The Problem with Sacred Spaces
The problem with sacred spaces is that they can be used to justify conquest. In the Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade, he states “whether it is a case of clearing uncultivated ground or of conquering and occupying a territory already inhabited by ‘other’ human beings, ritual taking possession must always repeat the cosmogony. For in the view of archaic societies everything that is not ‘our world’ is not yet a world” (Eliade, 31-2). In short, the spiritual and religious value humans place on the land is used to justify conquering other people who inhabit the sacred land they wish to possess.
Furthermore, this conquest is even considered holy because it “reproduces the [creation] work of the gods” (Eliade, 29). People attribute the creation of the world to their gods–the gods turned chaos into cosmos. As a form of mimicry, according to Eliade, humans work to conquer and till new lands to pay homage to the work their gods did to create the world. For example, in Greek mythology, the gods Gaia (the Earth) and Uranus (the Sky) were born out of Chaos and began developing and populating the land. In the Bible, God created the Earth in six days from nothing. First God created light, then land, the sea, and finally humans.
Connecting the land to religion has a history. Religion, in the form of Manifest Destiny, has been used as justification for the genocide of Native Americans and the taking of their land. Arguably, the way different groups of people treat the land–either as something to protect, something to use, or something to conquer–stems from their religious creation stories. Native American religious stories promote land conservation while American Christianity has promoted the extraction and use of the land for material gain.
Additionally, and more specifically to the history and holiness of Jerusalem, the land conflict between Israel and Gaza has religious roots. The British Government concluded in 1946 that Jewish and Arab “culture and social life, their ways of thought and conduct, are as difficult to reconcile as are their national aspirations” (Truman, 150). Those differences stem from their religious differences over land rights.
file:///Users/sarah/Downloads/TheSacredAndTheProfane-1%20(1).pdf
Truman, Harry. 1956. “The Partition of Palestine.” In Years of Trial and Hope: 1946-1953, 152-165. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Nice blog post dealing with the issue of land claims and sacred space. You do a nice job providing sources of your information, but your second to last paragraph doesn't include any citations or identified sources. I point this out because there are a lot of different Native American communities each with their own stories and there are a lot of different forms American Christianity each with their own approach to the land; therefore, it would have been helpful to have specific examples to illustrate your points.
ReplyDeleteSuggestion: it is always helpful to include at least one image in a blog post to help illustrate your main point.