Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

Chapter 28

Geography, space and the sacred

Kim Knott

Religion takes place in space. Religious people are distributed globally and locally in various patterns at different times and according to various factors such as mission and conversion, religious growth or decline, migration and population change, war and natural disaster. Religions – whether ‘indigenous’, ‘world’ or ‘new’ religions – are more or less closely identified with particular continents, countries or localities. Religious groups occupy social spaces, gathering in mosques, churches, temples, community centres and other buildings, and meeting at times in the open in places denoted or apprehended as sacred. Families and individuals practise their religions at home, sometimes setting apart a room or area for worship or meditation, chanting or dancing. Religious and cosmological beliefs often have a spatial character, such as ideas about where certain religious activities should occur or where objects should be placed, which lands or places are deemed to be holy, or how heavenly cities or spiritual landscapes appear and are spatially organised. Furthermore, the location of religion in secular spaces is important too. Is it confined to particular times and places by the secular state? Is this reflected in distinctions between public and private spheres, in planning regulations or in the ritual and discourse of state and civic life? Religions and religious groups change over time, and this affects their spatial arrangements. They change across space too: they may appear and be situated quite differently in the US, India and Indonesia, for example. As we can see, religions and places are mutually influential.

There are many reasons, then, for the study of religions to be concerned with matters geographical and spatial. The history of this concern has been intermittent, as I shall show in a later section, but in the first decade of the twenty-first century there has been a revitalisation of interest among both geographers and scholars of religion in each other’s subject matter. This follows what is now referred to as the ‘spatial turn’ in late-modern theory and methodology across the humanities and social sciences. Since the mid-1980s the spatial interests of continental social theorists, such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau, and radical geographers, such as Doreen Massey, David Harvey and Edward Soja, have had an impact on academics in many disciplines, including the study of religions. New perspectives on the geography of religion have begun to emerge in Europe, Asia and the US, and innovative theoretical engagements between religion, space and territory have been formulated by scholars of religion. Theologians have also turned their attention to place and space (Sheldrake 2001; Gorringe 2002; Inge 2003; Bergmann 2007).

Later in this chapter, I will set the study of geography, space and the sacred in historical context, and examine the new perspectives and innovative engagements mentioned above. After that I will look at several themes that have attracted the interest of contemporary

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geographers and scholars of religion: pilgrimage and mobility; diasporas and migration; bodies and space; death and dying; and religion in secular spaces. I will illustrate these with examples from recent research and hope to generate ideas for potential projects and dissertations. First let me begin with an illustration from the work of students at my own university. Their research shows what can be learnt by undertaking studies of religion in the local area.

Local studies of religion

In recent years small groups of students at the University of Leeds have undertaken a teamwork project called ‘The Religious Mapping of Leeds’ (Knott 1998, 2000, 2009). Over one semester they work together to research the religious life of a neighbourhood and to examine the way religion intersects with, influences and is influenced by other local conditions, such as demographic, social, economic and political factors, education, crime, health and social provision. Over the years teams have studied various inner-city and suburban districts of Leeds – a multicultural city in northern England with a population of approximately 720,000 – such as Beeston, Moortown, Armley, Burley, Chapeltown, Harehills and Headingley (see Community Religions Project website). Working with a university supervisor and local community partner – these have included a police inspector, ministers and other religious specialists, and chairs of interfaith and other voluntary bodies – the team undertakes fieldwork in the area, visiting churches, chapels, mosques, synagogues, temples, attending services and interviewing congregation members and leaders, as well as identifying key local institutions and interviewing their representatives. Team members often conduct a street survey and speak to people in shops, restaurants, bars and other public places about their views on the area and the place of religion within it.

As well as learning a great deal about the history of local religious groups and the way religion functions within the area, they become aware of the way in which locality informs religion. One Baptist church is not just like any other, neither in its internal and external appearance, nor in its concerns. Baptist theological interests and commitments, and Baptist sacramental and ministerial practices may provide continuity from one church to another, but the way they are lived out is informed by the church’s situation, the demographic profile of its congregation and local community, the type of neighbourhood, the built environment, the local economy and local resources of various kinds. This is equally true of mosques and gurdwaras. Furthermore, the role and place of religion differs from one neighbourhood to another. Religious leaders and members may be key players in local politics or active in social provision in some areas, or well known for their festivals or their contribution to fighting crime in others.

In many places in Leeds, as in other European cities, religion seems to have disappeared behind a lively façade of pizza take-aways, supermarkets, bars and boutiques, but when the students look more closely local charity shops come into focus, elderly people can be seen in day centres run by religious communities; mothers and toddlers make their way to groups held in church buildings; immigration advice and support services for asylum seekers can be witnessed in mosques and temples, and health food shops and libraries reveal the alternative spiritual life of the neighbourhood in posters and advertisements for local healers, meditation and yoga groups. Religious books, posters of deities, gurus and the Virgin Mary, prayer mats, tapes, CDs and videos of religious songs, films and festivals can be found vying for a little local space in bookshops or hardware stores. Focusing in still further reveals religion represented

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on mobile bodies – in hijabs and turbans, Christian crosses, Sikh kara and kirpan (symbolic bangle and sword), Hindu Aum (letter or syllable), Jewish star of David, the colours of rasta

–and in devotional music, alongside the songs of Bollywood, through open car windows. Once the students have described and analysed their data, and considered key themes of

local importance – such as religion and ethnicity, the role of religion in social work, youth provision or education, religious responses to crime and policing, the religious contribution to community and sustainability, or ecumenical and inter-faith relations in the area – they go ahead and prepare a report and directory, and give a public presentation and answer questions about their findings in a local venue. This requires them to engage, negotiate and be accountable to local people.

Local studies of religion have other advantages too. By starting from the particular rather than the general and by focusing on what happens to religions within designated local spaces, they challenge the ‘World Religions’ approach with its focus on discrete, generic traditions and normative beliefs and practices that is so common in religious studies. Students reason inductively from their examination of particular Methodist churches and Sikh gurdwaras rather than reasoning deductively from their reading of textbooks about Christianity and Sikhism. Local studies require a multidisciplinary and polymethodic approach that brings student researchers into contact with a variety of ways of working within and beyond the study of religions. Furthermore, because of the nature of late-modern urban neighbourhoods, such studies necessitate an investigation not only of local but also national and global communications and interconnections. Religious and ethnic plurality, diasporic relationships, global identity politics, national as well as local government support for faithbased initiatives, inter-faith ventures, and new spiritual collaborations can all be witnessed and studied (Stausberg 2009; Knott 2009).

Geography and the spatial study of religion: a brief history

Within the study of religions there has been a history of interest in religious places and movements – sacred landscapes, pilgrimage routes, places of worship, missionary activities, global religious developments and cyber-religious networks – but, except in a few cases to which I shall return, there has been a lack of concern with the explicitly geographical or spatial implications of such places and movements. Similarly, despite earlier interest within geography, religion has remained a fairly marginal object of study since the 1960s, though a change can now be discerned. In this section I will consider the history of these two separate, but interconnected, fields of study.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in Germany and England, the discipline of geography was forged overtly in a Christian mould, in part to demonstrate the ‘visible side of the Divine revelation’ (Park 1994: 9) but also to justify the superiority of Christianity in the context of other religions. However, despite Christian missionary interest in the relationship between religion and different geographical contexts, it was not until the late eighteenth century that the two were formally engaged in the scholarly project of Religionsgeographie by Gottlieb Kasche, and the possibility of a rational, non-confessional geography was addressed by Immanuel Kant (Büttner 1980; Park 1994). In the twentieth century several major geographical studies of religion were published, most notably by Deffontaines (1948), Sopher (1967), and Park (1994), with the latest addition by Stump (2008). Paul Fickeler is accredited with developing the modern agenda of the geography of religions in an article in German in

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1947 (Fickeler 1962). He suggested that ‘the science of religion should tackle the question of how environment affects religion, and that the geography of religion should tackle the question of how religion affects people and landscape’ (Park 1994: 16–17), and identified a range of themes appropriate for geographical study (Fickeler 1962). The division of duties he proposed has since been challenged, with scholars on both sides breaching the disciplinary boundary. Furthermore, a number of geographers (e.g. Büttner 1974; Kong 1990; Cooper 1992) have called for an informed understanding and study of the dialectical reciprocity of religion and the environment.

Since the late 1990s the geographical study of religion has moved away from some of its old spheres of interest in denominational studies, religious demography, the landscape of death and pilgrimage, to new ones in the poetics and politics of the sacred, identity and community, and religion in relation to diaspora and postcolonial spaces, body and gender, global and local, political and ethical geographies, and theoretical considerations. Key contemporary contributors are Lily Kong, a major reviewer of recent trends in the geography of religion (Kong 1990, 2001), two British geographers, Julian Holloway and Oliver Valins (Holloway and Valins 2002; Valins 2003; Holloway 2006), Hans Knippenberg, editor of The Changing Religious Landscape of Europe (2005) and fellow European contributors, and those scholars with essays in the 2006 Annals of the Association of American Geographers who have sought to move the field forward with new conceptual and empirical interventions, including James Proctor (2006) and Adrian Ivakhiv (2006). The American scholar, Roger Stump, has made a significant contribution in recent years to developing the geography of religion for a student audience. Following earlier work on the geography of religious fundamentalism (Stump 2000), a later book organises the field according to four frames: the spatial dynamics of religious distributions, the contextuality of religions, religious territoriality in secular space, and the meanings and uses of sacred space (Stump 2008). This framework enables him to bring up to date subjects that preoccupied earlier geographers (religious distribution, sacred space and the spatial diversification of belief and practice in the major religions), whilst acknowledging and exploring the operation of religious territoriality within the secular spaces of everyday life, including the communal scale, body, home, the state and the global arena.

Despite the early development of Religionsgeographie, little significant reciprocal interest by religious studies scholars in space, place and geography can be witnessed before the midtwentieth century. The content of Jacques Waardenburg’s anthology of the first hundred years of the non-theological study of religions (1973) suggests that scholars of religion outside the discipline of geography gave little credence to these issues. The exception was Gerardus van der Leeuw in the mid-1930s who was the first to take an explicit interest in the role of different places and scales for religion. In a chapter on sacred space in his book, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, he identified a series of homologies (home, temple, settlement, pilgrimage site, human body) and linked synecdoches (hearth, altar, sanctuary, shrine and heart) which have since become key terms for a scholarly discussion of the location of the sacred (van der Leeuw 1938: 393–402; Chidester and Linenthal 1995: 6–7).

It was with the work of Mircea Eliade, however, that sacred space really became a significant subject of theoretical and critical enquiry, with its meaning, characteristics and functions being examined and typologised. His ideas have provided a frame of reference for subsequent scholars of sacred geography, both followers and critics. Eliade is known for positing several axioms, of sacred space as set apart from ordinary, profane space, as the ‘Center’ or axis mundi through which communication between different domains is possible,

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and as the manifestation of the ‘Real’ (hierophany) (Eliade 1959: 26). Scholars investigating the meaning and power of sacred space and time have often used these axioms as a reference point. Belden C. Lane, for example, adopted and developed them in his phenomenological enquiry into the poetics of American sacred landscape as ‘storied place’ (Lane 1988: 11–20), whilst Chidester and Linenthal, accusing Eliade of mystifying the sacred and ignoring its politics, overturned them in their subversive, critical approach to the contested nature of American sacred space (Chidester and Linenthal 1995: 16–18).

These scholars were as indebted to Jonathan Z. Smith as they were to Eliade. In a lecture in 1971 entitled ‘The Wobbling Pivot’, Smith had queried Eliade’s focus on the Center at the expense of the periphery, and went on to elucidate what was to become an influential dichotomy between two existential possibilities, ‘a locative vision of the world (which emphasises place) and a utopian vision of the world (using the term in its strict sense: the value of being in no place)’ (Smith 1978a: 101). He developed these perspectives in his later essay, ‘Map Is Not Territory’, as an imperial, ideologically-orientated map, and a utopian map which reverses the locative and seeks to escape to a new world (1978b: 308–9). Smith’s use of the metaphor of the map in the context of investigating these cosmological perspectives simultaneously de-territorialised the sacred and showed how space operates as an organising principle beyond the material world in the arena of belief and ideology. Smith continued to employ spatial terminology in his 1987 book, To Take Place: Toward a Theory of Ritual, in which he moved beyond earlier phenomenological conceptions of the ‘sacred’ and ‘place’, in favour of anthropological and sociological approaches. He argued that ‘human beings are not placed, they bring place into being’ (Smith 1987: 28), using ritual to do so. People do not so much respond to sacred place, as Eliade suggested, as create it through their ritual activity (105).

One further scholar requires our attention before we turn to the current theoretical and methodological agenda and that is Manfred Büttner, a German scholar who, in the 1970s, strove to instruct a largely ignorant audience of religious studies peers of the importance of the geography of religion. Writing in English as well as German and in well known scholarly journals, including Religion and Numen, he charted the history of the engagement between geography and religion and sought to develop an agenda for field study that would bring scholars together from both sides to further their mutual understanding of the way in which settlement and landscape are moulded by religion and the way the environment influences religions and religious groups. He called for a ‘synthetic geography of religion’ within the meta-science of all disciplines concerned with religion (Büttner 1974: 84; 1980). Despite his valiant efforts, this has yet to be fully realised.

The spatial study of religion: theory and method

Before turning to some of the major themes that have preoccupied scholars writing about geography, religion and space, I will first review recent advances of a theoretical and methodological kind. As I suggested earlier, a spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has focused attention on space, place and location. It has challenged previous Cartesian perspectives, has considered space in its engagement with discourse, representation, power, identity and practice, as well as in both its physical and social aspects. Despite his interest in genealogy and the historical outworking of power relations, Foucault referred to modernity as the epoch not of time but space (1986: 22). Following Lefebvre’s ground-breaking work, La production de l’espace (1974), social relations and culture have been understood as having