The multivocality of space and the creation of heritages: New shrines in an old city (original) (raw)
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2021
This research is aimed at learning about the origins and functions of shrines, and changes to the pilgrimage movement in Poland during the Vatican II era (c. 1948–1998). The objective required finding and determining the following: (1) factors in the establishment of shrines in Poland during this time; (2) factors in the development of shrines with reference to the transformation of religious worship and to the influence of political factors in Poland; (3) changes in pilgrimage traditions in Poland, and (4) changes in the number of pilgrimages to selected shrines. These changes were determined by archive and library research. Additionally, field studies were performed at more than 300 shrines, including observations and in-depth interviews with custodians. Descriptive–analytical, dynamic–comparative and cartographic presentation methods were used to analyze results.
The question of how religious buildings should be appropriately reused has sparked a good deal of public discussion (particularly with regard to recent sales of churches to Muslim immigrants) but relatively little scholarly attention. In my view, however, the "serial use of religious space" provides a useful lens through which we can test and critique our theoretical understandings of religious spaces across traditions and time periods. Focusing on the temporal realities and transformations of religious space draws attention to a number of "problems" with our approaches, including 1.) underlying binaries of possession/non-possession and occupation/exile that inform much critical-spatial theory, 2.) the related assumption of power as power over rather than power to create in discussions of space as an authorizing agent, and 3.) the hegemony of internally-focused synchronic approaches that have the effect of essentializing religious space. This paper examines these and other problems and develops some suggestions toward addressing the "afterlives" of religious spaces by bringing into focus diachronic analyses, the palimpsest character of many religious sites, and their witness to relationships among multiple groups. The Polish Pavilion at the 11th Biennale of Architecture in Venice (2008) featured the collaborative photographic work of Nicolas Grospierre and Kobas Laksa, who examined the theme "The Afterlife of Buildings" in a series of photographs of recently erected buildings paired with photographic collages imagining their eventual reuse-that is, their afterlives. Among the several buildings the artists burlesqued was Polish architect Barbara Bielecka's Basilica of Our Lady of Licheń, a massive Roman Catholic church near Konin, Poland, completed in 2004. The afterlife conceived for this church depicted its reuse as-you guessed it-a water park. Grospierre and Laksa won the prestigious Golden Lion award for their entry in the Biennale, and the various pairings,
Catholic Sacred Places as Liminal and Living Cultural Heritage: A European Overview on Shrines
International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2023
This article presents Catholic shrines as living and liminal sacred spaces possessing an intrinsic vitality that exerts a specific attraction not only for believers and visitors but also for the territory that surrounds them. As a place of devotion and pilgrimage destination, they are a complex system from the social, cultural, symbolic economic, and political perspectives. The essay aims to describe Catholic sacred places are a "detector" of the secular/religious contact in the field of cultural heritage. They are religious spaces that respond to the primary characteristics of heritage production but escape any single consideration in that area. Being sacred places, they get exposed to a continuous movement between immanence and transcendence which is the same movement that characterises the creation of heritage, responding to mechanisms of permanentisation of liminality.
Religious heritages as spatial phenomena: Constructions, experiences, and selections
Anthropological Notebooks, 2020
This special issue explores the relationship between religious heritages and space. We will approach religious heritages as spatial phenomena to analyse how heritages are constructed, manifested, lived and experienced, celebrated and cherished but also neglected, disputed or contested through and in space(s). This introductory paper starts by untangling religious and heritage discourses triggered by the July 2020 Hagia Sophia transformation into a mosque. Furthermore, we refer to anthropological theorisations of religious and heritage and the ambiguity of sacralisation and heritagisation. Diverse theories of space and interconnectivity of time and spatial dimensions in the context of religious heritage sites are presented as inspiring tools for anthropologically oriented studies. While cases analysed in this special issue concern European societies (in England, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland), broader theoretical questions are instructive and could be applied to other geographical locations, especially when heritage discourses and processes of heritagisation interact with various conceptualisations of sacred and secular.
Traditiones: SACRED SPACE AND PLACE AND THEIR SYMBOLIC ADOPTION / SVETI PROSTOR IN KRAJ IN NJUNO SIMBOLNO PRISVAJANJE , 2018
An ethnographic narrative from Israel, with its sacred sites marked by war and destruction, explores the dynamics of absence and presence, of imagination and reality of religious dwelling places. This idea of a chapel of placelessness underlies an ethnographic field diary written in the summer 2015 in Israel. Sacred spaces offer their presence built on absence, on layers of cultural memory. The focal point of my diary is the town and the sacred sites of Nazareth, built on the incarnation of the word, and, more concretely, on Mary’s house. It is an everyday dwelling place in local narratives, and a centre point of worldwide pilgrimage. Yet, at the same time, the House of Mary is itself imagined as a travelling chapel, absent, but ubiquitously present in innumerable Loreto churches. *** Etnografska pripoved iz Izraela in njegovih svetih krajev, ki sta jih zaznamovali uničenje in vojna, razgrinja dinamiko o odsotnosti in navzočnosti, o imaginaciji in resničnosti svetih bivanjskih krajev. Zamisli o kapeli brez kraja je podlaga etnografski terenski dnevnik, pisan poleti 2015 v Izraelu. Sveti kraji so ponavzočeni z odsotnostjo, na plasteh kulturnega spomina. Žarišče dnevnika je sveti kraj Nazaret, zgrajen na utelešenju sveta ali, določneje, na Marijini hiši. V lokalnih pripovedih je to vsakdanje bivališče in središčni kraj svetovnega romanja, vendar je Marijina hišica hkrati zamišljena kot potujoča kapela, odsotna, vendar vsepovsodno navzoča v brezštevilnih loretskih cerkvah.
Studies in Political and Historical Geography, 2019
The main purpose of this article was to present contemporary narratives (social and scientific discourse) about the Evangelical cemeteries of Masuria, based on the examples of the activities under two projects, whose common denominator are the restoration of memory and the protection of cultural heritage. The present elaboration concerns selected issues of the functioning of the tangible cultural heritage in the Masuria region (in Pasym and one of the deserted villages). This piece of writing also describes how the spaces of Protestant cemeteries can be interpreted anew, especially as a result of documentative works.
RES, 2021
The sacred space is the place where the transcendent becomes immanent, and where the devotee can access God. The sacrality of such places stays thus as a topographical immanence of God. However, our contemporary world witnesses contrasting approaches to sacred spaces. While in some parts of the globe (especially in Western Europe) there is a decrease in the interest for religious buildings, as places for worship, due to the decline of the number of practicing believers, and such buildings are sometimes repurposed as public institutions, hotels or restaurants. In other regions one can testify to a renewal of intense attention directed towards religious architecture and sacred spaces manifested especially in Orthodox communities, in the Balkans and other places as well. These contradictory tendencies and dynamics in understanding the role of sacred buildings highlight the exploitation of sacred spaces as areas for the affirmation of religious identity and negotiation of power resorts.
The present collection of papers “Creating and Representing Sacred Spaces” brings together scholars from different fields of the humanities opening a great variety of per- spectives on sacred spaces. They share a common starting point in being convinced that a fruitful discourse on the spatial dimension of human praxis is not to be achieved through discussing only the ‘big issues’ of the theoretical debates on ‘space’. Rather, the contributors keep close contact to the materials themselves – not because theoreti- cal questions are considered to be unimportant, but because they insist on the impor- tance of understanding each other’s material and the specific perspective on this mate- rial in detail as a fruitful way to develop a common set of questions as a discursive framework. Thus, ‘space’ is not used as a clearly defined notion to set the boundaries of the collection of papers. It is used as a discourse-generating notion in a transdisci- plinary effort to understand different perspectives on and aspects of sacred spaces.
This symposium promotes the concept of “sacred space(s)” as a point of entry for bringing together recent theoretical work on space and place with the study of culture and the study/anthropology of religion. Furthermore, the symposium explores the changing, and at times conflicting, imaginations of the “sacred” and their role in the making and unmaking of specific spatial configurations and features in past and present contexts. The goal of the symposium is twofold: first, it aims at fostering an interdisciplinary dialogue in the study of spatial(izing) formations of the “sacred” and its cultural dynamics. Second, by focusing on the multiple layers, inner frictions and dynamics of “sacred space(s)”, it attempts to challenge an analytical vocabulary that is based on conventional dichotomies such as religious/secular, traditional/modern or sacred/profane.
S tat e , R e l i g i o n a n d C h u R C h (2 0 1 6) 3 (2) : 7 9 – 1 0 1 The culture of neighborhood with all its details that makes up the cultural mosaic of the Balkans is manifested at the level of popular religiosi-ty, in particular, in the cases of mixed pilgrimages and popular shrines with shared practices. Such interaction between communities belonging to different cultural and religious traditions assumes various forms and patterns. This paper focuses on one such example, a holy site of joint devotion by Muslims and Christians, the Zajde Bašće shrine in Niš, which maintains the traditional practice of ziyārāt within a changing social and cultural environment. The main role in maintaining this tradition is played by the local Roma minority. Recently the shrine went through certain changes: the common old narrative about the Muslim nature of the cult was complemented by another one, with a clear multicultural emphasis. The study of narratives, the site' s architectonics, and the co-practices of visitors help us to understand the correlation between competing discourses and to identify patterns of interreligious interaction. R ELIGIOUS culture in the Balkans is notable for its pluralism on the formal (confessional) level as well as on the popular (extra-confessional) level. The religious situation in the Balkans can be likened to a multi-colored mosaic made up of elements of various proportions and forms. This image of religious daily life is related to the region's historically conditioned ethno-confessional diversity. As a logical consequence of this, a developed culture of neighborhood has