Wayside Shrines Research Articles

Vom Heiligen Land Tirol. Sakrales Bauen und die Berge

The extreme mountain landscape and its potential dangers were one of the reasons for the high number of sacred buildings in the Alpine region. Tyroleans have long called their region the Holy land of Tyrol, due to the many churches, chapels, monasteries, wayside shrines and crucifixes in the region, among other reasons. How was the unique religiosity of Alpine inhabitants expressed in their buildings? Is it expressed differently than in the famous church buildings of European cities? It seems that the motives for erecting sacred buildings and monuments in mountain regions are to be weighted differently and that, in addition to their primary religious function, these structures fulfilled different tasks for the population at different times. While contemplative spatial concepts were and still are at the forefront of architectural thought, earlier buildings were primarily vessels for relics, images and statues. The motive lay in conjuring up and invoking the help of God and the patron saints. Thus, while historical buildings were seen more as places of practiced rituals – to receive help from the difficulties of everyday life – the individualistic interest in contemplative places has gained momentum in modern times. The sheer number of these different typologies of structures in a wide variety of social locations is unique to Tyrol, making it easy to identify social and societal conditions in different historical periods.

Wayside shrines as forms of religiosity as illustrated by the parish of Szczepanów in the 19th century

The article discusses the role of wayside chapels, statues, and crosses in the religious life of the parish in Szczepanów. By utilizing manuscript sources from the parish archives, cartographic sources, and detached structures, the author was able to determine the number, distribution, and functions of small sacral architecture. In the 19th century, dozens of structures were recorded, funded by the local residents and communities as expressions of gratitude for graces received and as memorials to places associated with the cult of St. Stanislaus. Among the prevalent religious motifs were the Passion of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and various saints, including the patron saints of the benefactors and St. Stanislaus of Szczepanów, portrayed as a bishop performing the miracle of resurrecting the deceased knight Peter (Piotrowin).

CHESTNUT-MOTIVATED NON-SETTLEMENT NAMES IN BOHEMIA

The paper contributes to the research of toponyms with tree elements by presenting findings of formal, lexical-semantic and motivational analysis of 231 anoikonyms from the area of Bohemia which include the Czech appellative kaštan ʻchestnutʼ or its derivatives (the nouns kaštánek, kaštanka, kaštanovka, kaštanice, and the adjectives kaštanový, kaštánkový). The research has revealed that the vast majority of the anoikonyms relate to the horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum), while only two names are motivated by thesweet chestnut (Castanea sativa). This reflects the occurrence of these two tree-species in Czechia: while the horse chestnut is widely spread in the whole of the country, sweet chestnut is rather rare, being planted only in parks and gardens in warmer regions. Most of the names are prepositional phrases which include a preposition and the common noun kaštan and indicate the localization of the object (mostly a field or another piece of land) in the vicinity of chestnut trees: a solitary tree, a group of trees, an orchard or a chestnut-tree lined road. A large number of names contain the diminutive kaštánek ʻsmall chestnutʼ. We assume that these names mostly do not relate to small trees. The use of a diminutive in the name usually reflects the name giver´s emotional relationship towards a particular chestnut tree rather than the tree´s size. It is a well-known fact that anoikonyms reflect the history and culture of a particular country or a region. In the instance of chestnut-related anoikonyms, this can be illustrated by names reflecting the old Czech tradition to plant certain tree-species near Christian wayside shrines (small chapels, crosses, statues, etc.).

Dodatky k soupisu pozdně gotických božích muk na jižní Moravě

Dodatky k soupisu pozdně gotických božích muk na jižní Moravě

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.

Crowning, rotating, and emanating hierophanies with elevatio aspect in wayside shrines

Abstract My aim in this paper is to investigate the variants of directionality implied in visual hieratic texts as religious markers in the sacrosphere, which are substantially expressed in the form of a wayside shrine/cross. The methodological underpinnings for this project rely on the proposed semiotactics (cf. Haładewicz-Grzelak): the investigative perspective modeled after phonotactics – a branch of phonology investigating the restrictions on and the possibilities of phoneme combinations in languages (cf. Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2011). The study draws on digital documentation of wayside shrines, crosses, and sacrality markers on houses collected by the author in various European countries (2009–2021), focusing in particular on the material collected in the area of present Slovakia, Ukraine, Austria, Slovenia, and the region of the Beskid Mountains in Poland. It shows how bodily hexis is inscribed into the phenomenology of a wayside shrine through particular types of hierophanic dynamics. The study also focuses on the aspect of headedness and markedness in the nano-structure of a sign, surfacing as directionality in the conceptualization of the religious sphere by particular communities.

Making Space for the Gods: Ethnographic Observations of Chinese House Temples in Singapore

Space for religious use is highly regulated in Singapore. Specific plots of land are reserved for religious groups to bid for, and create, “official” spaces of worship. However, religious practices continue to exist within “unofficial” sacred spaces, such as house temples and wayside shrines, negotiating and resisting the overt management of religion by the Singapore state. Scholars, including Vineeta Sinha and Terence Heng, demonstrate how sacrality infused into everyday secular urban spaces defies neat binaries of “sacred/profane” and “legal/illegal”, and how Chinese house temples or sintuas—temples located within public housing flats—sustain sacred spaces, despite being technically illegal under housing regulations. Drawing upon a series of ethnographic observations conducted over a year of four sintuas and their activities in Singapore, this paper explores the different ways through which sintuas produce sacred space as a response to spatial constraints imposed by the state. These include (1) re-enchanting everyday urban spaces during a yewkeng—a procession around the housing estate—with the help of a spirit medium; (2) using immaterial religious markers (e.g., ritual sounds and smells) to create an “atmosphere” of sacredness; (3) appropriating public spaces; and (4) leveraging the online space to digitally reproduce images of the sacred.

Wayside Shrines and Crosses as the Spatial and Memorial Signs in the Cultural Landscape of Polish Rural Areas

This article concerns the issues of investigating the role of the wayside crosses and shrines in cultural landscape of Polish rural areas as well as its functioning as the spatial and memorial signs in the awareness of local communities. The article is based on the ethnographical field research and publications. In the investigation, there was used authorial method in the anthropology field, cognitive mapping method -mental maps, which enables the researchers to describe and knowledge many cultural landscape dimensions - sacral, historical, legendary- mythological, social and to identify significant elements that create the rural space. The thesis was that the wayside crosses and shrines are multi code and complex macro-signs that serve multipurpose function in the lives of the countryside residents. The aim of this paper is to show the possibilities of reading the encoded cultural meanings of these small sacral architecture forms created as a result of direct or earlier life experiences of the village inhabitants. The article points out the need of documentation to protect, preserve and maintain these archetypical elements that influence the clarity of cultural landscape and the identity of the local communities.

Introduction. Wayside Shrines in India: An Everyday Defiant Religiosity

Drawing on this special issue’s ethnographic data and analysis this introduction aims to offer an analytical framework for understanding the notion of wayside shrines. It does so by defining wayside shrines as sites that enshrine a worshipped object that is immediately adjacent to a public path, visible from it and accessible to any passerby. Further, we argue that wayside shrines are spaces in which we can observe a unique form of everyday religiosity that challenges sedimented discourses and practices at three different scales: at the level of the individual, of the community, and of the state.

From the Heavens to the Streets: Pune’s Wayside Shrines

This article presents the results from brief ethnographic research conducted in 2016 in the city of Pune, Maharashtra. Through two case studies of wayside shrines in Pune—the first, a tiny pavement shrine which is steadily growing in popularity, and the second, a small shrine turned into an extravagant temple in just a few years—I consider them as more than just spontaneous expressions of devotion. Taking into consideration the roles that urban conditions and social configurations have been playing in how social actors forge connections between localities and different communities, this paper will look at how these shrines can be spaces of creative subversion of the established socio-religious order and its structures of power. In in this contribution, I argue that the wayside shrine reveals the blurred boundaries between the rural and the urban, the sacred and the mundane, the institutionalized and the popular as well as the legal and the illegal.

Shrines of Goa: Iconographic Formation and Popular Appeal

Religious shrines in Goa (India), both Hindu and Catholic, are marked by notable differences. Shrines in temples and churches are distinguished from wayside shrines by their formalized iconography and elite patronization. Shrines are further differentiated by modalities of their representation and iconography. Formalized shrines fulfill particular representational (symbolic) functions that reflect local social hierarchies. Emergent Hindu and iconic Catholic shrines stand out through peculiar material and embodied characteristics of their iconography and enjoy wide demotic appeal. Although decisive for the role the shrines play in society, their inherent representational, semiotic, and practical distinctions and differentiations are usually not reflected in the concept of the “shrine.” Eventually, the article, therefore, takes issue with this concept itself arguing that it is rather elusive and obscures more than it brings to light.

Bus-Stop Sami: Transient Temples in Urban South India

Wayside shrines are a ubiquitous feature of urban India. A site for community building and income-generation for their mostly poor and working class patrons, they are increasingly a source of anxiety for middle class residents who fear their capacity to morph quickly into full-fledged temples. Through a comparison of two roadside shrines, one that was successful at attracting a group of followers and one that was not, the paper analyzes the rhetorical and ritual means that the human representatives of a deity employ to transform ordinary, homogenous public space into sacred space, where a deity may take Her seat and be honored. Such a transformation of the way that space is experienced and understood can have a catalytic effect on the people who move through it, creating new publics who exist in tension with an increasingly influential vision of public space as hygienic, orderly and free from religion.

Site, Sight, Cite: Conceptualizing Wayside Shrines as Visual Culture

This article proposes a threefold framework for analyzing wayside shrines as artifacts of visual culture. Site casts shrine construction as a problem of the organization of space: a sacred space (the shrine) converges with a public space (the street). Sight defines the shrine as a visual phenomenon: a display framing an image that projects an ideological address. Cite directs attention to the semiotic operations of the image, focusing on effects of attraction and repulsion. The argument is organized in two parts. The first part is descriptive: the author presents a range of exemplary street shrines, from rudimentary (kaccha) to solid and well finished (pakka), encountered in the course of ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai. The second part takes a systematic approach to analyzing the visual relations street shrines engage in contemporary urban public space. The analysis hinges on a proposed re-theorization of visual worship, darshan, as a gesture of mutual recognition.

Sai Baba of Bombay: A Saint, His Icon, and the Urban Geography ofDarshan

Previous articleNext article No AccessSai Baba of Bombay: A Saint, His Icon, and the Urban Geography of DarshanWilliam ElisonWilliam ElisonDartmouth College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by History of Religions Volume 54, Number 2November 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/677808 Views: 207Total views on this site Citations: 10Citations are reported from Crossref © 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Roberto Rizzo Lithic devotionality and other aesthetic strata: Buddhist garden shrines in rural Java, Asian Anthropology 13 (Oct 2022): 1–18.https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2022.2122686Amanda Lucia The contemporary guru field, Religion Compass 16, no.22 (Jan 2022).https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12427Arzu YILDIZ Hinduizm ve İslam Arasında: Şirdi Sai Baba Örneği, Turkish Academic Research Review - Türk Akademik Araştırmalar Dergisi [TARR] (Jun 2021): 555–565.https://doi.org/10.30622/tarr.903914Alfred Collins Religious Experience without an Experiencer: The ‘Not I’ in Sāṃkhya and Yoga, Religions 10, no.22 (Feb 2019): 94.https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10020094Jonathan Loar From Neither/Nor to Both/And: Reconfiguring the Life and Legacy of Shirdi Sai Baba in Hagiography, International Journal of Hindu Studies 22, no.33 (Nov 2018): 475–496.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11407-018-9246-0ELAINE FISHER Public Space, Public Canon: Situating religion at the dawn of modernity in South India, Modern Asian Studies 52, no.0505 (Sep 2018): 1486–1541.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X17001044Borayin Larios, Raphaël Voix Introduction. Wayside Shrines in India: An Everyday Defiant Religiosity, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal , no.1818 (Jul 2018).https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.4546Borayin Larios From the Heavens to the Streets: Pune’s Wayside Shrines, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal , no.1818 (Jul 2018).https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.4549Eliza F. Kent Bus-Stop Sami: Transient Temples in Urban South India, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal , no.1818 (Jul 2018).https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.4554Anna Charlotta Osterberg The Role of Roadside Shrines in the Everyday Lives of Female Devotees in Mumbai, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal , no.1818 (Jul 2018).https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.4565

Saints and evil and the wayside shrines of Mauritius

This article discusses the cultural practice of constructing wayside shrines in the Black River district of Mauritius. Using interdisciplinary methods, the authors map the material practices of shrine-making, examine their historical and social contexts, and investigate their contemporary cultural meanings and values. The Mauritian tradition draws important parallels to what scholars have termed ‘spontaneous shrines’ but is a singular material expression of popular religion that is deliberate, often durable, apolitical, profoundly religious, and inextricably tied to the supernatural. In Black River, the majority of roadside shrines are grounded in a local folk Catholic tradition, derived from beliefs about the power of saints in everyday lives, the co-dependent relationship between the living and the dead, and the omnipresence of evil in the world. These shrines are complex sites that materially locate Catholic believers in the country’s varied ethnic geography, yet they also work as an articulation of popular religion that creates a unique intercultural space.

Guest Column—Epilogue: Celebrity's Face Book

Celebrity relies on a gaze, a collective or public regard that, in gazing, confers value. Celebrity also demands a face to celebrate—faciality is a sine qua non of “celebrification.” The historian Peter Brown demonstrates inThe Cult of the Saintsthat late antiquity introduced the overriding importance of saints' images, bodies, relics, or tomb sites in a Christian worship that emphasized the mediation of saints between heaven and earth and in place of angels; celebrity had its origins in the woodcut portraits and wayside shrines that proliferated as well as in the professionally wrought iconic images of the saints. Against David Hume's judgment of this phenomenon as “vulgar” and a remnant of pagan folk religion, he argues that the rise of the cult of the saints was as influenced by elites, including Augustine, as by supposedly lesser folk, and that the latter, especially women and the poor, were thus able to participate in a democratizing of culture profoundly indebted to graveside practices that promoted personal relationships, even friendships, with the dead saints and the circulation of their faces in imagery and their body parts as relics (17). Moreover, far from introducing vulgarity into Christian rituals, Brown shows how the cult was imbued with the culture of classical antiquity and with values associated with Athenian democracy and the philosophy of nous, a non-rational intelligence linking us to the divine (48). That we deploy the termcelebrity iconfor such figures as Oprah or Angelina Jolie only underscores the vestiges of public religious ritual that remain embedded in celebrity practices and the nimbus of the sacred that haloes even seemingly debased celebrity discourses.

Sandstone used in the historic wayside shrines in the region of Wieliczka

The region of Wieliczka is especially rich in various architectural structures like wayside crosses and shrines. The great number of these objects is connected with the folk culture, religious customs of Poles as well as an easy access to a suitable stone material, which is commonly used to build those structures. Wayside shrines, as a work of folk artists, were built of dolnoistebnianski sandstone, which quarries are characteristic for the region. The condition of stone building’s wayside shrines depends on the location (near to Cracow agglomeration), and biological and mechanical factors. Over the years, they have caused a rapid process of stone destruction. Conservatory work and revaluation of most of wayshrines seem to be necessary in order to restore their original beauty.

Crossroads of Religions: Shrines, Mobility and Urban Space in Goa

AbstractWayside shrines — representing Hindu and Catholic divinities and saints — show an astonishing dynamic in the cities of Goa and India. Not only do they persist in a milieu of drastic modern change that often seems to be at odds with their traditional locations, aesthetics and purposes, but also some of them surpass temples, churches and mosques in popularity. The popularity of these seemingly marginal religious monuments is a response to three forms of mobility characterizing modern Indian urban environments: cultural mobility — the diversification and fluctuation of religious ideas and practices; social mobility — the diversification and fluctuation of people from different castes, social classes and geographical regions, as well as the change of caste and class status due to socio‐economic change; and physical mobility — the movement of and movement around increasingly dense and complex flows of motorized traffic. The shrines modify and transform the centuries‐old spatio‐religious system of Hindus and Catholics to fit the conditions of late‐modern city life. They allow a culturally diversifying, socially changing and geographically fluctuating population to engage with a variety of personalized deities and saints whose charismatic authority is not only quite independent from formalized local social hierarchies, but often also cuts across orthodox divisions between religious traditions.RésuméLes sanctuaires installés le long des voies de circulation — représentations de divinités et saints hindous et catholiques — présentent une dynamique étonnante dans les villes de Goa et d’Inde. D’une part, ils persistent dans un milieu qui connaît une modernisation radicale souvent en contradiction, semble‐t‐il, avec leur finalité, leur esthétique et leur emplacement traditionnels ; d’autre part, certains dépassent en popularité temples, églises ou mosquées. La fréquentation de ces monuments religieux apparemment marginaux tient à trois formes de mobilité propres aux environnements urbains indiens modernes : la mobilité culturelle (diversification et fluctuation des idées et pratiques religieuses), la mobilité sociale (diversification et fluctuation des individus venus de castes, classes sociales et régions géographiques diverses, et changement de statut de caste et de classe à cause de l’évolution socio‐économique), et la mobilité physique (mouvement et circulation autour de flux toujours plus denses et complexes de trafic motorisé). Ces sanctuaires modifient et transforment le système spatio‐religieux séculaire des hindous et des catholiques qui doit s’adapter aux conditions de la vie urbaine postmoderne. Ils permettent à une population qui se diversifie au plan culturel, évolue au plan social et fluctue au plan géographique de s’engager à l’égard de divinités ou de saints personnalisés plus variés dont l’autorité charismatique est totalement indépendante des hiérarchies sociales locales formalisées et transcende les divisions orthodoxes entre traditions religieuses.

Analysis of Wayside Shrines in Kawachinagano City by GIS

Analysis of Wayside Shrines in Kawachinagano City by GIS

Comparative repression and comparative resistance: what explains survival?

Three Baltic peoples — Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians — survived centuries of repression culminating in Soviet policies aimed at cultural if not biological genocide. Baltic cultures had traits that tipped the scales towards survival, even when other forces pushed them towards extinction. They clung to symbols — musical, literary, and sacred places — that reminded them of their community and that strengthened common bonds. This article analyses the importance of the epic poems Kalevipoeg [Son of Kalev] for Estonians and Lāčplēsis [The Bearslayer] for Latvians and of wayside shrines for Lithuanians. Cultures that prized literacy, freedom, and solidarity helped Balts to acquire what complexity theorists term ‘self-organized fitness’ and emerge from Soviet rule able to function like and interact with other societies that the United Nations rates high in human development.