Brace C., Baily A. R. and Harvey D. C., 2006, Religion, place and space

Brace C., Baily A. R. and Harvey D. C., 2006, Religion, place and space: a framework for investigating historical geographies of religious identities and communities, Progress in Human Geography, Vol.30 No1, pp28-43

Abstract: Despite a weel-established interest in the relationship between space and identity, geographers still know little about how communal identities in specific places are built around a sense of religious belonging. This paper explores both the theorical and practical terrain around which such investigation can proceed. The paper makes space for exploration of a specific set of religious groups anf practices, which reflected the activities of Methodists in Cornwall during the period 1830-1930. The paper is concerned to move analysis beyond the 'officially sacred' and to explore the everyday, informal, and often banal, practices of Methodists, thereby providing a blueprint for how work in the geography of religion may move forward.

Kong (2001a:212) note that 'in many instance, in the same breath that race, class and gender are invariably invoked and studied as ways in which societies are fractured, religion is forgotten or conflated [combine] with race'. p.29 Part of this problem rests upon what Kong (2001a0 sees as an artificial separation of the sacred from the secular, the poetic from political. p.29 The production of religious narratives and cultic traditions are vital way in which communities remember, retell and rearticulate crucial aspect of their historical identity as the 'basic for self-understanding and renewed ethical action in present (Middleton and Walsh, 1995:93). For Ricoeur (1995) religious discourse contains interpretative schemas that bind significant events into sequences, or historical narratives, in which the tension between the unpredictalibility of human contingency and the inevitable out-comes of divine sovereignty, for instance, are played out and rationalized. p.31 In particular, it is necessary to mover beyond the spaces of the church or chapel and pay attention to the link between community work and religious belief by focusing on the everyday, and often banal, formal and informal practices of Methodists, from involvement in education, charities and autodidactic cultures, to the organization of sports and social events. p.32-33 Central to the resurgent interest in community formation is the recognition that the production of meaning and identity are contested processes, which involve institutions and individuals in the co-constitution of place (Young, 1990; Revill, 1993; Dwyer, 1999b; Putnam, 2000; Kong, 2001b). p.35 Newman and Paasi (1998) suggest that the key understanding processes of place-based identity formation and social construction of space is found in the analysis of boundaries. p.35 Boundaries and their meaning are historically contingent, and they are part of the production and institutionalization of territories and territoriality (Paasi, 1991). Even if they are always more or less arbitrary lines between territorial entities, they may also have deep symbolic, cultural, historical and religious, often contested meaning for social community (Newman & Paasi 1998:197) Places themselves are hybrid expressions that are always in a state of becoming (Pred, 1984). p.36