Religious Geography Research Articles

Geographies of transimperial religion: the transformation of religious space in a world of empires

ABSTRACT This article uses the concept of ‘transimperial’ history to show how religious transformations within then between different empires led to the development of new religious geographies and the alteration of existing religious centres. Combining examples from Asian, African, European and American empires, the article points to common patterns across four categories of religious space: steam ports (such as Bombay), railway towns (such as Harbin), preexisting pilgrimage places (such as Bodhgaya), and imperial borderlands (such as Hawaii). These transimperial sites spaces enabled doctrinal, ritual, linguistic, and organizational changes to Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, enabling the propagation of such new religions as Theosophy and Baha’ism. Further attention is paid to architectural and organizational change, as well as the use of printing and translation in promoting new versions of these religions to different population groups. In this way, transimperial tranformation paved the way for more familiar globalized forms of religiosity in the later 20th century.

Neither Black nor Queer: evangelicalism and groundless theology in Brazil

This article illuminates the ramifications of what I call ‘groundless theology’ for Afro-Brazilian LGBTQ evangelicals. Based on ethnographic research at an igreja evangélica inclusiva (inclusive evangelical church) in São Paulo, I articulate the role of groundless theology in a church that openly accepts LGBTQ Christians as members and church leaders. Although this geographically nowhere-but-everywhere, rootless theology can be found in mainstream Brazilian evangelicalism, it is particularly noteworthy to identify its influence in the theological interpretations of Afro-Brazilian LGBTQ evangelicals. I will illustrate the workings of this theology through analyses of a Black gay man’s sermon about Hagar, a figure in the Hebrew Bible, and the theological stances of Afro-Brazilian LGBTQ congregants. These examples elucidate how the geographical selves of Afro-Brazilian LGBTQ evangelicals are shaped, orienting them not towards Brazil, Africa, or even the ‘Holy Land,’ but towards a spiritually- but not materially- grounded religious geography that can produce ahistorical and acontextual hermeneutical frameworks.

The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation: The Reichsgau Wartheland, 1939–1945

The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation: The Reichsgau Wartheland, 1939–1945

Pilgrimage Space, Hinduization of Space, Hindutva Politics of Space, and the Case of Ayodhyā as a Religious and Religiopolitical Hotspot

Abstract In this article I analyze aspects of religious geography in the mobilization by Hindu nationalists in India in the 1980s and 1990s and how Hindu nationalism and Hindu religious geography were merged in the case of the Ayodhyā conflict. Ayodhyā was consciously changed from a pilgrimage center (tīrtha) of diminishing religious importance into a religiopolitical hotspot by political forces. The potential for a Hindu–Muslim conflict and for mobilizing support for their vision of a Hinduized India was probably what made the place attractive for Hindu nationalists. The article argues that Hindu nationalism exploited the views of territoriality of traditions of pilgrimage and salvific space and merged these with their political nationalist agenda, and that it was this blending of views of space from the pilgrimage traditions, ideas of national territory, and Hindu nationalists’ ideas of a homogeneous Hindu nation with aggressive political agitation that turned Ayodhyā into a religiopolitical hotspot.

География и религиоведение: интеграция, конвергенция, синергизм

Three stages integration, convergence and synergy can be traced in the interaction of many sciences. The first two demonstrate an increase in the degree of rapprochement, and the final stage symbolizes the synergistic effect of this rapprochement, that is, a qualitative leap in joint research and its reaching a new level. The object of the study is the format of interaction between geography and religious studies, and the subject is qualitative changes (synergism) during the transition from integration to convergence. The purpose of the research is to consider the features of the interpenetration of geography and religious studies at the present stage of the development of science. Research objectives are to identify the features of the convergence of geography and religious studies; consider the effects of mutual methodological enrichment of sciences. The main method is the scientific reflection of the history of the conjugate development of geography and religious studies, on the basis of which a forecast of the further interpenetration of the two sciences is made. Reflection was based on the application of a number of general scientific methods (approaches): historical, associated with retrospective analysis in the format of highlighting the stages of classical, non-classical and post-non-classical science; trinitarian, considering objects as integral triads; territorial, which is the essence of geographical research and allows you to see the spatial features of social processes and phenomena. The integration of geography and religious studies is based on two platforms of spatial research that pass into each other: religious geography and regional religious studies. The processes of integration and convergence of geography and religious studies are conditioned by the historical logic of the development of science, the passage of the classical, non-classical and post-non-classical stages. The growth of the religious consciousness of the population and the territorialization of spiritual life in our country only stimulate these processes. Converging sciences not only enrich each other with ideas about confessional space based on GIS technologies, they receive a qualitatively new interpretation of many of its components, which is a manifestation of synergy.

Making Informal Sacred Geographies: Spiritual Presence, Sensual Engagement, and Wayside Shrines in Urban India

Inspired by recent debates in material religion, and using the example of the central Indian city of Bhopal, this article characterizes an informal Hindu religious geography that flourishes in the interstices of India’s planned urbanity. The small wayside shrines that dot Indian cities usually arise spontaneously, created by believers who discern divine manifestations and begin to worship these. Traces of ritual activities animate others to follow suit and express their devotion, thus reinforcing the sites’ sacredness. The daily repetition of myriad minor ritual gestures maintains a dynamic religious geography, which in a recursive mode ties together devotees in an anonymous ritual community, whose members share a visual language and are inclined to take seriously the desire of deities to live among humans. With a focus on minor religion, and by concentrating on the social life of a cosmos of informal shrines, the text highlights a less-studied dimension of urban religion. It draws attention to the cumulative effect of lived practices and human–material entanglements, and complements discussions that frequently engage with omnipresent politics of formalization as well as competition of communities for attention and recognition in multireligious spaces.

A history of ‘Yan haƙiƙa, a revisionist Islamic group in northern Nigeria

Abstract‘Yan haƙiƙa are a Sufi group that has come to prominence in the second decade of the twenty-first century in northern Nigeria, with a significant following in Kano. Although members of the group perceive themselves to be bona fide followers of the path of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (Senegalese Islamic scholar and founder of Tijaniyya-Ibrahimiyya), they are considered by Sunni Muslims (both Salafis and Sufis) as a heretical faction. The basic ideology of this group is that Niasse Allah ne (Niasse is God); they also apotheosize their members. Their ideology stems from the concepts of Wahadat al-Wujud (oneness of being and unity of existence) and Tarbiyya (spiritual training), which is a method used by Sufi shaykhs to guide their disciples on the mystical journey to direct experiences of the Divine Essence – a method popularized by Tijaniyya-Ibrahimiyya. Initially, the group operated clandestinely, but in recent years its members have attracted public attention through Mawlid Baaye (celebrating the birthday of Niasse). During the celebration, they shower praises on Niasse and rank him above the Prophet Muhammad. Their comments generate violent reactions from Salafi and Sufi communities. While Salafis consider the creed of ‘Yan haƙiƙa as typical Sufi heresy, the Sufis not only disown them but also question their ‘Muslimness’. The emergence of ‘Yan haƙiƙa has changed the contours and composition of Tijaniyya in Kano because its defining ideology of deifying Niasse and its members contradict the teaching and doctrine of the mainstream Tijaniyya. This article unpacks the place of ‘Yan haƙiƙa in the highly contested and tense religious geography of Kano, exploring how its emergence complicates the category of ‘Muslim’ within mainstream Sunni Islam.

Iconic Reconciliations in a Secular Setting: Recent Bohemian Examples

In recent years, new exciting, publicly debated, and further thought-provoking events have appeared in the Czech Republic including, the restoration and benediction of the Marian Column on the Old Town Square in Prague, Darina Alster’s art performance, the Non-binary Madonna, the opening of the new Jan Palach Memorial in Všetaty and the temporary memorial to the victims of COVID-19. All these events, taking place in public, manifested qualities associated with religious practices and the concept of the sacred. Pointing selectively to trends in religious geography (Kong) and utilising the concepts of liquid religion (de Groot) and iconic religion (Tweed, Knott), this case study describes and analyses those events and shortly discusses their public reconciliatory character. It claims that the religious or sacral character of public objects or acts in a secular setting is permanently subject to questioning, contesting and opposition. Ritually enacted boundaries between non-negotiable values (the sacred) and values permanently negotiated (the profane) are always temporary and elusive in the public domain, as so it is with public acts of reconciliation.

The Religious and Racial Geography of Late Nineteenth-Century Bombay

The spatial separation of European colonialists and the local population was long seen as the defining feature of colonial cities. In recent years, the literature has moved toward a more ambivalent and contingent view of this spatial separation. This paper attempts to look beyond imagining the colonial city in terms of stark dualities or revisionist ambivalences, addressing both religious and racial separation. The paper analyses the street-level religious and racial geography of late nineteenth-century Bombay, using data from the 1881 Census. Results suggest moderate to high levels of racial and religious segregation in nineteenth-century Bombay at the street level, varying across groups, coupled with the existence of enclaves, and expressions of preference for segregation in diverse domains. The paper concludes that religion and race were meaningful social categories inscribed in urban space.

Cultural Geography in Russia in the Early 21st Century: Current State and Key Research Areas

—The article reviews and analyzes trends in the development of Russian cultural geography at the beginning of the 21st century, its specific features, and the latest scientific achievements with respect to the evolution of cultural geography in Western countries. Similarities and differences in the transformation of the main theoretical approaches, scientific methods, and subject areas of specific cultural and geographical studies in foreign countries and Russia are revealed. The most important thematic sections of the article cover the most significant segments of cultural and geographical research in Russia in the 2000s–early 2020s. It is shown that the main focus in the formation of Russian cultural geography (after several decades of neglecting anthropocultural approaches in the Soviet period) was cultural landscape science. The latest advances of Russian cultural geographers in the field of cultural landscape for the first decades of the 21st century are characterized. Domestic ethnic geography, which developed during the Soviet period as part of population geography, is gradually transforming to ethnocultural. Much attention is paid to the correlation of ethnic and regional identity in polyethnic regions, ethnocultural aspects of the geography of nature management, cultural geography of the indigenous peoples of the North, Siberia, and the Far East. Religious geography is a new direction of cultural geography for Russia, which has gained great relevance in the post-Soviet period in the revival of religious life in a country characterized by exceptional complexity and the diverse religious composition of the population. The article discusses and analyzes the experience of Russian developments in humanitarian geography—a set of research areas focused on studying systems of ideas about the geographic space in different sociocultural contexts. The great practical significance of cultural and geographical research and the possibility of their use for regional development and optimization of the spatial organization of society are emphasized.

Visual Images and Interpretations: A Semiotic Analysis of Textbook Covers

This article presents a comparative visual interpretation of the cover images of the selected textbooks. A social semiotic approach was used to analyse various compositional and thematic differences among two sets of textbook covers. The compositional interpretation was applied to explore the differences and similarities in an image composition and discourse analysis was used to explore their implied social discourses. The findings show some significant shift as well as continuum in the image composition and underlined social discourses. For example, the newly published textbooks focus on settings, character details and character connection, and use various colours in contrast to the old textbook covers. More activities promoting gender equality were found in the new textbook covers than in the old textbook covers. Overall, the new textbooks propose positive changes in their cover image composition in quality and gender discourses. However, the images only feature-specific religious symbols, regional culture and geography rather than multicultural, multiregional and multi-religious context of Nepali society. It seems that minority religion, ethnicity and regional variations that are found in Nepal are missing in the cover images across the curriculum. This article is expected to address the gap seen in the Nepali school educational research and helpful to provide insights that the cover images used in the textbooks are important and powerful meaning makers.

Formation of ethno-confessional Muslim education in the north of Kyrgyzstan in the late XIX-early XX centuries

This study comes as an attempts to summarize the published data and archival materials on the formation of the system of ethno-confessional education in the north of Kyrgyzstan, especially in the city of Tokmok. Due to its geographical location, this city was destined to become an educational center of Kyrgyz societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1897, Tokmok Russian-native school was opened, which was mostly named Rovnyaginskaya after the name of its head. Here, Muslim children were taught the basics of Islam and their native language, as well as Russian literacy and crafts – carpentry, bookbinding and shoemaking. According to the plan of the officials of the Russian administration of the region, such schools were supposed to train translators and small officials from the indigenous people. At the same time, in 1901–1902, the Jadid madrasah “Ekbal” (“Progress”) was opened in Tokmok, where, in addition to teaching the native language and religious disciplines, geography, arithmetic, anatomy and other disciplines were taught according to a new method. The article also provides a brief training program in this madrasah.

Паломнический туризм как технология религиозного воспитания личности

the results presented in the article allow us to justify the use of pilgrimage tourism as a tool in the formation of spiritual and moral values and worldview. The purpose of the study is to determine the specific features of pilgrimage tourism as a technology of religious education of the individual. The information base of the study was the stock, cartographic and statistical materials, including pilgrimage centers, as well as the sites of tourist organizations and materials collected during the expedition trips of the authors. The interdisciplinary nature of the research allowed us to use different methods from related fields of knowledge – religious studies, geography, sociology, and pedagogy. When interpreting the results of the study, historical, comparative-geographical methods and the method of statistical analysis were used. The results obtained allow us to substantiate the possibility of using pilgrimage tours as a religious education of a spiritual and moral person. In the course of the study, based on the analysis of the ideas of different authors, the value content of the conceptual apparatus of religious and pilgrimage tourism is determined. The system of developing religious education through pilgrimage tourism promotes the formation of a worldview, spiritual guidelines, ideals and meaning. The analysis of the role of pilgrimage in society allows us to distinguish its educational, missionary, charitable and spiritual-educational role. The results presented in the article can be used by pilgrimage centers, services of the Russian Orthodox Church for the development of pilgrimage tours, tourist companies for the promotion of religious tourism, geographers, historians in research and pedagogical activities when improving training courses.

Religious Geography and County‐Level Sex Ratios in China

AbstractThe sex ratio at birth in China is highly imbalanced in favor of boys. Past research on sex ratios in China emphasizes economic factors for their weakening effect on the Confucian tradition of son preference. Research in the sociology of religion suggests that religious geography may affect sex ratios through the spill‐over of religious teachings to those living in areas dominated by a religious tradition. To assess this linkage, we investigate the relationship between religious geography and county‐level child sex ratios using the 2000 China Population Census and the 2004 China Economic Census, the most complete and recent data available on religious presence in China. Applying spatial analyses of 2,685 counties (over 90% of all counties), we find that counties with a greater presence of Daoist temples have more imbalanced (male‐biased) sex ratios, whereas a greater presence of Buddhist temples and Islamic mosques is associated with less imbalanced sex ratios.

Culto Evangélico: Identificación, localización y caracterización en la segunda franja residencial (SFR) de Río Gallegos

El presente Informe Científico-Técnico, perteneciente a una Beca de Investigación para Alumnos Avanzados de la UNPA, se enmarca en el PI 29 A/427-1 “La Geografía de las Religiones en el ejido municipal de Río Gallegos en el año 2018. La Geografía Cultural en la Patagonia austral extraandina”. Teóricamente, pertenece a la Geografía Cultural Renovada en general y en particular a la Geografía de las Religiones, históricamente estudiadas desde la descripción y en sus características más básicas; actualmente se estudian integradas al territorio y sus transformaciones a diferentes escalas. Son escasas las investigaciones relacionadas a Río Gallegos, por esto la beca tiene como objetivos, en primer lugar, relevar y analizar bibliografía específica sobre la Geografía Cultural y la Geografía de las Religiones en particular. El segundo, identificar, caracterizar y cartografiar manifestaciones culturales religiosas relacionadas al culto evangélico en la Segunda Franja Residencial de Río Gallegos. Metodológicamente, se relevó, leyó comprensivamente y analizó bibliografía específica; se realizó una salida de campo para identificar y localizar las manifestaciones culturales religiosas evangélicas en la SFR, que fueron representadas cartográficamente con la ayuda de un SIG como herramienta principal y se realizó cartografía temática con dicho programa. Los resultados permitiran caracterizar las manifestaciones culturales, según las denominaciones de las iglesias evangélicas, además de aportar teórica y metodológicamente al PI 29 A/427-1 y a la formación en investigación del becario.

The Religious Geography of Thailand�s Malay Southern Provinces: Revisiting the Impact of South Asian and Middle Eastern Transnational Islamic Movements

SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthropology, sociology, and history.

Geopoetic Praxis in European Diversity/Decoloniality

ABSTRACT Based in Europe three authors deploy geopoetics as praxis to position their performance art work in the current debates on race, gender and sexuality in art and academia. They speak from displacement as mode of mobility into Belgium, where they engage in decolonial work. The article unfolds a relational approach in voicing resistance. Writing from distinct translocalities they merge European, South-African, Nepali, Iranian, sexual, gendered, religious and racial geographies into geopoetics. The article navigates geopoetics as praxis through three academic-artistic practices contributing to a shared theoretical framework building on work of queer and feminist scholars. Each author dives into a different yet interconnected angle of literacy and together they propose a shared framework of voicing translocal disidentifications as geopoetic literacy.

The Album of the Archconfraternity of the Blessed Sacrament and Five Wounds of Our Lord Jesus Christ at the Corpus Christi Church in Krakow. A Gem of Old Polish Sacred Art and an Invaluable Historical Source

The Album of the Archconfraternity of the Blessed Sacrament and Five Wounds of Our Lord ff Jesus Christ at Kazimierz in Krakow was made in the 17th century, but its oldest section duplicates the contents of an earlier catalogue comprising entries from 1551–1612. The album is a large-sized manuscript volume, an original and ambitious work, a gem of the Old Polish sacred art, a genuine document of several cultural epochs and an invaluable historical source. However, to date it has been largely ignored by researchers, although it has been referred to and used as a source on multiple occasions in studies on the Corpus Christi Church and the history and resources of the monastic archive. The album had a representative function, and the very act of opening. its pages must have evoked excitement as the book was beautifully executed. In its form, shape, and artwork, it resembles lavishly decorated Mediaeval and Renaissance codices. Many of its sheets are in fact whole-page paintings with figural scenes; it also features impressive floral and heraldic elements as well as initials. Despite the passage of four centuries since its inception, it is still in use, and has therefore become a link between the past and the present. Its scholarly, cognitive and application-related value was noticed by researchers only in the early 20th century. It was Rev. Józef Augustyn Błachut, author of the first modern monograph of the monastery, published in 1905, who introduced the album into scholarly circulation. Today, it is one of the most frequently consulted sources in the archive of the monastery, drawing attention of historians, art historians, culture historians and religious geography historians, but also culture enthusiasts who visit the monastery and its library. It is a remarkable memorial of cultural heritage of the nation and the Church, and a source to be used inresearch on Poland’s religious life, population mobility, reception and transmission of ideas, cultural exchange, ties of the monastery with its surroundings; it provides research data for studies on the demography, system of government, culture and infrastructure of Kazimierz and the entire Krakow urban area.

Faith Borders, Healing Territories & Interconnective Frontier? Wellness & Its Ecumenical Construct in African Shrines, Christian Prayerhouses & Hospitals

The religious geography of most health-seekers in modern Africa easily transverses the faith worlds of other religious traditions, thus building inevitably a lively-network of ecumenical spaces that surprisingly create an interpenetrating dialogue between African traditional shrines, Christian prayerhouses and western hospitals. The open-border policy of healing sites in Nigeria and Ghana in particular provides ecumenical directions and enriches interfaith conversations among different religious traditions. Consequently, the present study underscores the subversion of the dogmatic rhetoric of the different faith traditions in the quest of health and wholeness at healing sites. This ecumenical triangulation of the faith-borders projects a new religious landscape where the hostile rhetoric of faith traditions are clearly suspended, and a new appreciation of other faiths in definition of health and wellness is popularly entrenched. The existential blurring of dogmatic and traditional faith-borders raises new questions—and interesting perspectives in the modern study of religions, health and inter-faith/ecumenism in Africa.

Queer religious geographies? Qu(e)erying Indonesian Muslim selves

Emerging from two periods of fieldwork in Java, Indonesia, this article draws on participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews to address the co-production of queer Muslim spaces and subjectivities through the everyday practices of queer Muslims. What do queer religious geographies mean in this context? Approximations to this question are offered through an exploration of the lived realities of queer Indonesian Muslims who move between their queerness and religion engaging in commute and integration processes. By studying the domestic sphere, religious spaces and participation in LGBTIQ-rights NGOs, I reflect on the possibility to conceptualize agency from within certain degrees of submission to norms.