Globalization and the Religious Production of Space

This forum asks, essentially, "How shall we think about and talk about studying religion and place?"' This might seem to be a concrete and straightforward topic-one might think of Muslims and Mecca, or Mormons and Utah, or Rastas and Ethiopia. One might think, a bit more symbolically, of Moses and Mt. Sinai, the Cuban-Yoruba deity Yemaja and the ocean, the Virgin of Guadalupe and the nation of Mexico. The easy way to think of these terms is to say that religions "have" territories, and make "sacred" spaces. The association of place with religion tends to be positive; there are agreed-upon sacred places, which are by definition morally good to religious insiders and often regarded so by respectful outsiders. Such simple ideas must be examined critically, obviously, since the scholar more properly must ask, "What insight can be derived from relating theory about religion to theory about place," or better yet, "from theorizing religion and place together?" There is much that needs clarifying, and the definitions of our terms are contested. The study of religion and place taken together has happened differently in various fields, including human geography, religious studies, sociology, and anthropology, not to mention theology. There is historically, in these fields, a tension between firstand second-order levels of thought, between insider language and academic language. What is religion? Is it that which is held sacred, is it an inner and private feeling? Is it a socially constructed order, using superhuman beings to make meaning out of chaos? What is place? Is place physical space, or is it location occupied and made meaningful? And what is the purpose of studying these concepts together? Is it to better adjudicate legal rights between groups and their sacred spaces? Is it to understand and act in a "clash of civilizations" (Huntington 1993) informed directly by religion? I will suggest that studying religion and place has (at least) two main uses. First, to point to the ways that power works through the various levels, realms, and conceptions of space, in and through religious processes, especially amidst the religious conflict and violence of the contemporary, globalizing world. Second, studying religion and place makes plain and occasions the rethinking of the (Western) modernist bias in much study of religion, and of space.