Raccontare il paesaggio, prendersi cura dei luoghi
How is the sacredness of a landscape culturally constructed and reproduced? What role does storytelling have in weaving bonds of sense, and practice, between the territorial geography and the one constituted by the representations narrating its places? Based on the data of an ethnographic research c...
| Published in: | Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni |
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| Subtitles: | Telling the landscape, taking care of the place |
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | Italian |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Morcelliana
2014
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| In: |
Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni
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| Further subjects: | B
Geography
B altari B Landscape B Metaphysical cosmology B Sacred Space B Shrines B Religion B Pkhovi B andrezi B Landscapes B paesaggio B Sacredness B Storytelling B Georgia state history B Story telling in religion B narrazione |
| Summary: | How is the sacredness of a landscape culturally constructed and reproduced? What role does storytelling have in weaving bonds of sense, and practice, between the territorial geography and the one constituted by the representations narrating its places? Based on the data of an ethnographic research conducted in Caucasian Georgia, this work delves into such questions and proposes an analysis of the local geography as a spatialization of the sacred, with a particular attention to narrative practices. The Pkhovi and Tusheti regions (located in North-Eastern Georgia) constitute a peculiar cultural landscape, characterized by the presence of a specific type of sacred places: stone shrines called "cross" (jvari), "icon" (khati) and "Mother of Place" (agilis deda). Located on mountain tops and made up by a complex of both built and natural elements, these shrines perhaps date back to an age prior to the Christianization of Georgia (iv sec. A.D.): today, however, their ritual attendance (particularly intense in the summer period) inextricably combines pre-Christian, Christian and allogenic elements, with a strong influence exercised by the Asian worldview. These sanctuaries have been a focus of narrative attention for centuries: the stories narrating their construction are called andrezi, a vernacular word meaning "testament". Andrezis of place, in particular, recount the foundation of the shrines by some ancient deities who are thought to have chosen the best highland spots for themselves, defeated the evil entities who were occupying them, thus freeing the land for humans and their progeny, and then stopped to settle down there, where they are nowadays prayed and invoked as protectors of villages and communities. By anchoring the mythical deities to precise spots in the territory, andrezis interlace the emerging of their sacredness with the foundation of highland villages, the development of "feudal" relationships between shrines and villages and specific practices in the use of the territory itself, which nowadays survive in the ritual moment, wherein the stories of mythical ancestors are performed and represent an integral part of the prayer. In their strongly spatialized symbology, mythical plots allow us to reconstruct a whole, still very alive cosmology and to see how the region's sacred geography intertwines - actively, and in a ongoing incorporation of contemporary elements - with the mythical geography: which, in turn, generates and reproduces the sense of the sacred geography by stratifying it through cross-references to the actions carried out by ultramundane beings, whose spatial movements are thought to have generated the present-day forms of the landscape. This latter thus becomes the area of a very strong interaction between mankind and deities, past and present. Exactly because they absorb and transmit values and relations (among the different local communities, between these and the land) narrative practices do represent a way of "taking care of places" - in the same sense as ritual practices do. (English) |
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| ISSN: | 2611-8742 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni
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