It is impossible for me to consider Wendell Berry and his fervent plea for sustainability rooted in faith, family, and farming without contemplating my own family land in the Ozark foothills of Arkansas.  As the second generation “off the farm,” I am sympathetic to Berry’s claims about the possibilities for personal, collective, and ultimately environmental restoration within a “healthy farm culture” (43).  In many ways, I am persuaded by Berry’s emphasis on farming as a sacred ritual that preserves “essential experience” (45) within an “energy community” of production, consumption, and return (85).  While the correlation between production and consumption is perhaps self-evident in our consumer-driven economy, the “principle of return” is more complicated.

Describing a “succession” of  values, ethics, and attitudes “handed down to young people by older people whom they respect and love,” (44) Berry defines farming as a seemingly closed circle of insiders, “culturally prepared” to perpetuate a rural lifestyle.  Critical to this agricultural vision is both the “old man” and the “young tree” that Berry finds and celebrates in Odysseus‘ epic homecoming (129).  But going home is problematic in the real world.  Berry historicizes the United States as the root of rootlessness, a country whose discovery “invented the modern condition of being away from home” (54).  In contrast to Homer’s grand narrative that, in Berry’s analysis, affirms a return to the land, twentieth century migration patterns in the United States document consistent movement out of rural communities into urban centers.  Today, Americans predominantly move from one urban center to the next, largely avoiding rural communities altogether.  As Berry astutely demonstrates, this movement is both social and geographic–the American “success story” often leads away from home (160) and doesn’t necessarily privilege a return.

Writing from the center of his world in the marginal space of Henry County, Kentucky, Berry asks for “confirmation, amplification, or contradiction from the experience of other people” (160).  My life’s journey thus far as a “world citizen” with rural farming roots both confirms and complicates Berry’s many assertions and ideals, but it is the “principle of return” that seems most complex.  In asking us to return to the “perfectly human possibility” of the “old man and his farm” (191), Berry reminds me of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic that offers a return to naiveté, but only after substantial suspicion and interrogation. In fact, Ricoeur’s model of return within a closed hermeneutic circle provides an interesting parallel to Berry’s cyclical energy communities and to other ecological and environmental philosophies.  While Ricoeur privileges educated critique, for Berry, education, specifically the land-grant college complex and its emphasis on specialization, has created a chasm between knowledge/experience and practical/liberal that precludes a valuation of “health” and “wholeness” (138) that might yield a “primitive” connectivity.

The disconnect between “traditional education” and farming has a long and storied history in my family.  The story, as we tell it, involves an epic migration of the Gray family and their seventeen children, from western North Carolina to Arkansas in the nineteenth century, where they settled and quickly populated what became Independence County. The Grays settled on a tract of land with a fresh spring that could sustain a large family. My great-great grandfather, Christopher Columbus Gray, was one of “the original seventeen” and his decision to become a doctor, as opposed to a farmer, continues to inform the complex relationship my family has to its farming roots.  Apparently,on their eighteenth birthday, each of the seventeen Gray children was given a choice between a college education and a tract of land. Some of the seventeen chose farming and today, many of their descendants continue to farm parcels of the original homestead. Others, however, including my great-great-grandfather, chose an education and profession that led them off the land.  It is perhaps my great-great-grandfather’s decision to chose a professional career that prompts ambivalence in my grandfather, whose life journey precluded formal education and has been grounded on a farm he and my grandmother purchased when they were first married.

My grandfather is Berry’s quintessential “old man.” In recent years, he set out acres of young trees on the farm, unknowingly following Laertes famous example. Rooted in topsoil he has painstakingly nurtured, my grandfather has a body of knowledge about the land, gardening, and animal husbandry that could be the basis of Berry’s ideal intergenerational succession. The only problem is, my grandfather doesn’t particularly want his children and grandchildren to follow in his farming footsteps.  Both of my grandparents pushed their children, my mother and uncle, off the farm, out of their small town, and right out of Arkansas.  The American “success story” of mobility is what they envisioned for their children and grandchildren; so much so that I have struggled to convince my grandfather to let me farm with him. While my husband and I lived in Arkansas for two years, my grandfather and I had many conversations about my own visions for the farm.  After two years of cajoling and pleading, my grandfather finally consented to the first step of what could have ben my “return:” we agreed that I would raise chickens in the back yard, potentially moving them (and, eventually us) onto the farm. That same week, however, I was accepted into the Graduate Division of Religion and, instead of learning to raise chickens and cattle with my grandfather, I am here, honing a different set of skills.

There are moments when I sense my grandfather’s regret and sadness that there is no one to continue his work on the farm.  I hear it when he asks me whether I might “come home” one day.  In that gentle question, I understand that my grandfather recognizes in his own body of knowledge a heritage and legacy of value. Nonetheless, neither he nor I know how to translate his experience into my future.  While Berry points to industrial agribusiness as the culprit in marginalizing the small family farm, in my experience, that marginalization dates to my great-great-grandfather’s decision to pursue an education, a decision that considerably predates the era of Berry’s critique.  It is that turn towards formal education that has my grandfather profoundly seduced. No matter how much I might want my grandfather to advocate for himself and his chosen lifestyle, he is no more required to encourage my “return” than I am required to enact it.  How can we understand Berry’s plea for a return when, as in my situation, it doesn’t convict both young and old? How do we maneuver both the reality and ideal of the farm gate that, for me, represents an opening to a lifestyle in which I recognize my cultural heritage, but to my grandparents represents a powerful closure to a world of possibility that lies beyond the farm?

“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

I am recently returned from a road trip to Arkansas, a place I have been traveling to-and-from for as long as I can remember.  In some ways, the journey itself provides a “destination-on-wheels,” a predictable pattern of gas stations, small town cafes, and soybean fields that leads to Batesville, Arkansas, a town with a population of just over 10,000 people (2010 Census Data, American FactFinder).  Sidney Mead once described Americans as a “people in movement through space,” exploring both “obvious highways” and “unexplored and devious byways” (ix). Understanding Wanderlust as a problematic birthright of sorts, I often feel most “American” when traversing the country by car, subconsciously moving through Chidester and Linenthal’s three interconnected domains; natural environments, built environments, and the mythic orientations that spaces engender (12).  While scholars of religion have moved beyond the stark binaries of sacred/profane and center/periphery, preferring terms that situate space within constellations of political, social, economic, and symbolic power, for me, traveling to Arkansas has become a ritual journey from an unspecified somewhere to a holy nowhere.

My grandfather remembers these debates primarily as opportunities for Baptist and Church of Christ preachers to promote their denominational doctrine.  In particular, he recalls that members of each denomination would sit on opposite sides of the courtroom, listening to the formal debate.  Often, local ministers would debate one another, but traveling preachers also participated and were celebrated for their mastery of scripture and denominational doctrine.  Two prominent preachers that held debates in the Batesville courtroom included Baptists Ezekiel “Zeke” Sherill (1875-1960) and Benjamin Marcus Bogard (1868 – 1951).

These two men participated in over 250 debates each, contributing to a complex network of local and regional conversations that took place in public spaces, including town and county courthouses.  There is no official record of the debates, as they were not part of any legal proceedings, but it’s possible to find traces of this inter-denominational “discourse” in local newspapers and in the memories of devout octogenarians.  In my grandfather’s memory, the debates were civil and never resulted in any actual change of opinion.  Instead, they functioned as an important community ritual that regularly defined the doctrinal spaces of each denomination. The debates were always scheduled for Sunday afternoons, when the courtroom itself became a shared space in which religious difference could be explored, although never overcome.  This marks an important distinction from the role that the courtroom plays as an arbiter of sacred space, as in the case studies of Michaelson, Taylor, and Glass.  While American courts have a long and complicated history of adjudicating sacred space outside of the courtroom, the sacred space of the courtroom itself also warrants investigation.

Vestiges of this specific use of the courtroom are hard to locate today, although one visual aid vividly reminds courthouse visitors of the building’s lasting legacy of civil-religion. While some religious images and references in public spaces have generated national attention and controversy, most notably the Ten Commandments monument erected in the rotunda of Alabama’s state judicial building, others go quietly unnoticed, such as this sign located at the corner of Batesville’s courthouse.

Understanding the three spatial domains that Chidester and Linenthal introduce as co-existing realities that map onto and across spaces, I wonder what it means to inscribe words onto a courthouse and to “claim” it for a specific ideology.  I also wonder what it means that no one seems to object.  If we take seriously the “contested character of sacred space” (16),  Batesville’s courthouse provides a contemporary example of a seemingly bygone era of assumed, homogenous religiosity.  In traveling through Chidester and Linenthal’s “itinerary” (31), I am struck by the relationship between regional religious experience and competing national identities.  In my own travels, through Arkansas and beyond (most notably Appalachia), I will continue to investigate both real and imagined spaces and their often contentious designations as “sacred” in the American landscape.