Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona » (New Edition)

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

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 interests 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 pageant 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.

About the Author:
Adrian Ivakhiv is assistant professor in the Dept. of Religious Studies and Anthropology and the Program in Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. His writing on environment and culture has appeared in Social Compass, Topia, Ethnic Forum, Gnosis, The Trumpeter, and Musicworks."

List of Illustrations
Preface
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. Energy Fields and Crossed Currents: Red Rocks in Sedona's Multichannel Universe
IV. Arrivals
8. Practices of Place: Nature and Heterotopia beyond the New Age
Notes
Bibliography
Index