Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona - Hardcover

Ivakhiv, Adrian J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253338999 ISBN 13: 9780253338990

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Claiming Sacred Ground
Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona

Adrian J. Ivakhiv

A study of people and politics at two New Age spiritual sites.

In this richly textured account, Adrian Ivakhiv focuses on the activities of pilgrim-migrants to Glastonbury, England and Sedona, Arizona. He discusses their efforts to encounter and experience the spirit or energy of the land and to mark out its significance by investing it with sacred meanings. Their endeavors are presented against a broad canvas of cultural and environmental struggles associated with the incorporation of such geographically marginal places into an expanding global cultural economy.

Ivakhiv sees these contested and "heterotopic" landscapes as the nexus of a complex web of interestes and longings: from millennial anxieties and nostalgic re-imaginings of history and prehistory; to real-estate power grabs; contending religious visions; and the free play of ideas from science, pseudo-science, and popular culture. Looming over all this is the nonhuman life of these landscapes, an"otherness" that alternately reveals and conceals itself behind a pagenant of beliefs, images, and place-myths.

A significant contribution to scholarship on alternative spirituality, sacred space, and the politics of natural landscapes, Claiming Sacred Ground will interest scholars and students of environmental and cultural studies, and the sociology of religious movements and pilgrimage. Non-specialist readers will be stimulated by the cultural, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of extraordinary natural landscapes.

Adrian Ivakhiv teaches in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, and is President of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada.

April 2001
384 pages, 24 b&w photos, 2 figs., 9 maps, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, index, append.
cloth 0-253-33899-9$37.40 s / £28.50

Contents

IDEPARTURES
1Power and Desire in Earth's
Tangled Web
2Reimagining Earth
3Orchestrating Sacred Space

IIGlastonbury
4Stage, Props, and Players of Avalon
5Many Glastonburys: Place-Myths
and Contested Spaces

IIISEDONA
6Red Rocks to Real Estate
7New Agers, Vortexes, and the
Sacred Landscape

IVARRIVALS
8Practices of Place: Nature and
Heterotopia Beyond the New Age

About this title

About the Author

Adrian Ivakhiv teaches in the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.

Reviews

New Age Space, Christian TimeWhat do Glastonbury, England, and Sedona, Ariz., have in common? Both are centers of the New Age universe meaning that both are considered "power places" where the spiritual energies of the earth are felt most strongly. In Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona, Adrian Ivakhiv explores these centers of New Age tourism, drawing connections between the two sites and placing them in the larger context of the New Age movement. Although the book is a bit overtheorized and jargon-laden ("metanarrative" and "heterotopia" crop up particularly often), Ivakhiv makes some memorable points, especially about the depoliticization and privatization of New Age ideas since the 1960s.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253338999
• ISBN 13: 9780253338990
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 344