Why Shared Sacred Sites?
Shared Sacred Sites is a collaborative project investigating the sharing of spaces, sites, and symbolism by multiple religious communities that demonstrates the practical choreographies and social possibilities of cooperation between potentially antagonistic communities. The study of such sharing provides key insights into characteristics and features crucial to the cultivation of tolerance and understanding. Using multiple tools such as mapping, storytelling, exhibitions, fieldwork, bibliographies, and a media database, this project seeks to build a global commons for research and teaching on shared sacred sites.
The project
This project explores sacred spaces (shrines, churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, and natural sites) across the Mediterranean Basin, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa where local, regional, or transnational pilgrimages occur and where the practices of participating in the spaces and rituals of religious others are ongoing. In some cases religious mixing is a continuation of long tradition and in others the encounters are more recent. Our project explores such sites through a repository of research on shared sacred sites, storymaps investigating their visual and ritual cultures, and a visually interactive map of the world that connects sites to their histories.
The information that we provide on these numerous sites of religious encounter throughout the world is the result of many years of collaboration and research on the part of scholars who have studied, visited, documented, and filmed the places, practices, and patterns of pilgrims and devout members of religious communities. Their work is displayed here for anyone to browse and learn, use the material, and gain some understanding of these phenomena.
Our website seeks to bring together scholars and curious individuals to discuss the myriad possibilities that emerge from this particular field of study. We promote inquiry and make knowledge of these sites accessible through multimedia platforms: scholarly essays, maps, bibliographies, newspaper articles, photographs, audio clips, and videos. For scholars and students engaged in the academic study of these sites, we provide a network of interaction and collaboration in order to deepen engagement across regional and disciplinary boundaries.
General Perspectives
All over the globe we find sacred sites that are now, and have long been, sites of convergence for prayers, wishes, and celebrations between religious communities. These interactions employ various choreographies of mixing, sharing, and taking turns in the performance of rituals and prayers. They are, in other words, places that gesture towards the capacious possibilities of religious peoples and places, including the common reality of cooperation between potentially inimical religious communities. With the rise of religious nationalism throughout the world, such sites have come under threat as they are increasingly co-opted by the state and other interests that erase long histories of sharing and pluralism. As scholarship and media tend to focus on the conflicts arising in and around such places, such as in Palestine/Israel and in India, our projects seek to complicate this simplistic narrative.
Sharing of spaces, sites, and symbolism by multiple religious communities demonstrates practical solutions and the social possibilities of cooperation and interaction between potentially antagonistic communities. These examples provide evidence that sacred sites with multireligious investments and clientele are not inevitably in conflict, but instead demonstrate complex, multi-layered, and often cooperative engagements between adherents of different religions. By bringing multiple cases together in a single database, researchers and the interested public will recognize that neither conflict nor cooperation is inevitable in situations of interreligious sharing. Rather, it is clear that a great deal of work by many people, often over long periods of time, goes into shaping any particular moment in the past, present, and future of such sites.
Each of the key words that define the field covered by this website have storied pasts and particular constructions of meaning. While we want to be as capacious as possible with these meanings, we also want to delineate certain aspects of these terms that we are using. These terms also occasionally signal disagreements in the field, with scholars choosing different terms to represent the materiality and actuality of this phenomenon.
Shared is one such term. While “sharing” is used by many scholars, others prefer “mixing” and still others refrain from using either. Sharing denotes cases where participants are intentional and self-conscious that they are in situations of interreligious encounter, whereas mixing may suggest less interest in or awareness of the presence of religious others. When using the term sharing, we do not consider it synonymous with harmonious and peaceful mutual tolerance. Sharing is often partial, contradictory, and ambivalent. Yet the frequenting of shrines by people of different religions generally does not imply only a simple juxtaposition in space, a mere mixing, but also often involves the sharing of symbolic elements (narratives, hagiographies, worship of the same saints), of expectations (healing, help to overcome difficult moments in life), of countless ritual practices. Moreover, opting for the shared designation for us reflects the fact that some agents actively engage in the work of making a coexistence possible.
Sacred is a complex concept that does not merely indicate that which is distinct from the profane, secular, or everyday. The sacred is marked socially, personally, or theologically as manifesting transcendent meaning and power. For us sacred does not refer to a property inherent in certain places, which would give them a particular primal force, as an influential tradition in the history of religions has suggested. Instead, we consider it a conjunctural and variable property, attributed to certain places and always subject to negotiations and modifications. If a sacred space is always somehow set aside with respect to the flow of ordinary life, the extent and criteria of this separation vary considerably according to contexts and cultures. The behaviors that are encouraged or excluded vary from one situation to another, and even in the same space can fluctuate depending on the ritual moment or the liturgical calendar. Furthermore, while the notion of sacred is present in the sites, many of our sites are at the same time extremely quotidian and people are as likely to smoke a cigarette, have a picnic, or talk about their love lives as to actively pray.
Sites points to a geographical location, but also upholds the tensions between “space” and “place,” which each have their own distinct attributes across the fields of history, anthropology, philosophy, geography, and sociology. While space refers to an abstract concept, the notion of place is embedded in a physical location, with relations and meanings inscribed within it. Place also perhaps carries a notion of human engagement in the production of place, which is not to preclude the fact that many natural formations (mountains, caves, bodies of water, etc) have been and are sacred with different meanings for multiple religious groups. The versatility of the word “site,” which could point to a constructed place, a natural environment, a real location, or an abstract positionality, provides scholars with a significant and yet also evocative way of moving away from the place and space dilemma.
defining our terms
Shared sacred sites (especially those with a history of pilgrimage and visitation) have long been a source of intellectual and scholarly curiosity. In South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and elsewhere, this allows us to observe fluctuation between periods of peaceful sharing and conflict over joint use, including periods of communal violence. Scholarly debates on shared sacred sites often focus on the meaning of “coexistence,” on the logic that reputedly underlies centuries of “sharing” and why those conditions are sometimes disrupted by conflict. Studies that interrogate the concepts often used to account for these spaces (such as toleration, syncretism, and religious antagonism), explanations can often be divided into two types: one that anticipates and emphasizes continuing conflict, and another that privileges peaceful coexistence. Both see periods of interruption in either coexistence or violence, but for both the disruption is the exception that proves the rule. One of our objectives is to nuance these unsatisfying models through documentary, ethnographic, and historical evidence that reveals the complexity of inter-religious relations and engagements around shared spaces. The analysis of concrete situations reveals multidimensional symbolic and material investments by a plurality of actors, with motives and aims that do not necessarily coincide, even within the same religious community. More generally, shared sacred sites may be heuristic observatories where it is possible to study the dynamics of religious practices, going besides the received doxa which often postulates that people “belonging” to a same religion should unavoidably display congruence and uniformity in rituals and beliefs.
Religious Dynamics at Shared Sacred Sites
political and social dimensions
What makes coexistence possible at shared sacred sites when external conditions, including actual histories of inter-religious conflict, are challenging? Within these spaces, investigating the choreographies of sharing can reveal the parameters of inter-communal and intra-communal relationships, especially ones that are typically portrayed as conflictual. They demonstrate that conflict between religious communities in any given society is situationally constructed by various political and social factors rather than innately determined.
Shared sacred sites show that in certain cases, sharing can work against mainstream narratives of violence, religious extremism, and the inevitability of conflict between religions and civilizations. In the Mediterranean, for example, shared sacred spaces represent unique sites of sharing and coexistence between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Looking at these places allows researchers to demonstrate the ways in which people can transcend politically constructed “boundaries” or “divisions.”
We look to document ways in which public authorities and constructed social norms have facilitated or inhibited practices of sharing. In some cases, the state or normative environment may benefit from conflict between religions and promote inter-ethnic and religious strife, even while the shared space might be peaceful and respectful. In other instances, the political and social conditions may encourage or seek to produce interreligious comity. Given the range of possible conformations of sharing, studying sacred sites helps us understand the positioning of the space in a larger cultural or political framework.
To understand these sites, we must ask questions such as: What makes sharing possible? Who is likely to share a religious site? Can we understand joint participation as the product of a particular flexibility of a religious leader, or are there practices and rituals that facilitate the acceptance of another into one’s religious sanctuary? By studying sites that emerge from or fall into conflict we can understand how inter-religious relations can deteriorate and pinpoint the factors that are important in developing practices of sharing. To approach these questions, our project prioritizes ethnographic and spatial analyses of the sites in question.