The Location of Religion

A Spatial Analysis

Kim Knott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317313687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The ways in which humans interact with their location is an important topic within sociological studies of religion. It is integral to the place of religion in secular society. 'The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis' offers an overview of the ways in which religion can be located within social, cultural and physical space. It examines contemporary spatial theory - notably the work of the influential sociologist Henri Lefebvre - and the many disciplines that have contributed to the spatial study of religion. This volume will be invaluable to all those interested in the role of religion in spatial analysis.

Part I The Development of a Spatial Approach for the Study of Religion

Chapter 1 Opening Up Space for the Study of Religion

DOI: 10.4324/9781315652641-3

Like ‘religion’, ‘space’, ‘place’ and ‘location’ are concepts that have helped people to think about their social, cultural, and physical experience, their relationships to other people, things, and the cosmos. There is a history of thinking about space, place, and location, and there continues to be a lively debate about their meaning. It would be inappropriate to go into these in any detail here, but this dynamic interpretative process does suggest the need for me to clarify my use of these terms. As I hope to show in the discussion that follows, the framework for my analysis emerges from late-twentieth-century conceptions of space, articulated principally by Henri Lefebvre and a group of radical social geographers, that are self-consciously geared to contemporary global circumstances and their interpretation.

My perspective takes its inspiration and much of its method from the project of Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space.¹ I cannot claim to share his personal and intellectual engagement with Marxism,² but I am inspired by his enthusiasm for a spatial analysis and his hope that it offers a transdisciplinary and timely approach to the understanding of social and political relations, as well as the possibility of uniting previously separated fields of enquiry.³ Within the study of religions there has long been recognition of the value of a polymethodic approach, irrespective of the underlying conceptualisation of ‘religion’ itself. What Lefebvre offers is more than a conjoining of methods from different disciplines, however. He proposes a theoretical reunification of the physical, mental, and social dimensions of our lived experience.⁴ The scholar of religions is thus offered a potentially useful analytical approach to material, ideological, and social forms of religion and their embeddedness in a broader network of social and cultural relations.

¹ I have focused on this book in particular, with reference to several others, but have not made a complete study of Lefebvre’s works, written over a lifetime spanning the twentieth century (1901–91). I have used English translations of his works. ² Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 419–21; Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); Elden, ‘Politics, Philosophy, Geography’; Andy Merrifield, ‘Henri Lefebvre: A Socialist in Space’, in Crang and Thrift (eds.), Thinking Space, pp. 167–82; Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, ‘Henri Lefebvre in Contexts: An Introduction’, Antipode 33.5 (2001), pp. 763-68; Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). ³ On ‘unitary theory’ and transdisciplinarity, see Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 11, 413. ⁴ Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 11: ‘The aim is to discover or construct a theoretical unity between “fields” which are apprehended separately…the fields we are concerned with are, first, the physical–nature, the cosmos; secondly, the mental, including logical and formal abstractions; and, thirdly, the social’.

The discussion that follows, whilst being derived initially from Lefebvre’s commentary upon social space and its production, is informed also by a wider, but not exhaustive, reading in social geography and social and cultural theory. This reading no doubt reflects my own interests, the availability of resources and my idiosyncratic route through them.⁵ The purpose of the discussion in this chapter is to explain what I understand by space and to identify the general terms of a spatial approach to religion by briefly reviewing a number of issues, particularly the material and metaphorical uses of spatial terminology, the body, the social nature of space, the relations between space and time, and space and power, and key terms such as place and location, and their relationship to space.

⁵ I shall return to the issue of my own standpoint in Chapter 3.

Material and Metaphorical Space

In the majority of polite enquiries about this project it has been important to signal at an early stage the significance of both material and metaphorical understandings of space. Once it is clear that I do not mean outer space, the listener often settles for an image of abstract space. Yet even that proves difficult to imagine into a meaningful relationship with religion. Abstract space–with its roots in the geometrical space of Euclid and, later, Descartes–conveys a sense of emptiness, of being a passive container for bodies and objects, of being homogeneous. Such a space may contain religion or even be a tabula rasa or backdrop against which it is enacted, but how can it illuminate religion, let alone provide the terms for a spatial analysis?⁶

⁶ This view is supported by Edward S. Casey who writes that ‘space on the modernist conception ends by failing to locate things or events in any sense other than that of pinpointing positions on a planiform geometric or cartographic grid’ (The Fate of Place: A Philosophical Enquiry [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], p. 201). 1See also Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Chapters 4 and 5.

In an effort to unseat this image, which is very far from what I intend in a spatial analysis, my next move is to introduce the idea that space or rather spaces are both material and metaphorical, physical and imagined. A powerful religious example of this comes from the Hindu religious tradition of Vaishnavism in the form of Braja, the land of the young Hindu god Krishna.⁷ Braja is an actual geographical region in north India, noted for its forests, holy rivers, and town of Vrindavan. It is associated with the childhood mythology of Krishna, being the place where he sported with his cowherder friends and wooed Radha. It is the site where, in the sixteenth century, Rupa and Sanatana Goswami, two Vaishnava theologians, theorised about love of God. But Braja has other dimensions too. It is an imagined space, alive in the minds and hearts of devotees, poets, artists, and theologians alike, in which Krishna sports eternally with his followers.⁸

⁷ Vaishnavism is the name given to the religion of those who worship Vishnu or one of his incarnations, usually Krishna or Rama. For more on Braja and the worship of Krishna, see David L. Haberman, Journey Through the Twelve Forests: An Encounter with Krishna (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), and David R. Kinsley, The Sword and the Flute (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). ⁸ Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), reflecting upon Western cities, writes of ‘a strange toponymy that is detached from actual places and flies high over the city like a foggy geography of “meanings”…a second poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning’ (pp. 104-105).

Vrindavan, at the spiritual heart of Braja, is–for servants of Krishna–the place where liberation may be achieved. It is the place to leave the body, to die. It is also the place to live in mind and spirit for, as devotees are fond of saying, ‘Wherever you are is Vrindavan!’. The devotee’s body, ritually marked with sandalwood paste, becomes the temple of the Lord; Krishna dances on the tongue of the chanting devotee. The pastimes of Krishna in Vrindavan are thus extended beyond its physical boundaries by those who worship him and spread the teachings associated with him elsewhere in India or beyond.⁹ Both material and metaphorical Vrindavans are the spaces of Vaishnava devotional practice. It would be a mistake, however, to dissociate this poetics of Vrindavan from the politics of the town and the religious ideology associated with it, an ideology that may discipline and oppress as often as it liberates.¹⁰

⁹ Related issues on the embodiment and transplantation of Krishna beyond Vrindavan and India are dealt with by Nye in his discussion of the placing of Krishna in rural Hertfordshire, England: Malory Nye, Multiculturalism and Minority Religions in Britain: Krishna Consciousness, Religious Freedom, and the Politics of Location (Richmond: Curzon, 2001), pp. 51–66. ¹⁰ The poetics and politics of sacred space are discussed by David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal in their introduction to American Sacred Space (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). See Chapter 4.

In the case of references to Braja, material and metaphorical spaces are irrevocably linked together by the mythic narrative of Krishna’s youth and his pastimes. In other cases, however, a reference to an imagined or cultural space in an intellectual context may bear no obvious relation to a material base. Spatial metaphors may seem to float freely from what were once their moorings, and this may create confusion about what is meant by the spaces to which they refer. In the opening pages of The Production of Space, Lefebvre chastises Foucault:

[He] never explains what space it is that he is referring to, nor how it bridges the gap between the theoretical (epistemological) realm and the practical one, between mental and social, between the space of the philosophers and the space of the people who deal with material things.¹¹

¹¹ Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 4. For Foucault on his use of spatial metaphors in The Order of Things, see Michel Foucault, ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 239–56 (254), and for references to Foucault’s spatial terminology in The Archaeology of Knowledge, see Jeremy R. Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 105, 173–75.

This matters for two reasons. First, the failure to interrogate the material roots of theoretical spaces may result in the production of knowledge which itself seems to be extra-ideological.¹² Secondly, a lack of clarity on the relationship between mental and material spaces leads to an inadequate account of the nature of space itself, especially the place of the body in understanding it.¹³ In recent years, some scholars have called for the re-materialisation of social and cultural geography.¹⁴

¹² Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 6. ¹³ See discussion of the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson below. ¹⁴ In particular, see Peter Jackson, ‘Rematerializing Social and Cultural Geography’, Social and Cultural Geography 1.1 (2000), pp. 9–14, and for a critique, Matthew B. Kearnes, ‘Geographies that Matter–The Rhetorical Deployment o...