Geographic roots, anthropological routes: New avenues in geographies of religions

Abstract

Since their advent, geographies of religions have emerged as a kaleidoscopic, vital, yet often misunderstood subset of social and cultural geography. In this article, I respond to Kong's call (2010) for geographers to turn to the often neglected functional, mythic, and symbolic dimensions of religion. First, I offer a brief disciplinary biography, outlining seminal currents of research over the past century. In doing so, I identify two scalar poles of analysis around which the emergent literature is oriented – the individual/affective and the collective/structural. At the interface of these poles is a rich, albeit under-theorised, field of geographic analysis. To address this, I turn to Turner's theory on ritual performance as a way for geographers to better approach this interface and engage with the fundamentality of rituals in the (re)generation of religious worlds.