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In this 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 endeavours 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 should interest scholars and students of environmental and cultural studies, and the sociology of religious movements and pilgrimage. Non-specialist readers should be stimulated by the cultural, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of extraordinary natural landscapes.
