Religion, Culture, and Sacred Space

This book proposes a new way of thinking about how a place becomes sacred and investigates the cultural considerations that influence the way a place becomes fixed in a society’s consciousness. Smith argues that intense emotional attachments to places are constructed by texts that attach a narrative to the physical landscape. Through an examination of a wide range of sites--including Abydos in ancient Egypt, Delos in classical Greece, and Mecca in medieval Islam—a new theory of the human relationship to space is elaborated. His is a theory that has implications for the way we go about preserving landscapes as well as the way we understand our own experience of the world.