Sacred Place: An Interdisciplinary Approach for the Social Science

Abstract

This chapter presents a model of sacred place and sacred place-making that may contribute to the social science literatures on place, spirituality, and health in two ways: (1) attending to the embodied and emplaced nature of religious beliefs and spiritual practices and (b) exploring how sacred places may directly and indirectly affect human well-being. Sacred place is conceptualized in relation to spirituality, both as central to religious traditions and as experienced apart from specific religious traditions. From this perspective, sacred places are defined in terms of how they point to the transcendent, whether or not such places are explicitly grounded in specific religious traditions, with physical features that have been richly imbued with symbol and meaning through rituals and ceremonies over time. Sacred place-making represents efforts to create authentic, meaningful places and occurs through the reciprocal processes of sacralization (the myriad of socially constituted ways in which people create and sustain sacred places) and sacrilization, (the ways in which places help sensitize individuals to the spiritual, and to orient them to the transcendent). Contributions of essentialist, social constructivist, and person–place frameworks to an understanding of sacred place and sacred place-making are examined, along with their health implication.