In their award-winning films No Room for Wild Animals (1956) and Serengeti Shall Not Die (1959), the Grzimeks depicted Africa's national parks as untouched ‘gardens of Eden’, a framing of nature designed to appeal to war-weary European tourists that elided the crucial role of Maasai pastoralists in shaping wildlife ecology on the savanna and the colonialist violence that had partitioned the African landscape to ensure European hegemony. This article examines the documentary films, popular science books, and essays of former Frankfurt Zoo director and television star Bernhard Grzimek and his son Michael as harbingers of a global conservation movement and an emerging tourist economy in East Africa, moulded by the unresolved longings of German imperialism, West German anxieties about decolonization and the Cold War, and the rise of West Germans as the ‘world champions of travel’. If religion is, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, a “recent invention” that, with a shift in structural relations, might “be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,” the elements that have made up this thing called religion will certainly persist in other forms, and it is the task of geographers of religion to trace the changing orchestrations of those significances across space and place. Postmodernization exacerbates the individualization of religion but also destabilizes the boundary between the sacred and the profane. Rooted in modern distinctions of religious/secular and sacred/profane and in the Enlightenment urge to classify, constructs of religion are efforts to demarcate, purify, and territorialize. Rather than assuming there is a universal feature of human life called “religion,” the author argues that the religious and the sacred should be studied by geographers as ways of distributing particular kinds of significance across geographic spaces. This article argues that geographers of religion must take these deconstructive arguments to heart.
Recent religious studies scholarship has examined the historical and cultural variability by which “religion” and “the sacred” have been constructed by scholars and by the public.
0 kommentar(er)
