Religion and Senses of Place; Harvey; Takhar

Edited by

Graham Harvey [+–]

Open University

Graham Harvey is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the Open University, UK. His research is concerned with the performance and rhetoric of identities among Jews, Pagans and indigenous peoples. He is particularly interested in the ‘new animism’, embracing relational and material approaches to interactions between humans and the larger than human world. His recent publications include The Handbook of Contemporary Animism(2013) and Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life (2013).

Opinderjit Kaur Takhar [+–]

University of Wolverhampton

Opinderjit Kaur Takhar is Associate Professor of Sikh Studies and the Director of the Centre for Sikh and Panjabi Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. She has written numerous academic publications on the Sikhs, including her research in the Oxford Handbook on Sikh Studies (2014). Her publications and research on the Ravidassia community is recognised worldwide and she has presented her work in Universities across the world. She is an Editorial Board member of the peer reviewed journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture and Theory. Takhar is Associate Editor for a Special Issue of the peer reviewed journal Contemporary South Asia. Takhar was awarded a MBE in 2018 for her services to Higher Education and the community in Wolverhampton. She was given the award for ‘Inspirational Woman of the Year’ in February 2020 by Asian Today. She was awarded for her contribution to Sikh Studies at the Pride of India Awards, held in the House of Lords London in 2017.

Precisely because religion involves bodily and sensual activities, it happens in places. Indeed, religious locations are among the most vibrant, colourful, dramatic and engaging aspects of many cultures. Religiously important places – even the more austere ones – are richly expressive of all that is important to particular communities – at the same time potentially illustrating all that is objectional to others. Single trees, springs, mountains, rivers or other “found places” are selected as the focal points of some religions’ festivals, ceremonies and narratives. Such activities do not leave such places as they were found but shape them as they continue to shape continuing religious developments.

This volume examines senses of place in which people not only perform religious acts in particular places but also understand emplacement / belonging to be key features of their religious practices and identities. Such places include specific local shrines and large territories. Religion and Senses of Place focuses on case studies of religions originating in South Asia and those identifiable as “Indigenous”.

A range of phenomena expressive and educative of senses of place are discussed in this volume. They include the presence and presentation of religion in shrines, museums, homes and other places; pilgrimages, diasporas, exiles, dislocations, border crossings, inter-religious performances and other styles of movement; cosmologies; auspicious and inauspicious locations; topophilia and utopianism; and more. The contributions in the volume come from scholars with expertise in a range of approaches and methods in order to illustrate the breadth of possibilities for studying religious senses of place.

Series: Religion and the Senses

Prelims

List of Figures vii-viii

Graham Harvey,Opinderjit Kaur Takhar FREE

Open University

University of Wolverhampton

Series Foreword [+–] ix-xii

Graham Harvey FREE

Open University

Religion and the Senses builds on these relatively familiar perspectives on lived religion. However, the series is more than summative of existing knowledge. It seeks to advance the cutting edge of debates. It is provocative because it engages with the sensuality of religion on the understanding that religion is fully sensual, corporeal and earthy. It pushes further an existing project in which religious senses largely serve to enhance appreciation of the lived reality of religions.

Introduction

Groundwork: Setting the Scenes [+–] 1-31

Graham Harvey,Opinderjit Kaur Takhar £17.50

Open University

University of Wolverhampton

Precisely because religion involves physical, bodily, sensual activities, it happens in places. Some of these are identified as ‘sacred’ or ‘holy’ places. Special or required ways of behaving in religious places might be definitive of the rituals and other practices that define some acts as ‘religious’. But religion also happens in ‘ordinary’ or everyday places like kitchens and care homes. And there are vigorously defended ‘secular’ spaces which cast an invaluable light on what people mean by ‘religion’. Attention to senses of place is therefore a promising way of improving our understanding of the lived realities of religion(s). Religiously significant locations include some that are constructed—and perhaps enhanced over generations—and others that are ‘found’ in the larger-than-human world.

Chapter 1

Clouds Drifting Through a Landscape: Glimpses of Rishikesh [+–] 32-59

Stephen B. Jacobs £17.50

University of Wolverhampton

Stephen Jacobs is Senior Lecturer in Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Wolverhampton. Specialising in Indian traditions and Religion and Mass Media communication, his recent publications include Hinduism Today (Bloomsbury, 2010), ‘Simulating the Apocalypse: Theology and Structure of the Left Behind Games’ Online’ in Heidelberg Journal of Religion and the Internet (2015) and Art of Living: Spirituality and Wellbeing in the Global Context (Ashgate, 2015).

This chapter will explore how Rishikesh is represented as one place through the geosemitotics and discourses that construct this small Northern Indian town as unique. However, it will identify how Rishikesh may also be considered as many places through the multiplicity of experiences that different interpretive communities encounter. The chapter will be based on my own personal experiences of visiting Rishikesh over a period of thirty five years, both for personal and academic reasons.

Chapter 2

Ji Aya Nu: Gurdwaras as Refuge and Target in the Islamophobic World Order [+–] 60-78

Tavleen Kaur £17.50

Tavleen Kaur (she/her/hers) is a Visiting Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences at the University of Wolverhampton, U.K. She holds a PhD in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine. Her research looks at how the bodies and buildings of contemporary diasporic Sikh communities, particularly in the USA, are targeted with racialized hate and state violence. She has also published on immigrant detention, and Sikh diasporic feminisms. Her next project looks at the processes of recent and inadvertent community formation among undocumented South Asian migrants in Central and South America.

This chapter explores the spatial transformation of Sikh gurdwaras (community sites for faith-based gathering) over the last two decades in the United States. While since their inception, gurdwaras have always been sites of community mobilization and organization, it is hate violence on Sikh buildings and bodies in the post-9/11 period that has pushed mainstream Sikh communities to envision gurdwaras as sites through which to negotiate their racialized existence. Particularly since 9/11 and throughout the ongoing “War on Terror,” gurdwara buildings have been targeted with Islamophobic hate violence due to having similar architectural design features as mosques (namely domes and arches). The 2012 shootings at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin (Oak Creek), the incident in which a neo-Nazi white supremacist took the lives of six Sikhs and injured three others before turning the gun on himself, became a turning point for contemporary Sikh advocacy in North America. While “Sikh advocacy” has a wide range of policy-based meanings in the U.S. context, my focus is on what it means with regard to gurdwaras. Attacks on Sikh buildings have been occurring in tandem with attacks on Sikh bodies, again, both due to the violence wreaked by global Islamophobia. Many Sikh communities have used gurdwara spaces to host various kinds of open house programs to educate non-Sikhs in their respective areas on the Sikh faith. The underlying goal of open house programs is to demystify Sikhi and gurdwara spaces for passersby and neighbors, with the hope that such knowledge will ultimately prevent Sikh buildings being read as Muslim ones and will therefore thwart attacks on gurdwaras. This chapter explores how, in addition to open house programs, gurdwaras become “total sites” through official designation as safe spaces in the events of natural disasters and emergencies, polling sites during elections, community kitchens, medical clinics, and temporary relief shelters. By looking at specific examples, I explore how, in spite of being “total sites” serving their communities at large, gurdwaras are both places of refuge, as well as targets of hate violence. This chapter ultimately explores how gurdwara communities curate a sense of place, a complicated process informed by various forms of social and political displacement.

Chapter 3

The Role of Place in Shaping the Practice and Meaning of Seva among Jain Ascetics in Gujarat [+–] 79-102

Bindi V. Shah,N. Rajaram £17.50

University of Southampton

Bindi V. Shah is a sociologist at the University of Southampton, UK. She is a specialist in migration and religion and her research has addressed the ways in which ethnicity, religion, class, and gender construct identity, belonging, and citizenship among Asian immigrants and their children in the UK and the US. Currently, she is examining diasporic Jain transnational engagements in India, and leading a project to document and digitally archive the key contributions of British South Asians to modern Britain. She has also published widely on second-generation Laotians in the USA, on second-generation Jains in the UK and USA, and on diasporic faith spaces in London suburbs.

N.Rajaram served as Professor of Sociology at the Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar, and at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India. His research interest is social development. This interest resulted in working on different research projects of collaborative nature on transnational migration, return migration, and global circulation of ideas. These collaborations resulted in joint publications in various journals. In addition, his other areas of research interest and extensive publications are on rural development, health, gender, politics and development of marginal communities. His academic work has taken him to UK and several times to USA and China. He was also a Fulbright Fellow at New York University.

The roots of philanthropy amongst Jains can be linked to religious values and duties with regard to alms giving. Classically, dān is a disinterested gift, a gift without expectation of return, debt or reciprocity. In a hierarchical order of different types of gifts, a gift to a worthy recipient is the highest form of dān a lay person can make, to the only really worthy recipients, renouncers seeking liberation. In this paper we examine the practice of dān by diasporic lay Jains to a Jain socio-spiritual organisation established by a Jain nun in India. While Jain ascetics are expected to renounce all worldly possessions and focus their life mission to work toward their own internal purification, the Jain nun has reinterpreted this ascetic path and argues that compassion in action practiced through seva is the key message of the Jain tradition. In reinterpreting the ascetic path as seva and creating an institutional organisation through which to fulfil this worldly mission, the nun has allowed for the possibility of dān in the form of private voluntary philanthropy to Veerayatan. We draw on in-depth qualitative interviews with 24 diasporic Jains, in the UK, USA and Singapore, who have engaged in philanthropic giving to Veerayatan for a period of over twenty years to examine whether classical understandings of dān and the ethic of seva or “Western” understandings of giving shape the motivations and sustainability of philanthropic donations to Veerayatan. We contend that their philanthropy merges classical forms of Jain giving and Western ideas of humanitarianism. Veerayatan, the organisation, has become a worthy vessel for receiving dān, rather than the individual nuns that are part of the organisation. Classical understandings of dān also merge with “Western” ideas of giving, as is evident in displays of attachment to and concern for impact of the gifts. Additionally, some regard such philanthropy as an important avenue to transmit Jain religiosity and norms of compassion among Jain children in the diaspora. Overall, my respondents view philanthropy to Veeryatan as enacting Jain religiosity and being Jain in the modern world. We argue that such philanthropy allows diasporic Jains to strengthen ties to co-religionists in India and the diaspora, and facilitates the reconstruction of identities, communities and religiosity

Chapter 4

Aughars and their Sense of ‘Place’ [+–] 103-123

Jishnu Shankar £17.50

University of Texas at Austin

Jishnu Shankar is Senior Lecturer, Asian Studies, at the University of Texas at Austin.

Aughars provide a very interesting category of ascetic practices in India. Although the Aghor tradition is a very old one, some elements of it can be traced as far back as the Buddha (approximately 5th century BC), they are still often misunderstood because of one major component of their practices – the cremation ground. A majority of the meditative and ritual practices that they have take place either in isolated spots or in the cremation ground. Unlike in Europe where tourists go to visit hundreds of thousands of skulls and bones amassed at the, for example, the ‘Cimitero delle Fontanelle’ (the cemetery of skulls) in Napoli, Italy, or the catacombs in Paris, France, for a Hindu person in India the cremation ground is not a place one visits casually. In fact, most people try to avoid it if they can. They visit it only when they have to, as when transporting a dead body, and when they return home they have to go through a purificatory ritual, or take a bath at the least, because the cremation ground is regarded in the popular conception as an unclean, even inauspicious place. For the Aughars the situation is totally opposite. For them the cremation ground is the ultimate home of all living beings, it is the place of ultimate rest and purity where a very stark but continuous homage of lifeless bodies is offered to the care of the god of fire. This worldview informs their outlook on life in a very different manner, rather, it turns the normal person’s worldview on its head. For them the world of the senses represents a falsehood in that it is transient, while the cremation ground represents the stability of an inalterable truth. In this chapter I take a close look at how the Aghor worldview and their conception of the cremation ground informs their ascetic practice and their way of life.

Chapter 5

Sense, Place and the Goddess: Devotion to Kali in Cross-cultural Perspective [+–] 124-144

Nicole Petersen £17.50

Lesley University (MA student)

Nicole Petersen holds a Bachelor’s degree in Global Studies with minors in Religion and Anthropology. Her studies focused on ritual and devotional practices surrounding the goddess, Kali. Nicole’s work in India, specifically her interest in spirituality as a facet of holistic health, opened an inquiry into systems of traditional medicine. She studied with Dr. Vasant Lad at the Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico and is a NAMA certified Ayurvedic Practitioner. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Holistic Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Lesley University. Through her work, Nicole aspires to weave together the many branches of her education to serve as a change agent in the fields of sustainable health care and holistic wellness, supporting embodied wisdom, resilience, and thriving communities.

Kali, the dark Hindu goddess of time and fierce Mother of the universe, has a pervasive global presence. In this study, devotion to the goddess is traced from Her from historical roots in India across borders to temples in North America. Through this analysis, the project highlights the diversity with which devotion to Kali has been localized in different contexts, from radical preservation of conservative Hindu norms to integration into New Age spiritualities. In each of these diverse contexts, the sense of place is revealed as integral to the devotee’s ability to establish a connection with Kali. This essay analyzes the processes by which devotees separate themselves from their mundane reality and enter liminal spaces of worship. These spaces are understood both spatially and temporally and are characterized by devotional sensoriums (fluid networks of interconnected sensory stimulations) which are created and experienced by devotees and serve as gateways to the goddess. Finally, this essay explores the cultural and individual variations in processes of reaggregation, of leaving the limen and re-entering the mundane, where practices of worship and experiences in devotion to Kali are digested and given meaning. It is thus illuminated that the sense of place plays a significant role not only in the act of devotion, but the ways in this devotion is integrated into the rest of the devotee’s life.

Chapter 6

The Spirit of Place: Encounters with the Bauls and Fakirs of West Bengal [+–] 145-159

Denise Doyle,Tara Baoth Mooney £17.50

University of Wolverhampton

Denise Doyle is a Reader in Digital Media at the University of Wolverhampton, Adjunct Professor of Digital Futures at Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto, and the Principle Editor of the Journal of Virtual Creativity, Intellect, UK. Her research interests include: art-science dialogues, STARTS, VR/AR/MR, the phenomenology of digital space, interactive film, philosophies of the imagination, immersive technologies, practice-based research methods, and digital narratives. Having secured funding through the International Research and Innovation (IRIS) scheme she is currently Principle Investigator for Investigating Successful STARTS Methodologies (2019-21). With a background in Fine Art Painting and Digital Media, Denise has contributed research in the fields of art and technology, phenomenology, performance, video games, art and consciousness, virtual worlds, and digital arts practice through book chapters, edited book, and articles. She edited the artist led book New Opportunities for Artistic Practice in Virtual Worlds (2015). Denise is currently writing a monograph on Digital Embodiment for Intellect, UK, and sits on the editorial boards for the International Journal of Performance Art and Digital Media (Routledge) and the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds (Intellect).

Independent Artist, Musician and Design Consultant

Tara Baoth Mooney is a multi disciplinary Independent Artist, Musician and Design Consultant with a demonstrated history of working in music, sustainable fashion, and art. She is committed to both curiosity and reflection on the relationships between humans, their environment and the elements that surround them. Her work often explores the non-linear nature of self, place and narrative in other people’s lived experience and she uses different tools to explore these questions through her practice. This work has brought her from the Jim Henson Studio in New York, to the heart of fashion production in China, Bangladesh and India as well as working as a musician and artist in residence in UAL, London and UCD Ireland. Her work is featured in Fletcher and Ingun Klepp (eds.): ‘Opening up the Wardrobe: A Methods Book’ (Fletcher/Klepp, 2017), ‘The Craft of Use: Post-Growth Fashion’ (Fletcher, 2016) and the textbook on Sustainable Fashion: ‘A Practical Guide to Sustainable Fashion’ (Gwilt, 2014). Tara is a named inventor on the patent ‘A system and method for garment design online’ (WO/2009/118197). She has a Master’s degree with distinction that focuses on the complex relationship between Fashion and the Environment from London College of Fashion, UAL. Over a 5 years period Tara worked with the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) exploring innovative approaches to community development in Bangladesh through her work with womens’ groups, University fashion students and SME’s. Tara is currently completing a PhD at the University of Wolverhampton where she is exploring the complex relationship between people living with dementia and their cherished garments.

The rich history and sheer diversity of folk art practices in South Asia is repeated across the many states of India, already well known for its intense saturation of the senses. In particular the state of West Bengal, the onetime seat of British India and the birthplace of Rabindranath Tagore, is host to an array of intangible folk art practices. These practices are often specific to particular regions or even small clusters of villages. In Spring 2011 a group of artists, musicians and dancers from Europe and West Bengal were invited to participate in a ten-day cultural exchange workshop in Kolkata, India. Through this experience both authors became interested in the ‘Bauls and Fakirs of West Bengal’. Tagore is a well-known figure who was himself inspired by the Baul and Fakirs spiritual songs and practices. During a two-day trip to a Fakir village on the Bangladeshi border, where the group sang and played with a number of Baul and Fakir men, we were also introduced to an extraordinary female Baul, Shubadra Sharma, who played the harmonium and ektara (one stringed instrument which is plucked) and sang of God as ‘Manush who never changes, God as deep love’. In this chapter we propose to reconsider our experience of place through those encounters a number of years ago that still hold clear in our memory. Evenings spent at the Fakir village on the border of Bangladesh are remembered through those encounters as ‘lived experience’ and the spirit of that particular place through to the extraordinary meeting with Shubadra Sharma. We will argue that, ‘place’ in fact can be carried within us and, is not always or necessarily a physical place at all. Lived experience sits in tandem with place, easily connecting us with our past, while sitting in the present and informing our future.

Chapter 7

Landscapes of Enchantment and their Usage: A Critical Case Study from the Khasi Ethnic Community of Meghalaya [+–] 160-176

Margaret Lyngdoh £17.50

University of Tartu

Margaret Lyngdoh, University of Tartu, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Institute of Cultural Research, received her PhD in 2016 from the University of Tartu, Estonia. She studied at Ohio State University, Columbus, USA; University College Cork, Ireland; and the University of Tartu, Estonia. She was awarded the position of “Albert Lord Fellow, 2016” at the Centre for Studies in Oral Tradition, University of Missouri. She also received the prestigious Estonian Research Council Grant for her post doctoral research PUTJD746 on the topic, “Tradition and Vernacular Discourses in the Context of Local Christianities in Northeastern India in 2017. She is also editor for the Journal of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR). Her research interests include indigenous folklore, tradition, indigenous ontologies with theoretical focus on current ‘turns’ in anthropology, the study of religion and the folkloristics of vernacular religion.

Question: That big stone Bah, why is it standing there in the middle of your field? Answer: That, Kong (madam), is a Ryngkew (guardian deity) – I don’t know it well, but it is said that late at night, it walks to the river to drink water. Among the Khasis of Northeastern India, the construction of sacred places requires the validation of community: it constitutes a physical manifestation of narratives and beliefs, which become relevant within a given community. Places and the meanings they create are interwoven into the fabric of human existence. Place expresses epistemology. In the mentioned quote, the relevance that a particular, “special” stone has within the village is supported by the belief that to the traditional Khasis, each hill, river, mountain or a place with a special geographical feature is the dwelling place of a ryngkew or basa in the Khasi vernacular language. Ryngkew are always associated with specific places. In the rural areas of the Khasi Hills, ryngkew are numerous because of the place–making traditions which necessitate creation of a meaningful place in a location where accidents, bad deaths or religiously significant events have taken place. Non-human entities or ryngkew of place are thus created. In the framework of the set of practices commonly attributed to constitute the indigenous Khasi belief system, place plays a central role. Traditionally, there are cursed places as well as sacred places. Whereas holy places commonly comprise sacred groves and places of dwelling of guardian deities; cursed places are places which invite misfortune of a similar nature. For example, the Mawphlang sacred grove is the most popular and well preserved grove in the Khasi Hills. It has a guardian deity who manifests in the guise of a snake or a tiger. The concept of “sacred” in the traditional Khasi view is not equivalent to “holy” as in Christian understanding. Among the Khasis, “sacred” is associated with places which are free from the influence of tyrut which is a “curse” associated with place. Curses associated with families are called raibi and can transcend generations. Sacred is also connected with a code of conduct to be observed at the sacred space and the consequences of violations against this code. Sacred places are created by their identification as the sites of settlement by non human entities. A cursed place on the other hand, is always connected with misfortune which is recurrent. To exemplify, about six kilometres from the urban city centre in Shillong is a short stretch of road famously named, “Ryndang Briew” or “human neck”. It is located close to the Umiam lake which provides Shillong with electricity and which is also a highly folklorized space in terms of sacred myths, legends and water spirit sighting narratives which circulate around it. Ryndang Briew, is the place that the most number of accidents take place. From data I collected from the Umiam Police Station, I found out that from 2009 until 2011, 13 persons died and 10 persons were injured in four separate road accidents. Numerous reasons are cited as the cause of the accidents that take place here; and yet, having been a life-long resident of Shillong, I will not claim that this area has very special or dangerous geographical features. However, it is a straight stretch which allows vehicles to speed and this perhaps lends some influence on the frequency of accidents occurring there. This article will attempt to show how the place, as a concept, discursively shifts in the new context of Christianity and how Khasi Christianity has to accommodate the Khasi need for “sacred” and “cursed” places to ritualise. Further, Khasi Christianity has served to create binaries in how place is perceived which had hitherto not existed.

Chapter 8

Indigenous American Quadripartitioned Sense of Place [+–] 177-198

Miguel Astor-Aguilera £17.50

Arizona State University

Miguel Astor-Aguilera is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University, USA. An anthropologist by training, his scholarship concentrates on material culture and socio-religious theory. He specializes in Mesoamerican relational ontology and cross-cultural personhood issues. Select publications include Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood & Materiality (with co-editor Graham Harvey 2018), “Latin American Indigenous Cosmovisions” (2016), and The Maya World of Communicating Objects (2010). His research focuses on Maya ritual specialists in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula as related to their ecological behavioral environment.

Applying core indigenous understandings to sense of place can better our comprehension of native cosmologies and worldviews. Indigenous American quadripartite imagery, from north to south, represents a sense of relational being within space. From a reliance on the sun and directional weather patterns affecting the growth of plants for food, and the animals that feed on them, emerges a web of ideas coalescing into understandings regarding the world and our place within it. This chapter focuses on Mesoamerican perceptions of the environment as experiential and relational. Earth, within these worldviews, is not divided into discrete realms of sky, earthly plane, and underworld but encompassed as one with which one shares corporeal being. Mesoamerican cosmologies concern a social way of life revolving around self, personhood, and sense of place that relate to both the visible and invisible. Mesoamerican place making is conditioned by the quadripartitioning of space through performance rituals focused on the bodily senses of sight, smell, hearing, and touch that create material topographical embodiments. Place-within-space here is linked to the living ancestors as well as socially created kin-like relations with what Westerners typically divide into the natural and supernatural. Mesoamerican cosmologies are not anchored on faith-based beliefs but on practical actions that affect the self, one’s immediate and extended lineage, and social community. Place making here, then, is embedded within meaningful spaces that stir emotions and not based on a binary separation of the objective and subjective but an intersubjective experience composed of connection and interaction.

Chapter 9

A Tuna in Every Puna: Photofilmic Practices and Ngāti Porou Māori Tribal Desires for Environmental Reinvigoration of Freshwater Springs [+–] 199-229

Natalie Robertson £17.50

AUT University, Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland)

Natalie Robertson is a photographic and moving image artist and Senior Lecturer at AUT University, Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland). Robertson’s research terrain and artistic practice draws on historic archives and Ngāti Porou oral customs, engaging with indigenous relationships to land and place, exploring Māori knowledge practices, environmental issues and cultural landscapes. In response to local ecological crises, Robertson advances an indigenous counter-narrative to landscape photography, exploring how photofilmic images might contribute to environmental justice and revitalisation. Recent exhibitions include To Make /Wrong/ Right/ Now Honolulu Biennial 2019; Before is Now—Ko Muri ko Nāianei— Kenosis: XIV edition FOTONOVIEMBRE International Biennale of Photography, Tenerife, Canary Islands (2017. Robertson photographed extensively for the multi-award-winning book A Whakapapa of Tradition: One Hundred Years of Ngāti Porou Carving, 1830–1930, written by Ngarino Ellis (2016) which won The Judith Binney Best First Book Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction in the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

How might photographic and video practices support indigenous tribal goals for environmental restoration of waterways? This chapter discusses how Ngāti Porou hapū (sub-tribal communities) desires for the environmental restoration of puna wai (freshwater springs) are responded to through photofilmic practices supplemented by archival research. The Waiapu River on the East Coast of Aotearoa is in the midst of a century-long catastrophic environmental disaster due to deforestation. In response, river hapū have identified ‘desired state’ environmental indicators including that ‘Underground springs are used and protected’. Elders speak about times when there was ‘a tuna in every puna’, an eel in every spring to keep the water clean. Assisted by oral histories and land court records. I work with my Te Whanau-a-Pokai hapū to locate ecological microsites to visually record their current state, establishing working methods for using images as tools for inspiration and instigation for protection, and ecological restoration. The scale of the Waiapu River erosion disaster requires many generations of restorative work. Yet commencing healing the tributaries and freshwater springs of the catchment is conceivable in shorter timeframes. Our remaining elders who once used freshwater springs maintaining strict tikanga (protocols), and who can retell the stories, are now in their eighties and nineties. It is imperative to find collective ways to activate change to uplift the mauri (lifeforce) of the water in their lifetimes. Investigating ancestral places associated with water is important because they reveal the cultural and ecological mātauranga-a-iwi (tribal knowledge) of our tīpuna (ancestors), within tribal organizational boundaries marked by genealogies

End Matter

Index 230-232

Graham Harvey,Opinderjit Kaur Takhar FREE

Open University

University of Wolverhampton

Reviews

Overall, Religion and Senses of Place is an essential read for anyone interested in the intersections of religion, culture, and geography. Teachers of religion interested in introducing students to the wider vocabulary of religious experiences, often neglected in academic texts that privilege historical and doctrinal approaches, will also find this volume to be a refreshing resource. The diverse case studies and innovative research methodologies employed throughout the book give the reader the sense of a religious studies discipline full of energy and visionary momentum. And the inclusion of indigenous perspectives just adds that essential layer of nuance and complexity so painfully neglected in religious studies literature, offering important insight into the intricate relationship between people, their beliefs, and the environments that shape them.
Indigenous Religious Traditions

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Religion and Senses of Place

Graham Harvey [+–]

Open University

Opinderjit Kaur Takhar [+–]

University of Wolverhampton

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