Sacred sites, identity, and resilience - on the retrieval of collective and historic identity across religious and cultural difference

Abstract

This study explores the role of eminent buildings and shrines of cultural and religious significance for collective and individual identities, in the context of present culture with its disruptions of tradition, in cultural and religious regard. It draws on the renewed awareness of this connection, that developed in public debate in France, after the arson of eminent cathedrals, and in Germany, in debate about the reconstruction of historic buildings after reunification. The controversies are presented and viewed with regard to the changing contexts of secularisation, migration and religious plurality. The recent debates are understood as indication of a gradual recognition of the role of ‘symbolic landscapes’ and of the value of relating to them, for the sake of strengthening the bond with historical identity and heritage, as intrinsically connected. The growing or reluctant realisation that this includes the religious dimension, is noted – with both Christianity and Paganism. Theory about the symbolic function of eminent religious buildings is included. This is considered, in particular, with regard to religious and cultural pluralism as condition of reception, for a strengthening of a common and shared symbolic landscape, relevant to identity. It includes a view to ‘pilgrimage’ as mode of connecting to such sites. The essay also takes restored and rediscovered sacred sites in Africa into view. Here the disruptions and devaluation of historical identity due to colonialism is kept in view as background. Eminent examples of reconstructed shrines as centres of a spiritual and cultural geography, reinforcing collective and individual identity, are presented, as. An example of active appropriation of ancient sacred sites of previous populations is also mentioned, from South Africa, as means of cultural and spiritual ‘territorialisation’.

Keywords

• sacred sites
• individual and collective identity
• pilgrimage
• symbolic landscape
• restoration
• historical identity