Toward a Geography of “Religion”: Mapping the Distribution of an Unstable Signifier

Abstract

Recent religious studies scholarship has examined the historical and cultural variability by which ''religion'' and ''the sacred'' have been constructed by scholars and by the public. This article argues that geographers of religion must take these deconstructive arguments to heart. Rather than assuming there is a universal feature of human life called ''religion,'' the author argues that the religious and the sacred should be studied by geographers as ways of distributing particular kinds of significance across geographic spaces. Rooted in modern distinctions of religious/secular and sacred/profane and in the Enlightenment urge to classify, constructs of religion are efforts to demarcate, purify, and territorialize. Postmodernization exacerbates the individualization of religion but also destabilizes the boundary between the sacred and the profane. If religion is, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, a ''recent invention'' that, with a shift in structural relations, might ''be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,'' the elements that have made up this thing called religion will certainly persist in other forms, and it is the task of geographers of religion to trace the changing orchestrations of those significances across space and place.

An Inter-religious Basis for a Denominational Religious Education: A Paradox?

“…This diversity is reflected not only at macro levels but also at micro levels. Ivakiv's (2006) suggestion to consider religion and life stances in terms of "distributed significance" makes sense precisely because there is not only difference between traditions but also in the way people live, understand and express those traditions. It is one thing to be a Muslim living in Arab and Near East regions, and another to be a Muslim in, say, Singapore.…”

“…While agreeing that the term religion is a constructed category aimed at distinguishing situations, concepts and ideologies from others, such as magic from religion, or science from superstition, Ivakiv (2006) advances the idea of understanding religion as a distributed significance across spaces. The plurality and complexity of a post-modern western society and the globalisation brought about by information and communication technology, by politics and by the media require the continuous outlining of (re)distributions and (re)configuration of meanings and practices.…”

Planning with Resurgent religion: informality and gray spacing of the urban landscape

“…Asad brilliantly denounces religion as a definite or universal category and makes way for an understanding of the concept as the outcome of varying histories of discursive narratives (1993). Following his analysis, Ivakhiv (2006) recently challenged geographers to take seriously the study of the phenomena of sacrality and religion as ways to distribute significance over space. In order to avoid an essentialist approach to religion and fall back on the problematic definitions of religion previously criticized by Asad, I use this term rather loosely here as the sum total of understandings and spatial activities which are understood and labeled by those who perform them as emanating from religion.…”

Las romerías, oportunidad turística y relaciones sociales entre locales y visitantes. El caso de la Cerdanya en Cataluña

“…Entre otros autores, destacan los trabajos de Morinis, 1983;Esteve, 2002;Tilson, 2005;Andrés y Espejo, 2006;Brace et al, 2006;Buttimer, 2006;Cànoves, 2006;Ferber, 2006;Ivakhiv, 2006;Blackwell, 2007;Collins-Kreiner, 2010;Cànoves y Blanco, 2011;Lois y López, 2012;Millan et al, 2012;Shinde, 2012;Maddrell y della Dora, 2013;Olsen, 2013;Wilson et al, 2013;Cànoves et al, 2014;Cebrián y García, 2014;Cors, 2014;López Palomeque y Font, 2014;Pardellas y Padin, 2014;Uriely et al, 2015;Cànoves y Prat, 2016;Llurdés, 2016. Por otra parte, también se está modificando la actitud de los residentes hacia los turistas, teniendo en cuenta, que una actitud es "un estado mental de disposición para responder que ejerce una influencia directa sobre la conducta" (Royo y Ruiz, 2009). Entre los factores más influyentes en las actitudes de los residentes hacia el turismo, se encuentran fundamentalmente dos: el tipo y grado de interacción entre los residentes y visitantes y la importancia de la actividad turística en el territorio (Murphy, 1983).…”