Spiritual landscapes: existence, performance and immanence

• Published in: Social & cultural geography Vol. 10; no. 6; pp. 695 - 711
• Main Authors: Dewsbury, J. D., Cloke, Paul
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 01.09.2009
• Subjects: afecto; affect; belief; Beliefs; Centrality; christianisme; Christianity; Community; creencia; Cristianismo; croyance; el espiritual; Habitus; la spirituelle; Landscape; Phenomenology; phenomonologia; phénoménologie; Religions; Religiosity; Religious beliefs; Spirituality; the spiritual
• ISSN: 1464-9365; 1470-1197
• DOI: 10.1080/14649360903068118

This paper sets out to define what is meant by a spiritual landscape. As such it theorizes the immaterial push of spirit alongside the materiality of landscape by rendering spiritual landscapes as the associate mapping of the relations between bodily existence, felt practice and faith in something immanent but not manifest as such. To achieve this, the paper uses recent debates relating post-phenomenology to one aspect of spirituality-that associated with Christian religion, teasing out how landscape (existence), practice (performance) and affect (immanence) offer up alternative ways to think our being in the world. This is to suggest important new theoretical understandings of how faith and belief, Christianity and phenomenology, recast our notion of being in the world. Thus we seek wider understandings of the importance and centrality of the spiritual landscapes that forge a sense of community, arguing that such a community is already a part of our individual and singular communal disposition.