Intersecting religioscapes: A comparative approach to trajectories of change, scale, and competitive sharing of religious spaces

Abstract

In this article, we consider elements of sharing, space, and time involved in analyzing cases of shared and contested religious space. We draw on comparative data and use a model of competitive sharing of religious sites, or Antagonistic Tolerance, that we are developing with an interdisciplinary and international group of colleagues. A key concept which we explain in this project is that of the religioscape, the distribution in spaces through time of the physical manifestations of specific religious traditions and of the populations that build them. We demonstrate what we see as the advantages of this approach over the more customary one of looking at individual sites as if they were isolated in space and time. Examples are drawn from Portugal, Anatolia, and the post-Ottoman Balkans. © 2013 The Author.