Author: Paulus Gijsbertus Johannes PostPublisher:
ISBN: 9781592219544
Category : Group identity
Languages : en
Pages : 393
Book Description
Sacred Spaces and Contested Identities
Author: Paulus Gijsbertus Johannes PostPublisher:
ISBN: 9781592219544
Category : Group identity
Languages : en
Pages : 393
Book Description
Sacred Spaces and Contested Identities
Author: Paulus Gijsbertus Johannes PostPublisher:
ISBN: 9781592219551
Category : Group identity
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
The fundamental changes in society and culture are forcing us to reconsider the position of sacred space, and to do this within the broader context of ritual and religious dynamics and what is called a 'spatial turn'. This collection of studies on sacred space concerns itself with both perspectives by exploring place-bound dynamics of the sacred in Africa and Europe. Cultural dynamics, identities and ownership, and contestations are very much interrelated. The essays and cases show that, via these contested fields, identities are always at stake.
War on Sacred Grounds
Author: Ron E. HassnerPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801460417
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
Sacred sites offer believers the possibility of communing with the divine and achieving deeper insight into their faith. Yet their spiritual and cultural importance can lead to competition as religious groups seek to exclude rivals from practicing potentially sacrilegious rituals in the hallowed space and wish to assert their own claims. Holy places thus create the potential for military, theological, or political clashes, not only between competing religious groups but also between religious groups and secular actors. In War on Sacred Grounds, Ron E. Hassner investigates the causes and properties of conflicts over sites that are both venerated and contested; he also proposes potential means for managing these disputes. Hassner illustrates a complex and poorly understood political dilemma with accounts of the failures to reach settlement at Temple Mount/Haram el-Sharif, leading to the clashes of 2000, and the competing claims of Hindus and Muslims at Ayodhya, which resulted in the destruction of the mosque there in 1992. He also addresses more successful compromises in Jerusalem in 1967 and Mecca in 1979. Sacred sites, he contends, are particularly prone to conflict because they provide valuable resources for both religious and political actors yet cannot be divided. The management of conflicts over sacred sites requires cooperation, Hassner suggests, between political leaders interested in promoting conflict resolution and religious leaders who can shape the meaning and value that sacred places hold for believers. Because a reconfiguration of sacred space requires a confluence of political will, religious authority, and a window of opportunity, it is relatively rare. Drawing on the study of religion and the study of politics in equal measure, Hassner's account offers insight into the often-violent dynamics that come into play at the places where religion and politics collide.
Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites
Author: Elazar BarkanPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538065
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 437
Book Description
This anthology explores the dynamics of shared religious sites in Turkey, the Balkans, Palestine/Israel, Cyprus, and Algeria, indicating where local and national stakeholders maneuver between competition and cooperation, coexistence and conflict. Contributors probe the notion of coexistence and the logic that underlies centuries of "sharing," exploring when and why sharing gets interrupted—or not—by conflict, and the policy consequences. These essays map the choreographies of shared sacred spaces within the framework of state-society relations, juxtaposing a site's political and religious features and exploring whether sharing or contestation is primarily religious or politically motivated. Although religion and politics are intertwined phenomena, the contributors to this volume understand the category of "religion" and the "political" as devices meant to distinguish between the theological and confessional aspects of religion and the political goals of groups. Their comparative approach better represents the transition in some cases of sites into places of hatred and violence, while in other instances they remain noncontroversial. The essays clearly delineate the religious and political factors that contribute to the context and causality of conflict at these sites and draw on history and anthropology to shed light on the often rapid switch from relative tolerance to distress to peace and calm.
Loci Sacri
Author: Thomas CoomansPublisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9058678423
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
Sacred places are not static entities but reveal a historical dynamic. This volume explores both the cultural developments that have shaped them and their varied multidimensional levels of significance.
Rituals & Departures
Author: Akachi Adimora-EzeigboPublisher: Red Sea Press(NJ)
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164
Book Description
Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular
Author: Dr Abby DayPublisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409470326
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Book Description
Focusing on the important relationship between the 'sacred' and the 'secular', this book demonstrates that it is not paradoxical to think in terms of both secular and sacred or neither, in different times and places. International experts from a range of disciplinary perspectives draw on local, national, and international contexts to provide a fresh analytical approach to understanding these two contested poles. Exploring such phenomena at an individual, institutional, or theoretical level, each chapter contributes to the central message of the book - that the ‘in between’ is real, embodied and experienced every day and informs, and is informed by, intersecting social identities. Social Identities between the Sacred and the Secular provides an essential resource for continued research into these concepts, challenging us to re-think where the boundaries of sacred and secular lie and what may lie between.
Contested Spaces, Common Ground
Author: Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004325808
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 404
Book Description
Spaces are produced and shaped by discourses and, in turn, produce and shape discourses themselves. ‘Space’ is becoming a significant and complex concept for the encounter between people, cultures, religions, ideologies, politics, between histories and memories, the advantaged and the disadvantaged, the powerful and the weak. As a result, it provides a rich hermeneutical and methodological inventory for mapping interculturality and interreligiosity. This volume looks at space as a critical theory and epistemological tool within cultural studies that fosters the analysis of power structures and the deconstruction of representations of identities within our societies that are shaped by power.
The Neighborhood of Gods
Author: William ElisonPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022649490X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
There are many holy cities in India, but Mumbai is not usually considered one of them. More popular images of the city capture the world’s collective imagination—as a Bollywood fantasia or a slumland dystopia. Yet for many, if not most, people who live in the city, the neighborhood streets are indeed shared with local gods and guardian spirits. In The Neighborhood of Gods, William Elison examines the link between territory and divinity in India’s most self-consciously modern city. In this densely settled environment, space is scarce, and anxiety about housing is pervasive. Consecrating space—first with impromptu displays and then, eventually, with full-blown temples and official recognition—is one way of staking a claim. But how can a marginalized community make its gods visible, and therefore powerful, in the eyes of others? The Neighborhood of Gods explores this question, bringing an ethnographic lens to a range of visual and spatial practices: from the shrine construction that encroaches on downtown streets, to the “tribal art” practices of an indigenous group facing displacement, to the work of image production at two Bollywood film studios. A pioneering ethnography, this book offers a creative intervention in debates on postcolonial citizenship, urban geography, and visuality in the religions of India.
Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter
Author: Sandra E. GreenePublisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253108890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
"Greene gives the reader a vivid sense of the Anlo encounter with western thought and Christian beliefs... and the resulting erasures, transferences, adaptations, and alterations in their perceptions of place, space, and the body." -- Emmanuel Akyeampong Sandra E. Greene reconstructs a vivid and convincing portrait of the human and physical environment of the 19th-century Anlo-Ewe people of Ghana and brings history and memory into contemporary context. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork, early European accounts, and missionary archives and publications, Greene shows how ideas from outside forced sacred and spiritual meanings associated with particular bodies of water, burial sites, sacred towns, and the human body itself to change in favor of more scientific and regulatory views. Anlo responses to these colonial ideas involved considerable resistance, and, over time, the Anlo began to attribute selective, varied, and often contradictory meanings to the body and the spaces they inhabited. Despite these multiple meanings, Greene shows that the Anlo were successful in forging a consensus on how to manage their identity, environment, and community.