Page - 131 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

This article follows a social-constructivist approach to both religion and (sacred) space. Accordingly, religion is considered “a creative mode of cultural meaning-mak- ing initiated by humans, not beings from an unseen world”.6 Religion is taken to be a socially constituted symbol system that interacts with political and economic pow- ers as do other institutions and ideological systems. In turn, space is conceptualized as “claimed, produced and negotiated by groups advancing specific interests”.7 Consequently, sacred space is not thought holy in itself; the designation “sacred” reflects the presence of religion in the space, which is a product of human action. This perspective therefore focusses on socio-religious practices that transform spaces and make them sacred. In the course of sacralization, a distinction is created and maintained by drawing a dividing line between the holy and the profane.8 Yet space is dynamic and constantly changing, or “always becoming, never com- plete”, in the words of Lily Kong and Orlando Woods,9 as it is continually produced and reproduced. Similarly, they note, religion is “not a fixed set of elements but an ever-evolving web of shared meanings and understandings that is used in different ways by different people”.10 This conceptualization of both space and religion as dynamic categories also explains why holy space can never be definitively holy, for it is part of a repeated pattern of sacralization and desacralization. Space is generated, shaped, used and perceived by human imaginations, mem- ories, actions and speech. Specific forms of such spatial practice which combine all of these elements in a particular way are rituals. According to Jonathan Z. Smith, humans produce space – including holy space – through ritual, and thus ritual is a process through which meaning is attributed to space. Ritual, then, is not a reaction to something “holy”; rather, someone or something is made holy by ritual.11 But how exactly does holy-making happen? And what is “holy”, if holiness is not a substantial but a situational category? Here the definition of ritual provided by Catherine Bell is illuminating. Rather than provide a new conception of ritual per se, Bell focuses on “ritualization”, which she understands as the production of ritualized acts, [which] can be described, in part, as that way of acting that sets itself off from other ways of acting by virtue of the way in which it does what it does. Even more circularly, it can be described as the stra- 6 McAlister 2005, 250. 7 Kong/Woods 2017, 5. 8 With this approach, I am not denying the existence of the “holy”, but rather want to emphasize the necessity of a “methodological agnosticism” (see Smart 1973) within the study of religion. 9 Kong/Woods 2017, 6. 10 Kong/Woods 2017, 6. 11 Smith 1992, 105; Knott 2005, 35–43. 130 | Hannah Griese www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 127–151