‘God was with me everywhere’: women’s embodied practices and everyday experiences of sacred space in Czechia

In this paper, we approach religion and spirituality through the analytic lens of the everyday and examine how ordinary women make sacred space through their embodied, emotional, and spatially varying practices. Our research is grounded in Czechia where about 80% of inhabitants do not declare any religious affiliation and ‘new’ religions are on the rise. We deploy auto-photography as a method that invites participants’ own visual representations and interpretative narrations of their quotidian experiences. Thirty-eight Christian, Buddhist, and non-religious women participated in this study in 2016. Our analysis of photographs and interviews shows that our participants turn places that are not primarily associated with religion or spirituality (such as a kitchen sink or a bus stop) into sacred or spiritual places while at the same time integrate officially sacred spaces (such as churches and meditation centers) into their daily lives through social activities. Thus, we argue that a mutually transformative process is taking place in contemporary Czechia. In this process, religiously affiliated and non-affiliated women alike transform everyday spaces into sacred sites through their embodied and emotional practices that seek calmness, peace, and transcendence. At the same time, women who participate in organized religions remake the sacrality of officially sacred sites through their emphasis on social connections and feelings of communal belonging and shared identity. Our findings underscore that sacred space is not fixed in any one location and its production involves the continual emotional and material investment by ordinary women.     

Missionaries and Jews in Soho: ‘Strangers within Our Gates’

This article draws on historical evidence about everyday life and social practices in Soho to reconstruct the extent and mode of religious conflict in a neighbourhood which historians have traditionally viewed as an area of relative religious tolerance. It focuses on a weekly children's prayer meeting conducted by Methodist missionaries in the summer of 1900 at the epicentre of the Soho Jewish community. For the Jews the meeting was an intrusion but nonetheless epitomised the tacit negotiations that distilled into what Gerry Black calls an ‘absence of disharmony’ between Soho Jews and their neighbours. More generally, the encounter exemplifies British Jews' daily confrontations with the dense network of Christian practices and institutions of their adopted homeland. While historians have documented many episodes of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence in London, Jews' experience of daily life also involved a less visible, less dramatic and more chronic tension, one that the study of everyday practices brings into relief. At the same time, the prayer meeting is a reminder that members of national religious and philanthropic organisations like the Methodist mission were active participants in the daily lives of the districts where they were situated; their staffs could be held to neighbourhood rules of courtesy and mutual aid. Thus, the article maps the conflicts, negotiations and compromises between different ethnicities and religions that were played out in the spaces and routines of everyday life.     

The Sunday morning journey to church considered as a form of ‘micro-pilgrimage’

Using mixed methods data, the social significance and narrative of local journeys to church on a Sunday morning are examined and reframed as a form of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage studies over the last 30 years have criticized the concept proposed by Turner and Turner of pilgrimage as entirely opposite and peripheral to social structures and relation. Recent literature has reinterpreted Turner and Turner’s terminology of ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’, developing these ideas to identify the continuities that remain between much of everyday life and contemporary pilgrimage. Furthermore, there has been a shift in focus, prompted by interest in mobilities, from pilgrimage centres to recognize the significance of the journey to such centres. This paper advances the discussion further to argue that local scale journeys to church should be considered as a form of micro-pilgrimage: local journeys to church services that can form part of a break from daily social structures to be used to prepare oneself for the act of worship or immersion in the social relations based in the church. The concept of micro-pilgrimages therefore recognizes that these journeys can, like longer pilgrimages, contain qualities of liminality and communitas that combine social and religious significance and meaning for the pilgrim.     

Women’s everyday spirituality in Diamond Way Buddhism: an auto-photographic study

The Western world is experiencing increasing popularity of new religious movements whose adherents tend to spirituality, a subjective, personal form of religion. These spiritual forms shape the spaces of everyday life, their meanings, perceptions, and experiences, which is starting to be reflected in new geographies of religion. In Czechia, one of the most rapidly growing new religious movements is Diamond Way Buddhism. This contribution focuses on how Diamond Way spirituality is lived and experienced in space. The paper explores this phenomenon using the method of auto-photography. We asked six women to photograph places important to them in their daily lives and interpret their spiritual meaning. This method allows exploration of women’s spirituality in the everyday spaces where it is perceived and experienced, such as kitchens, buses, or natural sites. The results show that women have a specific way of experiencing Buddhism in seemingly secular space which they describe through feminine characteristics of transcendence. Everyday spaces become spiritual through the subjects’ emotional and continual experiencing of Buddhism, while the officially sacred space of a Buddhist center is incorporated into everyday life activities of women. The division between sacred and secular spaces often described by scholars is therefore challenged.     

Turkish–Dutch mosques and the formation of moral subjects

This article explores how mosque spaces become everyday sites of ethno-religious subjectivation for immigrants and citizens originating from Turkey in the Netherlands. I argue that the symbolic and material constructions of mosques as simultaneously moral and moralizing spaces undergird the production of ethno-religious subjectivities through mosque-centered everyday practices. The articulation of Muslimness to Turkishness at mosques in culturally specific and gendered ways is crucial for the formation of a particular modality of the Turkish–Dutch self as moral subject. The ensuing incorporation of practices and activities that are deemed ‘secular,’ i.e. ‘cultural’ or ‘recreational’ to mosque services engenders a creative tension between the sacred and profane conceptions of mosque space. Mosque administrators and their congregations concur that recreational activities and quotidian accessibility to mosques are essential to the long term survival of Turkish–Dutch alterity, for mosques are spaces where children and youth are exposed to the performances of Turkish-Islamic morality and subjected to collective social control. However, the diversification of mosque services does not always sit comfortably with the meaning and use of mosques as sacred sites proper within a secularized framework. A creative tension between mosques as serene and pure spaces of the sacred and mosques as impure and immoral spaces of the everyday arises, as a result.     

“Hangd for the True Faith”: Embodied Devotion in Early Modern English Carmelite Cloisters

The annals of the English Carmelites of Antwerp document religious devotions which were intensely corporeal. Biographical sketches of individual sisters describe spiritual practices in which prayer and meditation, often enhanced by visual or bodily contact with devotional objects, fostered mystical encounters with Christ, saints, and martyrs. The Passion and the physical torment of holy figures who died for their faith infused the cloister's spirituality. At Antwerp, nuns encountered stories of suffering in devotional books and in hagiographical accounts of both the early Christian, and the more recent English, martyrs. They might also engage physically with Christ and saints through the cloister's relic collection and other objects of devotion. This article explores the religious milieu at Antwerp, considering the nuns' spiritual proclivity for suffering, which was inspired in part by their religious exile from England. It argues that a culture of martyrdom infused private devotional practices and shaped the convent's corporate identity.     

Narrative claims on regions: prospecting for spatial identities among social movements in Finland

Regions have been regarded as processes, artefacts and discourses, and recently as ‘brands’ that various stakeholders use in marketing. Discourses on institutional regions are typically promoted by media, governmental bodies and planning organizations that draw on reputed collective regional identities—the expressions of past and current social discourses and cultural practices. However, such institutional regional discourses are often incongruous to spatial imaginaries of everyday life. This article scrutinizes the meanings of spatial attachment to citizens and explores to what extent regional identities are meaningful in everyday life. To avoid biased assumptions, focus-group interviews were carried out within four Finnish provinces among the members of four social movements. The results show that provincial spaces are not actively thought-and-practiced. Spatial identities are rather structured around personal experiences that typically accumulate in several locales, since personal histories are increasingly characterized by mobility. This article also recognizes that the everyday meanings of a socially constructed region are often generationally read and combine different historical narratives.     

Commodities and the Power of Prayer: Pentecostalist Attitudes Towards Consumption in Contemporary Ghana

This article addresses the phenomenal success of pentecostalism, a global religious movement par excellence, throughout postcolonial Africa. Investigating pentecostalist views of and attitudes towards commodities in southern Ghana, the article shows that pentecostalists represent the modern global economy as enchanted and themselves as agents of disenchantment: only through prayer may commodities cease to act as ‘fetishes’ which threaten the personal integrity and identity of their owners. Pentecostalism creates modern consumers through a ritual of prayer, which helps them handle globalization and control foreign commodities in such a way that they can be consumed without danger. Through prayer, commodities cease to possess their owners; the latter are rather enabled to possess the former. Pentecostalism engages in globalization by enabling its members to consume products from the global market and by offering its followers fixed orientation points and a well-delimited moral universe within globalization's unsettling flows.     

Surviving through movement: the mobility of urban youth in Ghana

In Africa, young people are engaging with a globalised world of flows and movements but are coming of age in environments characterised by uncertainty, economic hardship and unemployment. Drawing upon research conducted in Madina, a suburb of Accra, a social navigation perspective is adopted to explore young people's everyday mobility and their aspirations for future mobility. By drawing attention to the meanings young people ascribe to movement, and by analysing their movements as tactics of social navigation, the importance of spatial mobility to young people's everyday well-being and their processes of social becoming are illustrated. Young people find that their mobility is bounded by a range of factors including labour market characteristics, gender and generational relations, and their spatial location on the outskirts of the city and the margins of the world. However, neither their daily mobility nor their spatial imagination is restricted to Madina; real or imagined travel takes them to other parts of the city, into rural areas and across the nation's borders. Through illustrating how significant mobility can be for everyday survival, this paper contributes to ‘the mobility turn’ in the social sciences which has overlooked the importance of mobility for livelihoods in the global South.     

Geographies of religion and spirituality: pilgrimage beyond the ‘officially’ sacred

Abstract

The papers in this special issue, Geographies of Religion and Spirituality: Pilgrimage beyond the ‘Officially Sacred,’ are placed in the context of a comprehensive theoretical overview of the role that the sacred plays in shaping, conducting, controlling, and contesting pilgrimage. As scholarship examining the lived experiences of travelers has demonstrated, pilgrimages need not necessarily be religious in nature, nor be officially sanctioned. Rather, if pilgrimages are perceived as ‘hyper-meaningful’ by the practitioner, the authors in this special issue argue that a common denominator of all of these journeys is the perception of sacredness—a quality that is opposed to profane, everyday life. Separating the social category of ‘religion’ from the ‘sacred,’ these articles employ an interdisciplinary approach to theorize sacredness, its variability, and the ways in which it is officially recognized or condemned. Thus, the authors pay particular attention to the authorizing processes that religious and temporal power centers employ to either promote, co-opt, or stave off, such popular manifestations of devotion, focusing on three ways: through tradition, text or institutionalized norms. Referencing examples from across the globe, and linking them to the varied contributions in this special issue, this introduction complexifies the ways in which pilgrims, central authorities, locals and other stakeholders on the ground appropriate, negotiate, shape, contest, or circumvent the powerful forces of the sacred. Delving ‘beyond the officially sacred,’ this collective examination of pilgrimages, both well-established and new; religious and secular; authorized and not; the contributions to this special issue, as well as this Introduction, examines the interplay of a transcendent sacred for pilgrims and tourists so as to provide a blueprint for how work in the geography of religion and the fields of pilgrimage and religious tourism may move forward.     

Children's interdependent mobility: compositions,collaborations and compromises

This paper discusses findings from Australian research that used a qualitative and participatory methods approach to understand how children develop and negotiate their everyday mobility. Children's mobility negotiations are discussed in reference to interactions with parents, peers and places; journeys in relation to their multi-modality, compositionality and temporality; and mobility formations in terms of ‘companionship’ – travel companions, companion devices and ambient companions. Children's mobility is characterised by interdependencies that both enable and configure this mobility. Three themes – compositions, collaborations and compromises – are used to detail and describe some of the ways these interdependencies take shape and unfold.     

Global flows and everyday violence in urban space: The port-city of Buenaventura,Colombia

Buenaventura, Colombia's rapidly expanding Pacific port, is simultaneously a city of violence. Focusing the linkages between local violence and the port economy, this contribution explores the role the port's global interconnections play for Buenaventura as a site of violence. In which ways does everyday violence shape urban spatial practices, particularly movement? How do every day coping strategies, reacting to a violent context, produce urban space? I suggest an analysis that links the production of urban space through everyday practices to the notion of violence as inherent to urban power relations on the one, and to the role of global flows of goods in urban space on the other hand. The main argument is that, global interconnections through the port are not decoupled from, but rather constitute a condition for violence in Buenaventura, particularly in neighbourhoods next to port terminals. This urban space is constituted both by daily violence and by stretching along global supply chains. Both violence and the secured, off-access port spaces shape, transform and limit inhabitants' mobility, while they enable global flows. I identify coping strategies such as mapping safe spaces, accompaniment, adaptation of movement to zig-zag patterns, and organised spatial strategies. The article contributes to recent debates on violence and the everyday, and urban space shaped by violent global-local encounters.     

Landscapes without the car: a counterfactual historical geography of twentieth-century Britain

Despite increased concern about environmental damage and resource depletion, the private motor car, and associated automobility, are taken-for-granted aspects of twenty-first-century life. This paper makes the counterfactual assumption that private ownership of cars was severely restricted at the start of the twentieth century, and uses a range of historical data to examine the ways in which such a scenario might have impacted on transport infrastructure, personal mobility and urban life. It is argued that, even without the wholesale adoption of the motor car as a means of personal transport, patterns of everyday mobility would not have differed significantly from today so long as other forms of transport had remained or expanded to cope with this demand. However, such a scenario would probably have required journeys to be planned in different ways, may have been qualitatively different from travel today, and could have disadvantaged particular groups of the population, including some women. A landscape without cars would probably also have altered the form of cities, with services provided closer to where people live, and levels of air pollution substantially lower. The counterfactual historical analysis is used to argue that, although there is little likelihood of cars being banned in Britain, greater restrictions on private motor vehicles would not necessarily lead to the fundamental changes in everyday mobility that some might predict.     

“Where Can a Gypsy Stop?” Rethinking Mobility in Scotland

Abstract: This article examines mobile practices of Scottish Gypsy/Travellers and analyses how their mobility affects their socio‐spatial access to participation within Scottish society. It explores how different representations of mobility set up boundaries and limitations on travel, unravels everyday practices of mobility by Gypsy Travellers and discusses their embeddedness within Scottish society and culture. The discussion draws on empirical research results to assess attempts to accommodate mobile practices of Travellers within existing structures of political and economic organisation. It exposes dominant “punctual” understanding of movement, which lacks information about what happens during the move and overlooks important elements of ambulant lifestyles. Findings from this study suggest that formalised definitions of travel privilege specific forms of mobility to the neglect of the others and serve to perpetuate the marginalised identities of itinerant people. The paper concludes with theoretically informed observations about the new ways of re‐connecting policies tackling disadvantage with mobility.     

‘So that we don't spoil them’: understanding children's everyday mobility through parents’ affective practices

ABSTRACT

Children's everyday mobility and freedom of movement have been closely linked to parental practices, or what has been referred to as parental ‘mobility permits’ or ‘mobility licences’. Most research tends to focus on parental restrictions, while this article explores the affective practices Swedish middle-class parents use in order to enhance their children's mobility, i.e. how emotions are perceived as enabling parents’ and children's spatial experiences and thus their feelings of safety and security; as well as how emotions are talked of as disabling or disrupting the potential for children's mobility. These affective practices are analysed in relation to the parents’ self-reflexive positioning on a continuum between ‘the helicopter parent’ and ‘the engaged and enabling parent’. The material for the article is comprised of 33 interviews with the children's parents, carried out within a larger ethnographic research project on children's everyday mobility in Sweden.     

Duty to God/my Dharma/Allah/Waheguru: diverse youthful religiosities and the politics and performance of informal worship

This paper draws on a case study of the Scout Movement in the UK to explore the everyday, informal expressions of ‘worship’ by young people that occur outside of ‘designated’ religious spaces and the politics of these performances over time. In analysing the explicit geographies of how young people in UK scouting perform their ‘duty to God’ (or Dharma and so forth), it is argued that a more expanded concept of everyday and embodied worship is needed. This paper also attends to recent calls for more critical historical geographies of religion, drawing on archival data to examine the organisation's relationship with religion over time and in doing so contributes new insights into the production of youthful religiosities and re-thinking their designated domains.     

The pastoral role of Contemporary Christian Music: the spiritualization of everyday life in a suburban evangelical megachurch

Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), popular music featuring evangelical Christian lyrics, is one of the most widely consumed forms of commercial entertainment for America's 70–80 million white evangelical Christians. CCM is an excellent lens through which to examine the complex interactions of religious faith, community sentiment, and popular music practices in the contemporary US. I explain how CCM performs the ‘pastoral’ task of reinforcing Christian faith in an evangelical megachurch in the suburbs of Sacramento, California. I argue that a monthly concert series not only guides evangelical Christians in their ‘walk’, but also helps constitute the flock by building a sense of community. I suggest three spatial analytics to understand CCM's pastoral role: the place of the suburb, the sacred space of the church coffeehouse, and the body. At all three scales of analysis, the musical and religious practices of CCM at one suburban church spiritualize the everyday lives of the participants.     

Going out,getting about: atmospheres of mobility in Melbourne's night-time economy

Drawing from recent affective geographies of drinking and drunkenness, this article explores the affective atmospheres of spaces of mobility in Melbourne's night-time economy and how these atmospheres shape the experience of alcohol-related problems. Our discussion is grounded in the analysis of interview data collected in 2012 among 60 young adults living in Melbourne. Participants included youth residing in the inner-city who reported taking a tram, walking or cycling to nearby venues along with youth from periurban communities who used trains, buses or taxis to travel to and from venues in the inner-city. Each group reported spending varying amounts of time on the move during a night-out drinking, although the atmospherics of mobility differed for each group. Inner-city participants described ‘comfortable’ or ‘fun’ journeys on the tram, walking or cycling, whereas participants from periurban communities spoke of ‘boring’ or ‘unpleasant’ journeys via train, night-bus or taxi. Moving beyond reports of the ‘priming’ effects of affective atmospheres, we conclude that these atmospheres are (co-)constituted in encounters between bodies, human and non-human, as they move. We close with a brief discussion of the implications of our analysis for the study of alcohol-related problems in the city at night.     

Religious Cultural Hybridity in Chudosik (Ancestor Memorial Service/Ceremony) in Korean Protestantism

This article attempts to examine Chudosik in Korean Protestantism. The distinctive characteristics of Chudosik can be understood in terms of regarding religion as cultural practices. If so, Chudosik can be seen as a religious practice in everyday life of Korean Protestants. By conducting an ethnographic fieldwork in Seokkyo Korean Methodist church, I conceptualise five practical characteristics of Chudosik: indigenous, transformational, spiritual, pragmatic, and compounded. These characteristics show how the religious practices of Seokkyo congregation members keep both traditional socio‐cultural values and the features of Christian service in order to satisfy their demand, and how they transform their religious practices. In this sense, Chudosik represents the cultural hybridity of Korean Protestantism. It is also a spontaneous output of the Korean Protestants’ cultural habitus and the Korean context. Furthermore, in regard to Chudosik, it is also possible to say that Protestantism is re‐embodied onto Korean culture.     

Touring as labour: mobilities and reconsideration of tour guiding in everyday life

Abstract

The research adopts the mobilities approach to examining the everyday experience of tour guides. Scholars tend to highlight guides as service providers and cultural brokers, whose activities and feelings seem to be subordinate to tourism consumption. In contrast, the research moves beyond the context of business and economy and seeks to resituate tour guiding in ordinary life. It draws on the ethnographic fieldwork in Sanya, a coastal city in south China, and adopts the methods of secondary data collection, interviews and participant observation for data generation. Specifically, the research scrutinises how tourism mobilities are embedded into the production of local guides’ daily practices, emotions and feelings. Tour guiding is characterised by movement/stillness, instability and contested meanings. On working days, guides travel with tourists between scenic sites, receiving unstable income. The mobile work greatly shapes their everyday rhythms, social networks, familial lives and identities. On jobless days, guides are likely to confine ordinary practices to residence and suffer from deep anxiety. Immobilities arouse their feelings of inability and worries about the future, thus lowering their expectations of career and personal development. The research problematises the idiosyncrasy of tour guiding and underscores its close relationship with the production of everyday practices and experience, thus giving a wider view on tourism work. In so doing, it also enriches our understanding of the complexity of tourism mobilities and contributes to the debate on the de-differentiation of tourism.