Why Have We Lacked Geographies of Religion and Nature?

Keywords: religion, nature-society, cultural geography, environmental humanities
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Over the past two decades, geographers have begun redressing their longstanding omission of religions, spiritualities, sacralities, and beliefs. Scholarly literatures have flourished in recent years, particularly when it comes to religion and secularity, gender, embodiment, or emotion. Even so, substantial gaps continue to exist. These include limited attention to nature-society relationships, as these still remain marginal to much of contemporary geography--a particularly odd omission given our discipline’s history.

This paper aims to provoke a discussion as to why geographers and religion and nature-society relations have each tended to place religio-nature relations as external to their research programs. Certainly and quite fortuitously, geographers are beginning to fill this gap (ex. Silvern and Davis, 2021; Gao et al., 2021), but it still holds for much of our discipline. It thus remains crucial to understand how and why limited attention to religio-nature geographies cuts across disciplinary literatures.

I suspect this oversight stems from several mutually-reinforcing reasons, including (through not limited to) critical theoretical antipathy toward religion, the geography of religion’s emergence from new cultural geography, and long-standing efforts to stress religion as socially-produced. Assessing this, of course, requires embracing uncertainty. We tend not to write (or publish) about why certain questions lie unasked or topics unaddressed. Such hypothetical work is nevertheless crucial when it comes to understanding--and undoing--the persistent existence of under-researched scholarly fields. Through this paper I therefore hope to help understand why geographic research concerning religion arrived in its present place and where it might go next.