They begin by acknowedging the resurgence of religion which has brought studies of religion into a variety of scientifically-focused, rationality-based, interdisciplinary research perspectives - including geography. In fact, it seems as if the global and local changes in religious practices are so compelling, that religion is now applicable to, and being examined by many different academic discourses (from ecology to neuroscience). In fact, the first article in the journal Social & Cultural Geography which raised connections between geography and religion was written over 40 years ago (Yorgason & Della Dora 2009). It was seen then as 'frontier territory' (630).
As editors of this special edition of the journal, Yorgason and Della Dora do not simply add religious studies' frames to geography, instead they question the fundamental problems that arise when trying to merge or link two different academic styles. They argue that:
'Religion blurs geographical scales and conceptual boundaries: those between the self and the world, life and death, the local and the universal, the private and the public, the introvert and the political, the fixed and the mobile, or, in [Lily] Kong’s words, between politics and poetics (2001).' (Yorgason and Della Dora 2009:631).
A religious or spiritual geography looks to territory and spatiality, to sacred places and sacred spaces which inspire deep connections with the transcendent, where individuals seek insight, clarity, transformation and reverence. Dewsbury and Cloke (2009) explain that a shifting religio-geography can take a the macro (global) stance and also focus on local (micro) positionings, reducing the local still further to the self - where the intensity of religious and ritual performance is observed to be (and is being) written on the body. This new enspirted territory is sacralised in the way individuals experience religous and spiritual connections with a transcendent or immanent other - and how this experience is transmitted in and through embodied performance, individually and collectively in rituals and services.
This commentary reminds me of Birgit Meyer's (2006) significant paper on sensations and aesthetics. The body engages sensually with the elements and symbolism embedded in text, ritual and collective worship. According to Meyer, religion 'refers to the ways in which people link up with, or even feel touched by, a meta-empirical sphere that may be glossed as supernatural, sacred, divine, or transcendental.' Underlining this definition of religion is the beauty of relationship with the sacred other, however one defines that sacred other - as place, space or body.
Meyer, like the geographers seeking to embed a spiritual geography within their scholarly discourse, seeks to promote a binding movement towards the re-enchantment of religious faith and practice. Max Weber's observation of the disenchantment of religion has been transformed (or has transformed itself) into an enticing reformulation, one that blends privatised-subjective belief and practice systems with collective worship, and where the personal-individual relationship with the sacred other is celebrated alongside and within the communal outpourings of effervescence in ritual, worship, and performance.
These changes are increasingly apparent, Meyer (2006) explains, in forms of religions that embrace popular culture and contemporary music and art forms. But, in reflecting on the use of pop culture and contemporary (and fashionable) mediated genres, including online approaches, Meyer seems to be reaching out to the geographers with her statement that:
In order to account for the richness and complexity of religious experience, we need theoretical approaches that can account for its material, bodily, sensational and sensory dimension. The problem with, for example, interpretative approaches in the study of religion is that they tend to neglect the experiencing body at the expense of a focus on religious representations that are submitted to a symbolic
analysis.' (Meyer 2006:19, my italics).
These illuminating shifting territories, religion with geography, sacred with profane, transcendence with immanence, space with feeling - are bound up with shifts in the mediated expressions of religion and spiritualities. As Hollywood lifts its (and our) spirits with forays into witchcraft and vampirism, and religion is mediated in online celebratory practices, and a host of commodified and symbolic objects and processes, Weber's disenchanted spaces of religion disperse from fixed places of worship to more mediatized conduits, languages, and territories (Hjarvard 2008). These, indeed, can be re-enchanting and uplifting places.
Questions:
Why do other discourses outside of religion and spirituality wish to engage with religion?
In what ways is the media responsible, in part, for the shifts in pop cultural religion? Of course, these shifts do not come out of a vacuum but relate to the social, historical and political changes in modernity to multiple modernities, or what Zygmunt Bauman might call ' liquid modernities'.
Refences
Bauman Z. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Dewsbury JD and P Cloke. 2009. Spiritual Landscapes: Existence, Performance and Immanence. Social & Cultural Geography 10(6):695-711.
Hjarvard S. 2008. The Mediatization of Religion. Northern Lights, 6 (1): 9-26.
Meyer B. 2006. Religious Sensations. Why Media, Aesthetics and Power Matter in the Study of Contemporary Religion. Inaugural Address, Vrije University. http://dare.ubvu.vu.nl/handle/1871/10311.
Yorgason E. and V. Della Dora. 2009. Geography, Religion, and Emerging Paradigms: Problematizing the Dialogue. Social & Cultural Geography 10(6): 629-637.
Image source: http://pixabay.com/en/nature-animals-life-13752/
Image source: http://pixabay.com/en/nature-animals-life-13752/
