Sustaining the Sacred Mountains: Tibetan Environmentalism and Sacred Landscape in a Time of Conflict

Our Lady of Guadalupe is the only Marian apparition tradition in the Americas—and indeed in all of Roman Catholicism—that inspired a sustained series of published theological analyses. Theologians in each successive epoch since the mid-seventeenth century have plumbed the meaning of Guadalupe for their times. Their theological works are grounded in two realities: the first is the relationship between Guadalupe and her faithful, and the second is her power to shape their lives and their world. Theologies of Guadalupe examines the way theologians have understood Guadalupe and sought to orient her impact in the lives of her devotees. It also examines Guadalupe’s meaning in everyday devotees’ lives and the spread of Guadalupan devotion over nearly half a millennium. Chapters of this study successively examine core theological topics in the Guadalupe tradition developed in response to major events of Mexican history: conquest, attempts to Christianize native peoples, society building, independence, and the demands for justice of marginalized groups. The successive chapters also narrate how, amid the plentiful miraculous images of Christ, Mary, and the saints that dotted the sacred landscape of colonial New Spain, the Guadalupe cult rose above all others and emerged from a local devotion to become a regional, national, and then international phenomenon. From patristic-based theological writings in the colonial era down to contemporary formulations shaped by the emergence of liberation theologies in Latin America, the theologies under study here reveal how Christian concepts and scriptures imported from Europe developed in dynamic interaction with the new contexts in which they took root.

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Pausanias’ Dead Poets Society

10.1093/oso/9780198826477.003.0012 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Johanna Hanink

Keyword(s):

Root System ◽

Sacred Landscape ◽

Of Greece

This chapter examines the tombs of poets in Pausanias’ Description of Greece. It argues that the buried bones of ancient poets, and of heroes featured in their poetry, function as a kind of root system that, in Pausanias’ imagination, nourishes the sacred landscape of Greece, ensuring that the memories it holds always stay lush with life. For Pausanias, poets, through their deaths and their graves, become part of the mythical history that is itself a product of the poets’ imaginations. That history is, within the discursive topography of Pausanias’ Description, embodied—and entombed—in a landscape defined by its numinous places and monuments.

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Interlocking Networks and the Sacred Landscape of Hellenistic Northern Etruria: Capturing Social and Geographic Entanglement Through Social Network Analysis

Open Archaeology ◽

10.1515/opar-2019-0031 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 505-518

Author(s):

Raffaella Da Vela

Keyword(s):

Social Network ◽

Social Network Analysis ◽

Network Analysis ◽

Hellenistic Period ◽

Political Systems ◽

Residential Areas ◽

Sacred Places ◽

Sacred Landscape ◽

Religious Buildings ◽

Social Components

AbstractThe late Hellenistic period is a time of deep entanglement, interconnectedness and complexity. The breakdown of local political systems and the unification of economic spaces had strong repercussions on the perception and expression of several aspects of the cultural identities of local communities. Rapid waves of change can be observed in local religious identities and in the Etruscan sacred landscape: cult buildings were destroyed, sacred places abandoned or replaced by residential areas, and new organisational forms of managing cults appeared; Latin names and new iconographies were given to traditional deities in public religious buildings dedicated to the official religion, while private and popular worshipping polarized around salvation cults. Changes in the sacred landscape regarded both topographic aspects, such as the visibility of cult sites and their connections to settlements, as well as social aspects, such as the patronage of sacred buildings. This paper proposes to employ a relational approach in order to understand changes in the sacred landscape. It analyzes the geographic and social components of the Etruscan sacred landscape by means of Social Network Analysis (SNA), and it does so by looking at the landscape in its entanglement to the archaeological and epigraphic record between 350 and 80 BCE.

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Qualifying Land Use and Land Cover Dynamics and Their Impacts on Ecosystem Service in Central Himalaya Transboundary Landscape Based on Google Earth Engine

Land ◽

10.3390/land10020173 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 173

Author(s):

Changjun Gu ◽

Yili Zhang ◽

Linshan Liu ◽

Lanhui Li ◽

Shicheng Li ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Ecosystem Services ◽

Land Cover ◽

Ecosystem Service ◽

Forest Cover ◽

Google Earth ◽

Forest Cover Change ◽

Sacred Landscape ◽

Lulc Changes ◽

Google Earth Engine

Land use and land cover (LULC) changes are regarded as one of the key drivers of ecosystem services degradation, especially in mountain regions where they may provide various ecosystem services to local livelihoods and surrounding areas. Additionally, ecosystems and habitats extend across political boundaries, causing more difficulties for ecosystem conservation. LULC in the Kailash Sacred Landscape (KSL) has undergone obvious changes over the past four decades; however, the spatiotemporal changes of the LULC across the whole of the KSL are still unclear, as well as the effects of LULC changes on ecosystem service values (ESVs). Thus, in this study we analyzed LULC changes across the whole of the KSL between 2000 and 2015 using Google Earth Engine (GEE) and quantified their impacts on ESVs. The greatest loss in LULC was found in forest cover, which decreased from 5443.20 km2 in 2000 to 5003.37 km2 in 2015 and which mainly occurred in KSL-Nepal. Meanwhile, the largest growth was observed in grassland (increased by 548.46 km2), followed by cropland (increased by 346.90 km2), both of which mainly occurred in KSL-Nepal. Further analysis showed that the expansions of cropland were the major drivers of the forest cover change in the KSL. Furthermore, the conversion of cropland to shrub land indicated that farmland abandonment existed in the KSL during the study period. The observed forest degradation directly influenced the ESV changes in the KSL. The total ESVs in the KSL decreased from 36.53 × 108 USD y−1 in 2000 to 35.35 × 108 USD y−1 in 2015. Meanwhile, the ESVs of the forestry areas decreased by 1.34 × 108 USD y−1. This shows that the decrease of ESVs in forestry was the primary cause to the loss of total ESVs and also of the high elasticity. Our findings show that even small changes to the LULC, especially in forestry areas, are noteworthy as they could induce a strong ESV response.

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