“Khôra reaches us, and as the name,” says Derrida (On the Name, 89). In his classic work on American sacred space, Landscapes of the Sacred, Belden Lane reminds us that the Greeks had two names for place: topos and chôra (39-41; 221-228). Lane attempts to map topos and chôra onto the contemporary English terms “space” and “place,” respectively. This distinction follows clearly in the wake of Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, which all but inaugurated the study of human geography with its publication in 1977. But that distinction is too facile: it ignores the complicated philological and philosophical legacy of the Greek terms; and even the updated Johns Hopkins version of Landscapes fails to account for the growing dissatisfaction with this distinction among spatially-oriented social scientists. Can we rely on a space/place distinction in our study of American religious landscapes? There are several reasons that we should not.

First, τόπος and χώρα have complicated philological associations. While scholars like Lane and Tuan would map them onto space and place, respectively, their associations in Hellenic and later Greek often had the opposite associations. Liddell and Scott, for example, define χώρα as “the space in which a thing is” or “a land or country,” implying the open space of a region. They define τόπος as “a place,” and even offer that the Democritean phrase ὁ τόπος τῆς χώρας should be rendered “the local circumstances of the district.” Topos, in the Greek, seems to be more about locality and specificity than chora, which is associated with more expansive spaces. While much of the philosophical tradition has inherited these associations, social-scientific appropriations of these terms have tended to invert their earlier meanings.

In Plato’s Timaeus, chora is the openness (void?) that receives matter and creation. Heidegger, Derrida, and Irigaray among others (including several philosophers in the phenomenological tradition) have retained the notion that chora refers to an openness of sorts. Heidegger uses the category to refer to the “clearing” in which we encounter Being itself. And Derrida goes further to suggest that chora “would perhaps not only be the abyss between the sensible and the intelligible, between being and nothingness…between logos and muthos, but between all these couples and another which would not even be their other” (Derrida, On the Name, 104). That is heady stuff, but it shows, if nothing else, how freighted and contested these categories have been. No easy topos/chora distinction is tenable because both categories, of course, have the potential to disrupt the binary from within.

For that reason—as well as for the more practical reason that our spatially-oriented sub-disciplines in the social sciences need a unifying constitutive term—anthropologists and religious studies scholars have begun to abandon the space/place dichotomy. Among anthropologists, Setha Low has voiced particular exhaustion with the persistence of the space/place dichotomy, noting that both have been useful for her research. In her theoretical work as well as her work on enclosures and public spaces in Central America, Low continues to invoke “space and place,” and “space/place.” While social science may inherently list toward “space” and its attendant co-production models (think Lefebvre), philosophers and humanists have often been more interested in the category of “place” (and philosophers like Edward Casey suggest that it is primary in human experience (Low, “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Space and Place,” 22-23). It is interesting, then, that in a recent “Key Terms” edition of the journal Material Religion, historian and sociologist of religion Thomas Tweed advocated jettisoning the term “place” altogether. Tweed prefers the coherence of a single category and sees the social-scientific currency of “space” as a validation of its academic usefulness. Belden Lane’s retention of the space/place distinction is key to his method. In Landscapes, he does not so much resolve these categories into one another as he authors two separate works—one on “place” in chapter 1 and his several interludes, and another on “space” in chapter 2 and his historical case studies. His methodological reflections in Part III only confirm the fastness of this division.

–Sean T. Suarez, posted from Meredith Doster’s account