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Geography, religion, and emerging paradigms: problematizing the dialogue

Ethan Yorgason a; Veronica della Dora b
a
Department of Geography, Kyungpook National University, College of Social Science, Buk-gu,
Daegu, South Korea b School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

To cite this Article Yorgason, Ethan and della Dora, Veronica(2009) 'Geography, religion, and emerging paradigms:
problematizing the dialogue', Social & Cultural Geography, 10: 6, 629 — 637
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 Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 10, No. 6, September 2009

Editorial

Geography, religion, and emerging paradigms:

problematizing the dialogue
Downloaded By: [Leiden University Library] At: 15:11 11 January 2010

Ethan Yorgason1 & Veronica della Dora2

1
Department of Geography, Kyungpook National University, College of Social Science, 1370
Sankyuk-dong, Buk-gu, Daegu 702-701, South Korea, yorgason@knu.ac.kr and 2School of
Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol BS8 1SS, UK,
veronica.delladora@bristol.ac.uk

This introduction to the subsequent forum addresses social and cultural geography’s
recent engagement with religion and spirituality. While representing a laudable and
increasing willingness to approach religion/spirituality through sophisticated concepts
and theories, this engagement should include more than just an imposition of the
discipline’s emerging paradigms on a new object of study. Geographers need to allow
religion to ‘speak back’. The articles in this forum suggest that this speaking back may
range from, for example, spirituality/religion’s insistence on its own centrality in social
space, to its tendency to complicate categories and experience, to its reminder that it
informs the lives and identities of many geographers.

Key words: geography of religion, emerging paradigms, religion, belief, spirituality, self-
reflexivity.

Religion as the last terra incognita?
Some forty years ago, in the preface to his
pioneering book Geography of Religions,
David Sopher complained about the scarcity
of writing about religion within the field of
geography. He conceived of his book as a first
attempt to map ‘a frontier territory with some
indications where its boundaries may lie’
(Sopher 1967: vii). While we might still be
far from the prominence accorded to religion
by the popular press, as James Proctor noted in
the introduction to a recent forum (2006:
166), claims about religion’s marginality seem
to have been increasingly challenged over the
past few years. As a direct consequence of
9/11, or perhaps as part of a new interest
within the social sciences in ‘more-than-
representational’ aspects of life, such as the
spiritual and the numinous (Dewsbury, Harri-
son, Rose and Wylie 2002; Game 2001;
Lorimer 2005; Metcalfe 2001), religion has
been revisited in multiple and often very
sophisticated ways by an increasing number of

ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/09/060629-9 q 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649360903068100
 630 Ethan Yorgason & Veronica della Dora
human geographers who in the past paid little
or no attention at all to it. Critical approaches
to religion have recently flourished at a variety
of scales and contexts, from geopolitics
(Agnew 2006; Knippenberg 2006; Ó Tuathail
2000) and the analysis of transnational
processes (Olson and Silvey 2006), to the
study of the construction of socio-cultural
identities through everyday practices
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(Holloway and Valins 2002), embodiment,
affect, and spirituality (Game 2001; Holloway
2003, 2006), historical geographies (Brace,
Bailey and Harvey 2006), and geographies of
Islam, perhaps one of the largest bodies of
scholarship within recent critical geographies
of religion (see for example, Dunn 2005;
Dwyer 1999; Dwyer, Shah and Sanghera
2008; Falah and Nagel 2005; Hopkins 2006,
2007; Secor 2002, 2005).
At the same time, scholars from other
disciplines have increasingly utilized geographi-
cal concepts and ideas to talk about religion:
from theologians reclaiming the importance of
place (Brown 2004; Hamma 1999; Inge 2003;
Knott 2005; Sheldrake 2001) and natural
landscapes (Lane 1998) in religious traditions,
worship, and spirituality in ways that far
exceed the concern for sacred space tradition-
ally manifest by geographers of religion, to
social scientists and anthropologists interested
in the spatially embodied enactment of
religious rituals and practices such as pilgrim-
age (Coleman and Eade 2004; Eade and Garbin
2007; Smith 1987). Just as religion offers
geographers a new type of language to explain
more-than-rational aspects of life and the
world, geography conversely provides scholars
of religion with a new vocabulary to map the
ineffable. In the words of theologian Balden
Lane, geography ‘delights the human psyche
because of its localization of truth, its way of
helping us grasp the abstract by way of the
concrete’ (1998: 128).
Despite recent and past work, however,
Sopher’s description of religion as a ‘frontier
territory’ waiting to be mapped remains true
for many contemporary geographers, as well
as for non-geographers approaching the
concepts of our discipline. We read the
situation, for example, in the anxiety to find
new metaphors to define the long-debated
encounter between geography and religion.
Rather than tracing rigid boundaries, or
providing ‘some indications where [these]
may lie’ (Sopher 1967: vii), as Sopher and his
successors attempted to do (Park 1994; Sopher
1967), contemporary scholars seem rather to
challenge them. In a world in which everything
and everyone is ‘on the move’ (Sheller and
Urry 2006), scholarship orients itself toward
different kinds of spatial metaphors and
mappings, ones capable of making sense of
religion’s disciplinary and ontological fluid-
ities and mobilities (see, for example, Tweed
2006). ‘Frontier territory’ nevertheless
remains a useful metaphor in pointing to
how geographers who have recently turned to
the topic of religion are approaching it. They
often envisage religion as a terra incognita, a
field to ‘colonize’ within our discipline
through the imposition of new approaches
and theories. In their introduction to Social &
Cultural Geography’s themed section ‘Reli-
gion and Spirituality in Geography’, Julian
Holloway and Oliver Valins, for example,
note how geographers of religion and spiri-
tuality could usefully contribute to newly
emerging trends, such as the recent ‘interest in
issues of embodiment, performance, and
practice’ (2002: 7). Similarly, John Agnew
opens his recent editorial introduction to
‘Religion and Geopolitics’ by stating that
‘religion is the emerging political language of
the time’ (2006: 183). Or again, recognizing
that ‘historical geographers of religion have
been slow to apply critical interpretative

methods to existing well-used archival
sources’, Catherine Brace, Adrian Bailey, and
David Harvey suggest further methodological
developments in this direction (2006: 37); and
so on. In the light of emerging paradigms, new
orientations, and innovative methodological
trends, past claims about the (bounded)
possibilities offered by geography’s study of
religion often no longer prove true. What has
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been labelled ‘geography’s emotional turn’
(Anderson and Smith 2001; Bondi, Davidson
and Smith 2005), for example, opens new
venues for our discipline to explore personal
religious experience, spirituality, and the
transcendent (Game 2001; Hetherington
2003; Metcalfe 2001; Slater 2004).
These encounters between geography’s
emerging trends and religion as the last terra
incognita (after class, race, gender, sexuality,
disability, etc.) are by no means unproble-
matic, however. They raise a series of
questions, especially if we conceive the
relationship between geography and religion
as (at the least) a complex two-way dialogue
rather than a simple one-way colonizing
process. Taking the territorial metaphor
further, religion, like any terra incognita and
indeed like any place, is not a blank surface
waiting to be inscribed and shaped by
colonizers’ cartographic gazes and narratives.
It rather ‘speaks back’ through its own
specificities—constraining, redirecting, inter-
acting with, and often problematizing the
human geographer’s colonizing narrative. Just
as physical encounters with a specific place
often disrupt (rather than verify) pre-existing
imagined geographies, so too might episodes of
geographers ‘seizing’ religion do so. While
attempting to encourage and develop the
renewed geographical interest in religion and
spirituality, this themed issue of Social &
Cultural Geography also aims at further
problematizing the debate by exploring ways
Editorial 631
in which religion ‘speaks back’ to geography;
ways in which religion blends, for example,
categories such as sacred and secular, transcen-
dent and mundane, thus producing new forms
of experience, modes of practices and senses of
the world. Religion is thus not intended as a
new interface that is being interrogated, as the
above-mentioned earlier tradition of work on
the politics of space dealt with precisely that
interface; but the approaches are now taking
new and interesting turns.
Religious and spiritual matters, Holloway
and Valins observe in their editorial, ‘form an
important context through which the majority
of the world’s population live their lives, forge a
sense (indeed an ethics) of self, and make and
perform their different geographies’ (2002: 6).
Religion, however, we argue, also problema-
tizes common assumptions and spatialities. It
blurs geographical scales and conceptual
boundaries: those between the self and the
world, life and death, the local and
the universal, the private and the public, the
introvert and the political, the fixed and the
mobile, or, in Kong’s words, between politics
and poetics (2001). It blurs disciplinary
boundaries too. Subjected to politics and
shaping policies, and yet at the same time
offering an inner spiritual path to moral self-
improvement and salvation, religion is of
interest to social scientists and humanists
alike. It calls into question distinctions between
social actors, subjects, and the humanistic Self.
Rather than simply dictating social norms or
reinforcing worldly statuses quo, religion often
subverts them. While lived and articulated
in this world, religion and spirituality are
typically not bound to terrestrial life (and thus
society); the ultimate goal for many varieties of
the faithful is life after death.
Religion poses not only methodological
problems, but also ontological ones. It over-
turns epistemological beliefs. As Bruno Latour
 632 Ethan Yorgason & Veronica della Dora
has shown, where science is ‘uplifting’, ‘sub-
lime’, ‘far-reaching’, religion (at least the
Christian Catholicism he describes) can be
‘local’ and ‘contingent’. It is about personal
transformation here and now. While science
points to invisible worlds through complex
concatenations of instruments and models,
religion ‘does not even try to reach anything
beyond, but to represent the presence of . . .
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“the Word incarnate”’ (Latour 2005: 35–36).
The New Testament itself, with the visual
richness of its parables and its detailed
topography, seems to appeal more to the heart
through the visualization of objects, rather than
to the mind through intellectual speculation.
Dealing with visible, material things, such as
plants, mountains, talents, seeds, and animals,
parables reveal the otherwise ungraspable
through their appeal to human senses. Simi-
larly, liturgical performance does everything to
constantly redirect the attention of the faithful
‘by systematically breaking the will to go away,
to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored.
Conversely, science has nothing to do with the
visible, the direct, the immediate, the tangible,
the lived world of common sense, of sturdy
“matters of fact”’ (Latour 2005: 36). In other
words, religion is not about representation, but
(re)presentation. It does not speak of things, but
‘from things’ (2005: 29).
Religion also complicates positionalities.
‘Religious geographers’ face ethical dilemmas
when turning into ‘geographers of religion’.
The identity of the religious geographer may
often be stigmatized or considered taboo in
most ‘politically correct’ and yet rigorously
secular academic environments (Latour 2005;
Markides 2002; Slater 2004; see also Mad-
drell’s piece in this issue). Religion thus
problematizes self-reflexivity. In recent decades
geography began incorporating race, gender,
sexuality, and other axes of difference because
of identity arguments as much as anything else.
Geographers holding hitherto marginalized
identities insisted that their own categories of
experience could no longer be ignored. But
religion poses a unique challenge. There is
something about the ways in which people
adhere to, leave, or proselytize a religion that
differs from characteristics of other axes of
identity. Religion thus appears to many as
something more like political ideology than
gender: an identity chosen rather than given
(despite scholarship’s serious questioning of
that binary). At the same time, more than race,
gender, and sexuality, Enlightenment narra-
tives often define religion and belief as the
Other to the scholar’s identity. Religion and
belief, to some of academe’s residents and
gatekeepers, must be not only set aside but also
eradicated (Asad 1993). Unsurprisingly, then,
only a few geographers have prioritized
religion through identity arguments (see Slater
2004, for example); pressure persists against
doing so. Thus, ironically, Christianity, tra-
ditionally associated with dominant rather
than subordinate groups, with the ‘centre’
rather than the ‘periphery’, marks a taboo
identity in contemporary academia—indeed a
positionality in some ways perhaps even more
peripheral than Islam and other religions
ethnically associated with groups traditionally
marginalized in the West. The conscientious
critical geographer may not be able to erase his
whiteness and his maleness, among key
markers of potentially oppressive tendencies,
but he can erase his Christianity.
The papers
This forum emerges from the desire to rethink
the relationship between geography and
religion as a two-way dialogue rather than a
one-way ‘colonizing process’. It thus engages
with two sets of questions. First, emerging

scholarly paradigms, which address an
increasingly globalized, hybrid, and net-
worked world, produce doubts about the
adequacy of traditional approaches to faith
and space. How helpful, for instance, is
Mircea Eliade’s (1959) rigid structural opposi-
tion between sacred and profane space? Does
it still make sense to think of religion through
binary thought? How can concepts of per-
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formance, mobility, hybridity, identity,
emotion, and spatial power for example,
inform geographical approaches to religion?
Second and conversely, what implications
might the study of religion have for geogra-
phy? How can belief and the sacred inform
geography through their specificities? How do
their peculiar spatialities and dynamics pro-
blematize traditional and new approaches
within our discipline, the social sciences, and
humanities?
We posed these questions to this forum’s
contributors. The papers, whose focus ranges
from the macro-scale of the nation-state to the
micro-scale of the human body, broadly reflect
the authors’ specific research interests. At the
same time they set up broader agendas
towards a two-way, critical dialogue between
geography and religion. All of the papers
implicitly ask what the discipline of geography
offers the study of religion. But they also
enquire how the study of religion speaks back
to geography. They do so by bringing in
concerns from disciplines that have a longer
and more systematic tradition of studying
religion (for Howe the sociology of religion,
for Dewsbury and Cloke theology, for
example). But they also attempt to let
experiences of religion/belief/doubt/etc. speak
for themselves in ways geographers have not
been attentive to previously. The papers
pursue two main themes: (1) secularity in
relation to and the enactment of the sacred; (2)
the ineffable, the spiritual, and the numinous
Editorial 633
in the social sciences, exploring the import-
ance of these characteristics and how we might
recognise, witness, or make sense of them.
Others have scrutinized the sacred– secular
interface before, of course (in geography see,
for example, Dunn 2005; Kong 2001; Naylor
and Ryan 2002; Valins 2003), but the
contributions here move the discussion along
in new and important directions. Both
individually and as a whole, the papers
highlight the value of broadly religious or
spiritual forms of experience, practices, and
senses of the world. They bring fresh
contributions to the study of religion within
geography, but they also show in various ways
how religion can contribute to geography and
probe common scholarly assumptions.
Nicolas Howe’s examination of secular
iconoclasm shows that geographic theories of
public space that do not factor in religion can
only be partial, at best. The assumption of ‘no
religion present in ordinary social life’ should
not be the default starting point for analysis.
Religion and contests over religion are
important not only when manifestly visible.
The article builds upon contemporary theor-
etical literature on secularism as well as key
legal cases to suggest that the easy dichotomy
between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ is far too
simplistic, especially in the religiously plural
context of the USA. While certain actors,
identifying as both secular and religious, draw
sharp distinctions between secularism and
religion, the relationship is much more
complex, not least because the two categories
depend on one another for their existence.
Howe identifies three distinct modes of
secular iconoclasm in the USA—purification,
privatization, and profanation—each with
their separate motivations, methods, and
objectives. Thus, contrary to commonly held
views, secularism’s effect on social space is not
necessarily promotion of a ‘naked public
 634 Ethan Yorgason & Veronica della Dora
square’. Place and landscape, as used by
secularists, both enlarge and diminish the role
of religion in American public life. The
impulse to replace the idols of religion with
the idols of the secular state is only one aspect
of secularity’s larger impact on society.
Howe carefully notes how national context
affects the relationship between the secular
and the sacred. A society such as the USA,
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where the ideological and legal impulse (if not
always the practical effect) is for the secular
state and religion to stay out of one another’s
way, is very different from a society such as
France, where the state tries to co-opt many of
the public meanings and strands of identity
traditionally provided by religion. The state in
Turkey, with origins in French-based secular
republican ideology, is one that has pro-
foundly attempted to purge public space of
visible markers of religious devotion. Muslim
women there face both formal and informal
strictures on how and where headscarves can
be worn, for instance. While noting that the
headscarf is often seen as a sign (of repression,
for example; or its absence is seen as a triumph
of secular modernity), Banu Gökarıksel
analyzes how veiling practices cultivate sub-
jectivity and even the body itself. Her article
uses ethnographic research to explore new,
fashionable veiling in Istanbul, practices that
place the women involved in the crosshairs
of sharp debates between secularists and
Islamists. Gökarıksel’s work shows how
attention to religion extends the literature on
performativity; her paper points particularly
to the inscription of modesty and piety onto
the body. Religious practice in this case
subverts and complexifies commonsense
sociological assumptions. Subject to both
secularism and religiosity, as well as to the
city spaces that enforce these, women’s bodies
become not simply signs of religion or
secularism but also religious or secular spaces
themselves. Thus Gökarıksel suggests, in
pointing to the dialectical nature of studying
religion and producing theory/method within
geography, religion is embodied, and bodies
are religioned. She thereby reminds us that
religion’s role extends far beyond places and
spaces officially marked as sacred. Her article
provides a useful extension to Howe’s ideas in
its implication that variously religioned/secu-
larized bodies are important elements of any
landscape. Through both Gökarıksel’s and
Howe’s papers, religion thus speaks back to
geography by insisting that its presence is
more thoroughly pervasive within social space
than geographers typically recognize. It
often—perhaps necessarily—has a presence
even in its apparent absence.
Avril Maddrell pursues themes of landscape
and bodies somewhat differently, through
themes of ritual and relic. Like Gökarıksel
she addresses a topic not traditionally within
geographers’ purview. Using the emotional
turn within human geography as inspiration,
she classifies grief and bereavement as ‘more-
than-representational’ practices. Maddrell
phenomenologically explores the liminal
space between life and death, presence and
absence, and the spiritual and the material that
the places and relics associated with grief and
bereavement rituals call into existence; space
that in Massey’s words ‘is always under
construction’. In the UK, her specific focus of
attention, many of these rituals are not
formally associated with ecclesiastical bodies
or traditions, and the population is increas-
ingly non-churched. Yet ignoring the practices’
spiritual content would be unwise. While
Howe and Gökarıksel problematize the secu-
lar –sacred distinction in somewhat different
ways from one another, Maddrell adds a third
tack: a secular society does not necessarily
imply an absence of spiritual meaning. Space,
a careful study of grieving tells us, must be

understood for the both the tangibility and
unsayability it encompasses. Additionally, for
Maddrell, belief or spirituality speaks back to
geographers through its quiet insistence that it
plays a continuing role in their own lives. It has
been banished from neither the public square
nor the lives of those we study, nor even yet
from many of our own lives. Thus she invites
geographers to explore their own
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relationship to spirituality. How does a skeptic
adequately explore profoundly powerful and
personal experiences, for example—experi-
ences that suggest something more than spaces
of materiality and representable meaning?
Perhaps equally important, can geographers
discuss their own personal experiences of faith
or spirituality in the context of scholarship? In
other words, does opening geography to
studying belief also require institutional
accommodation of belief as a legitimate basis
of geographers’ identity and positionality?
J. D. Dewsbury and Paul Cloke conclude the
forum with a second paper in the (post)-
phenomenological, non-representational mold,
though one much more embedded in debates
within continental philosophy. Less directly
rooted in the personal experience of doing
geography while manifesting belief, their paper
is nevertheless equally concerned with the
relationship between spirituality and research.
Dewsbury and Cloke carefully examine a point
toward which many of the other articles hint:
spirituality is not incidental to everyday life,
but is instead fundamentally constitutive of it.
Religion attaches itself to spirituality in a
variety of contingent ways. But spirituality
itself arises from the moment of reflection upon
and recollection of the forgottenness of origin
that our existence in the world implies; it is
thus indivisibly part of human experience.
Centering the concept of spiritual landscapes
and using Christian theology as its paradig-
matic example of religious thought, the paper
Editorial 635
follows Kevin Hart in considering three ways
of regarding the relationship between religion
and phenomenology: religion is not available
to phenomenological study, religion can be
explored phenomonologically, and religion is
already a phenomenology. The difficulty in
addressing spirituality, Dewsbury and Cloke
then suggest, is the same difficulty inherent in
addressing any experiential knowledge. Their
paper thus links subtly but productively to,
among other ideas within the forum, Howe’s
profanistic mode of secular iconoclasm and
Gökarıksel’s religiously trained and knowing
bodies. Quoting Jeffrey Robbins, Dewsbury
and Cloke conclude that in a postmetaphysical
age, belief can and should be taken seriously as
a constitutive category of life.
As Proctor notes, secularization and sacrali-
zation are highly place-dependent; scholarly
analysis of these often contradictory trends in
contemporary religion must necessarily attend
to both empirical and conceptual complexities
(2006: 167). Following his lead, the papers push
forward various aspects of these problematics
through different empirical data, method-
ologies, and styles. Together, they provocatively
proclaim that we are doing more than neglect-
ing important epiphenomena when we fail to
account for religion and spirituality; we may
also be omitting fundamental features of social
space. We hope these papers, both collectively
and individually, provide ideas, concepts, and
models for geography’s ongoing negotiation of
emergent paradigms with the topics of religion,
belief, and spirituality.
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Abstract translations
Géographie, religion et paradigmes émergents: la
problématisation du dialogue
Cette introduction au forum subséquent s’adresse à
l’engagement récent vis-à-vis de la religion et de la
spiritualité de la géographie sociale et culturelle. En
représentant une volonté louable et croissante à
Editorial 637
aborder religion/spiritualité à la lumière de concepts
et de théories sophistiqués, cet engagement devrait
inclure plus qu’une simple imposition des para-
digmes émergents de la discipline sur un nouvel
objet d’étude. Les géographes ont besoin d’accorder
la parole à la religion. Les articles de ce forum
suggèrent que cette intercommunication varie, par
exemple, de l’insistance de la spiritualité/religion
sur sa propre centralité dans l’espace social, de sa
tendance à compliquer les catégories et l’expérience,
en passant par sa mémoire du fait qu’il influence les
vies et les identités de beaucoup de géographes.
Mots-clefs: géographie de la religion, paradigmes
émergents, religion, croyance, spiritualité, autoré-
flexivité.
Geografı́a, religión, y paradigmas emergentes:
problematizando el dialogo
Esta introducción al foro subsiguiente se trata a la
participación reciente de geografı́a social y cultural
con religión y espiritualidad. Mientras represen-
tando una voluntad incrementada para acercarse a
religión/espiritualidad por conceptos y teorı́as
sofisticados, esta participación debe incluir más
que las paradigmas emergentes de la disciplina
como un nuevo objeto de estudio. Los geógrafos
necesitan permitir a la religión ‘responder’. Los
artı́culos de este foro se sugieren que esta forma de
responder puede ser, por ejemplo, la insistencia de la
espiritualidad/religión de su propio centralidad, o
su recuerdo que se informa las vidas y identidades
de una multitud de geógrafos.
Palabras claves: geografı́a de religión, paradigmas
emergentes, religión, fe, espiritualidad, la reflex-
ividad propia.