The Substantive view and the problem of "Exclusive Humanism"

Heathen Godpole, photo by author

For the Revisiting Religion & Place Summer Institute, we are reading David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, "Introduction," from their influential book American Sacred Space.

The introduction presents their argument for a shift from the poetics of sacred space to the politics of sacred space. The poetic approach takes sacred spaces as places of power to which we respond. It depends on a romantic imagination that appeals to "mythology of place and person," a sense of "mystical intuitionism" about the inherent supernatural power of sacred place (6-7). In contrast, the politics of sacred space examines the ways that sacred spaces are constructed by human agents through ritualization, interpretation, and contestation.

The poetic approach arises from the "substantive" idea of sacred space, which identifies a special quality to sacred spaces, a position best enunciated and represented by Mircea Eliade. Eliade discusses three characteristics of sacred space: 1) it is set apart from ordinary/profane space; 2) as an axis mundi, it gives access or allows for passage between different levels or states of reality; 3) it irrupts or manifests itself into space - it is a hierophany. Religion and spirituality recognize and are responses to how this sacred power positions itself in the world.

Chidester and Linenthal critique the substantive idea of sacred space. They write that the substantive position "erases" the cultural labor of sacralizing a space (ritualizing, interpreting, and contesting) but "attributing all the action to "holy places" and "gods and spirits" (17). It merely "announces a mystical theology of sacred space" and shuts down analysis. They call this "analytical naivete" that either takes the form of theological dogmatism or mystical intuitionism. 

I agree with their argument and find this shift in perspective to be important. They go on to provide important foundational concepts and analytic tools for understanding the "situational" i.e. constructed and contested character of sacred space. However, I don't want to let go of the poetics with the same absoluteness as they seem to in this introduction, which seems to smack of "exclusive humanism." I want to take issue with their assertion that sacred spaces cannot have agency.

In her article "Uncanny Ecologies," Mayanthi Fernando, associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, describes Charles Taylor's term "exclusive humanism." This was a "new sense of self" that emerged in the Enlightenment and formed the basis of secularity. It rejected the old medieval view of a world open to supernatural powers, and posited a human self that was individual, autonomous, closed, directed only by its own will. In contrast, posthumanist scholarship, like the new animism, the ontological turn - she calls it multispecies scholarship - "recognizes the agency of nonhumans" and "extends notions of personhood and agency to other-than and more-than humans." (Fernando, "Uncanny Ecologies: More-Than-Natural, More-Than-Human, More-Than-Secular," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 42.3, 2022.) 

The posthumanist perspective of new animism or what I am calling "the relational turn" proposes that other-than-human beings and even places may exhibit some sort of agency and relationality. In part, this is the recognition of Indigenous ways of knowing. In this sense, a "place" may act on us; it is more animate than we have given credit from our position of exclusive humanism. But it also factors in new scientific knowledge about the ways that other-than-human beings like animals and plants learn and communicate.

It seems to me that the idea of other-than-human agency or relationality is not quite the same as the substantive perspective. That perspective locates a special quality in the place itself. But the relational perspective looks at the relationship between the sacred place/being with other actors, such as human beings.  Whatever is distinctive is located in the relational aspect not necessarily or solely the thing-in-itself.