Experiences of Place (Religions of the World) - Softcover

Macdonald, Mary N

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0945454384 ISBN 13: 9780945454380

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2003

Synopsis

Place and orientation are important aspects of human experience. Place evokes geography and culture and conjures up history and myth. Place is not only a particular physical location but an idea, a mental construction that captures and directs the human relationship to the world. The contributors to this volume invite us to reflect on the significance of places, real and imagined, in the religious traditions they study and on how places are known, imagined, remembered and struggled for. Whether looking at the ways myth and ritual reinforce the Yoruba's bond to the land or at Australian Aboriginal engagements with the origins of the created world, exploring Hildegard of Bingen's experience of heaven or myths of the underworld in contemporary American millennialism, listening to oral narratives of divine politics and deserted places of Rajasthan or investigating literal and literary images of the Promised Land, these essays underscore that place is constructed in the intersection of material conditions, political realities, narrative and ritual performance.

About this title

Review

The meaning, activity and experience of place offer far more to the study of religions than has yet been realized. In their timely discussion of present, material locations, the fantasized places of heaven and the conspiratorial underworld, the sites of oral and textual traditions, and the places of dreaming and promise, this book's contributors indicate some of the varied directions we might take in exploring the physical, social and cultural dimensions of place and their intersection with the religious.--Kim Knott

Experiences of Place is a multidisciplinary, cross-cultural exploration of a common human phenomenon. This book takes a bold and important step in filling, in MacDonald's words, 'an underdeveloped concept of religious studies.' This is an exciting book, full of possibilities, a most important work on the subject of place in the human imagination.--Philip P. Arnold

About the Author

MARY N. MACDONALD is Professor of History of Religions, Le Moyne College.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0945454384
• ISBN 13: 9780945454380
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 204