Special Issue of the JSRNC on Mountains and Sacred Landscapes

The next issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture will be a special issue developed from our 2017 conference in New York City, which had the theme “Mountains and Sacred Landscapes.” The conference featured more than 100 presentations exploring the ways landscapes are understood, revered, inhabited, and mourned in religious traditions of thought and practice. With The New School’s India China Institute as the host for this gathering, many papers focused on the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. A number of conference papers also grappled with the novel discourses and practices of sacredness emerging around sites of acute environmental degradation. Attendees presented scholarly work on volcanoes and earthquakes, coal mining, wine terroirs, small island nations, tea plantations, pilgrimage and spiritual tourism, rainforests, and more.

As is generally our practice, conference attendees were invited to expand their paper presentations and submit manuscripts for consideration for publication in the JSRNC. Amanda Nichols, the Journal’s Managing Editor, and Evan Berry, the Society’s President Elect, served as co-editors for this special issue, collaborating in the production of what will be volume 13, number 2. This issue will feature four articles developed from conference papers, including David Pike’s “Haunted Mountains, Supershelters, and the Afterlives of Cold War Infrastructures,” which meditates on bunkers and the nuclear apocalypticism of late 20th century American culture; Elspeth Whitney’s “Phlegmatic Landscapes: Medieval Perceptions of Wetlands, Acedia, and Complexion Theory” an exploration of swamps and bogs in the medieval imagination demonstrating the how these sites speak to murkier dimensions of human morality; Caroline Tully and Sam Crook’s “Power Ranges: Identity and Terrain in Minoan Crete,” which draws on the archaeological record to situate mountaintop temples from the Minoan Bronze Age within a politicized cosmological hierarchy; and Flor Lafaye de Micheaux’s “Politicizations of a sacred river: the story of Gaumukh-Uttarkashi Eco-Sensitive Zone, Uttarakhand, India,” an examination of conservation politics in Northern India as divergent discourses about the Ganga River run in countercurrents.

The ISSRNC’s most recent conference at University College Cork, in Ireland, focused on “Water / Climate / Religion.” We anticipate an invitation to attendees to contribute to a future special issue of the JSRNC.