Sacred Gardens and Landscapes: Ritual and Agency

by Michel Conan, Maria Elena Bernal-Garcia, Pierre Bonnechere, Sarah Bonnemaison, Claude Calame, Laura Cameron, Giorgio Galletti, David Matless, Richard Price, Behula Shah, Patrick R. Stanley-Baker, Michel Vieillard-Baron, Angel Julian Garcia Zambrano

Overview

Studies of rituals in sacred gardens and landscapes offer tantalizing insights into the significance of gardens and landscapes in the societies of India, ancient Greece, Pre-Columbian Mexico, medieval Japan, post-Renaissance Europe, and America. Sacred gardens and landscapes engaged their visitors into three specific modes of agency: as anterooms spurring encounters with the netherworld; as journeys through mystical lands; and as a means of establishing a sense of locality, metaphorically rooting the dweller's own identity in a well-defined part of the material world. Each section of this book is devoted to one of these forms of agency. Together the essays reveal a profound cultural significance of gardens previously overlooked by studies of garden styles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780884023050
Publisher:	Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
Publication date:	03/28/2007
Series:	Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium Series in the History of Landscape Architecture , #26
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	9.40(w) x 10.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

?Michel Conan is the former Director of Garden and Landscape Studies, Dumbarton Oaks.

Claude Calame is Directeur d'Études, L'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Richard Price is Dittman Professor of American Studies and Professor of Anthropology and History at College of William and Mary in Virginia.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Cultural Agency of Gardens and Landscapes   Michel Conan     3
Gardens as Anterooms to the Netherworld
The Place of the Sacred Grove (Alsos) in the Mantic Rituals of Greece: The Example of the Alsos of Trophonios at Lebadeia (Boeotia)   Pierre Bonnechere     17
Gardens of Love and Meadows of the Beyond: Ritual Encounters with the Gods and Poetical Performances in Ancient Greece   Claude Calame     43
Religious and Lay Rituals in Japanese Gardens during the Heian Period (784-1185)   Michel Vieillard-Baron     57
The Dance of Time, the Procession of Space at Mexico-Tenochtitlan's Desert Garden   Maria Elena Bernal-Garcia     69
A Voyage through Mythical Lands
Mythic and Sacred Gardens in Medieval Japan: Sacral Mediation in the Rokuonji and Saihoji Gardens   P. Richard Stanley-Baker     115
Braj: The Creation of Krishna's Landscape of Power and Pleasure and Its Sixteenth-Century Construction through the Pilgrimage of the Groves   Behula Shah     153
Sacred Texts and Ritual Spaces in the RamLila of Ramnagar   Sarah Bonnemaison     173
The Production of Locality
Ancestral Rituals of Landscape Exploration and Appropriation among Indigenous Communities in Early Colonial Mexico   Angel Julian Garcia-Zambrano     193
Africans Discover America: The Ritualization of Gardens, Landscapes, andSeascapes by Suriname Maroons   Richard Price     221
Horse Racing, Hunting, and Praying in the "Shady Walks and Sacred Woods" of Cetinale   Giorgio Galletti     239
Devotional Landscape: Ecology and Orthodoxy in the Work of Marietta Pallis   David Matless   Laura Cameron     263
Contributors     297
Index     301

Editorial Reviews

Gardens reveal the relationship between culture and nature, yet within the substantial library of garden literature, Sacred Gardens and Landscapes is among the few to focus on what the garden means in the spirit realm...Undeniably, Sacred Gardens and Landscapes is a magnificent compendium about a subject address by few writers: the mystical dimension of gardens.
— Dorothea Bedigian

Plant Science Bulletin

Gardens reveal the relationship between culture and nature, yet within the substantial library of garden literature, Sacred Gardens and
Landscapes is among the few to focus on what the garden means in the spirit realm...Undeniably, Sacred Gardens and Landscapes is a magnificent compendium about a subject address by few writers: the mystical dimension of gardens.

Plant Science Bulletin - Dorothea Bedigian