Spaces of Spirituality

Nadia Bartolini, Sara MacKian, Steve Pile, Nadia Bartolini, Sara MacKian, Steve Pile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315398402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Geografía

Spirituality is, too often, subsumed under the heading of religion and treated as much the same kind of thing. Yet spirituality extends far beyond the spaces of religion. The spiritual makes geography strange, challenging the relationship between the known and the unknown, between the real and the ideal, and prompting exciting possibilities for charting the ineffable spaces of the divine which lie somehow beyond geography. In setting itself that task, this book pushes the boundaries of geographies of religion to bring into direct focus questions of spirituality.

By seeing religion through the lens of practice rather than as a set of beliefs, geographies of religion can be interpreted much more widely, bringing a whole range of other spiritual practices and spaces to light. The book is split into three sections, each contextualised with an editors' introduction, to explore the spaces of spiritual practice, the spiritual production of space, and spiritual transformations.

This book intends to open to up new questions and approaches through the theme of spirituality, pushing the boundaries on current topics and introducing innovative new ideas, including esoteric or radical spiritual practices. This landmark book not only captures a significant moment in geographies of spirituality, but acts as a catalyst for future work.

1 Spaces of spirituality

An introduction

Nadia Bartolini, Sara MacKian and Steve Pile

1 Placing spirituality

Writing in 1993, Martha Henderson asked the question ‘what is spiritual geography?’ Her question was prompted by the publication of two books, both of which used spiritual geography in their subtitle: Beliefs and Holy Places (1992) by James Griffin and Dakota (1993) by Kathleen Norris. Henderson’s response to the question focuses upon the geography of the spiritual. She argues that spirituality is a subject that can be approached by people working in many different disciplines and, indeed, working in transdisciplinary modes. In this view, the spiritual is one aspect of the relationship between people, place and the earth. Fundamentally, spirituality is connected to the earth and is, therefore, a part of the human ecology and history of particular sites and places. Thus, spiritual geography taps into the long-standing connection that people have with places. Places, as she puts it, ‘momentarily trap and illuminate [the] supernatural ability of humans to adapt, create and re-create their surroundings’ (page 470). Supernatural? She does not explain. However, Henderson is trying to grasp something unquantifiable: the relationship between the known and the unknown, between the real and the ideal. So, the spiritual is about more than religious beliefs and practices and the creation (and recreation) of sacred sites and spaces. It is not, therefore, an analogue for other ways of thinking about human life, such as the industrial or the biological or the behavioural. Introducing the spiritual starts to interfere with commonplace understandings of place by pushing them into a consideration of the ‘supernatural’: the unknown, the unknowable, the ineffable and the numinous. The spiritual makes geography strange. Indeed, the spiritual is itself a strange territory: not just uncharted, but calling into question what can be charted. So, this book is not an attempt to provide a cartography of the spiritual, as this would be to disavow the way that the spiritual interferes with geography. Instead, we wish to explore the many different ways that space and spirituality can be entangled, in ways that are surprising, challenging and (hopefully) provocative.

While Henderson wishes to approach spirituality through place, Julian Holloway and Oliver Valins argue that spirituality can be explored at a range of different spatial scales, from, for example, the body to the global (2002, page 5; see also Bartolini et al., 2017). This might imply that spirituality operates within, and confirms the operability of, nested hierarchies of scale. Yet, Holloway’s and Valins’ aim is to draw out the different ways that spirituality and space are entangled through notions of scale. Rather than spirituality simply being in evidence at different scales, spirituality is seen as productive of those scales. Thus, for example, the body is itself understood and lived in different and distinct ways through spirituality. Indeed, spirituality is woven through everyday life. Moreover, as Jennifer Lea, Chris Philo and Louisa Cadman (Chapter 9) argue, the weaving of spiritual forms through everyday life does not necessarily reveal itself in dramatic or obvious ways. They focus upon the ‘small stuff’ of spirituality: the ‘micro-instances’ of other ways of being in the world. They explore the significance of stillness in spiritual life and how forms of stillness can then infuse everyday life. Thus, practices learned in yoga sessions can then be used to ‘pause’ or ‘still’ everyday situations or be used to cope with the ordinary stresses of life. Often, this goes unnoticed even by the people doing it. And, even if they do, it is unremarkable and easily forgotten. Yet, these unnoticed micro-instances of spirituality are part of how everyday life is conducted, sustained and endured.

This makes it hard, perhaps impossible, to disentangle the spiritual from the production of space in general. Holloway and Valins observe:

‘Religious and spiritual matters form an important context through which the majority of the world’s population live their lives, forge a sense (indeed an ethics) of self, and make and perform different geographies’.

(page 6)

Everyday life is infused with practices that carry religious and spiritual connotations, often unthinkingly: this is especially clear in the types of foods that are eaten or the clothes in which people feel comfortable (or uncomfortable) or the festivals that people observe; but also in people’s celebration of births and marriages – and how they cope with death and bereavement. More than this, Holloway and Valins argue,

‘religion is a crucial component [of] the construction of even the most “secular” societies. Through, for example, systems of ethics and morality, architecture, systems of patriarchy and the construction of law, government or the (increasing) role of the voluntary sector’.

(page 6)

Religion, and by extension spirituality, do not stand outside of modernity in such a view, but are fundamental to how it is constructed: whether through the implicit moral codes that govern people’s conduct or through its explicit laws and their execution. Seemingly secular decisions about what is right or fair or just are informed by value systems derived as much from implicit religious and spiritual assumptions as from the explicit formation of principles by other means. Personal and shared values, then, are hard to shake from religious and spiritual precepts – and this is political, too: for it shapes how people think about and treat others; how they construct and live through collectives, of all kinds; and the values that they seek to operationalise in their everyday lives.

Yet, it is hard (impossible?) to make universalisable statements about religion and spirituality, at any scale. There are intense debates about whether Western societies are post-secular or not, post-Christian or not; about the rise and distribution of religious fundamentalisms across the planet, though especially where it becomes evident in acts of violence, terrorism and war; about whether new forms of spirituality are alternative or mainstream, meaningful or merely a product of fashion (think, for example, about the appearance and spread of the Jedi religion in the West); about the meaning and significance of different kinds of clothing; about the decline or intensification of religious observances; or about the coexistence of laws founded on different religious or spiritual principles. Taken together, these debates challenge the relentless and ubiquitous assumption that social processes are driven by economic, political and cultural logics that have nothing to do with religion and spirituality.

While the trajectories of the social, in different places, at different scales, cannot be universalised, what we can say is that religion and spirituality remains complicit in the production of space and scale. Yet, this is to take religion and spirituality as a singularity: one kind of thing that makes and unmakes geography in distinctive, perhaps even unique, ways. Too often, spirituality is marshalled under, or alongside, the heading of religion and treated as much the same kind of thing. For sure, religions are formed by practices, performances and sacred spaces that are all designed to evoke the divine – and this marks religion out as different from other social practices. Indeed, as the divine is beyond geography, religions work hard to produce a consistency of the numinous across different places, through highly formalised practices, performances and sacred spaces. Yet, not only are religions constantly splitting, mutating and syncretizing, creating contact with the divine is not the only purpose of religious practices, performances and sacred spaces. They are also spiritual, concerned with the nature of spirit, both human and nonhuman. Spirituality, and its forms, extend far beyond religion. Spirituality is therefore not, in this book, a synonym for, nor coextensive with, religion.

Setting spirituality inside, alongside and aside from religion allows us to pose new challenges for understanding the production of space. These are less to do with the structure of beliefs and practices, and more to do with how beliefs and practices play out in, or intersect with, everyday life. Significantly, thinking through spirituality sets new puzzles and challenges for understanding the production of space.

2 Understanding space and spirituality

Paul Cloke and J. D. Dewsbury, writing in 2009, take up the challenge of thinking through the relationship between spirituality and space. To do so, they introduce the idea of ‘spiritual landscapes’. Spiritual landscapes, for them, are constituted by the relationship between ‘bodily existence, felt practice and faith in things’ (page 696). Helpfully, they distinguish spirituality from religion. First, they argue that spirituality can be experienced in a wide variety of religious and non-religious forms. To establish this, they use the examples of experiences with nature, of meditation, and of ghosts. Second, they argue that formal religion can be practiced and experienced in un-spiritual ways, but especially where religious institutions and practices become interwoven with practices of domination and exploitation. So, while ways of understanding religion – through, for example, ritual, beliefs and faith – are useful for understanding spirituality, they are not enough. Cloke and Dewesbury argue for an experiential approach to spiritual landscapes, focused on people’s personal experiences, their ways of inhabiting, and engaging with, the world.

Thus, the expression ‘spiritual landscapes’, for Cloke and Dewesbury, is a way to understand the relationship between the spiritual and the spatial. The spiritual, for them, is a disposition that involves both faith and an openness to the possibility of ‘other-worldliness’. Notice that this shifts the terrain of spirituality away from the divine, as such, onto a much broader set of possibilities for ‘other-worldliness’. In a sense, this idea harks back to Henderson’s use of the supernatural to evoke the ineffable. The spiritual implies some kind of world beyond the visible and the material. Key, for Cloke and Dewesbury, is that this other-worldliness is a possibility: faith is associated with this possibility and, indeed, comes to be defined by it. Faith, for example, in Heaven. Or Hell. Or the after-life. Spirituality, however, is not limited to its faith in the possibility of other worlds. It is practised and performed – and becomes manifest in its performances and practices. Such performances and practices include, for example, prayer and meditation, retreats and pilgrimages, singing and chanting, art and music, but also more profane activities such as ghost hunting and dark tourism.

In Chapter 17, Alison Rockbrand explores the performance of esoteric theatre. She shows how esoteric rituals are drawn into theatrical performances that include the audience, enabling them to take part in a spiritual journey. Esoteric theatre creates a transitional space that enables the transmutation of the self that can be carried into the world. Esotericism, thus, undermines the boundaries between worlds (see also Goodricke-Clarke, 2008). Spirituality, through its performances and practices, proliferates through everyday life, often in ways that go unrecognised and unacknowledged, sometimes in ways that are easily dismissed and disavowed. Significantly, Rockbrand also points to the therapeutic and healing aspects of spiritual practices (see also Lea, 2008; and, Williams, 2010, 2016).

Arguably, more than through specific beliefs or rules, it is through bodily practices that people come to live out their spirituality (see Mills, 2012; and, Olson et al., 2013). As Holloway has shown (2003, 2006), the body is active in the production of sacred and spiritual spaces. As importantly, it is through the body that the sacred and spirituality come to make sense. Indeed, religious and spiritual practices organise the senses and distribute them in specific ways. This can run counter to the privileging of the visual in Western cultures as spiritual practices intervene in the whole body and reorganise the senses, through practices such as yoga, meditation, praying, hymns, chanting, festivals, scents, candles and special foodstuffs. All this suggests that ways that we recognise the spiritual and the spirituality of ordinary life need to be expanded, so as to see better new ways that spirituality is being expressed and experienced.

As importantly, Cloke and Dewesbury (2009) evoke the entanglement between space and spirituality through the idea of ‘landscape’. For them, landscape is about embodied ways of being-in-the-world. Significantly, these landscapes are, like spirituality, built out of practices and performances as well as lived experiences. There is, then, no spirituality, no landscape, no spiritual landscape that simply has its own pre-formed intrinsic qualities. Landscape, then, suggests an indeterminate range of possible spatial relationships and geographical outcomes, one of which may indeed be ‘a landscape’, but equally it might be a sacred space or a roadside shrine or a haunted house (see also Olson, Hopkins and Kong, 2012). Dwyer (Chapter 7) shows how religious architecture has altered the landscape along Highway 99 in Vancouver. The juxtaposition of religious buildings creates its own effects. The road becomes a metaphor for the journey towards the divine. Rather than competing, or undermining claims to the one true path to the divine, the highway becomes a part of the practice of reaching the divine. As importantly, it becomes evidence of the divine, with everyday miracles and religious observances now set side by side (and within easy reach, if you have a car).

Following Lily Kong (2001), Cloke and Dewesbury reaffirm that the task is to consider the ways in which spaces become entangled with spirituality such that they become sacred. Sacred spaces are a product of the rituals, performances and practices that make space sacred. This may sound circular, but it indicates that spirituality can be understood through the ways that it produces spaces and spatial practices for itself. Consequently, churches and yoga retreats, pilgrimages and festivals, all highlight the particular spiritual practices through which spirituality is itself constituted (see for example Rose, 2010; and, Conradson, 2012). Thus, spirituality is not simply a matter of personal beliefs, as it is spatially performed and constituted. Indeed, the spaces and spatial practices of spirituality are revealing both of their underlying beliefs and also of how those beliefs sustain ways of inhabiting and producing the world (see Lea, 2009; or, Finlayson, 2012). This is easily witnessed: for example, in architectural plans for sacred spaces, in plans to travel to sacred sites, in the transformation of space during festivals, and in political activism of all kinds.

Even so, as Richard Scriven shows in Chapter 5, the spatial practices of spirituality are often quite marginal, both socially and spatially, yet can be thoroughly transformative. Indeed, the seeming marginality of pilgrimage can disguise its personal effects and affects. What is, then, less easily witnessed is the entanglement between spirituality, personal experience and other ways of being in the world. Indeed, the pilgrimage itself can often appear, especially in its mass forms, as if it is only performed, undertaken only so that it can be seen to be undertaken. Often, spirituality can be seen the same way. In Scriven’s hands, thinking through the entanglement between the performative and the experiential becomes a way to understand the significance of spirituality and spiritual transformation.

This performative and experiential understanding of spirituality – and indeed also of space – can unsettle the distinction between modernity and religion. On the surface, modernity might appear secular, profane, scientific and rational, while, on the other hand, religion may appear a legacy of pre-modern beliefs in superstition, in the supernatural, in animism and in magic. Yet, in this account, spirituality and modernity would appear entwined, imbricated, embroiled through their constitution of thoroughly modern sacred spaces and spatial practices. Thus, Tariq Jazeel (Chapter 4) unpicks the relationship between the sacred and the modern. He argues that the entwinement of Buddhism and modernity produced, what he calls, a tropical modern architectural space. This architecture, significantly, is both modern and spiritual. That is, as he says, that the space performs a secular modernity, upon which modern Sri Lanka relies, but the space is also recognizable as having a Buddhist structure of feeling. Rather than seeing the modern and the sacred as in opposition in this architectural space, it must be understood through its duality: both modern and sacred.

Understanding the sacred and the profane requires us to see them as relationally constituted, but also practised, performed and experienced; not separate, but entangled. In Chapter 10, Elizabeth Olson, Peter Hopkins and Giselle Vincett explore the ways that young people engage with religion by testing the limits of belief and spirituality through, what might be seen as, sacrilege. Olson, Hopkins and Vincett argue that the dichotomy of modernity and religion is actively unhelpful in understanding how people negotiate their personal and social lives through religion. Youthful spirituality does not, they argue, fall neatly into the category of religion. The dichotomy between the sacred and the profane has fallen. And not just this dichotomy. Thus, an attendance to spirituality also questions the relationship between the material and the immaterial. Taking spirituality into ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1 Spaces of spirituality: an introduction
• Section 1 Spaces of spiritual practices
• Section 2 The spiritual production of space
• Section 3 Spiritual transformations
• Index