Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona

Adrian J. Ivakhiv

Indiana University Press, Jul 26, 2001 - Religion - 344 pages

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

• ONE Power and Desire in Earths Tangled: 3
• TWO Reimagining Earth: 18
• THREE Orchestrating Sacred Space: 44
• FOUR Stage Props and Players of Avalon: 65
• PlaceMyths and Contested Spaces: 93
• SIX Red Rocks to Real Estate: 145
• Sedonas Multichannel Wilderness: 173
• Nature Heterotopia and the Postmodern Sacred: 211
• NOTES: 241
• BIBLIOGRAPHY: 285
• INDEX: 317

Popular passages

Page 5 - Pilgrimage is born of desire and belief. The desire is for solution to problems of all kinds that arise within the human situation. The belief is that somewhere beyond the known world there exists a power that can make right the difficulties that appear so insoluble and intractable here and now. All one must do is journey.

About the author

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

Bibliographic information

• Title: Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona; Claiming Sacred Ground
• Author: Adrian J. Ivakhiv
• Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2001
• ISBN: 0253108381, 9780253108388
• Length: 344 pages
• Subjects: Body, Mind & Spirit / New Age; Religion / Sociology of Religion; Science / Environmental Science; Social Science / Sociology of Religion