Cultural Geographies

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Pilgrims: an ethnography of sacredness

Mitch Rose
Cultural Geographies 2010 17: 507
DOI: 10.1177/1474474010376136

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 cultural geographies
17(4) 507–524
Pilgrims: an ethnography of © The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
sacredness co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1474474010376136
http://cgj.sagepub.com

Mitch Rose
Department of Geography, University of Hull, UK

Abstract
The aim of this paper is to illustrate how subjectivity is constituted via exteriorities. Drawing upon
the work of Levinas and others, it examines how voices irretrievably outside the subject call to
us, on a pre-subjective level, welcoming us into various modalities of identity and belonging. In this
sense, identity is conceived not as something we have but something we are given. Identity is a
primordial response to various others, some of which are material and sensible and others wholly
infinite and eternally beyond our perceptible horizons. The exploration of this call is conducted
through an ethnography of sacredness focused around a ‘new age’ tourist group visiting Egypt in
March 2007.This is not an ethnography of pilgrims or pilgrimage but on sacredness itself. By focusing
on one modality through which the call announces itself (i.e. sacredness), I hope to help the reader
hear how the call takes shape. Thus, the paper uses ethnography to create a space for listening. It
illuminates a site (sacredness) where the various voices of the call can potentially be heard.

Keywords
Egypt, ethnography, identity, non-representational theory, sacredness

All ethnography is part philosophy, and a good deal of the rest is confession. (Clifford Geertz)

Preface
Over the last 20 years, there has been a progressive move in the humanities and social sciences, to
relocate the origin of identity from inside the self-conscious mind to a set of distributed sociologi-
cal and ontological positions variously conceived as outside the subject.1 Rather than identity being
something subjects have – something we own, inside us, part and parcel of our being, present in the
here and now of our consciousness, available and on-hand to be expressed – identity has been
conceptualized as mobile, hybrid and entangled,2 performative and effected,3 emergent and con-
junctive.4 This project begins by suggesting that while much of this work has endeavoured to move
away from understanding identity as internal, interior and immanent (preferring terminology such
as performance, enactment, effect or event), there often remains a tacit unacknowledged artefact of
an abiding internalized presence in many of our working notions of what identity is. We find this
remnant in notions such as ‘practical consciousness’,5 pre-subjective ‘willing’ or ‘desire’6 and even

Corresponding author:
Mitch Rose, Department of Geography, The University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, UK
Email: mitch@lostgeographer.com

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508 cultural geographies 17(4)

the ‘sensing body’,7 figures that operate as standing sensibilities capable of relating to other beings
and situations before specific identity constructions become articulated. This figure appears most
obviously in Butler’s notion of performativity, where the agent of identity moves from a fully self-
conscious subject to a Lacanian psyche, an agent that, while not (yet) self-present (it has not yet
taken up identity as an epistemological category), is nonetheless capable of judging and strategi-
cally assessing how identity can be practically performed.8 Similarly one can see this manoeuvre
in certain renderings of the sensing body, a mode of knowing that, while preceding linguistic
apprehension, nonetheless suggests an interior capacity (e.g. a muscular consciousness) that pre-
exists the exterior world the body (secondarily) engages.9
The point is not to suggest that such renderings of identity end up reinstating a self-present
subject. Identity here is no doubt partial, becoming and embryonic, and its conceptualization is
distant from the dialectically conceived modes of subjectivity to which they respond. And yet, this
remnant of a pre-subjective knowing that is anterior to a fully self-conscious agent, remains an
unacknowledged figure in our ostensibly post-subject age. There remains, in other words, the spec-
tre of a pre-established interiority: a standing capacity that pre-exists the relations it will encounter
and whose ‘sense’ (whether conceived cognitively or corporeally) allows the performative event to
occur. While this standing capacity is no doubt connected (and perhaps intrinsically so) to what is
outside – whether it be epistemological categories or ontological affectivities – its presence (as a
capacity) operates as a pre-established remnant of the self-present subject. It buzzes along on its
own pre-constructed steam; a pre-synthesized ability (a psyche, a body, a bundle of nerves) that has
integral to its nature the capacity to perceive regardless of whether a perceptible body actually
arrives. Once the subject has been stripped away of every last ornament of self-identifying con-
sciousness, there remains this final remnant; a voice that speaks not for the ‘I’ it might eventually
become, but for its own knowing; answering for itself, to itself, before anyone arrives to ask.
The aim of this paper is to illustrate a different perspective on identity. Specifically, it endeav-
ours to explore identity as something that is, in its essence, responsive. By this I do not mean it is
sociologically responsive, i.e., responding to sociological forces and events, but ontologically
responsive. Identity, here, is not something subjects ever have. It is never ours to represent, rein-
terpret or creatively perform. On the contrary, identity is something primordially elicited, its origin
residing in demands, problems and imperatives beckoning from outside the subject, calling us into
diverse modalities of being. The subject has no identity before such demands. Rather, we emerge
from them, taking our place in the world in the form of an answer (a response). The aim of this
paper is to explore this idea by illustrating how identity emerges in response to various exteriori-
ties, some of which are material and sensible – such as the affectivities resonant within particular
moods, situations or material formations10 – and others wholly infinite and eternally beyond our
perceptible horizons.11 In this sense, the purpose of the paper is two-fold: primarily it endeavours
to help the reader hear such calls, that is, hear how exteriorities invite us to take up our subjectivity
in various meaningful forms. Second, it aims to help the reader hear how such calls call, that is,
hear how these imperatives manifest in various present and non-present encounters.
The methodology is an ethnographic engagement with a ‘new age’ tourist group visiting Egypt
in March 2007. The purpose of the ethnography is not to better understand culture or cultural iden-
tity, but rather, to make audible those forces that call us into identity, i.e., that welcome us to take-
up identity, in the first place. Thus, this is not a study of pilgrimage as a cultural practice nor is it a
consideration of the place of pilgrimage within socio-cultural life.12 It is also not a study of sacred
objects and places as meaningful sites nor a consideration of the social significance of sacred/
religious experience.13 Finally, this is not a study of ‘the sacred’ itself, as if sacredness were an
existent and knowable force that can be empirically exhumed. The aim of the methodology is to

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explore the site that sacredness marks. While the sacred appears to us in concrete forms (places,
objects and events), these forms by definition do not speak for the mysterious origins they serve.
Indeed, they are sacred precisely because they shelter a secret, a silence that must inhere at the
heart of the visible thing. In this sense, sacredness is a proxy, a surrogate to study what cannot be
directly observed – the absent call that beckons subjectivity into its own announcement. Such sites
are by no means confined to the esoteric but inhere in the most banal aspects of everyday human
relations: in the mysteries of love and death, in the unknowability of the future and in the perpetual
revelations of the past.14 The aim of this paper is to shine a light on sacredness because sacredness
offers one way to listen – one means to hear the silences that solicit the subject to speak.
Finally, it is precisely because this paper attempts to elucidate that which cannot be seen that it
relies on a specific mode of writing. The calls this paper explore cannot be elucidated through
traditional empirical description. They cannot be fully brought to light nor subjected to rigorous
empirical clarity. The prose, therefore, works as part of the methodology, that is, as part of the
overall aim to illuminate a site (sacredness) where the various calls that solicit subjectivity – the
overlapping echoes and the infinite silence – can potentially be heard. The writing aims to help
the reader sense the ‘something there’ that cannot be seen; to illustrate what Harrison calls a pres-
ent non-presence;15 a presence that presents itself as an absence, a nagging question, a distant call-
ing whose contours remain wholly obscure. Like other experimental approaches to writing in the
discipline,16 the writing is not intended to seem whimsical, fanciful or to be ‘experimental’ for
experimentalism’s sake. The central point is to create a space for listening. To give voice to a call
that, by definition, must remain silent.

Part I
About a mile north of Saqarra and ten miles south of the Giza plateau, is the rarely visited temple
complex of Abu Ghorab. The site is configured around a squared enclosure about 50 meters across
at each end and bordered by a low lying wall. At the top is a broken pyramid ten metres high, its
boulders fallen away from its point and now secured in their own sandstone rubble. A remnant,
Egyptologists suggest, of a temple dedicated to the 5th century BC pharaoh Nuiserre. At the oppo-
site end are pieces of what seem to be a broken granary with strange cog-like pieces; evidence,
Hakim tells us, of ancient acoustic resonance machinery. In the middle is an altar, a roughly hewn
circular slab squared off by smooth polished limestone, with archaic fleur-de-lis on each side.
There is no shade or shadow here, the flat morning sun renders the landscape featureless and plain.
To my right the three minor pyramids of Abu Sir, to my left the towering edifices of Giza, their
crumbling forms sinking into the soot-stained sand. I lift my sunglasses to watch the pilgrims per-
form their ritual. Encircling the altar they hold hands while Hakim speaks in what he calls
Khemetian, the lost spoken language of ancient Egypt. He breaks his reverie and exhorts the pil-
grims to repeat after him: the light surrounds me (the chorus repeats), the light moves through me
(the chorus repeats), I am the light (the chorus repeats).
The morning began with an argument outside the ticket office at Saqarra. The group was barred
from meditating at any sight in the area. The tour bus idled on the pavement and we watched the
conversation from our air-conditioned seats. Steven, one of our leaders, was swearing and shout-
ing; the site director was quietly sipping his short glass of tea. Steven got on the bus in a tantrum
and our Egyptian guide Miriam went in to negotiate. About ten minutes later we were permitted
through. The bus dropped us outside the village of Abu Sir and we dropped through a small almond
grove into the desert. On the way I asked Miriam what happened: the director doesn’t like it
because he thinks we are pagans. A pilgrim walking in front of us turned around. Well we are, she

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said. It was true we were here to perform earthly rituals – supplications to gods hidden and
dispersed through sand and rock, and yet, available in lost recesses and forgotten reserves waiting
to be tapped. I ascended the pyramid and sat on top watching the pilgrims hover around the altar,
some with their palms facing up, others their arms pushed down, reaching to touch the energy that
everywhere traverses this horizontal plane; a light, I was learning, from which we are all made.
Three days ago the tour group met for the first time in the old wing of the Mena Palace, the 19th
century hunting lodge of the Khedive Ismail Pasha set at the foot of the Giza plateau. I was late and
footing it through a labyrinth of chipped tiled corridors and worn arabesque carpets. When I found
the room the group was sitting in a long oval with the trip leaders, Andrea and Steven, at its head.
I took a seat near the door just as Andrea began to speak: let’s get started, she said. Well we made
it. There they are, right outside the hotel and already you can feel their energy. Andrea describes
herself as a shamanic practitioner, a spiritual counsellor and a healer. She is a Reiki Master Teacher,
a member of the Fellowship of Isis and the North American Grand Prioress of the Worthy Fisher
Queen Prioress of the International Order of Gnostic Templars, a community devoted to the god-
dess tradition and the worship of the divine feminine. Her day job is the director of Sacred Journeys,
a division of the tour company Body Mind Spirit Journeys, which organizes tours and holiday
packages to promote sacredness, healing and spiritual well-being. I had spoken to Andrea several
times on the phone in Britain and had already come to think of her as my guide. It was a difficult
choice given the hundreds of companies and tours I had to contemplate. In the last 20 years sacred
or new-age travel to Egypt has increased exponentially, particularly as alternative theories of
ancient Egyptian history – theories that propose that the Giza pyramids and other temples were not
built by ancient Egyptians – have become increasingly popular. To recount and explain the multi-
tude of alternative theories and their offshoots would be impossible since it is totally non-
institutionalized knowledge. Alternative Egyptology is expansive, all-encompassing and eclectic.
It is wayward knowledge – adolescent, rebellious and so easily seductive in its untame-ability.
While at various points Egyptologists feel the need to do battle with these groups and their various
theories (especially seeing how much ground had been lost in the public imagination), it is a
doomed contest. They fight a multi-headed hydra – as soon as one head is cut off, three more
emerge. They are thrice bitten before they can even take aim.
Steven Mehler was our other leader, an independent Egyptologist who, since 1992, has been
working with Egyptian sage and mystic Hakim Aywan to learn about the living indigenous tradi-
tion of ancient Egypt. While Steven accepts that the pyramids were built by ancient Egyptians, his
description of that culture (its history, its religion and the reasons it built its monuments) is at odds
with traditional Egyptological explanations. Through a master teacher relation with Hakim, Steven
has developed a different conception of the pyramids and ancient Egyptian history as a whole;
ideas he promulgates through his writing, talks he conducts across the United States and his rela-
tion with Sacred Journeys tours. Many of the people on the trip had seen Steven talk and were
anxious to meet Hakim, whom Steven enrolled in the programme. We were, in essence, Steven and
Hakim’s students. We were there to be introduced to the power of Hakim’s ancient indigenous
teachings. We were there to share in a revelation.
After the initial introductions we went around the room to introduce ourselves: I am a healer, I
am a triple Leo, I am spiritual, and so on. When we finished Andrea pulled out a large blue glass
chalice-like bell, struck it and waved its vibrations around the room. It was tuned to our heart reso-
nance and she was going to use it to cleanse us and open our hearts for the journey. We were asked
to close our eyes and meditate. Andrea walked into the middle of the circle and struck the bell,
waving it slowly and carefully, caressing its sides with a rubber mallet that perpetuated and
extended the sound. She then stepped in front of the person sitting to her left and held the bell in

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Rose 511

front of their face and chest. She did this for a few seconds before moving to her left, each person
being individually cleansed. What would I do when she came to me? I tried to close my eyes like
a good ethnographer, tried to participate in the ritual that was taking place but I couldn’t stop peek-
ing. How to breathe in this strangeness? How to converse in this conversation? How to receive this
thoroughly odd gift?
Psychologists often conceptualize culture shock with the difficulty of negotiating foreign cul-
tural values – a miserly definition that does little justice to the phenomena. Culture shock is not the
shock of a surprise but the shock of realizing that the means by which you relate to people, under-
stand people and build relationships – the small signs and gestures we both send and receive during
everyday conversation to keep the liquidity of relations smooth – no longer work. We do not under-
stand the signs we are sent and we have no idea how to send the correct signs. It is the shock of
flying blind, of having no idea how to put others at ease, of how to steer a conversation or soothe
potential sites of conflict. When we are in culture shock, we have no idea how to speak. We are
shocked by being bereft of our voice. Although situated in a community, society or group, we are
utterly robbed of the means to belong.
The next morning the group flowed from the bus following Steven and Hakim along the limestone
ledge supporting the pyramid of Khafre, the second largest in Giza. Dressed in a flowing Galabaya
and walking with a bamboo staff, Hakim sat on a long flat stone and began a rhetorical dialogue: now
how much do these stones weigh, he asked. Two hundred pounds, says Steven. Two hundred pounds,
Hakim repeats. Now what kind of muscle moves two hundred pounds? Hakim smiles and points to
his head. The muscles in here. Hakim goes on to explain how the ancient Egyptians, whom he terms
the Khemetians (a derivation of the hieroglyph for Egypt KMT), used anti-gravity machines to build
the pyramids. Through a system of vibrations, conducted through forms of spiritual toning, the
ancient Khemetians cut and levitated the rocks to construct their monuments. The pyramids were not
built as tombs but as spiritual power plants for collecting and dispersing such energies. Steven calls
them spiritual machines: you have to understand both parts, the machine is the nuts and bolts but the
spiritual is a part of it, it was a device to produce free energy for all the people.
Hakim seems to be known by the Egyptologists, archaeological inspectors, tour guides and
security escorts that regularly work the Giza plateau. He is addressed as a sort of wise-man,
respected and derided in equal measure; respected for his age, his formal education and for the fact
that people come from all over the world to visit him; derided for his outspoken views on Ancient
Egypt and his heretical modes of religious practice. His prominence in the community brought me
to him in 1999 when I was conducing research on his village Nazlat Essaman, which is threatened
with relocation due to its proximity to the Giza pyramids. For four months Hakim and I sat on his
porch to discuss village history; its politics and power struggles; its tribal and kinship relations and
the tactics its various members used to keep government threats from becoming realised. Yet,
among our discussions of local history and politics, Hakim would digress. Has the minister of
Culture made any effort to move Nazlat Essaman in recent history? No, he said distractedly, this is
just babbling. We sat cross-legged on a matt in front of his house, the Giza pyramids sprouting
from the top of Hakim’s head into the blaring white sky. They have no basis to work on, he said.
Sometimes they send the antiquity inspectors to look for antiquities here but they just repeat what
George Reisner said. He is an American professor who in 1936–7 uncovered what he thinks is the
valley temple. Then everyone thought, by mistake, that each pyramid should have a valley temple
and a funery temple. This is not true. The pyramids are not tombs. There is no temple at all! It is a
unit to collect energy! Collect power! It is a power source!
Hakim now had a far more willing audience for his theories. For most of the group, he was the
primary draw, the dominant reason, for coming. As he walked from site to site on the plateau, group

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512 cultural geographies 17(4)

members followed behind, sometimes touching a shoulder, other-times holding his hand. As the
bearer of indigenous wisdom, Hakim represented lost information and a lost spiritual relationship.
The people he said he descended from, and on whose behalf he spoke, where people who lived
closer to God. He was a remnant of Eden, a time when people lived with and among higher powers.
But Hakim was not the only way to connect to this lost spiritual past. The landscape itself
echoed its resonance. The sand, the stones, the statues, the stones, the columns and the earth
harboured hidden traces of Egypt’s forgotten spiritual presence. Walking around the ruined tem-
ple complex of Memphis, I watched members of the group put their hands and head on artefacts,
searching within them for embedded channels of spiritual energy. It was a sensible convocation,
a prayer constituted not by voice but by touch, their fingers and palms scanning the surface of
whatever broken remnant called to them. At one point in my wandering I turned and saw David
and Tara standing around a black granite sarcophagus, eyes closed, arms stretched across its face.
I walked up, closed my eyes and laid my palms on the stone. Did you feel anything? Tara asked
me. I don’t know, I said. Together they described the energy. It was warm, it was flowing, it was
deep, it was loving, it was feminine, it was powerful, it was warm. Later I asked Carl where the
energy comes from and he told me it can come from anywhere. You can walk into a friend’s
apartment just after he and his wife are having an argument and feel it in the air. Sometimes those
vibrations settle in a place.

Figure 1.

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Rose 513

After Memphis we drove to the pyramid site of Dashur, an area composed of two major
pyramids attributed to the Old Kingdom Pharaoh Sneferu and also thought to be early examples
of pyramid architecture due to their imperfect proportions. Hakim and Steven said they, like all
pyramids, are resonance chambers designed to generate energy through spiritual vibrations and
that their proportions are deliberate attempts to generate different vibrational frequencies. As we
parked in front Hakim took the microphone at the front of the bus: a sound instrument in there.
Try to use the traditional Asian tone, oooooooohhmmm. By generating vibrations in our bodies,
we could experience how the ancients used the monuments to conduct spiritual energy. While
the ancients had access to special crystals and flowing water to amplify this energy, as a group
we could imitate their incantations and, potentially, experience a fraction of what they were able
to produce.
Entrance into the pyramid was via a long descending tunnel. As I neared the bottom I was gasping
from the wet ammonia filled air. Entering the first chamber I heard the group chanting. The room
was 20 feet long and ten feet across with a few yellow fluorescents fitted into the stone floor. The
group lined the walls, many crouching with palms up, their steady ohm sounds reverberating off the
stepped masonry ceiling. Some in the group formed lines, others separated into the corner to sing
spiritual songs: shanti shanti, let there be peace on all worlds for all beings. In the next chamber a

Figure 2.

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514 cultural geographies 17(4)

separate group of German women healers stood in a circle and sang in wordless breaths, their medi-
tative voices moving from South Asian-like mantras to Palestrina-like plainchants. The harmonies
in the space were chaotic as people moved in and out of various tonal relations, sometimes commun-
ing with each other, sometimes with stones and sometimes with unseen partners.
Outside the pyramid Hakim waited near the remnants of what looked like a limestone causeway.
He took his walking stick and rubbed the sand at his feet: you see, it is silt. He then led a group over
to a bank of low limestone blocks: you can see erosion here from water, look at the lines. Hakim
explained how the Ancient Egyptians built a canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea over 10,000
years ago. Pointing to features in the landscape, Steven made the case pointing to the horizon: look
at these sand dunes over there, when we came here with Hakim to do our research we found silt
from the water, still there, you see? Looking at the landscape, the portents are vague and malleable
– the shape of dunes, an arrangement of stones, numerous relics in far flung pieces. The water is
still here, Steven told us, under the sand.

Part II
When the ritual Hakim was leading at Abu Ghorab finished, I climbed down from the pyramid to
join the group. There was a reverential silence and I noticed Hakim had been crying, his dark wiz-
ened face slightly flush. At that point Irene climbed to the centre of the altar and sat crossed legged
on the circular stone. From the back of her throat came a primal gurgling. The sound built slowly
into an ascending electronic whoop, like a cartoon space-ship taking off in a bubbling synthesized
putter. Her breath ended with a long mournful descending siren. She then dropped her shoulders,
put her face in her hands and cried. Hakim broke away from the altar and drifted off to the south
corner of the site. Most of the group followed.
I walked around the altar and saw Carl meditating on the ground, sheltered from the sun and our
security escort on the other side. I put down my bag and sat next to him attempting to follow suit.
I closed my eyes, I counted breaths, I tried to make my mind quiet. What I felt was relaxed and
calm and pleasantly warmed in the late morning sun. And possibly something else. Maybe a state,
maybe a way of being calm, maybe a unique moment, peculiar to the time and place. The question
of course is what did I feel precisely? To say I felt nothing would be ridiculous since we always feel
something – our heart jumps with a certain touch or tenses from a passing thought. I had shivered
in the shadowed coolness that morning but felt increasingly revived in the increasing warmth. The
stones were like smooth plastic beneath my hands, a breeze blew, Carl breathed rhythmically 14
inches away. How could I not feel?
In Levinas’ terms it could be said that I bathed in the elemental, subsumed by the world’s com-
forts and qualities. Before self-identity and self-reflection, my body enjoyed the sensations it
received. The question for Levinas is from where do these sensations arrive? Do they come from
the world’s own molecular fabric? Or are they indicative of the trace of something else? Tangibilities
that echo the remnants of an absent or distant presence? ‘What is the origin of the wind?’ Levinas
asks, ‘the solidity of the earth that supports me, the blue of the sky above my head … the undula-
tion of the sea, the sparkle of the light, do not cling to a substance. They come from nowhere …
appearing without there being anything that appears – and consequently coming always, without
my being able to possess the source’.17 The elemental sensations of light and air have no origin. A
cooling breeze appears from nowhere – it is present but also infinitely distant, perpetually beyond
the subject’s control or mastery. As Levinas suggests, enjoyment is not a form of possession but a
way of being possessed; it is to be in the midst of something without concern over how it arrives
or how long it will remain.

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Rose 515

The significance of enjoyment, however, is in how it precipitates a particular threshold of

self-consciousness. In enjoyment, the subject is not a subject because she is not concerned with
herself. She does not consider herself a self (an I) because she simply and contentedly enjoys the
sensations she receives. But when enjoyment is disturbed (a cloud over the sun, a pang of hunger,
another human being asking for help), she crosses a threshold of awareness. It is in the disruption
of enjoyment that the subject recognizes the precariousness of her situation; a situation where she
has no claim over what she enjoys and is utterly vulnerable to enjoyment’s fickle comings and
goings. This awareness is on the one hand anxious (because we cannot secure our enjoyment), but
at the same time an invitation. It is what Levinas calls ‘a warm embrace’; a welcoming of the sub-
ject into a mode of consciousness that Levinas describes as interior – the recognition of oneself as
a self, operating in and among other seemingly separate beings. The point, for Levinas, is that the
subject’s capacity to cross this threshold of consciousness is precipitated by an external event.
There is a knock at the door, Levinas says, but when we answer there is no one there. Before it
came we simply enjoyed the world we found. The knock cuts short our enjoyment, and in doing so,
precipitates a gathering, a form of self-possession, where the subject takes an interest in herself
and the forms of enjoyment she covets. Enjoyment is now rendered as something that is mine –
something an I takes an interest in having and preserving. But the cause of this awakening arrived
from nowhere. The source of the knock is absent; its arrival, like the arrival of enjoyment itself,
profoundly mysterious.
Later on in the trip I interviewed Irene about what happened at Abu Ghorab. What did she do
when she climbed on that rock and why did she do it? She avoided the interview until almost the
end of the trip. Whenever I asked her if she would talk to me she would say, I am waiting for an
answer. When we finally talked I found her responses cryptic and unsatisfying. What happened up
there? I can’t say yet, but I was told something was going to happen that day. Why did you come
on this trip? The choice was not mine, I am here for a reason, which I cannot at this point reveal.
When you say the choice was not mine what do you mean? She smiled in a way that seemed sym-
pathetic to a perceived ignorance. I was called, she said.
The day after Abu-Ghorab the group left for Assiyut in Upper Egypt and the day after that took
the bus further south to Luxor. It was going to be a long bus ride regardless but various complications
made it an almost ten hour journey. On the way I got to know members of the group better. Tara, a
healer from British Columbia; Carl, a Swedish spiritual motivational speaker and consultant who
runs corporate workshops and is currently finishing his second book; Eve, a health care worker
from Colorado. There was also Larry, who came at the encouragement of his wife Kathy, a touch
healer and ordained minister. Larry was enjoying the trip and was pleased to see that the group was
not as weird as he thought. Later on I asked Kathy how she and Larry decided to come: I had strong
guidance that I should be on this trip. I am a commercial writer and have scribe energy. When this
trip came to me in an email we had just been to Belize so the timing wasn’t right so I deleted it and
didn’t think much more about it. And then the next day I was putting out my recycles and I see there
is still a newspaper lying out on the kitchen counter and it is turned up on this article about a
mummy discovered in Saqqara who they think was a scribe, so it grabbed my attention. So I read
this and I come down to this part about the scribe and I see there is every letter in my name except
the T. Then I remember a reading I had had almost eight years ago to the day, 23 February 1999. I
had gotten into some past lives and in one in particular I was a curator of sacred and spiritual lit-
erature, documents in the library of Alexandria in Egypt. Well when I remembered that I got an
energy hit. One of those where it’s like a bolt of lightening. It goes all the way from the crown
chakra and it goes all the way down to the root chakra. So I looked at my work schedule, I looked
at my children’s schedule, I prayed about it, I visited my friend to talk to her about it and we had a

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meeting and we channelled some things and did some divination techniques to get guidance on
whether we should take the trip or not. I talked to Larry about coming and he said it doesn’t matter
what I want, you gonna do what you gonna do. I suggested that he consider coming. If you can
come with an open heart and an open mind I think it would be transformative. I was getting a lot
of resistance; a lot of ooo la is it going to be a lot of touching stones? And I said just sit with it. And
then we were sitting in a restaurant and the reservations I had made cancelled at midnight and Larry
said why don’t we get a cheaper flight from Raleigh or Durham rather than New York. And then I
knew he was thinking about it seriously. When I asked Kathy what features of the trip attracted her
it was the wrong question. There was nothing about where we went or how it was organized that
stood out as appealing. The first email when I saw Hakim’s picture on the email, I knew him. He
talked to my heart. He is a very evolved being. I knew this would be a very special trip. I ask her
to explain this further, to tell me more about this feeling. We were at a carpet shop, and I looked
into his eyes and I said I know you, and he said I know you. We know each other on a deeper level.
Then he took me to his breast and gave me a rush of unconditional love that filled my body (she
begins to cry). It was powerful and I had never felt anything like that before. And that is the most
important thing I can tell you. Do you understand that? If you can understand that then there is
nothing more to say.
We arrived at Luxor at about 8 o’clock that evening and were up early the next morning to visit
Dendara where there was a late Pharonic temple dedicated to Hathor, the Goddess of love and
sensuality. Venerating the feminine had been a repeated theme of the trip. Steven and Hakim regu-
larly refer to ancient Egyptian culture as matriarchal and they claim that patriarchy was a Greek
imposition that changed the way Egyptian culture has since been understood. The Sphinx, accord-
ing to Hakim, is the image of a woman, not the Pharaoh Khafre, as most Egyptologists suggest.
Hakim and Steven also argue that the most significant deities in ancient Egyptian religion are
feminine. Nut, the sky Goddess, shelters us on earth and gives birth to the sun each day. Isis, the
symbol of political power and kingship, whose crown always features a chair to symbolize the
power she gives to the king. Finally, there is Hathor, the Goddess of unconditional love, typically
represented with cow ears to represent passivity, gentleness and total giving. For Andrea, it is
Hathor that represents the essence of the divine feminine.
For Andrea, worshipping the divine feminine is a reverence for those qualities historically asso-
ciated with women: it is the reverence for the earth, the connection with the earth, the one-ness, the
inclusiveness. Whereas the masculine can be more exclusive the reverence for the earth makes the
feminine all inclusive. The idea that women are innately connected to nature, mother earth, fertility
and all that is wild and untame, was a fairly popular idea among the group.18 Yet, Andrea did not
simplistically map the divine feminine onto the female gender. Indeed, the ritual at Dendara was a
veneration of the divine feminine itself, rather than the women that supposedly embody it. The
ambition, she told me, was to summon divine feminine energy and to encourage the divine feminine
within us all.
The ceremony took place in a small enclosed chapel situated south of the temple’s main sanctu-
ary. The group sat down in a tight circle and Andrea shook a small rattle to clear the energy. Norma
skimmed her bronze bowl creating a flat circulating drone. Close your eyes and allow yourself to
breath, Andrea said. Hakim entered the chapel and sat cross-legged near the entrance. After brea-
thing deeply for two or three minutes, he began a heavy ohm sound and the rest of the group
followed. After a minute he modulated his voice to an ahh – a long chant, an extended wail, a
downward pressing howl, a descending wail. The sound quiets and Hakim gave what sounded like
a Koranic prayer. He raised his hands together, holding them above his head and then in front of
his chest and incanted: we are secured by the mother and the mother is Nut, the one in the sky, the

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mother in the sky. Here we are protected and safe within the wings of momma. The light surrounds
me (the chorus repeats), the light comes through me (the chorus repeats), I am the light (the chorus
repeats).
People open their eyes, some stand, a number are crying. Norma struck the bowl again and
Andrea invokes another incantation: we now invoke the energies of Hathor, hail to thee great
Hathor, sovereign lady, worshipped one, oh beautiful one, oh glorious lady, oh mistress of the gods,
look upon us Hathor, see us mother. We, your children, are here. We open our hearts to you to
receive your unconditional love. Andrea takes out her bell and strikes it with the rubber mallet.
Those that would like to receive a special Hathor blessing please come in front of Hakim, Hathor
is coming through him.
In Levinas, the concept of the feminine is one of the most central, and yet, under-explained
aspects of his work.19 To understand it we need to recognize that, for Levinas, subjectivity and
identity are not the same thing. In much of modern cultural theory, who we are is thought to be
shaped by how we are. As beings born into an already cultural world, subjectivity is thought to be
an ongoing process, constituted as we manoeuvre through a contingent environment, performing,
accreting and synthesizing its various components, at different levels and in response to unfolding
events. Subjectivity is presented as a process of identity making. It is the modulation of a self in
relation to a moving complexity of social and cultural forces. In Levinas, however, subjectivity is

Figure 3.

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518 cultural geographies 17(4)

not an identity making process. The signs we carry, the language we use, the traditions we pass
down, these are seen by Levinas as attributes of an already self-possessed subject, characteristics
we drape like epaulettes from a being already theorized as present and self-standing. For Levinas,
identity and subjectivity have no necessary philosophical relation. Identity, rather, is something
outside the subject, something a subject comes to find. Yet, in conceptualizing identity thus, i.e., as
something that the subject comes to, we are immediately faced with a fundamental question,
namely: what calls on the subject to find identity? What brings the subject to this particular place,
this peculiar threshold of being, where identity is desired and taken-up? The answer, for Levinas,
is the feminine.
The feminine is Levinas’ term for the welcome that invites us to take up identity. As previously
suggested, a subject’s self-awareness is precipitated by a disruption of enjoyment. But in that dis-
ruption there is a warm embrace, a ‘primary hospitable welcome’.20 The welcome is rendered as
feminine for a number of reasons: first, because the welcome invites us into a world that is familiar
and comfortable. As Levinas suggests, self-awareness is not an epiphany, as if the I never knew it
existed. It is rather a coming home to oneself, ‘a retreat home with oneself as a land of refuge,
which answers to a hospitality, an expectancy, a human welcome’.21 There is an intimacy in cross-
ing this threshold. It is in being welcomed that one finds oneself in and among social relations that
are familiar and historical. Second, the welcome is demure, an ‘other whose presence is discreetly
an absence’.22 The feminine never shows herself but calls in silence; her voice endemic to the situ-
ation of being interrupted – inherent to the insecurity of enjoying. By making the disruption of
enjoyment a path to self-possession, she quietly transforms vulnerability into an embrace, turning
the subject from undifferentiated enjoyment to a self-aware, self-identifying being. Finally, the
welcome is generous. The feminine welcomes the subject into a condition of interiority but does so
without asking for gratitude. She gives without reciprocation, always withdrawing ‘into its mys-
tery’.23 She is the voice that cannot be brought to light – heard but not seen. While feminists have
rightly taken issue with this characterization,24 it is nonetheless significant that the welcome is
rendered passive. The feminine does not designate a resource or a repository for becoming. She is
not ‘ready-to-hand’ and never properly appears (actually or virtually) for the taking. On the con-
trary, she comes as a silent call without origin or place. Emerging from enjoyment’s interruption,
she solicits the subject’s will, and in doing so, engenders a primordial desire for self-possession – a
desire to make a home for oneself, fix a place for oneself, between four walls, where one’s future
can be imagined as secure.

Part III
The first free morning we had in Aswan I scheduled a healing session with Tara and Norma. These
sessions involved the direct application of spiritual energy directly to a body in order to release
blockages – channels that become obstructed because of physical, mental or emotional trauma. I
had never heard of, much less experienced, such therapies nor did I fully understand the problems
they were thought to solve. The bed was stripped except for a single white sheet and the windows
were open, filling the room with Aswan’s sturdy yellow sun. Norma struck her bowl and waved it
over my body. I lay down on the bed, closed my eyes and waited for something to happen. I did not
expect anything specific; maybe they would touch pressure points on my legs and head. My mind
wandered. And then something came – a feeling that was quiet surprising in its force and intensity.
My body began to feel like it was rocking left and right. It was slow at first and then became more
energetic making me slightly queasy. I thought I would have to sit-up and then the rocking sub-
sided. And then another wave came across me, this time from head to toe, back and forth, not as
intense but still forcefully present.

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Rose 519

In my first year philosophy course at university I remember my professor talking to us about the
fallacy of empiricism. The example he took was from Sartre: God comes down to Sartre, Dr Penner
said, and states John-Paul you and Simone have to get married! How does Sartre reply? What does
Sartre say in the face of God? He says, how do I know that you are God? When I left the hotel room
I felt some affinity with Dr Penner’s parable, though my countenance was one of confusion rather
than defiance. A voice comes. You hear it. Its manifestation is mysterious. Its arrival thoroughly
strange to my world. You consider the possibility that you are mad. A strange summons asks you
to answer for its presence. And yet, how can you do so without forsaking your own? Like Levinas’
knock at the door, here was a call that in its hearing, shook me from being myself – or at least of
being a self-standing self-knowing self, fully accountable for my being.
Similar to Levinas, Chrétien describes the call as something we only ever partially hear.25 It is a
presence that we register, even as its form cannot be brought to light. This is because the call, for
Chrétien, is infinite. It cannot be conceived as a single voice (a knock) but rather as a choir. It
encapsulates an infinity of voices in a single saying. What we hear is only an aspect of this choral
call, its voice refracting in the finitude of our mortal ear. And yet, we know there is more there,
emerging beyond what we can distinctly describe, reverberating as a silent yet nagging presence.
For simplicity’s sake we could describe these two registers of the call as the call of the world and
the call of the infinite. The former is that which we hear and respond to – claims made by people,
things and forces. The latter is that which we don’t hear, a silence that we note even as its summons
is indistinguishable. In many ways this paper has been about the call of the world. The rocks that
summon, the feelings that guide, the tones that elevate, the portents that portend. But one cannot
hear these calls without the latter. Like the feminine in Levinas, Chrétien terms the call of the infi-
nite the first call. It is the primordial voice that first invites us to be human, that welcomes us to
grasp ourselves as beings capable of hearing and responding. It is the call that claims us before we
have registered its, or indeed our own, existence. It is that which gives us an ear to hear the world
and respond to its claims. ‘In what he hears’ says Chrétien ‘lies always already what he has failed
to hear, which is precisely what promises him a voice’.26
The healing waves I experienced in the three-star hotel room in Aswan was a voice I had not
heard before. But this is not to say that it was not always there, surrounding me, resonating with
people and things in ways I did not recognize and could not sense. The question is what gave me
the capacity to sense it? Where did the ability to feel something new come from? This is the call of
the infinite, a silence that is simultaneously a voice irretrievably beyond us whose infinite-ness
summons us to hear in new dimensions – a call that opens us (infinitely) to other ways of sensing,
experiencing and existing. It is the same silent call that gives Hakim secret after secret to reveal
about ancient Egypt. The same voice that provides hidden energies to be endlessly tapped from the
crevices, rocks and artefacts that constitute this landscape without the tank ever running dry. It is
the call of revelation. A voice announcing itself through the fading timbre of an echo whose mes-
sage we only ever partially register. Knowing something’s out there without knowing what it is or
from where it comes, and yet, leading us towards further portals of human experience. As Heidegger
once said of Being, this is a silence that gets to us. And in being gotten we become available to be
claimed in new and strange ways.

Part IV
We had been at Abu Ghorab over an hour now and I was getting bored. I climbed back up the
pyramid and sat down on one of the stones to enjoy the view of Abu Sir in the distance. Hakim was
still talking to some followers in the far end. The other members of the group were touching stones,
meditating or just wandering the site taking photos. At the altar below I noticed Rosie and Don, a

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520 cultural geographies 17(4)

couple from Vancouver, had taken a stance in the middle of the circular rock. They stood side by
side, feet together, eyes closed, facing west. They seemed to be praying. After a few minutes they
both did a slight bow and lifted their hands into the prayer position. They then turned north and
repeated the process. After a few minutes they again repeated their supplications and turned another
quarter turn east and finally, bowing again, they completed the circle. I planned to ask them what
they were doing but the next day I heard Rosie tell Eve about the death of her son Harvey the pre-
vious year. It was his time, Rosie said. Yeah I suppose so, Eve confirmed, it was just time for him
to go. Listening to the conversation I had a strong sense of pity and sadness but also, surprisingly,
a dose of anger. Later that evening I was walking with Eve and I asked if she thought everything
happens for a reason. I do, she said. I responded quite energetically: Eve that’s crap! You are telling
me that Rosie’s son died for a reason. That it was his time at 23? Eve was measured in her reply:
maybe that’s the way Rosie needs to understand it. I get that. I was silent for a bit, struggling with
my dissatisfaction. When it comes to death, I said, it’s always too soon. It’s never your time. It’s
always too soon.
I suppose if you believe in God or an afterlife the notion of there being a time for death makes
sense. Whether this afterlife takes place in another dimension (with your individuated self or soul
intact) or is simply a folding into the one-ness of the universe, your time is not an end but a trans-
formation, even an evolution or growth. And if that is something you believe then maybe the notion

Figure 4.

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Rose 521

of us all having a time to die works. Yet it is also possible that this is not what Eve and Rosie meant.
One could not deny that it was Harvey’s time. He died. He was dead. As Lingis suggests, our
notions of what or how we believe do not arrive to us in a vacuum.27 They are not decisions made
by an independent mind exercising its free will based upon internal choices. Such ideas, rather, are
responses to events. We are forced to make decisions in the face of events. The events themselves
demand that we make decisions.
In this light my assertion that Harvey’s death was too soon was no doubt true. But it was a state-
ment of profound emptiness and even ignorance in that it fundamentally denied the imperative that
Rosie faced. She had to face the death of her son. She was called to reckon with its occurrence. And
while I may answer such a summons differently than Rosie, to declare the event an injustice (as too
soon), is simply to deny its reality. To close ones ears and rail against what presents itself, as if the
world should only give us what we request of it. As previously said, the feminine that Levinas
describes is supremely generous. It unconditionally gives. Yet, the source of this giving is a mys-
tery. While the feminine silently calls on us to invest in our subjectivity, it itself hides or slips away;
it never asks for compensation or thanks; it simply, primordially and unceasingly gives. The down-
side of this generosity is that it is totally unaccountable. While the feminine might always wel-
come, we have no idea, much less control over, what it welcomes us into.
On the final day of the trip the group had rented the great pyramid of Giza for a private chanting
session. I had been with the group almost two weeks and was oddly looking forward to testing my
mettle in this final ceremony. Up until now I had been an ambivalent participant, trying at various
points to join in the rituals and, yet, always allowing myself to pull back to play social scientist. At
ten minutes before 12 o’clock the group, all dressed in white, climbed the steep ramp to the kings
chamber, a comparatively large room with a granite sarcophagus at the far end. Andrea took out her
bell and Norma donned her bowl and the group sat around the chamber wall. At 12 o’clock the
lights inside the pyramid were shut off and everyone inside began to hum. I sat in the corner with
my eyes closed attempting to give myself to the ceremony. The sounds, as usual, were haunting and
relaxing, soft ohms and ahhs resonating through the stone. Then some members of the group began
to wail, screaming in full lunged bursts to the ceiling. The space was too enclosed and the sound
too obnoxious for me to concentrate and instead of relaxing I found myself getting increasingly
anxious. I thought that possibly the war cries would end or that I would be able to focus it out of
my mind but my anxiety increased. I stood up in the pitch black and with focused calm searched
for our Egyptian guide Miriam. I could not see a thing and felt someone’s sacred object crush
beneath my feet. I saw a flash-light briefly shine in the corner and, after a slow travail, found her
arm and pulled myself to her ear: I have to leave. She walked me to the opposite corner and pointed
her light down the narrow tunnel: crawl through and sit outside. The lights will come on in about
45 minutes.
Sometimes, the call in its infinite chorality, calls us into things, and sometimes, perhaps, it calls
us out. It can play the siren, entrancing us towards the rocks or it can play the beacon, a blinking
light of a far-off plane flattening towards the horizon. Four months after I returned home Lars, one
of the more sceptical members of the group, emailed me his reminiscences. Now that a few months
have passed, he wrote, the whole Egypt thing was very strange. A lot of the people on the tour were
very strange and as far from grounded that you can get. The need to think that everything that hap-
pens is special can definitely be too much. When I received the email I thought about the portents
that always seemed to be surrounding us in Egypt – a coincidence of events, a configuration of
landscape, a tangible stream of energy bursting invisibly from the sky – each of them carrying a
message. One wonders what complexity within us resonates with some calls over others. What
allows us, among the infinite claims that claim us, to hear or not hear? And at what register do we

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522 cultural geographies 17(4)

tune in, engendering new modalities for being that are sometimes terrifying, and indeed, always
strange? Like Lars, I never saw these things. But I occasionally heard them. And while I, like Lars,
was sceptical of the inner truths such calls were thought to foretell, I could not help but be intrigued
by their attendant force, their capacity to engender and claim.
This paper has endeavoured to pass on this curiosity by circling the possibility of a spectral
other present in that which we take to be most our own. It has endeavoured to suggest an idea of
subjectivity not as something we have but something we take, indeed, something we are given
(gifted) in the form of a question, arriving from outside, asking ‘who are you?’ For Levinas, it is
only in response that we find a voice, a name and a self that we can (at least partially) claim. Such
a framework goes against the prevailing, but unrecognized, presumption that our identity is, at
some level of analysis, still predicated on a mode of knowing, an inner voice practically familiar
with what it can sense and perform. This paper attempts to discredit this last remnant of the self-
standing subject by illustrating a conception of identity where there is no abiding interiority –
where identity is wholly and primordially called. And yet, such calls remain elusive. They resist
empirical demonstration and cannot properly be shown. At the heart of this project lies a conun-
drum, how to illuminate what, by its nature, cannot be brought to light? My strategy has been to
open a space where the various calls that solicit subjectivity can potentially be heard; where we can
hear, rather than see, how subjectivity arrives from earth and sky. It is to reveal, beneath the words
and drama of the events, the whisper of a mystery; the slumbering esoteric silence within which
lies the very essence of our I-ness.

Acknowledgements
I would like to think the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Royal Geographic Society-Institute
of British Geographers for supporting this research as well as three anonymous reviewers whose engaged
reading forced me to consider and clarify the purpose of the paper. I would also like to thank Andrea, Stephen,
Tara, Lars, Carl, David, Eve, Norma, Kathy, Patricia, Irene and everyone on the Sacred Journeys tour for their
generous and open assistance. Finally, I would like to dedicate this paper to the late Hakim Aywan whose oral
histories and non-traditional wisdom continue to bear their trace on the lives and work of me and many others.

Notes
1 Jacque Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995); Emmanuel Levinas, Totality
and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969); Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the
Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
2 Linda Malam, ‘Spatialising Thai Masculinities: Negotiating Dominance and Subordination in Southern
Thailand’, Social and Cultural Geography, 19, 2008, pp. 135–50; Catherine Nash, ‘Genealogical
Identities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20, 2002, pp. 27–52; Paul Cloke and
Harvey C Perkins, ‘Cetacean Performance and Tourism in Kaikoura, New Zealand’, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space, 23, 2005, pp. 903–24; Emily T. Yeh, ‘Exile Meets Homeland: Politics,
Performance, and Authenticity in the Tibetan Diaspora’, Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space, 25, 2007, pp. 648–67; David Atkinson, ‘Kitsch Geographies and the Everyday Spaces of Social
Memory’, Environment and Planning A, 39, 2007, pp. 521–40.
3 Merje Kuus, ‘Ubiquitous Identities and Elusive Subjects: Puzzles from Central Europe’, Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers, 32, 2007, pp. 90–101; Robert Kaiser and Elena Nikiforova, ‘The Performativity
of Scale: The Social Construction of Scale Effects in Narva, Estonia’, Environment and Planning D: Society

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Rose 523

and Space, 26, 2008, pp. 537–62; Mitch Rose, ‘Seductions of Resistance: Power, Politics and a Performative
Style of Systems’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20, 2002, pp. 383–400.
4 John David Dewsbury, Paul Harrison, Mitch Rose and John Wylie, ‘Enacting Geographies: Editorial
Introduction’, Geoforum, 33, 2002, pp. 437–40; Derek McCormack, ‘Diagramming Practice and
Performance’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23, 2005, pp. 119–47; Nigel Thrift, ‘Steps
to an Ecology of Place’, in Doreen Massey and Allen Sarre (eds) Human Geography Today (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1999), pp. 295–321; Nigel Thrift and John-David Dewsbury, ‘Dead Geographies – and
How to Make them Live’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18, 2000, pp. 411–32; Sarah
Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces (London: Sage, 2002); John Wylie, ‘The Heart
of the Visible: An Essay on Ascending Glastonbury Tor’, Geoforum, 33, 2002, pp. 441–54.
5 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Anthony Giddens,
The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984).
6 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993); Judith
Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997); Anne McClintock,
Imperial Leather : Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (London: Routledge, 1995).
7 McCormack, ‘Diagramming Practice and Performance’; Wylie, ‘The Heart of the Visible: An Essay on
Ascending Glastonbury Tor’; Paul Harrison, ‘Making Sense: Embodiment and the Sensibilities of the
Everyday’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18, 2000, pp. 497–517.
8 Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’.
9 Thrift, ‘Steps to an Ecology of Place’; Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces;
Harrison, ‘Making Sense: Embodiment and the Sensibilities of the Everyday’; Nick Bingham and Nigel
Thrift, ‘New Directions for Travellers: On Michel Serres and Bruno Latour’, in Michael Crang and Nigel
Thrift (eds) Thinking Space (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 280–301.
10 Ben Anderson, ‘Practices of Judgement and Domestic Geographies of Affect’, Social and Cultural
Geography, 6, 2005, pp. 645–60; Owain Jones, ‘An Ecology of Emotion, Memory, Self and Landscape’,
in Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi and Mick Smith (eds) Emotional Geographies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005),
pp. 205–18; Derek McCormack, ‘An Event of Geographical Ethics in Spaces of Affect’, Transactions
for the Institute for British Geographers, 11, 2003, pp. 238–47; Paul Simpson, ‘Chronic Everyday Life:
Rhythmanalysing Street Performance’, Social and Cultural Geography, 9, 2008, pp. 807–29; Nigel
Thrift, ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect’, Geografiska Annaler, 86B, 2004,
pp. 57–78; John Wylie, ‘Depths and Folds: On Landscape and the Gazing Subject’, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 2006, pp. 519–35.
11 Paul Harrison, ‘How Shall I Say It...? Relating the Non-Relational’, Environment and Planning A, 39,
2007, pp. 590–608; Paul Harrison, ‘Corporeal Remains: Vulnerability, Proximity, and Living on After the
End of the World’, Environment and Planning A, 40, 2008, pp. 423–45.
12 Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman, Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and
Tourism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Jill Dubisch, In a Different Place: Pilgrimage,
gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Jill
Dubisch and Michael Winkelman, Pilgrimage and Healing (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press,
2005); John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow, Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Simon Coleman and John Eade, Reframing Pilgrimage:
Cultures in Motion (London: Routledge, 2004).
13 Ruy Llera Blanes, ‘The Atheist Anthropologist: Believers and Non-Believers in Anthropological
Fieldwork’, Social Anthropology, 14, 2006, pp. 223–34; Fiona Bowie, ‘An Anthropology of Religious
Experience: Spirituality, Gender and Cultural Transmission in the Focolare Movement’, Ethnos, 68,
2003, pp. 49–72; Douglas James Davies, Anthropology and Theology (London: Berg, 2002); John P.
Homiak, ‘Images of the Sacred, Embodiments of the Other: Representing Religious Experience on Film

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524 cultural geographies 17(4)

and Video’, in Stephen D. Glazer and Charles A. Flowerday (eds) Selected Readings in the Anthropology
of Religion: Theoretical and Methodological Essays (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing,
2003), pp. 165–223; Geraldine Mossiere, ‘Sharing in Ritual Effervescence: Emotions and Empathy in
Fieldwork’, Anthropology Matters Journal, 9, 2007, Ellen Schattschneider, Immortal Wishes: Labor and
Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain (Durham, MD: Duke University Press, 2003); Charles
Stewart, ‘Secularism as an Impediment to Anthropological Research’, Social Anthropology, 9, 2001,
pp. 325–28.
14 See the following for more banal examples: Mitch Rose, ‘The Problem of Power and the Politics of
Landscape: Stopping the Greater Cairo Ring-Road’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,
32, 2007, pp. 460–76; John Wylie, ‘Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love’, Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers, 34, 2009, pp. 275–89.
15 Harrison, ‘How Shall I Say It...? Relating the Non-Relational’.
16 Jones, ‘An Ecology of Emotion, Memory, Self and Landscape’; John Wylie, ‘A Single Day’s Walking:
Narrating Self and Landscape on the South West Coast Path’, Transactions for the Institute for British
Geographers, 30, 2005, pp. 234–47.
17 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 141.
18 There is a long history of feminist critique of the association between women and nature, for example see
McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest; Londa Schiebinger,
Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); Susan Bordo,
The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1987); Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston, MA:
Beacon Press, 2001).
19 See Levinas, Totality and Infinity; Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 1990); Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays
(Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987).
20 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 155.
21 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 156.
22 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 155.
23 Levinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays.
24 Simone de-Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954); Craig R. Vasey, ‘Faceless Women
and Serious Others: Levinas, Misogyny, and Feminism’, in Arleen B. Dallery, Charles E. Scott and
P. Holley Roberts (eds) Ethics and Danger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 317–30;
Luce Irigaray, ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love’, in Robert Bernasconi and
Simon Critchley (eds) Re-Reading Levinas, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 109–18;
Luce Irigaray, To Be Two (New York: Routledge, 2001); Stella Sandford, The Metaphysics of Love:
Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (London: Athlone Press, 2000); Tina Chanter, Time, Death, and
the Feminine : Levinas with Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
25 Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004).
26 Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response.
27 A. Lingis, The Imperative. (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1998).

Biographical note
Mitch Rose is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Hull who works on questions of
landscape and material culture through the lens of phenomenology and post-structural theory. He is currently
working on a monograph that uses the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to explore the primordial relation-
ship between identity and landscape. He can be contacted at: Department of Geography, The University of
Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, UK; email: mitch@lostgeographer.com

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