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.     

Church, Space and Conflict: Religious Co-Existence and Political Communication in Seventeenth-Century Switzerland

This article sets out to explore how a local quarrel in theGrafschaft of Baden, a bi-confessional Swiss county, occasionedby efforts to install a separate font for Protestant parishioners,activated larger constitutional and confessional tensions betweenthe Catholic and Protestant cantons of the Swiss Confederation.The article reconstructs the lengthy political negotiationscaused by the rearrangement of church space since the Landfriedenof 1531: this treaty had enshrined bi-confessionalism in theSwiss Confederation and had established the duties and rightsof both confessions, although to the disadvantage of the ReformedProtestants. It had also transformed the consecrated space ofthe church into a stage for political action by the cantons.From 1531 onwards, changes in religious belief and observancewere subject to the will of the supreme governing authority.The article shows that local conflicts over the arrangementand furnishing of certain church spaces can give us fascinatinginsights into political practice, the establishment of socialorder and the handling of denominational differences withinthe Swiss Confederation. It attempts to contribute to our understandingof early modern political history by using concepts from culturalhistory and communication theory in which politics is closelylinked to social and confessional processes generating meaningand order.     

The Social Basis of Sacred Spaces in the Prehispanic Andes: Ritual Landscapes of the Dead in Chimú and Inka Societies

Sacred landscapes are a subset of the diverse media that people use to make statements about social order. Mary Douglas has discussed two dimensions of social order—group and grid—and suggested connections between their varied conceptions and expressions in the culturally constructed landscape. I extend Douglas's concepts to a specific domain of sacred landscapes, funerary architecture. Drawing on two examples from the prehispanic Andes, I argue that differences in Chimú and Inka funerary landscapes represent different conceptions of social order. Archaeological investigations of sacred spaces as expressions of varying social experience deepen understanding of Andean societies and other ancient peoples.     

传统村落神圣空间形态、当代价值及其研究范式再认识

神圣空间是中国传统村落重要的空间形态,但理论界对神圣空间时有\"存续论\"和\"废弃论\"的学术争议,对其内涵、类型、流动性发展趋势以及新的研究范式也缺乏深入解读,这对人们深入认知传统村落神圣空间带来了困惑和迷茫.通过文献梳理,认为:神圣空间的内涵是\"空间+意义\"的综合.在传统村落中空间形态有两类,一是具有明显可观察性的宗教信...     

From invisibility to visibility? The appropriation of public space through a religious ritual: the Filipino procession of Santacruzan in Padua,Italy

Mainly employed as domestic workers and care providers since the 1980s, Filipino migrants have been, and still are, largely invisible in Italian public space. Since 1991, once a year, on the last Sunday of May, they transform the streets of Padua, city of Saint Anthony, into their own temporary ‘sacred space’ celebrating the finding of the Holy Cross (Santa Cruz). Based on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, the paper analyses the preparation of the ritual and the embodied performance as a means to interpret the Filipino local and transnational territorialisation in the Italian context. The discussion underlines how the Italian setting affects the relationship between the sacred and the secular and between majority and minority religions in the urban texture. Urban space being the symbolic arena where identity and the process of boundary making are inscribed, we consider public space as a social process constituted by three levels: accessibility, temporary appropriation and visibility. Drawing on this immigrant religious ritual, we apply this perspective to look at the interactions between local society and newcomers and the blurring boundaries between religious and non-religious in the ambiguous Italian public space.     

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.     

Sacred Space in the Worldview and Art of the Tungus-manchu Ethnic Minority Sakhalin Island

The article contributes to research into concepts of sacredness held by the Tungus-Manchu ethnic minority living on Sakhalin Island. The study focuses on the Rukutama staff found by a hunter in 1972 on the Angurovka River, an old arm of the Rukutama River. The staff displays the spatial features of Sakhalin Island in great detail, all of which were included into the life cycle of the island's inhabitants. Sacred knowledge was transmitted over centuries via generations of shamans using the language of sacred compositions, “visual folklore.” Visual art is central to the study of the ethnic history and culture of the modern inhabitants of Sakhalin Island.     

The Visual and the Visceral. Bodily Communities and Visual Communities in Martín Céspedes’s El estómago de la cultura (2012)

El estómago de la cultura (Culture’s Stomach) (2012) is a short documentary film directed by Martín Céspedes which depicts the slaughter process in a refrigerated warehouse ‘without a foreman’ on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The documentary offers a visual reflection on the place of the livestock industry in Argentina in the face of finance capital driven by genetically modified agriculture and encourages debate around the functioning of an establishment managed by its own workers. In this article, I propose a reading that provides a way of thinking about the representation of Argentine post-2001 communities and their ‘exposure’ in this documentary by analysing two visual strategies: first, the generation of images which appeal directly to the viewer’s sensibility, that is, images affecting the body of the spectator, and second the presentation of collective images or images of groups of people, of livestock, and of lifeless organs or bodies. By generating a community that includes the spectator’s body and by portraying parcels of men and animals and their ‘common ways’ of existing, El estómago de la cultura on the one hand reinforces the sense of communion and, on the other hand, simultaneously indicates the precarious nature of its existence and the survival of post-2001 communal projects.     

中国传统室内空间的价值探讨

多维度的分析可以为室内设计作品的客观评价提供一个基本框架,也可使室内设计实践者在其作品中的追求有一个价值标准。本文通过分析空间价值的构成信息,解释了空间价值对社会和自然的适应性和包容性,并阐述了空间中哲学与文化的价值体现。     

Cato Street Conspiracy and Consuming Crime: How Radical Politics Fed into the Public's Passion for Violent Media Coverage*

The Cato Street Conspiracy ended in failure, with its five leading radicals executed. This conspiratorial insurrection caught the media's attention, creating a vibrant visual culture of the stable and execution. Arguably, the conspiracy's treason was not directed at the king but rather parliament and government through its aim to assassinate the cabinet. Although usually considered as an end point to Regency radicalism, Cato Street provides the opportunity to explore how radicalism was covered and consumed as part of the growing passion for crime reporting. Using the framework of wound culture, which highlights the centrality of consuming violence in contemporary society, this article demonstrates how the Cato Street stable and execution were fervently consumed through the visual culture generated to disseminate the conspiracy. Here, radicalism, treason and violence collided, demonstrating the passion of the conspirators but also the passion of the public who voraciously devoured the coverage.     

旅游地景与地方的关联机理初探——基于空间与文化的交汇视角

对landscape旅游景观的判读传统由来已久。文章对landscape同源异形的景观与地景两种译法进行了比较,区分了旅游景观与旅游地景的异同,并将旅游地景分为\"成为的\"旅游地景、\"再造的\"旅游地景和\"创造的\"旅游地景。选用地景主要是考虑对其原意的尊重、强调土地在中华文明中的重要地位及重视其传导的地方性信息。研究从有形的空间与无形的文化相交汇的视角来探讨旅游地景与地方的关联机理,认为空间视角下的旅游地景与地方是\"依附中的割裂\"关系,文化视角下的地方与旅游地景则呈现出\"渗透下的不可控\"的关系。研究提出了处理旅游地景与地方关系的理想模式,即由多方均衡参与的基础支持和内外融合的策略来实现神形兼备的目标的全方位一体化融入模式。