CONCLUSION

Religion is firmly interwoven in the fabric of culture. Religions vary greatly from one region to another, creating diversity so profound as to give special significance to James Griffith’s admonition that we should all “learn, respect, and walk softly.” Yet religions tend to share some common elements, the most basic being that they provide a structure of faith that anchors communities. This religious spatial variation leads us to ask how these distributions came to be, a question best answered by examining methods of cultural diffusion. Some religions actively encourage their own diffusion through missionary activity or conquest. Other religions erect barriers to expansion diffusion by restricting membership to one particular ethnic group. People, as well, are set in motion thanks to spiritual practices, most notably pilgrimages.

In today’s globalizing world, it is worth exploring how—or even if—the world’s great religions will become significantly modified in response to changing contexts. The common practice of Internetbased religious practice brings into focus the debates over the importance of place in a global world.

The theme of nature-culture reveals some fundamental ties between religion and the physical environment. One major function of many religious systems, particularly the animistic faiths, is to appease and placate the forces of nature in order to achieve and maintain harmony between humans and the physical environment. Plants and animals diffuse—or not—with the spread of religions. The followers of various religions differ in their outlooks on environmental modification by humans.

The cultural landscape abounds with expressions of religious belief. Places of worship—mosques, temples, churches, megachurches, and shrines—differ in appearance, distinctiveness, prominence, and frequency of occurrence from one religious culture region to another. These buildings provide a visual index to the various faiths, as do their related architectural elements. Cemeteries and sacred spaces also add a special effect to the landscape that tells us about the religious character of the population. In all these ways, and more, the five themes of cultural geography prove relevant to the study of the world’s religions.

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DOING GEOGRAPHY

The Making of Sacred Spaces

For this exercise, you will use Professor Kenneth Foote’s ideas about how spaces become sacred. In his book Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy, Foote argues that what a society chooses to forget about its past is at least as important as what it remembers in shaping an image of itself that can be presented to the world. Foote discusses how certain places in the United States have, or have not, become sacred sites. He notes, for example, that the battlefields of the Revolutionary and Civil wars are well marked and visited by thousands every year. Yet the 1692 execution site of the supposed witches of Salem, Massachusetts, is unmarked. How could the exact site of such an infamous event in U.S. history be impossible to locate? Foote realized that this scenario was not limited to the United States, writing, “Indeed, soon after my first trip to Salem, I found myself in Berlin before the reunification of Germany. There I came across similar places—Nazi sites such as the Gestapo headquarters and Reich chancellery—that have lain vacant since just after World War II and seem to be scarred permanently by shame.”

Professor Foote suggests that sites of important events can be sanctified, obliterated, purposely ignored, or fall somewhere in between. Sanctified sites are set apart from other sites, are carefully maintained, are often publicly owned, and attract annual visitors and ceremonies. At the other end of the spectrum, the sites of particularly shameful, stigmatized, or violent events simply may be obliterated from the landscape in an attempt to forget about them.

Steps to Understanding Sacred Spaces

When people are unsure of how an event fits into their history, the site where the event occurred may inhabit a sort of limbo, remaining unmarked until the society in question comes to terms with the event. This is the case with many sites of racially motivated, violent, or shameful acts in the United States, such as the Memphis, Tennessee, motel where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, or the Manzanar, California, internment camp where Japanese Americans were confined during World War II. Only recently have both sites become prominent on the landscape after decades of neglect. Consider the following questions:

Are any newsworthy events happening now that may mark a place as a site of tragedy?

What sites, whether nearby or far away, do you expect to become more sacred over time?

Can you think of an event that is so horrific that the place where it occurred will be forever forgotten and erased from the map?

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This large statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe inhabits the corner of the parking lot of Self-Help Graphics and Art, an artists’ cooperative in East Los Angeles. According to Michael Amezcua, a metalwork artist at Self-Help, neighborhood residents actively use this shrine, leaving offerings and petitions to the Virgin in the outdoor grotto. Every December 12th, neighborhood residents gather here to celebrate the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

We could interpret this unique parking lot shrine to be a variation on the yard shrine, a common feature of the residential landscape of the southwestern United States. Throughout the Mexican American homeland of the Southwest, it is common to see a small shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe in people’s front yards. This, in turn, is a variation on the Mexican custom of maintaining elaborate shrines and altars to important religious figures. These are sometimes located inside the house in a space reserved especially for altars (called a nicho). Or they can be located outside the house, near the front door, because Mexican homes usually do not have yard space in front of the house. On December 12th, altars all over Mexico and Mexican American areas in the United States are elaborately decorated with candles, ribbons, and flowers. Devotees of the Virgin of Guadalupe celebrate with family and neighbors throughout the night. Since turquoise blue is considered to be the favorite color of the Virgin of Guadalupe, this color abounds. Because the Virgin of Guadalupe is also the official patron saint of Mexico, the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag are prevalent in altar decorations.

In Miami, another Latino population center in the United States, yard shrines are built to La Virgen de la Caridad de Cobre. Like the Virgin of Guadalupe, La Virgen de la Caridad is an American manifestation of the Virgin Mary. This Virgin hails from the copper mining village of Cobre, in Cuba. She is believed to protect seafarers and has been adopted by Cuban rafters as their patron saint. Yemayá, who is an orisha, or spirit, in the Afrocentric Cuban religious tradition of Santería, is often equated with La Virgen de la Caridad de Cobre, as both are associated with the sea.

What does the fact that this particular shrine is built in a parking lot rather than a yard say about what, and how, spaces become sacred? Can you think of a more mundane place than a parking lot for such a hallowed figure as the Virgin of Guadalupe?Perhaps the drive-through architecture of strip malls, highways, and parking lots that is so closely associated with the urban landscape of Los Angeles has something to do with it. Where else, other than in Los Angeles, would you find a sacred parking lot?

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Match each of the terms on the left with its definition on the right. Click on the term first and then click on the matching definition. As you match them correctly they will move to the bottom of the activity.

Question

You can learn more about the geography of religion on the Internet at the following web sites:

BBC News Europe. 2011. Halal and Kosher Hit by Dutch Ban. 6 November video. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15610142.

Eliade, Mircea. 1987 [1957]. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Willard R. Trask (trans.). San Diego: Harcourt.

Foote, Kenneth E. 1997. Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Griffith, James S. 1992. Beliefs and Holy Places: A Spiritual Geography of the Pimería Alta. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Hobbs, Joseph J. 1995. Mount Sinai. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Huntsinger, Lynn, and María Fernández-Giménez. 2000. “Spiritual Pilgrims at Mount Shasta, California”. Geographical Review 90: 536-558.

Newport, Frank. 2012. God Is Alive and Well: The Future of Religion in America. New York: Gallup Press.

Raban, Jonathan. 1996. Bad Land: An American Romance. New York: Pantheon.

Rashtogi, Nina Shen. 2010. “Is Kosher Better for the Planet?” The Washington Post, 2 February. http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2010-02-02/opinions/36839736_1_kosher-meat-halal-meat-kosher-products.

Singh, Rana P. B. 1994. “Water Symbolism and Sacred Landscape in Hinduism.” Erdkunde 48: 210-227.

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Warf, Barney and Morton Winsberg. 2010. “Geographies of Megachurches in the United States.” Journal of Cultural Geography 27(1): 33-51.

Worthen, Molly. 2012. “One Nation Under God?” The New York Times Sunday Review, 22 December. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/opinion/sunday/american-christianity-and-secularism-at-a-crossroads.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

(For additional suggested readings, see the Contemporary Human Geography LaunchPad: http://www.macmillanhighered.com/launchpad/DomoshCHG1e.)

Esposito, John, Susan Tyler Hitchcock, Desmond Tutu, and Mpho Tutu. 2004. Geography of Religion: Where God Lives, Where Pilgrims Walk. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic. In the tradition of National Geographic magazine, this comprehensive reference book is beautifully illustrated.

Falah, Ghazi-Walid, and Caroline Nagel (eds.). 2005. Geographies of Muslim Women: Gender, Religion, and Space. New York: Guilford Press. A collection of chapters by geographers that highlights the diversity of women’s experiences across the Islamic world.

Hart, John. 2006. Sacramental Commons: A Christian Ecological Ethics. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. The author suggests that local places and communities provide “sacraments,” or signs of divine presence, which give rise to an awareness of human interconnected-ness with all living things and our moral duty to care for the planet.

Murray, Stuart A. P. 2009. Hammond Atlas of World Religions: A Visual History of Our Great Faiths. Irvington, N.Y.: Hylas. Takes a historical look at the development of the world’s religions. This atlas contains beautifully rendered historical and topical maps, along with many photographs.

O’Brien, Joanne, and Martin Palmer. 2007. The Atlas of Religion: Mapping Contemporary Challenges and Beliefs. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Maps the nature, extent, and influence of the world’s major religions. Depicts how religions spread across space, their role in global issues such as hunger as well as conflict, and the locations of sacred places.

Orsi, Robert A. 2005. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars who Study Them. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Examines twentieth-century American Catholicism and how people forge ties to heaven and Earth through their relationships to the Virgin Mary and the saints.

Stump, Roger W. 2008. The Geography of Religion: Faith, Place, and Space. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. An overview of a geographer’s approach to studying religion, encompassing their growth and spread, the diverse geographical scales that religion engages, and sacred spaces.

Timothy, Dallen J., and Daniel H. Olsen (eds.). 2006. Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys. London: Routledge. Acknowledging that faith is still the primary reason people travel, this collection of essays provides case studies of religious tourism and pilgrimage.

Tomalin, Emma. 2009. Biodivinity and Biodiversity: The Limits of Religious Environmentalism. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate. Argues that environmentalism may be a romantic Western notion which poorer nations cannot easily subscribe to. Case studies from India and Britain trace environmental concerns in divergent religious and material contexts.

Tweed, Thomas. 2008. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. This book’s premise is that religion is about movement, connection, and life as lived, rather than a static entity pinned to a certain place.