Julian Holloway

Enchanted Spaces: The Séance, Affect, and Geographies of Religion

Abstract This article calls for the geographies of religion and belief to attend to the sensuous, vitalistic, and affectual forces through which spaces of the religious, spiritual, and the sacred are performed. Not only do we need to recognize and explore these forces themselves, but our analyses of how religious-sacred spaces (re)produce or challenge societal and cultural discourses can also be enhanced if we focus on affect and embodiment. Through the case study of nineteenth-century spiritualism and the key space of the séance, these points are exemplified and substantiated. Finally, I explore some of the implications of recognizing these sensations for the study of geographies of religion and belief through Bennetts (2001) nonreductionist and nonteleological notion of enchantment.

Editorial: Placing religion and spirituality in geography

As Foucault’s work demonstrates, a culture cannot understand itself without erst understanding its implicit connection and development within the constructs of religious belief and practice. Contemporary culture is born out of religious traditions and the conditions of our knowledge are therefore embedded in religious discourse. The so-called secular space is itself a hybrid of past religious traditions, and in order to understand contemporary culture Foucault recognised (and was fascinated by) the religious ineuences upon thought and practice. (Carrette 1999: 33) From the spatial distributions of religious populations, the impacts such groups have on landscapes (with a particular, and rather peculiar, focus on cemeteries), to explorations into religious ecology and the role of Christian theology on environmental practices, the ‘geography of religion’—typically understood as a sub-discipline of (cultural) geography—has a long and distinguished history (see Kong 1990). Nonetheless, in recent years geographers

Make-believe: spiritual practice, embodiment, and sacred space

In this paper I examine different forms of spiritual practice which seek to (re)enchant the everyday and the ordinary. By considering the duality of sacred and profane as the relational outcome of both embodied action and the action of other objects or things that are nominally valued as profane, an account is sought which acknowledges the corporeal enacting and sensing of the sacred both in and of the everyday. Taking empirical examples from New Age spiritual seekers, I trace the ways in which profane spatialities and temporalities are reconfigured into sacred topologies and how these seekers realise spiritual enlightenment through a reinhabited appropriation or articulation of the world. The source of signification of this spiritual comportment lies in embodied practices of the everyday that are sensed as the spiritually ‘correct’ or ‘true’ way of doing things. New ways of thinking everyday spiritual practice are thus sought and elaborated upon.

Mundane mobilities, banal travels

All of us are caught up in banal or mundane mobilities, whether it is the walk to the bus stop and catching the bus to town, the daily commute by train to work, the trip by car to the supermarket, the cycle ride to school or the holiday visit to a tourist attraction. What makes these everyday voyages mundane is their commonplace and regular occurrence, so they are not generally conceived as extraordinary or special trips through time and space but are enmeshed with the familiar worlds we inhabit, constituting part of the unreflexive, habitual practice of everyday life. We believe that this focus upon the banal or mundane dimensions of mobility is timely with regard to recent claims that have been made about the expansion of mobilities through technological and social developments and the ways in which people increasingly coordinate their activities in new and complicated ways under conditions of accelerating and expanding journeys through space and time. This ‘mobility turn’ or ‘new mobilities paradigm’ has appositely identified the flows which make up the spatial and social complexity of the expanding, variegated relationships between people and places and critiqued static, bounded conceptions of place, space and belonging. While we welcome their timely critique of geographical sedentarism, Sheller and Urry somewhat hyperbolically claim that ‘all the world seems to be on the move’ despite the fact that movement has always been endemic to social life. They exemplify their claim by identifying the large-scale travel of the likes of tourists, migrants and business people, implying that contemporary mobility is distinctive by virtue of its trans-national characteristics (Sheller and Urry 2006: 207). Yet while they warn against the hyperbolic tendencies that overstress disembedding and deterritorialization processes without acknowledging the ways in which ‘all mobilities entail specific, often highly embedded and immobile infrastructures’ (2006: 210), the examples they discuss tend to focus upon the spatially extensive movements across the planet rather Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 8, No. 2, April 2007

Rhythmanalysing the coach tour: the Ring of Kerry, Ireland

This paper utilises and extends Henri Lefebvres ideas about rhythmanalysis to explore the rhythmic qualities of taking a coach tour. The paper investigates the Ring of Kerry tour in the West of Ireland and reveals both the reproduction and disturbance, through itinerary and narratives of the coach drivers, of anticipated discourses and visual indexes of commodified Irishness. Central to the paper is the ordering of different rhythmic assemblages, which connect and disconnect in multiple ways. It is argued that the rhythmic multiplicity of coach tours involve entanglements of embodiment, affective registers, technologies and materialities. The paper reveals how the myriad tempos and rhythms of the tour take on different consistencies and intensities at different stages of the journey, and investigates the capacities of these rhythms to affect and be affected by the pulse of the spaces moved through and stopped at. In so doing, a supplemented rhythmanalysis is suggested as a productive approach for apprehending tourist spaces, practices and landscapes.

Institutional geographies of the New Age movement

This paper is concerned with the production and reproduction of diAerent institutional geographies of the New Age movement. Instead of taking institutional geographies to be given and fixed co-ordinates in the social field, the paper seeks to understand how they are relational outcomes and eAects that require constant upkeep. After characterising the New Age movement, in terms of its central cosmology and visions of transformation, the paper takes an actor-network theory (ANT) approach to the understanding of institutional geographies. Through analysing how New Age knowledges and practices travel through time and space, and utilising ANT’s concept of ‘centres of translation’, institutional geographies are taken to be active space-times that are both enrolled into New Age teachers and practitioners programs of action, and space-times that actively enrol teachers and practitioners. It is argued that the intertwining of diAerent engineered actor-networks in and through these space-times maintains the New Age movement itself and thus examining institutional geographies can tell of the movement’s shape or topology. A controversy over the work of David Icke is explored to reveal how institutional geographies are sites for regulation of what counts as New Age knowledge. Finally, this paper seeks, partially at least, to assess in terms of the ANT approach taken, the visions of transformation propounded by the New Age movement. ” 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Legend-Tripping in Spooky Spaces: Ghost Tourism and Infrastructures of Enchantment

This paper investigates the increasingly popular practice of ghost tourism comprising urban ghost tours and organised paranormal investigations. Set in the context of modern forms of enchantment, wherein audiences engage in a knowing and reflexive sense of ‘delight without delusion’, the paper explores the various infrastructures, (discursive, affective, and material) that engender a sense of supernatural possibility. I argue that practices of legend-telling, legend-tripping, ostension, and play produce affective assemblages of supposition and wonder that momentarily transform space into something charged with the strange and anomalous. This infrastructure relies on the engineering of dispositions that are both shaped on and brought to the tourist event itself. As such, those with deeply held beliefs in ghosts and the afterlife, as well as those for whom the infrastructures fail to generate wonder, place limits on the artifice of modern enchantment. The paper uses examples from participant observation on ten ghost tours across the UK, an overnight vigil in a Tudor mansion, and interviews with tour guides.

The Space That Faith Makes: Towards a (Hopeful) Ethos of Engagement

This chapter seeks to move beyond functionalist and reductionist accounts of religion into realms broadly conceivable as the post-secular. As such, this chapter is placed at the still fuzzy border between the religious and non-religious, and their apparent rapprochement, and aims to explore a creative and critical ethos of engagement with and of the faithful. After examining the affective presencing of faith through rituals (as patternings of qualitative intensity), the chapter explores faith as a disposition that colours space and time. The chapter then turns to investigating the notion of hope in (broadly Christian) faith in an effort to seek out moments of post-secular coincidence and assemblage. Here the ineffability of the impossible–virtual is posited as one site of juncture wherein the post-secular might (hopefully) emerge.

'Undercurrent affairs': radical environmentalism and alternative news

This paper is set in the context of the increased prevalence of environmental direct action in the United Kingdom. After delimiting ‘radical’ enviromentalism, and briefly describing the impetus for this turn to direct action, I focus on the radical environmental movements use of different media. Thus parallel to the increase in direct action has been the emergence of a variety of radical environmental news texts (in both video and print form). These texts carry different representations and cultural–political mappings of the rural and rurality. Three themes of such a depiction are described: the rural as ‘natures refuge’, as a local space but potentially global in its consequence, and a space of a radical history of Englishness. In the second half of the paper I draw insight from actor–network theory to argue for a relational–materialist approach to the production and consumption of these texts. By taking this approach I describe a ‘moment’ wherein it becomes difficult and problematic to separate these two processes. The notion of chains of production–consumption is suggested in order to overcome this difficulty.

Muji, Materiality, and Mundane Geographies

This paper is based on the premise that mundanity is not so much a quality inherent in an object or event as an appearance or affordance generated at the intersection of object, subject, and location. Assuming that a single object will appear banal in one context and different in another, we focus our attention on cases in which a single object is encountered as both banal and different—visible and invisible at the same time, marked out by its ability to blend in. In this paper we explore the mundane and distinctive by reference to marketing and products of the Japan-based company Muji, and in particular through relating the two contrasting aspects of the Muji image to the different ways in which the objects are located in presentation-marketing contexts and in wear-use contexts. In order to explore the usefulness of this distinction between display space and use space we perform a tactical erasure of the commonsense distinction between the textual and the material, thereby enabling the collapsing together, into the single category of display space, of the textual spaces of Muji catalogues and the material spaces of Muji shop floors. The distinction between the en-masse presentation of new objects in highly controlled display spaces and the mundane wear and use of purchased objects in the various and variously encountered spaces of everyday life is explored through the hybrid display-use space of Muji show homes known as Muji-Infill. We conclude by proposing that this display-use distinction can be used strategically to articulate the way in which skilled consumers are able to encounter objects imaginatively and practically in two different contexts simultaneously. In other words, we speculate that, when skilled consumers encounter a superficially mundane Muji object in the literal and disorganised context of use space, they are able to recognise it as stylish and desirable in part by referring to an acquired understanding of the ways in which that object-in-use evokes a Muji marketing space of massed objects-on-display.