Sacred Places and Modern Landscapes

Sacred Places and Modern Landscapes
Author: Ronald A. Lukens-Bull
Publisher: Asu Center for Asian Research
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2003
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781881044321

"Older studies of South and Southeast Asian sacred geography focus on the spatialization of ancient cosmologies. The papers in thie book suggest a number of new ways of consdering sacredy geography. They suggest that spatialized notions - in the context of globilization and modernization and, more recently, of economic and political crisis - can best be understood in the tension between 'tradition' and 'change'." - Ronald Lukens-Bull, Editor

Sacred Landscapes

Sacred Landscapes
Author: A. T. Mann
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Sacred space
ISBN: 9781402765209

Captures magical spaces - archetypal and architectural manifestations of the sacred. This title illustrates the ways in which people have used and understood their sacred landscapes throughout history and around the world, from hillside Celtic oak initiation groves to Megalithic open-air sanctuaries to Macchu Picchu and Oregon's Crater Lake.

Crystals and Sacred Sites

Crystals and Sacred Sites
Author: Judy Hall
Publisher: Fair Winds Press (MA)
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2012-11
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1592335225

Crystals and Sacred Sites teaches you how to tap into the healing energy of sites from around the world using the power of crystals and sacred stones.

Layered Landscapes

Layered Landscapes
Author: Eric Nelson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2017-06-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317107195

This volume explores the conceptualization and construction of sacred space in a wide variety of faith traditions: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and the religions of Japan. It deploys the notion of "layered landscapes" in order to trace the accretions of praxis and belief, the tensions between old and new devotional patterns, and the imposition of new religious ideas and behaviors on pre-existing religious landscapes in a series of carefully chosen locales: Cuzco, Edo, Geneva, Granada, Herat, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kanchipuram, Paris, Philadelphia, Prague, and Rome. Some chapters hone in on the process of imposing novel religious beliefs, while others focus on how vestiges of displaced faiths endured. The intersection of sacred landscapes with political power, the world of ritual, and the expression of broader cultural and social identity are also examined. Crucially, the volume reveals that the creation of sacred space frequently involved more than religious buildings and was a work of historical imagination and textual expression. While a book of contrasts as much as comparisons, the volume demonstrates that vital questions about the location of the sacred and its reification in the landscape were posed by religious believers across the early-modern world.

Profane Landscapes, Sacred Spaces

Profane Landscapes, Sacred Spaces
Author: Miroslav Bárta
Publisher: New Directions in Anthropological Archaeology
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019
Genre: Environmental archaeology
ISBN: 9781781794098

Ever since Herodotus, it has been observed that Egypt - that is, ancient Egyptian civilisation - was a gift of the Nile. However, only recently have Egyptologists come to appreciate that Egypt was as much a gift of the desert as a gift of the water, at least as regards its very beginnings. To understand the civilisation that originally settled along the Nile Valley and in the Delta, we must study not only the remains of ancient monuments, excavated artefacts and reconstructed texts, but take proper account of the landscape, conditions and environment that shaped Egypt's culture, religion and ideology. This volume addresses various aspects of how the world was perceived in the minds of Egyptians, and how Egyptians subsequently reshaped their surrounding landscape in harmony with their view of geography and cosmological ideas. Profane landscape and sacred space thus blend into one multi-faceted concept.

Indigenous Rights in Modern Landscapes

Indigenous Rights in Modern Landscapes
Author: Lars Elenius
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2016-11-10
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1317059689

This book examines the diverse use of Indigenous customary rights in modern landscapes from a multidisciplinary perspective. Divided into two parts, the first deals explicitly with Sámi customary rights in relation to nature conservation in the Nordic countries and Russia from a legal and historical perspective. The authors investigate how longstanding Sámi customary territorial rights have been reassessed in the context of new kinds of legislation regarding Indigenous people. They also look at the ideas behind the historical models of nature conservation. The second part deals with the ideas and implementation of new kinds of postcolonial models of nature conservation. The case of the Sámi is compared with other Indigenous people internationally with cases from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and India. The work investigates how the governance of protected areas has been influenced by the principles of equality and positive discrimination, and how it has affected the possibilities of establishing adaptive co-management arrangements for specific areas. How the legal situation of Indigenous peoples has been recognised in an international context is also investigated. The volume provides a multidisciplinary analysis of how the customary livelihood of Indigenous people has adapted to modern industrialised landscapes and also how postcolonial approaches have contributed to global changes of Indigenous rights and nature conservation models.

Sacred Places in Modern Western Culture

Sacred Places in Modern Western Culture
Author: Paul Post
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Civilization, Western
ISBN: 9789042924987

Sacred spaces in contemporary Western culture are subject to a dynamics in which the traditional forms of ritual are increasingly marginalised and new forms emerge. In Western Europe churches are growing empty, whereas new rituals - for instance those surrounding the victims of violence - are gaining prominence and are mediatized in a variety of ways. The destruction of churches, the rise of increasingly multi-religious urban ritual spaces, the remarkable vitality of places of pilgrimage and war cemeteries and the growing popularity of lieux de memoire in general show the changing landscapes of ritual spaces in modern Western culture.This book aims at describing and analyzing the profound changes and developments that are presently taking place. In the main part of this volume the broad field of ritual spaces is explored in contributions on various modern 'sacred places'. The case studies range from traditional places of religious worship, to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Berlin Holocaust Memorial; from the Tor Tre Teste Millenium Church in Rome to the Columbine School Shooting Memorial in Colorado, the memorials for Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh and virtual ritual sites. The dynamics of ritual space is further explored in various in-depth essays on the dynamics of space and ritual, musealisation and memorial culture.

Inca Sacred Space

Inca Sacred Space
Author: Frank M. Meddens
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Andes Region
ISBN: 9781909492059

A collection of conference papers which present the principles and functions of ushnus, Inca sacred spaces, through history, archaeology and anthropology.

Landscapes of the Secular

Landscapes of the Secular
Author: Nicolas Howe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2016-09-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 022637680X

“What does it mean to see the American landscape in a secular way?” asks Nicolas Howe at the outset of this innovative, ambitious, and wide-ranging book. It’s a surprising question because of what it implies: we usually aren’t seeing American landscapes through a non-religious lens, but rather as inflected by complicated, little-examined concepts of the sacred. Fusing geography, legal scholarship, and religion in a potent analysis, Howe shows how seemingly routine questions about how to look at a sunrise or a plateau or how to assess what a mountain is both physically and ideologically, lead to complex arguments about the nature of religious experience and its implications for our lives as citizens. In American society—nominally secular but committed to permitting a diversity of religious beliefs and expressions—such questions become all the more fraught and can lead to difficult, often unsatisfying compromises regarding how to interpret and inhabit our public lands and spaces. A serious commitment to secularism, Howe shows, forces us to confront the profound challenges of true religious diversity in ways that often will have their ultimate expression in our built environment. This provocative exploration of some of the fundamental aspects of American life will help us see the land, law, and society anew.

Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity

Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity
Author: Ralph Haussler
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 816
Release: 2020-07-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789253284

From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.