Geography - Book chapters
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Item Prayer of the body: Located corporeal practices on the Lough Derg pilgrimage, Ireland(Springer Nature Ltd., 2023-07-02) Scriven, Richard; Lopez, LucreziaThis chapter considers how embodiment is central to an Irish pilgrimage by situating prayer and ritual as corporeal spatial practice that transforms participants into pilgrims facilitating numinous experiences. Lough Derg, or St. Patrick’s Purgatory, is a Roman Catholic three-day pilgrimage consisting of cycles of prayers, going barefoot, fasting, and keeping a twenty-four-hour vigil on a lake-island. This tradition reaches back centuries allowing pilgrims to retreat from the world, reflect on life, and encounter spiritual renewal. Ethnographic fieldwork provides an insight into the reality of the pilgrimage, motivations of participants, and the distinct religious and spiritual feelings associated with the site. Meanings and spiritualities become embodied in the pilgrims and emplaced in the site through the practices. The chapter will begin by outlining the nature and features of Lough Derg, followed by an overview of recent research on pilgrimage as embodied spatial practices. An account of the pilgrimage’s corporeal practices explores how prayer and performance overlap and entwine on the island. The analysis is enhanced by a selection of interview excerpts demonstrating the motivations and experiences involved.Item Introduction to Colonialism, Tourism and Place(Edward Elgar, 2020-10-06) Linehan, Denis; Clarke, Ian; Xie, Philip F.Item The Cork Catholic Missionary Exhibition, 1937: Negotiating the Irish representation of Indigenous peoples(Wiles Trust, 2023-01) Linehan, DenisBetween 1932 and 1937, four Catholic Missionary Exhibitions were held in Ireland. These shows, which attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors, offer remarkable insights into the structure and outlook of the Irish Catholic missionary enterprise. Their elaborate engagements with visual and material culture mobilised an imaginative and social engagement with foreign peoples and lands that reflect a distinctive cultural history of race and difference. In this chapter, I will reflect on the general character of the Missionary exhibitions in modern Ireland but focus in detail on the Cork Missionary Exhibition of 1937, in part because it has been neglected historically and also because of the novel way it set out to represent Indigenous People, which up to this time and indeed after, were consistently racially stereotyped. As I proceed, I will draw upon the cultural histories of exhibition space, curating, and collections, which offer insights into the significance of objects and how they are mobilised in various forms of knowledge production. My contribution here is also guided by work in historical and cultural geography, which has recast exhibitions as a particular kind of urban assemblage, a gathering of tangible and intangible ideas reproduced through the regimes of curation and inter-mobility of objects, people and experiences.Item Nitrogen, planetary boundaries, and the metabolic rift: Using metaphor for dietary transitions towards a safe operating space(Routledge, 2021-07-29) Sage, ColinThe framework of planetary boundaries serves as a useful metaphor for a “safe operating space” if we are to maintain Earth as a viable habitat for humanity. Using another metaphor, that of metabolic rift, the chapter concentrates on one of the anthropogenically breached boundaries: the global biogeochemical flow of nitrogen. The disruption of the global nitrogen cycle is largely an unintended consequence of the widespread use of nitrogen-based fertilisers arising from the development of the Haber-Bosch process early in the twentieth century. The capability to synthesise atmospheric nitrogen into fertiliser has had a transformative effect on humanity’s ability to feed itself, with consequences for population growth and also dietary change. Reflecting upon the disturbed metabolic interaction between human society and the environment under the current global agri-food system, the chapter highlights how agricultural intensification has resulted in increasing production of animal feeds that, in turn, has made livestock products cheaper and more ubiquitous. Rising levels of meat consumption have problematic consequences both for human and planetary health and the chapter explores the prospect of planetary boundaries as a metaphor that may guide a process of dietary transition towards a safe operating space.Item Metaphor, transformation and transdisciplinarity(Routledge, 2021-07-30) Sage, Colin; Hughes, Ian; Byrne, Edmond P.; Mullally, GerardMetaphor, along with narrative and other linguistic devices such as myth, fable, parable, and allegory, enables us to make sense of the world around us and shape how we think and act individually and collectively in relation to society and the natural world. The chapter considers the properties of metaphors and how they can promote or curtail action towards transformative change in the direction of sustainability. The notion of transformation itself is examined and is taken to represent profound changes in the ways we understand economy, society, and the place of technology. Indeed, it calls for a recalibration of the popular imagination – and this is where metaphor, myth, and fable have such a vital role to play. As an introduction to the book, the chapter explains the structure of the volume comprising four parts each of which explore different dimensions of metaphor from the ways it shapes our relationship with science and technology to the rich terrain of psychoanalysis, creativity, and artistic practice. Each of the subsequent 13 chapters are briefly described and demonstrate the spirit of transdisciplinary collaboration which informs their quite different analyses, but which share a commitment to sustainability representing an authentic societal and environmental flourishing.