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departures 44 Three Orchestrating Sacred Space  Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different. —Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane Sacrality is, above all, a category of emplacement. —Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual Most societies distinguish places that are deemed especially significant, sacred or powerful, imbued with authority or prestige, or reserved for special uses, from those which lack such significance.1 The idea that sacredness inheres in a place, emanating from it of its own accord, is frequently taken for granted by believers in that place’s sacred status. The distinguished scholar of religion Mircea Eliade characterized all religious behavior as concerned with one’s relationship with a sacred realm. Sacred places, in his view, are manifestations or “irruptions” of inherent power and numinosity, exuding potent meanings and significances for the religious practitioner, who is able to shed everyday constraints of socially conditioned time and space by “entering into” or “partaking of” their sacred power. In Eliade’s words, “For religious man, space is not homogeneous”; rather, “some parts of space are qualitatively different from others” (1959:20) and these qualitative differences are given by the sacred itself: sacred sites are the places where divine or supernatural power breaks through into the human world, manifesting in the form of specific theophanies or hierophanies.2 In contrast to this view, which sees the sacred as a sui generis force whose action precedes the activities of social groups, much recent scholarship by cultural geographers and others has demonstrated that spaces, places, Orchestrating Sacred Space 45 and landscapes—including sacred places and landscapes—are actively produced by a myriad of social activities, and that this “social production of space” is dynamic and highly contested, imbued with cultural presuppositions and marked by social differences.3 As Kay Anderson and Fay Gale put it, “In the course of generating new meanings and decoding existing ones, people construct spaces, places, landscapes, regions and environments. In short, they construct geographies. . . . They arrange spaces in distinctive ways; they fashion certain types of landscape, townscape and streetscape; they erect monuments and destroy others; they evaluate spaces and places and adapt them accordingly; they organise the relations between territories at a range of scales from the local to the international” (1992:4). The carving out of particular kinds of places and spaces, endowed with specific meanings, is an activity sociologist Rob Shields calls social spatialization. “Partly through ongoing interaction,” he writes, “a site acquires its own history ; partly through its relation with other sites, it acquires connotations and symbolic meanings” (1991:60). These meanings, or “place-myths,” are integrated within larger systems by which places are contrasted against each other and differentiated into, for instance, the sacred and the profane, or the central and the peripheral. Sacred space, in other words, is produced through the spatial, material, and discursive practices of social groups. As such, it does not exist apart from the human meanings, sedimented over time in actual landscapes and places, which imbue them with their “sanctity ” and which are always subject to reinterpretation and contestation. The sacred geographies of the New Age and earth spirituality movements can be viewed through both of these lenses: that of the insider or believer, who sees the sacred as really existing in particular places (or the scholar who empathetically assumes the believer’s stance in order to better understand the belief), and that of the outsider who skeptically scrutinizes or deconstructs the sacred to show how it is socially produced and contested. In the latter view, a hermeneutics of suspicion rather than one of trust, sacred space is seen as a kind of “religious void,” “a vessel into which pilgrims devoutly pour their hopes, prayers, and aspirations,” and which accommodates “the meanings and ideas which officials, pilgrims, and locals invest” in it (Eade and Sallnow 1991:15). Sacred places, however, like all places, are not empty vessels or voids, and, like literary texts, they cannot equally accommodate all possible interpretations .4 Rather, places and landscapes are constituted in and through histories of human-nonhuman interaction in specific biophysical and material topographies and ecologies. Meanings, in other words, are not simply imposed onto preexisting environmental tabulae rasae; they emerge reciprocally with landscapes, cultures, and activities. To the above two perspectives , then—sacred space as inherently given, and as socially constructed and contested—we can add a third...

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