Society and Space review editor Veronica Della Dora has compiled a virtual theme issue on sacred space. Read the remainder of her introduction to the issue, as well as links to its contents (which are currently free to access), at the link below.
All religious belief implicates space; all religious practice makes geography. In the broader sense, the term ‘sacred’ indicates something ‘different’, ‘set apart’, ‘other’, as well as something to which is ascribed special meaning. Yet, where do the boundaries of the sacred lie? Is sacred space an ontological given, or is it a social construction? Is it a portion of territory, or is it the product of a set of practices? Is it something we walk on, or is it something we perform? Is it permanent or ephemeral? Is it private or public?
Over the past decades, geographers and other scholars from across the humanities and the social sciences have approached sacred space in different ways: as a well-defined space set in opposition to ‘the secular’; as a contested domain continuously articulated and rearticulated through performance; as a repository of powerful symbols and meanings; as a dynamic assemblage of materials, sounds, and human emotions. This virtual theme issue presents a small selection of articles published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and Environment and Planning A which have developed some interesting approaches to sacred space and which reflect some broader epistemological shifts occurred over the past twenty years. While the concept of the sacred has been often extended to non-religious spaces and rituals, especially in the context of memorialization and national identity making, for the purposes of this issue we will limit our selection to spaces associated to religion.
Continue reading here.
