The Peripatetic Tradition

As part of the Revisiting Religion and Place summer institute at UVA, we read Evan Berry, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism. Berry also came to the institute one day, spending a couple of hours with our group in thoughtful discussion about his book and related topics. He was richly and generously conversant with the group and it was a fun afternoon.

Early in the book, Berry brings up the topic of walking. I love to walk - it is a daily ritual of mine. And I walk for all sorts of reasons -- to take the dog out, to get my heart rate up, to go places around campus, to engage in solitude and contemplation. Walking has become a widely practiced ritual, associated with a healthy lifestyle. There were so many people who took up walking during the COVID lockdowns. I would see so many people walking in my neighborhood during that time. While it has fallen off as a practice again, everyone understands walking as part of a healthy lifestyle. Berry describes it as a "cult of walking" promulgated by doctors, public health officials, and fitness gurus as a practice promising "health, happiness, and wholeness to those who take up the ritual" - which suggests a type of religious or spiritual practice (56).

Walking is a practice that has been intertwined with religion - or at least reflection and contemplation - since Aristotle's Peripatetic school (Devoted to Nature, 49). Berry writes that walking has been "one of modernity's primary contemplative techniques" and lists Western philosophers--from Hobbes to Thoreau--whose walking was "integral to their thinking" (50). They developed a particular type of walking: rambling "disassociated from the pursuit of fixed goals and free of any agenda" (51). This sort of walking engages the body while freeing the mind - without a goal in mind and without the constraints of time, one's thoughts wander freely, stimulating new ideas and fresh ways of thinking.

Berry contrasts this philosophical rambling with the medieval pilgrimage. These pilgrimages were a type of scripted walking, he suggests. A pilgrimage is a walk structured around a purpose, a story or narrative,  a specific way, and a destination. Not only that, it was "often carefully managed and hierarchically organized" by ecclesiastical authorities (51). That is, many pilgrimages may have originated as spontaneous popular responses to highly charismatic people and powerful events, such as miraculous healings or events of martyrdom, but were often quickly routinized and monetized as packaged religious experiences. Of course, that does not preclude their importance as personal and meaningful religious experiences. 

While it was a vital part of medieval Christian practice, pilgrimage has long been practiced in many religious traditions. The Islamic Hajj may be the most well known - but Shiites have their own pilgrimage routes in Iraq and Syria. There are many, many piligrimage routes in Hinduism from Amarnath to Varanasi. Buddhism has its own routes including Bodh Gaya of course and the Japanese Shikoku pilgrimage among others. Jainism has its own peripatetic tradition of wandering saints. And pilgrimage continues in new contemporary forms as a secular practice of self-discovery, healing from trauma, or making a transition in life.

All this got me thinking about types of religious and spiritual walking. What are the religious ways of walking? In addition to pilgrimage, what are other ways that walking has been utilized for religious or spiritual ends?

• Walking meditation - regularly used in Zen practice, Thich Nhat Hahn made it a central practice in his teaching.
• Circumambulation - around Buddhist stupas, or as part of a Hindu puja
• Fire walking - for instance, the Thimithi Fire-Walking Ceremony in which devotees of Draupadi from the Mahabharata walk across beds of red-hot coals
• Labyrinth walking - in the medieval Catholic tradition and revived in the contemporary spirituality movement
• Conversion -  "walking the sawdust trail" in Protestant revivalism
• Processions and parades - think of Holy Week processions in which the statue of a saint is processed through a European town, or a murthi of Durga is taken to a body of water and immersed at the end of Navratri. In Germania, Tacitus described the Heathen wagon procession of the goddess Nerthus and I described a contemporary wagon procession of Thor in my book Being Viking
• Protest marching - think of religiously inspired Civil Rights marches, nuclear protest marches, peace marches, etc 

I would love to hear about other examples of distinctive religious types of walking!

Two Types of Attachment

 

In The Battle for Yellowstone, Justin Farrell describes two types of attachment to places. 

These are two different ways that we “ascribe meaning to places, imbuing them with emotion and feeling, making them much more than the bundles of matter that they are, The individual attributes of a space emerge into something much more culturally meaningful: a neighborhood becomes the self-identity of a people a national park becomes for some visitors a lasting source of positive emotional attachment; a farm becomes more than fields and crops but the site of family ritual passed down to future generations.” (239)

The first is place attachment, which he explains as “members’ connection to the biophysical attributes” of a place, (Farrell, Battle, 239). Place attachment in his definition involves connection to the land. It doesn't necessarily have to do with social relationships, but concerns a deep attachment to the environment. People become attached to a landscape in various ways, through work, story, recreational experiences, etc. There is a significant body of literature on place attachment theory that is worth exploring.

The second is community attachment, which I am defining as "members’ connection to the social-relational community of a place." In this sense, attachment comes primarily through one's relationship to people, to a community of people who may also reside in a certain geographical locality--thus there is some conflation with place attachment. It is about social bonding.

Community attachment involves two factors. Group identity is about feeling connected to a group's purpose or character. An example might be identifying as a Corbin Redhound (our local high school mascot) - a strong sense of connection to this local school-based identity because one feels connected to the football team, or the band and their purpose. The other factor is interpersonal relational bonds between community members--real, lived relationships between members of this community. While group identity can be somewhat abstract, interpersonal bonds are very concrete and involve friendships, kinship, and other intimate personal connections between specific people.

"Community attachment relates to a person's sense of fit or belonging in a locality, which creates a sense of loyalty. . . . community attachment and community satisfaction should not be automatically equated with each other. People can be very attached to their community and yet highly dissatisfied with it." Ralph B. Brown "Community Attachment" in the Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World, edited by:Karen Christensen & David Levinson. SAGE Publications, 2003.

I am trying to think about this in relation to Appalachia and other parts of Kentucky. I think you often have community attachment without a strong place attachment. This may be what Harry Caudill is pointing to when he writes about the woods, "The hill people probably know as little about their native heath as any folk on earth . . . . Today, a typical eastern Kentuckian cannot tell a black oak from a black gum or a hickory from a hornbeam. Though the people of China will pay more than sixty dollars for a pound of dried ginseng root most Kentuckians can walk past it without recognition" (Caudill, Darkness at Dawn, 38, 41). I see this exemplified in my wife's life – she has a strong attachment to the relationships and the relational network of extended family and friends that she grew up with in her small town. These are social bonds that have been forged for generations of living together. But she doesn’t have a strong connection to the land and its features, the environment and ecology of her local area. She doesn’t know the land or the geography, nor spend any time in it.

Now some of her family also has place attachment, which was formed through years of hunting, fishing, and farming the land.

Another issue of place attachment is that it might be super-local – families might be very attached to their holler or their mountain, but not so attached to the other side of the mountain. Families forge these sorts of super-local place bonds by generations of living in one certain place, the family holler or farm. Thus a very powerful place attachment might coincide with a negligent attitude toward environmental destruction someplace else. This sort of super-local place attachment for one’s own property but not the property of another fails to appreciate the interconnection between these “properties” defined by deeds rather than an interconnected landscape. It makes it more difficult to build joint or communal action to protect a landscape.

"Too Special to Drill"

In The Battle for Yellowstone, Justin Farrell writes that "some areas are ‘too special to drill,’ and some areas are not. Some ecosystems we plunder with impunity, and some ecosystems lead us to pause and reflect on repercussions" (Farrell, 238-39).  

I couldn't get my mind off this idea that in the history of industry in Appalachia, there was no place "too special to drill" - no place that shouldn't be logged, mined, or stripped. In Appalachia, no place was treated as "special." There were no sacred places, no sacred mountains. Every landscape, every mountain was devalued as "overburden."  

For instance Harry M. Caudill writes about the passivity, negligence, and complicity of local officials who handed over the rich Appalachian landscape to the rapacious machines of the logging and mining industries. "Kentucky mountaineers . . . transferred legal title to [the land] to 'furriners,' [foreigners] then routinely elected judges and legislators who steadfastly sided with the coal owners in all clashes between their rights and those of the resident population. These officials stood by while mining mangled mountains, ruined streams, and made broad areas into wastelands" (Caudill, A Darkness at Dawn, 46)

He further notes that "Appalachia's absentee landlords have had many willing helpers within the region. Their greed has been more than matched by that of local entrepreneurs who were, and are, all too willing to plunder their homeland and impoverish their kinsmen for profit" (Caudill, Darkness, 31)

Chad Montrie notes that some local Appalachian people supported and defended the destruction of the Appalachian environment, perpetuating the falsehood that Appalachia was a poor land, "not worth a plug nickel." As Caudill writes, all powerholders from legislators to educators "continued to spread the worn myth that Appalachian people are poor because their land is poor and, by implication at least, that the wisest course is to leave. Thus indifference on [college] campuses combined with greed in boardrooms to work the ruin of one of the fairest and most promising parts of the globe" (Caudill, Darkness, 43)

In a perverse logic, those complicit with the mining industry actually argued that Appalachia was improved by strip mining. They "defended surface coal mining as good for miners, the local economy, and even the land" saying, "it gives people work and the land that we strip is in 50 percent and a lot of times 100 percent better condition that it was when we came in there." Montrie writes "On one job they paid a man to mine a part of his property that ‘wasn’t worth a plug nickel,’ leveled it off flat and sowed grass all over, ‘'and now he’s got a pasture out there.’’ Other operations had created flat land for a college and an airport, which [was] believed to be a better use of the land" (Montrie, Making a Living, 89). 

Farrell asks “But what makes something more ‘special' than something else? Where do those moral boundaries come from?” His answer is "the stories we tell about a place"--pointing to the role of sacred story and myth, both personal and communal, that instills certain places with a sense of the sacred. People, individuals, and communities construct sacred places through these narratives that create attachment to places. “We rarely think about them explicitly, but these deep narrative and commitments that are inscribed in our identities and cultures inform what we judge to be more ‘special'" (Farrell, Battle, 238).

So where are the sacred stories of the Appalachian landscape? This is the chilling line from Caudill, "The lack of an Appalachian land epic made the hill people willing collaborators in the destruction of their own region" (Caudill, Darkness, 31, emphasis added). 

What are the sacred stories, myths, narratives, and folktales that enchant or re-chant the Appalachian hills? That's what I am looking for.  

Sources

Caudill, Harry M. A Darkness at Dawn: Appalachian Kentucky and the Future. University Press of Kentucky, 1976.

Farrell, Justin. The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict. Princeton University Press, 2015.

 

Montrie, Chad. “Degrees of Separation: Nature and the Shift from Farmer to Miner to Factory Hand in Southern West Virginia.” In Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States, 71–90. University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Spirituality vs Covenant

In Defend the Sacred, Michael D. McNally does a lot to clarify for readers what Native religions are and how they work. Part of this discussion involves the long story of how Native religions have been folded into or coopted into the contemporary category of Native American Spirituality.

The Holy Mountain, San Francisco Peaks

Spirituality, as it has come to be understood since the late 20th century, is an approach to meaning and identity that is individual - not tied to a community or a specific place; subjective - internal and emotional, based around experiencing feelings of awe or ecstasy for instance, and eclectic - it involves seeking a sense of fulfillment from a wide range of experiences. He writes that spirituality is a type of "piety whose authenticity relies on the self's ability to range freely across religious and cultural boundaries to find its fulfillment" --a spiritual marketplace coupled with the therapeutic turn in American religion "from communal norms of self-disciplines to individual possibilities of self-fulfillment" (106).

McNally argues that defining Native American religion as spirituality distorts and misrepresents it in ways that are detrimental to Native American religious freedom. He is quite disparaging of this approach, at one point calling it an "alchemy" (97) that denatures and mangles the factual claims of Native people about their beliefs and practice. He quotes a law case about the San Francisco Peaks that reduces the Peoples' relationship (Hopi, Navajo, and others) to the mountain as "the profound integration of man and mountain into one." McNally caustically responds, "Where does such a construction come from if not straight out of some bookstore's New Age Spirituality shelf" (111). 

I wonder how often in World Religion classes around the US, Native American religion has come across in this ambiguous and universalized way, as a glowing and sentimental feeling of emotional bliss that all nature is sacred? McNally helpfully emphasizes that the point "is not to be in a mystical union of man and mountain, but rather to discipline one's thought and behavior to conform ritually and ethically and doctrinally to the narratives, ethical teachings, and ritual duties of discrete religious traditions" (111-12).

There may indeed be significant differences in how people come to be attached to or in relationship with a locality, a particular land - this is Jonathan Z Smith's locative religion. There is a significantly different historical arc for how the Cherokee, for instance, and the small farmers of Kentucky's Knobs region and the Cumberland Plateau of Appalachia came to have a relationship with the land. And significant differences in how they would understand it and speak about it and live it out. 

But as Wendell Berry and others have shown--in communities where families have farmed the same place for generations, a profound relationship can emerge. 

Wendell Berry raking hay with horses

Like Native American religion, the relationship to place described by Berry is based on knowledge, duty, obligation, and discipline. While "spiritual experiences" of awe or transcendence might emerge at times - the relationship with the land is not primarily subjective (internal and emotional). Rather it is covenantal - a word that McNally himself uses several times. Covenant describes a relationship of commitment built upon knowledge and lived out through discipline and obligation. As Berry would say, to respect and to love a place is to know it and understand it as only deep generational knowledge can do, and then to live in and with it's ecology in a careful and disciplined way. Before using a plow, one ought to know when and where to use it, what it will do, and how the land will respond lest you end up making a mess that cannot easily be remedied. And again as Berry repeatedly points out, at its best this is not an individual pursuit but a collective lifeway in which a community embodies, protects, and passes along its accumulated discipline and knowledge of its environment and how to live well in it.

It is in this way that the world described by Berry is similar to that of the Navajo and Hopi. McNally writes that "the religious significance of the San Francisco Peaks is not primarily an individual matter of internal states but a collective matter of duties, ceremonies, peoplehood" (114).  Native American religions have embodied this covenantal relationship. "Traditional Native American religions are profoundly local, tied to particular places not simply through deep feeling and aesthetic appreciation, or through religious practices that take place on them, but also through a whole range of narratives, ritual disciplines, and sophisticated moral codes relating to specific places" (108). 

This statement so closely tracks with the relationship with land described by Berry in the small agrarian communities of Kentucky in the early half of the 20th century. Of course, all that is gone now. As Berry points out, the predominantly evangelical Protestant religion of the small farmers of Kentucky since the 2nd Great Awakening struggled and failed to include a covenantal relationship to the land in its tenets and practices. Thus, what was tenuous was easily lost.  

An interesting note might be to compare the relationship with land and the family farm exemplified by Joe Brown in Crystal Wilkinson's novel The Birds of Opulence. There is a connection of ancestral animism that binds Brown to the land through memory, ritual, and power.

The Home as American Sacred Space

Towards the end of the introduction  in American Sacred Space, Chidester and Linenthal ask "What is American about American sacred space?" (25) 

This is a great question. After all, in many ways sacred spaces are similar in their features and characateristics. We can use the same set of concepts and tools to examine and analyze sacred space no matter where they are.   

They suggest that these spaces have been distinctively shaped by the American historical experience. They go on to discuss several feature of the American historical experience that have been particularly influential in shaping these spaces. These include:

• the frontier situation
• the American legal system
• a managerial ethos involving the federal bureaucracy
• commodification and property rights
• revolutions of information technology
• a national orientation and patriotic sacrality
• American civil religion

One new and interesting idea they bring to the analysis is that of "home." While homes are ubiquitous, they write "At first glance, the home might seem the locus of the ordinary, the everyday, or the mindane in American symbolic life. However, domestic space in America has also been set apart as a special, sacred site of religious significance" (22). They go on to mention the "cult of domesticity" that has ritualized and regulated family relationships as been a compelling force in shaping public and political life. American politicians have long wanted to extol their familial virtues and present their families in performances of the virtuous and happy Christian family. 

This may indeed be a distinctive (though not exclusively) American sacred space. Thinking about this, I was struck by the sheer number of homes that have been turned into sacred sites. In fact, we will be visiting one of these during the summer institute - Monticello.  All the "founding fathers" have their domestic shrines, most famously George Washington's Mount Vernon. But there are so many more throughout the American landscape--almost every community has preserved and maintained homes as a form of sacred space from the Ernest Hemingway Home in Key West, FL or Graceland in Memphis, TN, a full-blown shrine to a mythic figure.  In Kentucky we have Ashland the home of Henry Clay in Lexington, KY and the William Whitley home established in the frontier near present-day Crab Orchard the hometown of my wife. And there are so many others, almost uncountable. Why do Americans create shrines and sacred sites out of homes? What do these say about the American home as a sacred site, the "cult of domesticity", the Christian home and family, and the "great men" who built and ruled over these homes? 

What are the layers here? "Home" is in one sense a place constructed by and for the family. The home is the ultimate "built environment" - the site of meticulous energy, control, supervision, maintenance of a very personal nature and its own family culture. And the home is the location of private religious observance from Passover to Advent wreaths to ancestor altars. Of course some families have more autonomy and agency here than others. The home raises the whole question of what is family anyway? What are the religious and cultural forces that have acted to create this idea of home?  These have been interpreted as monuments to a man's greatness-but this perspective is now actively contested. In one sense, the domestic is in tension with and contrast to the political. Andrew Jackson's home in Nashville, TN was called "Hermitage" as if it was an escape from the political man, a place of privacy and sanctity. And George Washington longed to escape politics and the District of Columbia and return to the freedom and leisure of civilian life at Mount Vernon. A leisure, we might add, built on the labor of enslaved people. But at the same time, domesticity "the family man" has long been source of legitimacy for politicians in American.  And the family photo has been an inescapable aspect to political campaigns. 

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.

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. 

Lefebvre's Spatial Triad

In Kim Knott's The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis, she introduces Lefebvre's spatial triad. This was new to me and I am thinking through it.

Lefebvre introduces three interrelated conceptualizations of space:

Representations of Space - I understand this as the official and technical plan of space, top down - it is abstract, planned - "conceived space" - the building as it is designed by the architect, for instance

Spaces of Representation - how people (and perhaps other-than-human people) actually live in space - "lived space" - as one article put it "The lived space concerns how human beings use the space and, most importantly, retrofit and mold the space for their own use." 

Spatial Practice - this is still confusing  - It seems to be the everyday ways that people use, perceive, and navigate space  - ordinary everyday practices "from minute, repeated gestures to the rehearsed journeys from home to work and to play" (39). These are the patterns and "paths" that emerge from everyday use. They "encounter and have at times to acknowledge the conceived order, but they form their own stories that are inaccessible to planners and scientists." And they connect to the lived order.

Trying to think about the spatial triad in relation to Barrow, AK:

Representations of Space - this was a city planned and built by white Americans and incorporated in 1958 to settle nomadic Inupiaq people. In this sense it is a city space as conceived and imposed by non-Inupiaq. It has the official pattern of what a city or town is supposed to be, based on American and European precedents. A city must have a post office, a city hall, a school, a hospital, roads laid out in blocks, single-family dwellings. It is small town USA - set down 327 miles above the Arctic circle. Knott writes "Always embedded in such representations are ideology, knowledge, and power" (36), 

Lived Space - Spaces of Representation - All of this is then imposed on 1) the Artic Tundra and 2) on Inupiaq people and culture. So the place "distorts" or changes the idealistic model of small town USA, forcing it, bending it into new directions based on the realities of the place and the culture. So "main street" becomes an ice road in the winter that melts into muddy ruts during the summer. The houses (which are American Lower 48 style houses that are heated, and would warm the tundra beneath them) have to be built on pilings - again because these are houses that are not conceived in relation to the space, its environment and ecology. The Inupiaq also built homes - but these were very different from the homes of the lower 48, the "average American home," because they were built in relationship to the environment. Then there are the meat drying racks outside each home, which is an adaptation by Inupiaq culture trying to live, it fits its lifeways in these spaces. There are the summer camps out on the tundra to which families travel and stay living off the land, hunting, fishing, gathering berries, pushing out against the residential model, deconstructing and subverting the idea of a home in town and the suburban American ideal.

Kim Knott writes that "Such lived spaces, imbued with distinctively local knowledge, often run counter to spaces generated by formal, technical knowledge" (37). These lived spaces can "disrupt the dominant order, through their association with the clandestine and underground side of social life."

Spatial Practice - this seems to be how someone actually perceives a space that they look at or encounter. This perception is mediated by the person's cultural perspective? So one person - say a white person from the outside, or someone who drives a car - looks at Barrows and sees the "offical" planned roads and perceives these as the way to move around the city.  And I did too -- until I got a snow machine or a skidoo. After I began to ride the skidoo around town during the winter, I perceived for the first time a myriad of skidoo trails that twisted around and through the town - through "yards" and around homes and buildings (and therefore subverting the idea of planned roads, space conceived of as private property and homes with "lots." The trails created a new map of shaped by a different perspective on space and the technology of the snow mobile. The trails threaded their way through back spaces, secret spaces that I had never seen before. These trails were used primarily by Inupiaq people. This was a completely different way of perceiving the space and navigating through the space - it paid no attention whatsoever to the "roads" but built a system of trails that mapped out a different world of Inupiaq places and relationships.