Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian HistoryMain MenuGet to Know the SiteGuided TourShow Me HowA click-by-click guide to using this siteModulesRead the seventeen spatial stories that make up Bodies and Structures 2.0Tag MapExplore conceptsComplete Grid VisualizationDiscover connectionsGeotagged MapFind materials by geographic locationLensesCreate your own visualizationsWhat We LearnedLearn how multivocal spatial history changed how we approach our researchAboutFind information about contributors and advisory board members, citing this site, image permissions and licensing, and site documentationTroubleshootingA guide to known issuesAcknowledgmentsThank youDavid Ambaras1337d6b66b25164b57abc529e56445d238145277Kate McDonald306bb1134bc892ab2ada669bed7aecb100ef7d5fThis project was made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Deities
12019-11-27T22:35:10-05:00Evan Dawley7a40080bd5bb656cee837d5befaa3ea8e7a2ac44352A subsidary of Actorsplain2020-02-29T20:37:46-05:00Evan Dawley7a40080bd5bb656cee837d5befaa3ea8e7a2ac44Not all actors in this history were human, or even mortal, many were deities or ancestral spirits. Indeed, these were the figures who were able to cross the divide between sacred and physical geography. Humans could invite a deity to inhabit a particular temple, but only the deity could make the journey from one realm into the other. Humans could, at appointed times of the year, open the Hell Door to allow ghosts into the world, but only ghosts could cross through that portal. For both Taiwanese and Japanese, the deities manifested in the physical world in active ways, able to influence and guide the course of individual lives or collective processes. This presence was seen most clearly in the bureaucratic model of the pantheon of deities inherited from Chinese societies and embraced by the Taiwanese. The realm of the gods was envisioned as a hierarchy, with low-ranking deities, mapped to magistrates and lower-ranked bureaucrats, reporting up a chain of command, ultimately to the Yellow Emperor, who was a heavenly counterpart to the imperial rulers of China’s dynasties. Although Japanese traditions did not have such a highly schematic vision, in popular Shinto, the spirits (kami 神) were everywhere.
This page has paths:
12019-11-27T22:32:33-05:00Evan Dawley7a40080bd5bb656cee837d5befaa3ea8e7a2ac44ActorsEvan Dawley5In this sub-pathway, I define the principal actors in the module.plain54012020-02-29T21:04:29-05:00Evan Dawley7a40080bd5bb656cee837d5befaa3ea8e7a2ac44
This page is referenced by:
12020-07-16T15:50:04-04:00Sacred Geography: Definitions5This page opens the Sacred Geography pathway, and begins to develop an explantion of sacred geography and its interactions with physical geography.plain51482020-07-16T16:32:53-04:00The central concern of this module is the analysis of sacred geography: its construction, its operations, and its interactions with physical geography. The latter spatial form is certainly not fixed or closed to redefinition. People apply different, often competing, meanings to discrete chunks of physical topography, and they radically transform the appearance and composition of their environments. Even mountains and oceans change, seemingly of their own accord, across Braudel’s longue durée. Nevertheless, physical geography is susceptible to being mapped through the tools of modern cartography. The features and boundaries of sacred geography, which mostly lack tangible forms, cannot be precisely mapped with the coordinates of latitude and longitude, or with the tools of GIS systems. But I have framed these definitions in the negative, in terms of what it is not. What is sacred geography?
It is a type of imaginative geography, both in the sense that it is a spatiality that we can represent but not actually see, and in the sense of a spatiality that people construct as they assert, or attempt to assert, power. Societies create sacred geography, or sacred space, as the territory affiliated with the divine—deities, ancestors, cosmological forces—and imbue it with an existence that is separate from, but intimately connected to, our own world. They construct it as fluid and indeterminate, a form of territory that exists both nowhere and, potentially, everywhere The ability to determine how sacred and physical geographies intersect depends upon whether or not a socio-political group holds sufficient power to assert its spiritual beliefs within specific territories, particularly in the face of counter efforts by other socio-political groups.
Although sacred geography is a human construct, it has been imbued with its own organizing logics, and with powers to shape human affairs. Therefore, sacred space does not simply exist, it also acts upon the physical world and its residents, and it imparts meanings to the territories with which it is associated. The following pages explore representations and architectures of sacred geography, and the everyday practices through which people create pathways through which the divine can manifest within and affect the physical world.