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Contents
Background
Content
Key Terms
Dialogue
References
External Links
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Background
American Sacred Space, published in 1995, was “a pioneering attempt to bring recent trends in religious studies to the subject of American sacred space.”[1] The book examines the production and presence of sacred space through a series of case studies. Editor David Chidester is Professor of Comparative Religion at the University of Cape Town. His scholarly focus in on the relationship between religion and globalization, religion and popular culture and religion and society and the problem of social cohesion. His most recent work is Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa. Co-editor Edward T. Linenthal taught in the Religious Studies department at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh for 25 years, and now teaches in the Department of History at Indiana University. Never caring much for the “academic jargon” that each discipline seemed to hold in high esteem, he says he is interested in investigating and writing for a broader audience about the less examined, which at first glance does not seem “religious.”[2]
[1] Michael Ashcraft, “American Sacred Space,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35, no. 3 (S 1996): 336–318.
[2] “Edward Linenthal,” Indiana University Bloomington, accessed on March 16, 2013, http://www.indiana.edu/~histweb/faculty/Display.php?Faculty_ID=19.
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Content
Chidester and Linenthal argue that sacred space is ritual space, significant space and contested space, with the third being the primary focus of the book. The volume’s contributors use examples that focus on the politics of sacred space in the American context ranging from property rights to environmentalism, home schooling to the symbolism of Mount Rushmore, and from the U.S Holocaust Museum to an international view of America. Competing worldviews, especially how those worldviews interact with a person or group’s understanding of America, surface throughout and are central to each of the contests.
A key indicator of the sacrality of space is the risk of defilement or desecration, which was especially felt in the design of the American Holocaust Memorial Museum. The risk of defilement was palpable throughout Linenthal’s narration of the process. Consecration required careful intention. The sacralization process could be seen in the designers’ journeys to Europe, the use of the materials from the ghettos and concentration camps, and the actual journey through the memorial orchestrated for visitors of the museum.
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Key Terms
– Sacred/Sacralization/Sacrality
– Desecration/Desacralization
– Defilement
– Displacement
– Consecration/Reconsecration
– Purification
– Utopian & Locative Space
– Worldview
– Environmental Paganism
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Dialogue
Editors Chidester and Linenthal rely on the work of Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, and Jonathan Z. Smith to define sacred, suggesting that the sacred is a by-product of the sacralization process. They postulate the adjective “sacred” can be assigned to virtually anything through the human labor of consecration. The broad reaching case studies reiterate this understanding. The editors work with a situational definition of sacred more heavily than the substantial one of Otto, Eliade and Van der Leeuw. Yet, they suggest that even in the substantial, essentialist attempts to discuss the poetics of sacred space, the politics of sacred space have been present as the subtext. For example, within Van der Leeuw’s text Religion in Essence and Manifestation is the politics of space; the politics of position, property, exclusion and exile. Jonathan Z. Smith is relied upon by many of the volume’s contributors, with Chidester in particular using his terms utopian and locative space to frame his essay on the symbolic effects of American within the South African context.
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References
Chidester, David and Edward T. Linenthal, editors. American Sacred Space. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
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External Links