PRELIMINARY FINDINGS

 

The following preliminary findings were agreed at a project workshop in Belgrade, Serbia, June 2011:

A Processual Model of Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites:

Religioscapes

Most research in anthropology and history on shared or contested religious sites treats each site (e.g. Ayodhya, India; or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem) in isolation from other sites sacred to members of the same religions. Our work, however, indicates strongly that treating sites in such isolation ignores so many relevant factors as to make the analyses largely meaningless.  At a theoretical level, such analyses are grounded on a form of structural-functionalism, with all of the inability to deal with time and change that have long been seen as crippling flaws in such models.  Lest this seem extreme, consider an analysis by a leading writer on shared shrines and former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Glenn Bowman.  Discussing competitive interactions between members of various Christian denominations at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Bowman (2011) celebrates a putative “existential consanguinity … when people live in relatively close proximity, engaging with each other in quotidian activities” except when this is disrupted by external religious leaders.  He also says that “[e]ven manifestations of apparent hostility between local Christians of different denominations, such as the ritualised ‘fights’ which take place between Armenians and Greeks … are traditional charades played out between men who, on the street, are friends.”  This is classic structural-functionalism, with the function of the “ritual fight” being to sustain the continuity of the structure of “existential consanguinity.”  We understand the normative appeal of seeing interaction within shrines as being determined primarily by the traditions of sanctity that mark them as sacred to a local community that operates in harmony unless it is disrupted from outside. However, to do so is to make the same mistake made by the structural-functionalists when they analyzed “tribal” institutions (e.g. kinship, law) without making reference to the institutions of the colonial states that set the parameters on what “tribes” could do, and made them “semi-autonomous social fields” (Moore 1973).

To us, the local focus of work like Bowman’s not only shifts away from historical trajectories in order to study a presumed - and presumably “normal” - structural – functional maintenance of relations, but necessarily also avoids consideration of the importance of wider social networks on local interaction except as disrupting forces. These self-limitations on what is considered to be worthy of study are related logically to each other, being the temporal and spatial parameters of what is presumed to be a self-correcting, repeating condition, which thus must be, essentially, static.

In order to address this problem we have developed the concept of religioscapes, drawing in part on Arjun Appadorai’s “ethnoscapes” to indicate the geographical distribution of markers of an identity form and in part on the concept of “landscape” as developed in history (e.g. Simon Schama) and archaeology (e.g. Susan Alcock), focusing on spatial, monumental and performative dimensions of the built environment in identity politics.  In our usage, the term “religioscape” refers to the distribution in spaces through time of the physical manifestations of specific religious traditions and of the populations that build them.  Both the population and the physical manifestations of the religion are components of a religioscape; a physical artifact associated with a religion that is no longer practiced may be evidence of a previous religioscape but does not itself constitute a religioscape.  The situations we are interested in are those in which two populations distinguished by differing religions inhabit the same territory; in such cases, two religioscapes intersect.

Religioscapes as we define them are inherently fluid: people move, taking their religious practices with them, and potentially changing the built environment, too, in ways that reflect their beliefs.  Yet the religioscape also reflects the connections between people who regard themselves as holding the same beliefs, or are regarded by others as doing so.  The point seems simple and yet it is precisely in this regard that writers such as Bowman have put themselves into the strictures of a structural-functionalist framework. Viewing sites as isolates fails to consider how they come into being, how they are changed, and how they may cease to be associated with a local community, all processes likely to be tied to events at other sites associated with the same religious community.

To exemplify this point, we may very briefly consider the former Church of the Archangels, now the Republican mosque, in Derinkuyu, Cappadocia, Turkey.  That the church was built in 1859-60 ties it to other churches built after the Tanzimat edict of 1839, when for the first time the construction of non-Muslim religious structures was officially permitted for Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. Such “tanzimat churches” (our term) have a number of physical similarities in Turkey, Bulgaria, and Macedonia (Greece and Serbia already having been effectively out of the empire by 1839).  That the church was abandoned in 1923 is due to the “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey in that year, which mandated that the Christians of Cappadocia leave even though they had not had a recent history of major conflict with the Muslims.  It is this lack of local conflict, we think, that has led to the preservation of many diagnostically Christian elements within the former church even after its conversion (e.g. the iconostasis, easily recognizeable as such though with all Christian iconography removed).  In brief, then, it is impossible to consider the erection of the building and its transformation without reference to intersections between the Orthodox Christian and Sunni Muslim religioscapes in Cappadocia in the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries.  It would be equally unrevealing, indeed even distorting, to try to view relations between the Derinkuyu Christian and Muslim communities during this period without reference to the larger patterns of relations between Christians and Muslims that led to the Tanzimat reforms and the reactions of the local people to them.  At the same time, we recognize that the specifics of these local relations did have some impact on how the communities separated and the treatment of Christian structures afterwards.


Measuring Indicators of Dominance

Key components of religious sites:

Since in our model sees religious sites as indicators of political dominance, or challenges to it, we have developed measures of dominance that, we think, have potentially universal applicability.  These measures are based on what we have come to regard as important features of major religious sites: perceptibility (especially visibility, audibility, massiveness) and centrality. In all cases, a greater level of the feature indicates dominance.

Perceptibility:  Major religious sites are constructed in ways that make them noticeable, a feature we refer to as perceptibility.  Height may be increased, as in the minarets on mosques, bell towers or steeples on churches, or towers on Hindu or Buddhist churches.  Audibility may be enhanced, as with the azaan in Islam, or bells in many forms of Christianity.  Pure size – mass – may be pronounced, as in the Buddha statues at Bamyan, Afghanistan from the 6th century until 2001, or bright colors used, as in the multiple hues of South Indian Hindu temples.  Such features may be combined, so that a massive building may have a tower from which sounds are issued.  However, when structures from different religioscapes are in proximity to each other, these features will be the focus of competition, such as competitive verticality, or azaans competing with church bells. Competition may take the form of prohibition: the Ottoman Empire prohibited bell towers and church bells, but such towers were added immediately after liberation in Balkan Christian states.

Centrality: Centrality is a key concept in religious studies, and in the course of our research we also found that centrality of a site was a key element of dominance.  Centrality may refer to location within a settlement; or to location of important economic or political activities, to give a few examples.  Our preliminary research in Peru was driven in part by the importance of centrality to the ceque system (see works of Brian Bauer).

Centrality and Perceptibility as Co-relevant factors: It has become apparent in the course of our research that centrality and perceptibility are co-relevant factors.  That is, a shrine may exhibit a combination of these attributes.  A massive building with a high tower and amplified sound in the center of a settlement would be dominant, but as these factors vary, dominance may be challenged. A key finding of the research thus far, however, is that centrality is the key factor in indicating dominance.  That is, a religious structure that is at a central location is presumed to reflect dominance over shrines at less central positions. Further, in situations where a conquering power introduces a new religious paradigm, the new adminstrators may alter the built environment to shift the physical center of the community, thus re-centralizing the new religioscape as an assertion of civil and spiritual dominance

Centrality, verticality, audibility

Since we find that the key, co-relevant indicators of dominance are centrality and perceptibility, we have had to develop methods of evaluating sites in regard to these criteria.  Centrality must be defined in cultural/ religious terms, since a religious site that is located at a central location of economic or political activity may or may not be regarded as the most important religious structure (compare the Coricancha, the center of Inka religious life, to the Plaza de Armas in Cusco; or the Friday Mosque to the Market Mosque in most Ottoman cities).  Further, and in keeping with the fluidity inherent in the concept of religioscape, centrality may change. For example, the primary temple of the Roman city of Serdica became one of the first Christian churches in the Balkans but as the city grew and a large church to St. Sofia was built on higher ground slightly to the west, the older church became peripheral in the city now known as Sofia, after that very church.  On the other hand, that very peripheralism was what probably kept the smaller, older church from being converted into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest, unlike the St. Sofia and all other churches in Sofia.  In something of an inversion of these processes, the only Byzantine church in Istanbul that was never converted into a mosque, St. Mary of the Mongols in the Fener neighborhood of the Fatih District, had been on the outskirts of the city and a peripheral church.  This marginal neighborhood, however, then became the heart of the Greek areas of Istanbul after the Conquest and is still the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch.

Centrality, then, must be defined in terms of location and religious significance, at specific moments in time – in keeping with the fluid nature of the concept of religioscape.  Perceptibility lends itself more to empirical measurement: verticality (height), audibility, color contrast, to name only a few features.  The most important of these is, we find, height.  A key finding of this research is that assuming equal centrality, indicators of greater perceptibility, and especially of height, indicate dominance.

Seeing the relationship of these factors in this way lets us understand various strategies used to transform religious spaces when dominance changes.  While we had earlier noted changes in directionality of a building, such as the re-orientation from east to southeast of the apse of Hagia Sophia and other Byzantine churches converted to mosques (see Hayden et al. 2011), we can now refine our model, because “center” is culturally defined but also can be read on varying scales.  For example, the orientation of mosques towards Mecca should be universal but might be varied for local reasons.  Thus in the “Republican Mosque” in Derinkuyu, the building structurally is oriented due east, so orienting towards Mecca would have required a mihrab in the corner, hard to do.  So they re-oriented to the South.  But that’s interesting because South is as out-of-line with Mecca as East would have been.  By re-orienting towards South the founders of the mosque decentered the Christian orientation (East) under the guise of re-centering toward Mecca – in other words it was more important that it not be the Christian orientation than that it be the correct one.  Another example is in Ankara, where the mihrab at the Haci Bayram mosque is off-line for Mecca but actually lines up with the head of the saint himself, Haci Bayram Veli, in the tomb on the other side of the qibla wall – a local centering that decenters from the formal rule of orienting towards Mecca.  Finally, in Mathura, India, at a place where Aurangzeb (17th Century) tore down a temple to build a mosque, a new temple has been built literally on the other side of the qibla wall, so that Muslims praying towards Mecca are also praying directly towards the shrine of Krishna. Centering/ decentering/ recentering then seem to be major resources that ascendant religiously-based powers use to assert dominance over conquered populations

Verticality seems primarily an empirical measure – height – but the question is compared to what?  The context for comparison is important, and this seems defined primarily by centrality.  A finding of the research in regard to the factors of centrality and height is that centrality is more important since it defines the relevance of buildings for comparison.  Put more formally, we find that in cases of competitive sharing of religious space in which there are structures of two religions:


-- Height is relative to other structure(s);

 

-- Context is defined by centrality;

 

-- Centrality is culturally defined;

 

-- Assuming equal centrality, greater height indicates dominance.


We note that we have found these principles useful for the analysis of current cases of Antagonistic Tolerance, including competitive mosque and church building in Bosnia (sponsored in part by international civil servants) and the Sunnification of Alevi sites in formally secular Turkey, the transformation of Muslim sites into Christian ones in EU-member Bulgaria, and the 2009 ban on minaret construction in democratic, western Switzerland.

(c) 2011, by Robert M. Hayden