Space and Its Characteristics

In The Location of Religion chapter 1, Kim Knott discusses key concepts that characterize space and help us to locate religion within space. These include configuration, simultaneity, extension, and power (Location, 21)

Configuration - in a social space, entities are in relationship to other entities and arranged in space in certain ways ( configured) in relation to each other.

Extension - locations or places are extended temporally in the past and the future. Think about how communion extends back into the past and future - imagining for many Christians the Last Supper of Jesus as well as the eschatological "marriage supper of the Lamb" in Revelation 19. But are also connected to or extended into other locations and into virtual spaces. Think about how a church service might be streamed online and extended in this way into a cyber-space. Or if I use Youtube to take a video tour of a college campus or a cathedral or Stonehenge, my home or my location--wherever I am engaging in the electronic tour--extends into these other geographical distant locations. 

Similarly, an imaginative extension - how salat extends a local masjid imaginatively to Mecca, or the Passover extends imaginatively to Jerusalem, "next time" says the participant. How the 14 Stations of the Cross in every Roman Catholic church extends that space to the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. 

I am touching on both of configuration and extension in my world religions class in which I have the class take objects and rituals and think about how they are configured in relation to other thins, people, objects, groups. How they extend in time and imaginatively into other locations past, present, and ideal - such as the eternal return to the powerful creative mythic age of Changing Women in teh Apache Sunrise ceremony. 

Simultaneity  - This is an interesting idea that space confronts you with the now, "a present space given as an immediate whole complete with its associations and connections in their actuality" (quoting Lefebvre, 23). But within that present, every space is stratified, layered with past iterations, meanings, connections, containing "within its fabric many phases of building." In her analysis of the left hand, Knott also raises the possibility of comparative simultaneity - two different but related systems existing together. She discusses the Western and the Tantric traditions of the left hand. But for my world religions class, an example might be the Apache Sunrise Ceremony and perhaps the identity of young girls communicated in schools or in the broader culture of girl's empowerment. The religio-cultural identity of the Apache Woman communicated in the Sunrise Ceremony stands and exists in possible tension with other sorts of contemporary identities available to young girls, like scientist or coder, the sorts of progressive identities that are expressed in American culture.

Power  -- The idea here is that space is full of power. And that things in space are in relations of contestation or "force relations" (77).  Power struggles are played out in space. "The spaces that religion occupies and participates in are spaces of power -- and the challenge will be to discover the relationship between religion and power in any gvien space." We see power playing out in hierarchal relationships, as well as hegemonic and colonial relationships.  One way we see it is through exclusion. Sacred spaces are often created through boundary-making, control, and exclusion. 

In the World Religions class this semester during a presentation on the hajj, we had a discussion of  Mecca being off-limits to non-Muslims. The Haram is marked by exclusion of non-Muslims, but also the transformation of Muslim bodies from unclean to ihram through washing, changing clothing, through mental/emotion focus, and through recitation of the talbiya or labbayka, which interestingly enough places one in space and in spatial relationship to God. "Here I am, oh God." We went on to discuss the ancient Israelite Temple in Jerusalem which was bounded by courts of Gentiles, of Woman, of the exclusion of Jewish men from the Temple itself, and even all the priests except the High Priest one time a year from the Holy of Holies- boundaries and exclusion create this sense of holy space. We hear of an act of transgression against these boundaries in Acts 21:28-29 when Paul is accused of  bringing Greeks into the temple and defiling the holy place.  In a similar way, we talked about our field trip to the Roman Catholic cathedral and how the sanctuary was a raised platform in the center of the church bounded by a railing. Only the priests enter this space. "Did we go into that space?" I asked the class and you could feel the light bulbs turning on as they all shook their heads no. (Although in a previous tour of the church, the priest did bring our group up to inspect the altar close-up. But I didn't bring that up, haha.)

Names of places also reveal power struggles. Here is how I opened my 2021 AAR presentation "Land, Property, Asatru": "Let’s imagine that we are together in a place now called San Antonio in a land sometimes called Texas. Where are we? What do we name this place? What story do we tell about this place? Who belongs in this place? Is it America? The United States? El Norte? Turtle Island? Is it Vinland? Each name is a vision of place and a claim to belonging."

Now, thanks to Kim Knott, we could see these different names as representations of space, symbolic markers of positions within a field, contesting and struggling with each other.