Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Sacred Geography: Definitions

The central concern of this module is the analysis of sacred geography: its construction, its operations, and its interactions with physical geography. The latter spatial form is certainly not fixed or closed to redefinition. People apply different, often competing, meanings to discrete chunks of physical topography, and they radically transform the appearance and composition of their environments. Even mountains and oceans change, seemingly of their own accord, across Braudel’s longue durée. Nevertheless, physical geography is susceptible to being mapped through the tools of modern cartography. The features and boundaries of sacred geography, which mostly lack tangible forms, cannot be precisely mapped with the coordinates of latitude and longitude, or with the tools of GIS systems. But I have framed these definitions in the negative, in terms of what it is not. What is sacred geography?

It is a type of imaginative geography, both in the sense that it is a spatiality that we can represent but not actually see, and in the sense of a spatiality that people construct as they assert, or attempt to assert, power.  Societies create sacred geography, or sacred space, as the territory affiliated with the divine—deities, ancestors, cosmological forces—and imbue it with an existence that is separate from, but intimately connected to, our own world. They construct it as fluid and indeterminate, a form of territory that exists both nowhere and, potentially, everywhere The ability to determine how sacred and physical geographies intersect depends upon whether or not a socio-political group holds sufficient power to assert its spiritual beliefs within specific territories, particularly in the face of counter efforts by other socio-political groups.

Although sacred geography is a human construct, it has been imbued with its own organizing logics, and with powers to shape human affairs. Therefore, sacred space does not simply exist, it also acts upon the physical world and its residents, and it imparts meanings to the territories with which it is associated. The following pages explore representations and architectures of sacred geography, and the everyday practices through which people create pathways through which the divine can manifest within and affect the physical world.

 

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