Experiences of Place (review)

How do scholars of religion approach the study of place? Judging from the articles in Experiences of Place, they proceed primarily from within their respective disciplines and with a surprisingly high level of attention to narrative. Experiences of Place is a collection of six lectures presented at Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions, edited by convener Mary MacDonald. Each of the articles has much to offer in its own right, but together they present a continuum of approaches rather than suggesting potential cross-disciplinary pathways.

Acknowledging inspiration from Gregory Bateson's theories, anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose presents an intricate representation of Australian Aboriginal relations with space—patterned relations that rely on motion and connectivity, on the acknowledgment of differences and the crosscutting of those differences. Rose explores the relationship of time and space in Aboriginal understandings of the sacred, not abandoning the former to focus on the latter, as do less-sophisticated analyses. One manifestation of the temporal and spatial connection with the sacred, Rose argues, is that, "to live morally one must return, and return again" (p. 174).

Rose's skillful writing style is effective. For example, she uses a personal experience story to convey that narratives are embedded in the land. In one section, Rose brings us along on a trip with friend and teacher Ivy Kulngarri as they document sacred sites for presentation to the Australian government. Rose expresses shock at the littered condition of one site, confusion over Ivy's joyful acknowledgement of the trash, and eventual understanding as Ivy links the garbage with a powerful memory of her son Roy's coming-of-age ceremony. Rose comes to understand that, as part of her dialogic relationship with her country, "Ivy does not erase herself. Rather, she announces herself" (p. 174) through footprints, fires, songs, stories, and visits to particular places.

The other article equally embedded in physical place is Ann Grodzins Gold's "Owl Dune Tales." Acknowledging anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson for their attention to place-making processes and Keith Basso for his work with narratives and places, Gold examines stories that imbue the Owl Dune ruin in Rajasthan with "overflowing narrative potency" (p. 33). Relying on well-developed stories and fragmentary suggestions of narratives collected from members of the Mina minority, Gold applies symbolic and historical analysis to these stories "of place and displacement" to show how Owl Dune became one of several "storied places where the agency and actions of human and divine beings have generated meanings at once historical and religious, contingent but enduring" (p. 33).

A strength of both Rose's and Gold's analyses is their attention to the relations of power and politics that they find embedded in places. Rose relates her study to issues of justice and land rights for Aborigines. Gold explicates "the ways religious realities interact with political ones in mutually transformative fashion" (p. 23). Specifically, Gold shows how a disempowered group used flight as a means of protesting oppression.

If Rose's and Gold's ethnographic studies represent one end of the continuum in this volume, at the other is a textual analysis of an idea. Political scientist Michael Barkun impressively traces an imagined place developed in American pulp fiction and picked up by millennialists. The "place" is a legendary dystopia, an underworld inhabited by "Serpent People" who are poised to launch an assault on humanity. Barkun's genealogy of this idea illustrates the development of "improvisational millenarian style" (p. 159), a trend in which distinguishing between fact and fiction is unimportant, maintaining a coherency of tradition is abandoned, and indiscriminate borrowing from wildly disparate sources is pursued, enabled by new communication technologies. Barkun's opening contention, that "'Place' is as much a product of mind as of space" (p. 147), is thoroughly substantiated by his treatment.

Biblical scholar Nili Wazana's interesting study of the textual definitions of the spatial boundaries of...