Space, Place and Religious Landscapes
Space, Place and Religious Landscapes

Author: Darrelyn Gunzburg

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1350079901

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Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities. This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity. In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.

Religion and Place
Religion and Place

Author: Peter Hopkins

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-09-14

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9400746857

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This unique collection highlights the importance of landscape, politics and piety to our understandings of religion and place. The geographies of religion have developed rapidly in the last couple of decades and this book provides both a conceptual framing of the key issues and debates involved, and rich illustrations through empirical case studies. The chapters span the discipline of human geography and cover contexts as diverse as veiling in Turkey, religious landscapes in rural Peru, and refugees and faith in South Africa. A number of prominent scholars and emerging researchers examine topical themes in each engaging chapter with significant foci being: religious transnationalism and religious landscapes; gendering of religious identities and contexts; fashion, faith and the body; identity, resistance and belief; immigrant identities, citizenship and spaces of belief; alternative spiritualities and places of retreat and enchantment. Together they make a series of important contributions that illuminate the central role of geography to the meaning and implications of lived religion, public piety and religious embodiment. As such, this collection will be of much interest to researchers and students working on topics relating to religion and place, including human geographers, sociologists, religious studies and religious education scholars.

Landscapes of the Secular
Landscapes of the Secular

Author: Nicolas Howe

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-09-05

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 022637680X

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“What does it mean to see the American landscape in a secular way?” asks Nicolas Howe at the outset of this innovative, ambitious, and wide-ranging book. It’s a surprising question because of what it implies: we usually aren’t seeing American landscapes through a non-religious lens, but rather as inflected by complicated, little-examined concepts of the sacred. Fusing geography, legal scholarship, and religion in a potent analysis, Howe shows how seemingly routine questions about how to look at a sunrise or a plateau or how to assess what a mountain is both physically and ideologically, lead to complex arguments about the nature of religious experience and its implications for our lives as citizens. In American society—nominally secular but committed to permitting a diversity of religious beliefs and expressions—such questions become all the more fraught and can lead to difficult, often unsatisfying compromises regarding how to interpret and inhabit our public lands and spaces. A serious commitment to secularism, Howe shows, forces us to confront the profound challenges of true religious diversity in ways that often will have their ultimate expression in our built environment. This provocative exploration of some of the fundamental aspects of American life will help us see the land, law, and society anew.

Religion
Religion

Author: Yi-fu Tuan

Publisher: Center for American Places

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781930066946

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""What does it mean to be religious in the modern world?" This is the question posed by Yi-Fu Tuan, the esteemed humanist geographer. In this, his latest book in a long and distinguished career, Tuan turns to this specific challenge, which has been a uniting current in much of his previous work. To illustrate more fully the modern meaning of religion, Professor Tuan collaborates with photographer-artist Martha A. Strawn, who has devoted the last four decades making place-based photographs from around the world. Her stunning portfolio of photographs and short essays conclude the book." "Religion is a perennial human quest for safety, certainty, and spiritual elevation, Tuan argues, whose origins are oriented in place and particular cultural practices. In its highest reaches, religion moves toward universalism and placelessness. Drawing examples principally from Christian and Buddhist traditions, Tuan explores the ultimate placelessness of religious experience. Tuan's meditations, combined with the elegance and purpose of Strawn's photographs and essays, create a book that is both thought. provoking and quietly beautiful." --Book Jacket.

Religion, Space, and the Environment
Religion, Space, and the Environment

Author: Sigurd Bergmann

Publisher: Transaction Publishers

Published: 2014-02-04

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 1412852145

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Religions often nurture important skills that help believers locate themselves in the world. Religious perceptions, practices, emotions, and beliefs are closely interwoven with the environments from which they emerge. Sigurd Bergmann’s driving emphasis here is to explore religion not in relation to, but as a part of the spatiality and movement within the environment from which it arises and is nurtured. Religion, Space, and the Environment emerges from the author’s experiences in different places and continents over the past decade. At the book’s heart lie the questions of how space, place, and religion amalgamate and how lived space and lived religion influence each other. Bergmann explores how religion and the memory of our past impact our lives in urban spaces; how the sacred geographies in Mayan and northeast Asian lands compare to modern eco-spirituality; and how human images and practices of moving in, with, and through the land are interwoven with the processes of colonization and sacralizing, and the practices of power and visions of the sacred, among other topics.

Urban Religious Events
Urban Religious Events

Author: Paul Bramadat

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-04-08

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1350175498

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How might we best understand the relationship between the vibrant religious landscapes we see in many cities and contemporary urban social processes? Through case studies drawn from around the world, contributors explore the ways in which these processes interact in cities. This book argues that religious events – including rituals, processions, and festivals – are not only choreographies of sacred traditions, but they are also creative disruptions that reveal how urban cultural hierarchies are experienced and contested. Exposing the power dynamics behind these events, this book shows how performative uses of urban space serve to destabilize dominant genealogies and lineages around urban identities just as they lay claims to cultural supremacy or heritage. Through exploring the affective disruptions and political controversies caused by religious events, the contributors engage theoretical discussions in urban studies, the sociology of religion and the ethnography of ritual. This book is a significant contribution to understanding emerging patterns in contemporary religion and also for theories related to heritagization, eventization, and urbanization.

Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape
Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape

Author: Elizabeth A. Cecil

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-09

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 9004424423

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In Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India, Elizabeth A. Cecil explores the sacred geography of the earliest community of Śiva devotees called the Pāśupatas. This book brings the narrative cartography of the Skandapurāṇa into conversation with physical landscapes, inscriptions, monuments, and icons in order to examine the ways in which Pāśupatas were emplaced in regional landscapes and to emphasize the use of material culture as media through which notions of belonging and identity were expressed. By exploring the ties between the formation of early Pāśupata communities and the locales in which they were embedded, this study reflects critically upon the ways in which community building was coincident with place-making in Early Medieval India.

Space, Place, and Motion: Locating Confraternities in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City
Space, Place, and Motion: Locating Confraternities in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-04-11

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 9004339523

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Space, Place, and Motion: Locating Confraternities in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City offers the first sustained comparative examination of the relationship between confraternal life and the spaces of the late medieval and early modern city. By considering cities large (Rome) and small (Aalst) in regions as disparate as Ireland and Mexico, the essays collected here seek to uncover the commonalities and differences in confraternal practice as they played out on the urban stage. From the candlelit oratory to the bustling piazza, from the hospital ward to the festal table, from the processional route to the execution grounds, late medieval and early modern cities, this interdisciplinary book contends, were made up of fluid and contested ‘confraternal spaces.’ Contributors are: Kira Maye Albinsky, Meryl Bailey, Cormac Begadon, Caroline Blondeau-Morizot, Danielle Carrabino, Andrew Chen, Ellen Decraene, Laura Dierksmeier, Ellen Alexandra Dooley, Douglas N. Dow, Anu Mänd, Rebekah Perry, Pamela A.V. Stewart, Arie van Steensel, and Barbara Wisch.

Candi, Space and Landscape
Candi, Space and Landscape

Author: Véronique Degroot

Publisher: Sidestone Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 9088900396

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Central Javanese temples were not built anywhere and anyhow. On the contrary: their positions within the landscape and their architectural designs were determined by socio-cultural, religious and economic factors. This book explores the correlations between temple distribution, natural surroundings and architectural design to understand how Central Javanese people structured the space around them, and how the religious landscape thus created, developed. Besides questions related to territory and landscape, Degroot's book analyzes the structure of the built space and its possible relations with conceptualized space, showing the influence of imported Indian concepts, as well as their limits. Going off the beaten track, this book explores the hundreds of small sites that scatter the landscape of Central Java. It is also one of very few studies to apply the methods of spatial archaeology to Central Javanese temples and the first in almost a century to present a descriptive inventory of the remains of this region.

The Meanings of Landscape
The Meanings of Landscape

Author: Kenneth R. Olwig

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-02-12

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1351053515

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Compiling nine authoritative essays spanning an extensive academic career, author Kenneth R. Olwig presents explorations in landscape geography and architecture from an environmental humanities perspective. With influences from art, literature, theatre staging, architecture, and garden design, landscape has come to be viewed as a form of spatial scenery, but this reading captures only a narrow representation of landscape meaning today. This book positions landscape as a concept shaped through the centuries, evolving from place to place to provide nuanced interpretations of landscape meaning. The essays are woven together to gather an international approach to understanding the past and present importance of landscape as place and polity, as designed space, as nature, and as an influential factor in the shaping of ideas in a just social and physical environment. Aimed at students, scholars, and researchers in landscape and beyond, this illustrated volume traces the idea of landscape from the ancient polis and theatre through to the present day.