Full Description
Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities.
This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity.
In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.
Contents
List of Figures
List of Maps
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Introduction: Darrelyn Gunzburg and Bernadette Brady (University of Wales Trinity Saint David)
Foreword: Professor Christopher Tilley (Professor of Anthropology & Archaeology, UCL)
PART I: PREHISTORIC CONVERSATIONS
1. Frank Prendergast (Technological University, Dublin): The Archaeology of Height—cultural meaning in the relativity of Irish megalithic tomb siting.
2. Anna Estaroth (University of Wales Trinity Saint David): How the shadow of the mountains created sacred spaces in Bronze Age Scotland.
PART 2: MEDIEVAL CONVERSATIONS
3. Jon Cannon (University of Bristol): Time and place at Brentor: exploring an encounter with a 'sacred mountain'.
4. Darrelyn Gunzburg (University of Wales Trinity Saint David): Building Paradise on the Hill of Hell in Assisi: Mountain as Reliquary.
PART 3: ANIMISTIC CONVERSATIONS
5. Fiona Bowie (Research Affiliate, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Oxford University): Mountains as sources of power in seen and unseen worlds.
6. Amy Whitehead (Massey University, New Zealand): Appalachian animism: religion, the woods, and the material presence of the mountain
PART 4: STORIED CONVERSATIONS
7. Bernadette Brady (University of Wales Trinity Saint David): Mountains talk of kings and dragons, the Brecon Beacons.
8. Christos Kakalis (Newcastle University): Representing the Sacred: Printmaking and the depiction of the Holy Mountain.
PART 5: CONTEMPORARY CONVERSATIONS
9. Lionel Obadia (Université de Lyon / ANR): 'Sacred' Himalayan peaks: for whom? The paradoxical and polylogical construction of mountains.
10. Alan Ereira (Professor of Practice, University of Wales, Trinity Saint David): The Black Line of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta; a Red Line for a mountain.
