Introduction

Abstract

Sensing Place, the fifth volume of Refract, investigates the intersections of ritual, place, and the sensorium: it asks how rituals reify power, resist structures of oppression, or construct senses of identity. The expansiveness of this theme is evident across the contributions to the volume, which suggests that concepts of space, place, and site, distinct as they all may be, are at the same time rich, varied,and overlapping. By drawing on diverse and sited articulations of somatic experience, the essays in this volume explore the ways in which ritual is influenced by its material and ideological surroundings while contributing to the creation of place. This leads us to consider: What can be said of embodiment, a visceral experience of space that articulates place as a site of ritual? In so doing, this volume contends with an otherwise empty conception of space as neither here nor there,inviting the lived, embodied, and repetitively performed elements of place to takehold: sensing place.