering the religious mapping of urban neighbourhoods, an example of the way in which students can engage with the subject of religion in their own localities.
The history of the geography of religion and the study of sacred space was presented, with particular reference to the work of Fickeler and Stump, van der Leeuw, Eliade and Smith. Recent theoretical and methodological contributions – by Anttonen, Tweed and Knott – were then discussed, showing the way in which scholars outside geography have worked productively with spatial concepts and tropes to understand more about religion and the sacred and to hone tools for their study. Ivakhiv’s call for geographers to use their disciplinary knowledge and skills to challenge the boundary between religion and other kinds of significance and sacrality was also considered.
In the final section I took five themes – pilgrimage and movement, diasporas and migration, body, death and dying, and religion in secular context – and examined their contemporary relevance for the geographical and spatial study of religion. Examples were given from recent ethnographic work that show how scholars are able to innovate and refresh old themes as well as develop new ones. They suggest fruitful topics that can be pursued in student projects.
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