Veronica della Dora

Geography, religion, and emerging paradigms: problematizing the dialogue

This introduction to the subsequent forum addresses social and cultural geographys recent engagement with religion and spirituality. While representing a laudable and increasing willingness to approach religion/spirituality through sophisticated concepts and theories, this engagement should include more than just an imposition of the disciplines emerging paradigms on a new object of study. Geographers need to allow religion to ‘speak back’. The articles in this forum suggest that this speaking back may range from, for example, spirituality/religions insistence on its own centrality in social space, to its tendency to complicate categories and experience, to its reminder that it informs the lives and identities of many geographers.This introduction to the subsequent forum addresses social and cultural geographys recent engagement with religion and spirituality. While representing a laudable and increasing willingness to approach religion/spirituality through sophisticated concepts and theories, this engagement should include more than just an imposition of the disciplines emerging paradigms on a new object of study. Geographers need to allow religion to ‘speak back’. The articles in this forum suggest that this speaking back may range from, for example, spirituality/religions insistence on its own centrality in social space, to its tendency to complicate categories and experience, to its reminder that it informs the lives and identities of many geographers.

'Dreams so big only the sea can hold them': man-made islands as anxious spaces, cultural icons, and travelling visions

This paper explores a new phenomenon which is assuming global proportions: the planning and construction of artificial islands. Varying in size, shape, and purpose, man-made islands are looming on the horizons of an increasing number of aspiring global cities and regions at the margins of global capitalism. From the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, from the Caribbean to the North Sea, artificial islands are increasingly embraced as spectacular, technical signifiers of global participation and urban economic progress: as the ‘new cultural icons’. Appropriated in different contexts, island projects, however, can be (and are) also resignified. They thus change in form, meaning, and use. While islands have been objects of renewed interest in cultural and historical geography, surprisingly, these new man-made landforms seem to have gone largely unnoticed. This paper suggests a research agenda to engage with artificial islands as a new ‘metageographical’ category of emergent, yet historically resonant, social space.

The rhetoric of nostalgia: postcolonial Alexandria between uncanny memories and global geographies

Memory, nostalgia and place are subjects of increasing scholarly interest. While invoked by cultural geographers as a ‘productive force’ moulding urban landscape, nostalgia often remains an unexamined, a priori concept. Through the exploration of different reactions to the spatialized history of postcolonial Alexandria, I consider nostalgia as a fluid, multifaceted, and performative force operating at different scales and levels: on one hand, an unconscious phenomenon in the years following Egyptian nationalization, intertwining with the uncanny and bringing to surface ‘unwanted’ memories; on the other, a powerful device increasingly exploited by urban developers and the state for the construction of a ‘cosmopolitan memory’. While the former kind of nostalgia presents itself as an effective counterpart to the colonial ‘cartographic gaze’, the latter responds to the logics of cultural consumption, and constitutes a strategy adopted in an increasing number of former cosmopolitan cities seeking to negotiate a position within the global capitalist economy.

Performative Atlases: Memory, Materiality, and (Co-)Authorship

Abstract Maps have traditionally been conceptualized as visual representations and studied for what they represent. In the past few years, however, scholars from different disciplines have started to approach them from new perspectives. Broadly speaking, art historians have shown increased interest in their materialities, and geographers and map historians in their social and performative aspects. This article reviews and synthesizes these approaches using the example of the atlas in its earliest and latest incarnations (Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and Google Earth). Atlases are conceptualized as mnemonic tools activated through different types of personal encounters that are at once visual and tactile. Focusing on performative encounters between atlases and their users, the article calls for a re-conceptualization of maps as fluid objects that are always in the making. It also invites a reading of the history of cartography as a history of interactions and co-authorships between map-makers ...

On canonical geographies

Histories of geography are, by their very nature, selective enterprises. The apparent tendency of geographers to disparage particular periods of the discipline’s history, at the same time as exalting others, is characteristic of the way in which progress has been measured, relevance defined, and novelty identified. Yet, whilst other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences actively engage with their textual canons and founding figures, geographers have notoriously avoided doing so. In this paper, we consider why this has been the case and how different conceptions of canonicity have mattered to the ways in which the history of geography and its intellectual foundations have been narrated. In thinking through the significance of geography’s texts to the ways we imagine the discipline – its past, present, and future – we consider how processes of remembering and forgetting have been employed to serve certain intellectual and ideological agendas. We conclude by advocating a more serious engagement with geography’s textual legacy: one which might benefit not only disciplinary historiography but also disciplinary consciousness, and thus the future of geography itself.

Crossing Surfaces in Search of the Holy: Landscape and Liminality in Contemporary Christian Pilgrimage

This paper examines the role of surfaces in pilgrimage practices and experiences in two denominational and cultural contexts and landscape settings for Christian pilgrimage: a week of Ecumenical pilgrimage walks in the Isle of Man and Orthodox pilgrimage to the monasteries of Meteora in Greece. Surfaces are examined as dynamic textured platforms for journeying and stages for the performance of ritual; as part of visual aesthetic and multisensory embodied experiences; as hermeneutical texts; as perceived liminal thresholds through which the divine might be experienced; and as tangible material fragments encapsulating and facilitating the ‘taking home’ of the pilgrim experience. Surfaces are found to be significant for pilgrims in a variety of shared ways, but also ways which are inflected by different theological and cultural contexts. Through its analysis of faith adherents and practices, this study offers (i) a spiritually informed perspective on both perceptions and experiences of surfaces, and (ii) understanding of faith-inflected mobilities and ‘more-than-representational’ meanings and practices.

PUTTING THE WORLD INTO A BOX: A GEOGRAPHY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY ‘TRAVELLING LANDSCAPES’

Abstract Materiality, performance and mobility have recently attracted increasing interdisciplinary interest and called for new approaches to landscape. In most cases, however, these remain limited to the first meaning of landscape, as a complex of material/ visual forms in a given geographic area. By contrast, the second meaning of landscape, as a representation on different media, has remained out of such a debate. This article proposes a reconcep‐tualization of landscape representations as travelling objects at once visual and material. It does so through the example of nineteenth‐century panoramas. Part of a broader history of performative representation, these are approached on the one hand as optical devices participating in the construction of a ‘new kind of observer’, and on the other as material objects travelling across space and time, through different cultural contexts and changing accordingly. In their various manifestations, panoramas and other optical devices paralleled and complemented formal geographical education, but they also constituted terminals in the nineteenth‐century geographical web of perception comparable to the TV, the internet or video cell‐phones in our contemporary world.

Mapping Global War: Los Angeles, the Pacific, and Charles Owens's Pictorial Cartography

Abstract Writing on popular geographies has emphasized the shaping role of media. Newspapers and magazines, school texts, and atlases, had particular impacts on the twentieth century American geographical imagination, notably during World War II when news cartography became entwined with geopolitical mapping. The wartime mapmaker Richard Edes Harrison has been cited as exemplary of the role graphics played in promoting and popularizing an “air-age” geographical imagination. But Harrison was only one of a number of innovative mapmakers whose work reflects broader graphic traditions in mid-twentieth-century America. The Los Angeles Times artist Charles Owens, whose dramatic color maps of the World War were published weekly between 1942–1945, offers a West Coast perspective on the emerging spatiality of the air age in the context of wartime geopolitical mapping. Images that were powerfully influenced by Southern Californias modern cultural landscape—specifically by air photography, automobiles, and the movies—provide insight into a more general association of mass media, popular culture, graphics, and geopolitical “imagination” in mid-twentieth-century America.

Taking Sacred Space out of Place: From Mount Sinai to Mount Getty Through Travelling Icons

Abstract Starting from a behind‐the‐scenes tour preceding the opening of the recent Getty exhibition Icons from Sinai, this article seeks to destabilize traditional notions of sacred space as a territorially fixed entity defined through a binary opposition to the profane. Icons and other ‘travelling’ sacred objects are regarded as vehicles for the circulation and displacement of holy places outside of their physical boundaries and for the reconfiguration of sacred space in new, hybrid forms. The paper thus suggests a reconceptualization of sacred space in relational terms, as the product of human and non‐human interactions and networked flows, and of ‘sacred places’ as ‘reassuring anchors’ (both territorial and imaginative) within a world of fluid global networks.Abstract Starting from a behind‐the‐scenes tour preceding the opening of the recent Getty exhibition Icons from Sinai, this article seeks to destabilize traditional notions of sacred space as a territorially fixed entity defined through a binary opposition to the profane. Icons and other ‘travelling’ sacred objects are regarded as vehicles for the circulation and displacement of holy places outside of their physical boundaries and for the reconfiguration of sacred space in new, hybrid forms. The paper thus suggests a reconceptualization of sacred space in relational terms, as the product of human and non‐human interactions and networked flows, and of ‘sacred places’ as ‘reassuring anchors’ (both territorial and imaginative) within a world of fluid global networks.

Alexander the Great's Mountain

Abstract. The metaphorical power of natural landscapes and geographical objects has attracted an increasing amount of critical interest. The myth of Dinocrates planning to carve Mount Athos into the figure of Alexander the Great epitomizes the complex relationship between the insistent materiality of prominent geographical features such as mountains and imagination. Through an iconographic reading of different renderings of the Dinocratic myth in western Europe, this article explores the way Mount Athos turned into a powerful emblem circulating across space and time. While considering the continuity of a Classical vision projected on rock, the article focuses on its constant reappropriations and transformations in different historical and geographical contexts. Dinocratic Athos becomes a metaphor of egotism, power, and desire but also a free‐floating referent, reflecting a shifting relationship between the microcosm of the human body and the natural macrocosm.