Religion, culture, and sacred space
By: by Martyn Smith.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2008
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 184
Subjects: Sacred space
Description: "This book proposes a new way of thinking about how a place becomes sacred and investigates the cultural considerations that influence the way a place becomes fixed in a society's consciousness. Smith argues that intense emotional attachments to places are constructed by texts that attach a narrative to the physical landscape. Through an examination of a wide range of sites - including Abydos in ancient Egypt, Delos in classical Greece, and Mecca in medieval Islam - a new theory of human relationship to space is elaborated. His is a theory that has implications for the way we go about preserving landscapes as well as the way we understand our own experience of the world."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p.         ) and index.
Table of contents: title: How to build places with words; title: Abydos: inventing a landscape; title: Delos: the soft power of poetry; title: Mecca: through the eyes of a pilgrim; title: A storied wilderness.