Giving voice to place: Three models for understanding American sacred space

Religion and American Culture

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 53-81

  Lane, Belden C ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62549108235     PISSN: 10521151     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rac.2001.11.1.53     Document Type: Review

References (74)

1. See E. V. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of Human Environment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 120-23
2. Aristotle, Physics, 209a (see also Max Jammer, Concepts of Space [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969], 17-21); Plato, Timaeus, 49a, 51a
3. The western Apache frequently speak of the land as "stalking people" or "going to work on them," playing tricks so as to reconnect them to their roots. The pivotal places of a community's life have a way of calling them back to an identity (and responsibility) that they share with the entire landscape. The land and the teaching stories connected with it have a way of "shooting them with arrows" so as to call them back to their origins in the earth. See Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 38-41, 58-64
4. Mikhail Bakhtin recognizes the joining of time and place when he speaks of the "chronotopes" that serve as monuments to a community's shared life and identity. These are "points in the geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse." They are recognized in the defining narratives that rehearse a people's experience of "space becoming charged and responsive to the movements of time and history." See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 7
5. See Rowland A. Sherrill, "American Sacred Space and the Contest of History," in American Sacred Space, ed. David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 323-25
6. From another point of view, however, to attend to intimate perceptions of place is to share in the characteristic American propensity (from Jonathan Edwards to Mary Oliver) for regarding nature as personally instructive, as a source of spiritual insight. See Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)
7. Charlene Spretnak observes that poststructuralist thinking "spawns books and articles that perceive only a one-way creative power; the projection by humans of their 'social constructions' onto nature. All this seems exceedingly odd - and more than a little pathological - to traditional native peoples." They insist, by contrast, that there is a two-way process of communication between the human and more-than-human world. See Charlene Spretnak, The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World (New York: Routledge, 1999), 27-28
8. John Muir, "My First Summer in the Sierra," in Nature Writings (New York: Library of America, 1997), 292
9. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (New York: North Point Press/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 103, 114-15
10. David Abram observes that "many indigenous peoples construe awareness, or 'mind,' not as a power that resides inside their heads, but rather as a quality that they themselves are inside of, along with the other animals and the plants, the mountains and the clouds." David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in the More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 227
11. See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 347-57
12. A brief survey of methodological approaches to the study of American sacred places is given in the introduction and notes to Chidester and Linenthal, American Sacred Space, 1-42. Douglas Burton-Christie canvasses a wide body of literature relating spirituality and place in his article, "A Sense of Place," The Way 39, no.1 (January 1999): 59-72
13. Ethnographic approaches are outlined in the introduction to Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, Senses of Place (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996)
14. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 20-29
15. Chidester and Linenthal, American Sacred Space, 18
16. Eliade's own intellectual roots and political outlook had been shaped by the same antimodern pessimism and romanticism that gave rise to European fascism. Cultural studies approaches, by contrast, have been deeply committed to exposing the ways by which dominant cultures often silence the voices of difference. See Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999)
17. Bernyce Barlow, Sacred Sites of the West (St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 1996), 35
18. Astronomer John Eddy of the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, affirmed these alignments in his own observation of the summer solstice at Medicine Wheel, Wyoming, in June of 1972, building on the earlier work of British astronomer G. S. Hawkins. See John Eddy, "Medicine Wheels and Plains Indian Astronomy," in Native American Astronomy, ed. Anthony E. Aveni (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 147-169
19. Different attitudes toward the site can be found among First Nations people themselves. The Cheyenne, for example, perceive the circle as too sacred to enter, tying offerings of their own in a stand of small, wind-whipped spruce trees nearby
20. James J. Gibson, quoted in Dolores LaChapelle, Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: Rapture of the Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life (Sky Land, N.C.: Kivaki Press, 1992), 108
21. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 26
22. D. H. Lawrence, "The Spirit of Place," in The Symbolic Meaning, ed. Armin Arnold (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 20, 18
23. In speaking of "synchronistic events" and "miracle healings" in 1959, Jung mentioned "numinous spots" like the cave and underground spring at Lourdes. See The Letters of Carl G. Jung, 2 vols., ed. Gerhard Adler (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 2:500. Cf. Daniel C. Noel, "Soul and Earth," Quadrant 23, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 62-63
24. See James A. Swan, Sacred Places (Santa Fe: Bear, 1990)
25. James A. Swan, ed., The Power of Place: Sacred Ground in Natural and Human Environments (Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1991)
26. and Winifred Gallagher, The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993)
27. Stephen F. De Borhegyi describes the history and devotion of the site in El Santuario de Chimayo (Santa Fe: Spanish Colonial Arts Society, 1956)
28. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978), 308
29. See the first chapter of Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward a Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)
30. Elsewhere, he argued, "There is nothing that is inherently sacred or profane. These are not substantive categories, but rather situational or relational categories." Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 55
31. Victor and Edith Turner observe that "the holiest pilgrimage shrines in several major religions tend to be located on the periphery of cities, towns, or other well-demarcated territorial units. Peripherality here represents liminality and communitas, as against sociocultural structure." Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 241
32. See also Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974)
33. See Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988)
34. and Robert A. Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)
35. John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow, eds., Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London: Routledge, 1991), 5-6, 7, 10 (emphasis added)
36. Edward T. Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 55-62, 187-99
37. Linenthal's subsequent book on the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., documents the tensions between Holocaust survivors who feared a second victimization in the murder of their memory and those who did not want a building focused on grief and repentance to compete with the larger national monuments on the mall nearby. See Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (New York: Penguin, 1997)
38. Timothy Matovina of Loyola-Marymount University, in a paper on "The Alamo and San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio" given at the November 1997 meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Francisco, spoke of the Alamo as originally a mission, not a battle site - showing how the cathedral dates back one hundred years before the "sacral events" of 1836. Proud Tejanos still describe the cathedral as "the only unconquered place in town." Others tell of how they have "been left out of the story," as African Americans for the Alamo and the Irish Shamrock Society recall those of their number who died in the fighting at the old Spanish mission
39. See Mary Pat Dowling Beal, Grotto Stories: From the Heart of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, Ind.: Mary Sunshine Books, 1996)
40. Robert S. Brown discusses the role of college and professional football in occasioning national mourning, community bonding, and healing in "Football as a Rhetorical Site of National Reassurance: Managing the Crisis of the Kennedy Assassination" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1996)
41. Since Castro's revolution in 1959, the number of Cubans in Miami has grown to over half a million, with this shrine becoming the sixth largest Catholic pilgrimage site in the United States. See Thomas Tweed, "Diasporic Nationalism and Urban Landscape: Cuban Immigrants at a Catholic Shrine in Miami," in Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape, ed. Robert A. Orsi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 131-54
42. See James S. Griffith, Beliefs and Holy Places: A Spiritual Geography of the Pimeria Alta (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 105-10. Griffith has identified more than twenty variants of the narrative in the Arizona Folklore Archives. In one of the accounts of this "wishing shrine," an old man is said to have been killed there. "If you want anything real bad," the local people explain, "like if you want a new car or if you're in the third grade and want to pass into the fourth, you go there and tell the old man that if you get it you'll go and light a candle for him." Ibid., 108
43. While the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, passed in 1978, provided for the first time a guarantee of Native American religious rights, it lacked any ability to enforce what it had set up in principle. A Free Exercise of Religion Act, therefore, was introduced to the U.S. Congress in 1993, providing for (among other things) the protection of forty-four sacred sites on federal land that were being threatened by tourism, development, mining projects, etc. What finally was passed in Congress in 1993 was a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, aimed at restoring religious liberties threatened by the Supreme Court's ruling in the 1990 Employment Division v. Smith case. This was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1997. A new Religious Liberty Protection Act was introduced in Congress in 1999 to try once again to assure that only a compelling state interest can limit the free exercise of religion. No one has written more thoughtfully on matters of litigation related to First Nations claims to sacred places than Robert S. Michaelsen of the University of California, Santa Barbara. See Robert S. Michaelsen, "American Indian Religious Freedom Litigation: Promise and Perils," Journal of Law and Religion 3, no. 1 (1985): 47-76; Robert S. Michaelsen, "Sacred Land in America: What Is It? How Can It Be Protected?" Religion 16, no. 3 (July 1986): 249-68
44. and Robert S. Michaelsen, "Dirt in the Court Room: Indian Land Claims and American Property Rights," in American Sacred Spaces, ed. Chidester and Linenthal, 43-96
45. See Klara Kelley and Francis Harris, Navajo Sacred Places (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 143, 169-72
46. If sacred places are popularly understood to be clearly differentiated from surrounding terrain, if they are expected to function in a manifest way as a "center," if one even anticipates a permanent physical structure of some sort to be the focus of attention there (like a church or temple), then Navajo and Hopi plaintiffs obviously have no credibility when they speak of the San Francisco Peaks as intrinsically holy. To court justices operating under an essentially Eliadean conception of sacred place, these mountains appear to be a very diffuse and "ordinary" terrain, not at all marked off in any particular way as sacred, and, therefore, not necessarily requiring protection under First Amendment rights
47. Eade and Sallnow, Contesting the Sacred, 15. Chidester and Linenthal speak of any given "sacred" space as an "empty signifier," something "open to unlimited claims and counter-claims on its significance." Chidester and Linenethal, American Sacred Spaces, 18
48. No more, that is, than a written text can be interpreted convincingly in any random manner. William L. Portier, "A Church Polarized: Fault Lines in the History of American Catholicism," U.S. Catholic Historian 14, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 141-45, criticizes cultural analyses that reduce devotional practices in American life to mere cultural patterns alone
49. See Tim Ingold, "Culture and the Perception of the Environment," in Bush Base: Forest Farm (Culture, Environment, and Development), ed. Elisabeth Croll and David Parkin (London: Routledge, 1992), 41. Ingold argues elsewhere that "the landscape, in short, is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it is rather the world in which we stand in taking up a point of view on our surroundings." Tim Ingold, "The Temporality of the Landscape," World Archaeology 25, no. 2 (1993): 171
50. See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960); and Edmund Husserl, "Epilogue," in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, II, trans. Richard Rozcewicz and Andre Schuwer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989), 421
51. Ingold, "Culture and the Perception of the Environment," 39; Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 67
52. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 127-43
53. These affordances "exist as inherent potentials of the objects themselves, quite independently of their being put to use or realized by a subject." Ingold, "Culture and the Perception of the Environment," 42
54. Ingold, "Culture and the Perception of the Environment," 42
55. See Adrian Iwachiw, "Places of Power: Sacred Sites, Gaia's Pilgrims, and the Politics of Landscape: An Interpretative Study of the Geographics of New Age and Contemporary Earth Spirituality, with Reference to Glastonbury, England, and Sedona, Arizona" (Ph.D. diss., York University, Toronto, 1997)
56. David Abram says "the perceiving body does not calculate logical probabilities; it gregariously participates in the activity of the world, lending its imagination to things in order to see them more fully." Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 58
57. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 214
58. See Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
59. and Jan D. Scruggs, To Heal a Nation: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (New York: Harper and Row, 1985)
60. Abram says, "My hand is able to touch things only because my hand is itself a touchable thing, and thus is entirely a part of the tactile world that it explores." To touch the name of my friend cut into the black granite wall was, in this respect, "to experience [my] own tactility, to feel [myself] touched by the [wall]." It is to recognize fully that my "surroundings are experienced as sensate, attentive, and watchful." Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 68-69. The wall was the powerful medium of contact with my friend as our mutual interaction of person and place was joined in a single moment
61. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 204-22
62. Jack Turner shares an engaging story of his own journey into the Maze in The Abstract Wild (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 3-18
63. See also N. Scott Momaday, "The Native Voice in American Literature," in The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), 14
64. See Douglas Burton-Christie, "Interlude: the Literature of Nature and the Quest for the Sacred," in The Sacred Place, ed. W. Scott Olsen and Scott Cairns (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1996), 165-77
65. Douglas Burton-Christie, "Mapping the Sacred Landscape: Spirituality and the Contemporary Literature of Nature," Horizons 21, no.1 (Spring 1994): 22-47
66. and Douglas Burton-Christie, "A Feeling for the Natural World: Spirituality and the Appeal to the Heart in Contemporary Nature Writing," Continuum 2, nos. 2-3 (Spring 1993): 154-80. Much of my appreciation for the phenomenological approach argued in this paper is tied to a backpacking trip into the Maze with Doug Burton-Christie in the spring of 1998. This journey to one of the first and hardest to reach of all American sacred places was profoundly formative of my thinking
67. The Apache claim that places have their own way of "stalking" them with the power of their stories. "The land makes people live right," they claim. See Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 37-70
68. Walter Brueggemann's book by this title, subtitled Daring Speech for Proclamation, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1990), reflects on the importance of the poet's artistry to biblical hermeneutics in the same way I want to suggest its significance for the understanding of place
69. See Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 19-35
70. W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970), 1
71. Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 80-82. Abram argues that our language is "continually nourished by these other voices - by the roar of waterfalls and the thrumming of crickets. It is not by chance that, when hiking in the mountains, the English terms we spontaneously use to describe the surging waters of the nearby river are words like 'rush,' 'splash,' 'gush,' 'wash.'"
72. Heidegger quoted in Bruce V. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995), 49-50
73. See Lynda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred (New York: Crossroad, 1982)
74. and Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and "Women's Work" (New York: Paulist Press, 1998)