Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba

3: What Sacred Spaces Do

61 Academic fields of religious studies, anthropology, geography, sociology, and others have persistently investigated religious activities as a product of human group interactions. Sacred spaces that result from religious activities also have received considerable attention as scholars and researchers study them and apply an array of methods and theories. for example, David Morgan and Sally H. Promey’s anthology, The Visual Culture of American Religions, explores spaces as visual culture. Sandra greene took her examination of spaces to ghana and produced the volume Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana. And the geographer yi-fu Tuan centers his interest in space on how “place,” composed of spaces, is an experienced, human phenomenon created through habitual interactions of ordinary daily life. Tuan contends that “the concept of place refers not simply to geographic location but to a dialectical relationship between environment and human narrative.”1 Sacred spaces, too, can take on this complexity. Most investigators will agree that human interactions produce knowledge that is indispensable to the construction of a society in a given environment , and sacred spaces can be significant parts of the knowledge produced. In chapter 1, we set forth the geographic and historical parameters that examined colonial Africans as intimate participants in building 3 What Sacred Spaces Do  62 Chapter 3 Oriente. In chapter 2, we reviewed the interactive nature of human knowledge production as the foundation for constructing reality, and we examined the shared Africa-based cosmic orientation brought to Oriente by colonial enslaved workers. We also presented salient elements of phenomenological knowledge derived from that orientation as contemporarily used among Oriente practitioners. Now we turn our attention to the idea of sacred spaces themselves. The purpose is to clarify important functions and particular responsibilities of these geographies in the context of indigenous religions practiced in Oriente. At no time do we purport to be exhaustive in the functions attributed to sacred spaces but we believe that important functions will be considered and that they resonate in the eastern environment of Cuba. Sacred spaces—locations or geographies of sacrality—are visual representations of a common, collective body of knowledge that has been accumulated and transmitted by religious practitioners over several, if not hundreds or thousands, of years. Sacred spaces are constructed assemblages of shared awareness that articulate a three-dimensional symbolic expression of the body of knowledge that undergirds practitioners’ comprehensions about life and being in the world. This is a pool of cultural information produced through commonly understood interactions with beings, ideas, things, entities, and activities of the historical and cosmic world—a world that existed long before humans appeared. Sacred spaces of Oriente’s indigenous religions exist within the general complexity of collective cosmic orientation and knowing. Contemporary practitioners’ specific appreciations about the cosmos are mostly derived from the continental heritage passed to them by colonial enslaved Africans.2 These regional inhabitants also understand that interaction in sacred spaces is charged with dynamic and sometimes explosive cosmic energy. Most have experienced and/or know of occurrences in the spaces that are unlike the dynamics or action performed in other, outside locations. This suggests that in addition to having specific functions, sacred spaces of Oriente possess a charismatic character.3 We will return to the topic of charisma shortly. Roles of Spaces generally, sacred spaces of all varieties and religious traditions are part of the world of humans and have roles in that reality. They accomplish certain 63 what sacred spaces do purposeful goals and objectives and are arenas of ritual behavior. They can be small, personalized locations where individuals perform particular acts related to a personal understanding of the cosmic order, just as they can be large, massive settings, where a community of supplicants regularly gathers to perform and reenact activities related to principles of their cosmic orientation and religious tradition. We want to review salient functions of both large and small spaces and will do so by using ideas put forth by David Morgan and Sally H. Promey.4 These are not the only authors to suggest functions of spaces but their discussions proved useful for our work in qualifying the unknown of Oriente assemblages. Morgan and Promey propose that sacred spaces have an assortment of important, though not exhaustive, roles and we have expanded their propositions to incorporate general observations of spaces in Oriente. Our thinking combines with these authors to suggest that sacred...