African Sacred Spaces

Download or read book African Sacred Spaces written by 'BioDun J. Ogundayo and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Sacred Spaces: Culture, History, and Change is a collection of carefully and analytically written essays on different aspects of African sacred spaces. The interaction between the past and present points to Africans’ continuing recognition of certain natural phenomena and places as sacred. Western influence, the introduction of Christianity and Islam, as well as modernity, have not succeeded in completely obliterating African spirituality and sacred observances, especially as these relate to space in its various iterations. Indeed, Africans, on the continent and in the Diasporas, have responded to the challenges of history, environmentalism, and sustainability with sober and versatile responses in their reverence for sacred space as expressed through a variety of religious, historical, and spiritual practices, as this volume attempts to show.

Download or read book African Sacred Spaces written by 'biodun J. Ogundayo and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on space in African and Black religion and spirituality through the lenses of area studies, African and black diaspora studies, history and culture, cultural studies, ecotourism, environmentalism, and sustainability.

Download or read book Sacred Spaces written by Samina Quraeshi and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quraeshi provides a vision of Islam in South Asia enriched by art and by a female perspective on the diversity of Islamic expressions of faith. An account of a journey through the author’s childhood homeland, the book reveals the deeply spiritual nature of major centers of Sufism in the central and northwestern heartlands of South Asia.

Download or read book American Sanctuary written by Louis P. Nelson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines a diverse set of spaces and buildings seen through the lens of popular practice and belief to shed light on the complexities of sacred space in America. Contributors explore how dedication sermons document shifting understandings of the meetinghouse in early 19th-century Connecticut; the changes in evangelical church architecture during the same century and what that tells us about evangelical religious life; the impact of contemporary issues on Catholic church architecture; the impact of globalization on the construction of traditional sacred spaces; the urban practice of Jewish space; nature worship and Central Park in New York; the mezuzah and domestic sacred space; and, finally, the spiritual aspects of African American yard art.

Download or read book Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba written by Jualynne E. Dodson and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dodson examines the history of traditional religious practices in the Oriente region of contemporary Cuba.

Download or read book Honoring Ancestors in Sacred Space written by Grace Turner and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Provides new insights into how enslaved and freed Africans in the New World navigated racialized landscapes while honoring the memories of their dead."--Laurie A. Wilkie, coauthor of Sampling Many Pots: An Archaeology of Memory and Tradition at a Bahamian Plantation "Turner's unique hybrid approach makes this book a valuable resource in the study of the African diaspora."--Rosalyn Howard, author of Black Seminoles in the Bahamas The Anglican Church established St. Matthew's Parish on the eastern side of Nassau to accommodate a population increase after British Loyalists migrated to the Bahamas in the 1780s. The parish had three separate cemeteries: the churchyard cemetery and Centre Burial Ground were for whites, but the Northern Burial Ground was officially consecrated for nonwhites in 1826 by the Bishop of Jamaica. In Honoring Ancestors in Sacred Space, Grace Turner posits that the African-Bahamian community intentionally established this separate cemetery in order to observe non-European burial customs. Analyzing the landscape and artifacts found at the site, Turner shows how the community used this space to maintain a sense of social and cultural belonging despite the power of white planters and the colonial government. Although the Northern Burial Ground was covered by storm surges in the 1920s, and later a sidewalk was built through the site, Turner's fieldwork reveals a wealth of material culture. She points to the cemetery's location near water, trees planted at the heads of graves, personal items left with the dead, and remnants of food offerings as evidence of mortuary practices originating in West and Central Africa. According to Turner, these African-influenced ways of memorializing the dead illustrate W. E. B. Du Bois's idea of "double consciousness"--the experience of existing in two irreconcilable cultures at the same time. Comparing the burial ground with others in Great Britain and the American colonies, Turner demonstrates how Africans in the Atlantic diaspora did not always adopt European customs but often created a separate, parallel world for themselves. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

Download or read book Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter written by Sandra E. Greene and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-14 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Greene gives the reader a vivid sense of the Anlo encounter with western thought and Christian beliefs... and the resulting erasures, transferences, adaptations, and alterations in their perceptions of place, space, and the body." -- Emmanuel Akyeampong Sandra E. Greene reconstructs a vivid and convincing portrait of the human and physical environment of the 19th-century Anlo-Ewe people of Ghana and brings history and memory into contemporary context. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork, early European accounts, and missionary archives and publications, Greene shows how ideas from outside forced sacred and spiritual meanings associated with particular bodies of water, burial sites, sacred towns, and the human body itself to change in favor of more scientific and regulatory views. Anlo responses to these colonial ideas involved considerable resistance, and, over time, the Anlo began to attribute selective, varied, and often contradictory meanings to the body and the spaces they inhabited. Despite these multiple meanings, Greene shows that the Anlo were successful in forging a consensus on how to manage their identity, environment, and community.