This session explores agency and sacred space in four different instantiations: land-owning deities, built religious space, liminal passages, and ontological others. In each of these papers, territories are created, borders established, and structures built. Movement is key in this generative process. Of course, territories, borders, and buildings can restrict movement, but as people and deities (are) move(d) through and within these spaces, they create, reinforce, and inscribe themselves and their actions on these spaces. These papers offer diverse perspectives on this process by showing how space is created by the migrant, the divine, the earth, and the initiate. Finally, these papers demonstrate the connections between humans and space. Divine spaces demand recognition from the state; they “observe, recollect, and feel;” they frame human identity; and they impose identities on “people crossing through [them who are deemed] as outside the human.”
In the largely rural landscape of the Kullu district in the North Indian hill-state of Himachal Pradesh, most villages are presided over by territorial village deities which exercise significant influence over the everyday lives of their followers. Many of these deities are recognised as land-owning ‘perennial minors’ by the district administration. The deities are active agents who speak through their mediums and move through their chariots. Drawing from my fieldwork conducted in 2021-2022, I aim to discuss how these moving, territorial deities shape sacred landscape through pilgrimages, territorial surveys and festivals. I also aim to look at oral traditions around these deities to explore how they sustain the deities’ historic ties to the landscape of Kullu. In a context where the State officially recognises the presence and land-ownership of deities, I wish to explore the role of the state in sustaining a sacred landscape.
In this paper, I analyze the narrative descriptions in the Pachomian corpus in order to construct a detailed description of the process of entry for a beginner joining a Pachomian monastery, with an emphasis on the religious landscapes involved, which is presented in the literature as a stark contrast between the chaotic, dangerous desert outside the walls, and the ideal, sacred space set apart by the monastery. Entry through the front gatehouse, then, marks the liminal passage from the harsh desert wilderness to a life of order, peace, and holiness, so the rituals and architecture of the gatehouse are significant for framing and imagining one’s new life and identity.
In the Holy Quran, the earth, an inanimate space and place, is promised by God to be given a voice to “declare” and testify about the actions of the humans who lived upon it. Built structures such as mosques, both located upon earth and made of earthen materials, become creatures of memory. Engaging traditional Islamic cosmology, built structures of American Muslim worship are more than public spaces of congregation, but also deeply intimate, animate interiors who observe, recollect, and feel. Through a serious engagement with the sacred memory of American Masajid, new dimensions of communal ritual are made evident.
With Mircea Eliade, Borders are theorized as an act of worldmaking where “foreign and unoccupied” space becomes settled and inhabited through an ordering of chaos in and through the sacred. The religious man remains near the divine while the chaotic outside carries “demons, foreigners” and the “souls of the dead.”
With Sylvia Wynter, these structural ontological oppositions (divine/demon, order/chaos) are seen as mapped onto the landscape itself. Ontological divides appear inside geographies as certain areas are deemed “habitable” while others are “unhabitable.” Dominant discourses are infused into the space/landscape of the Border in order relocate space and people crossing through as outside the human.
In the location of chaos, what is space for the migrant moving through the violence of such enclosure? What is the pressure migrants crossing these borders enact on dominant spatial formations? What are the geographies built by them as they traverse these spaces?