CULTURAL HERITAGE CONSERVATION: CASE STUDY OF PEDAWA VILLAGE, BALI- INDONESIA

Bali, which is famous for its tourist areas, has many cultural heritages, one of them is the Bali Aga villages. Bali Aga Village is an indigenous village that existed before the arrival of community from the island of Java in the era of the Majapahit kingdom. Pedawa Village which is located in Banjar District, Buleleng Regency is one of the Bali Aga Villages in Bali which has many cultural heritages that need to be preserved. This village is very famous for its culture, customs and belief that are still preserved by the local community. One of the cultural heritages is the temple named Pura Dalem Kayehan Desa and Kayehan Desa Alas Jeringo which both have natural springs that are used by all villagers in daily basis. These two temples are used for activities ranging from sacred activities (rituals and traditional ceremonies) to profane (bathing and washing clothes). Local community often experience difficulties when carrying out sacred and profane activities during the rainy season due to the low quality of access that is difficult to pass. Hence, there are no adequate supporting facilities to perform ritual and profane activities. Moreover, the condition of the temple is not well maintained, so it requires immediate treatment. This study raises the concept of preserving these two temples and water springs in Pedawa Village. This conservation is urgent because these two temples are very important for the local community but its condition is not maintained and well organized. Interviews, focus group discussions and field surveys is applied to determine the suitable conservation concept. Results show that the conservation concept applies the Tri Mandala concept (sacred area, middle area and profane area). Further, participation and needs of the local community also has become the important contribution towards the basis of conservation concept of these two temples.

The Politics, Poetics and Performance of Sacred Space: The Sacred Space of Cook Islands Christian Churches

<p>The current literature about sacred space suggests that it is produced through either substantive definitions of space (the poetics of space) or situational definitions of space (the politics of space). I conducted ethnographic research in the Cook Islands to consider how these two constructions of space interact to produce the sacred space of the Cook Islands Christian Church. I have shown that the production of sacred space can be described through three modes of spatial production: the politics of space, the poetics of space and the performance of space. They are enacted through social practices in an inter-related process. Based on these findings I propose a spatial triad model. I suggest that by moving beyond traditional dichotomous constructions of space such a spatial triad model can contribute to new understandings of how sacred and profane space is produced and reproduced.</p>

The Politics, Poetics and Performance of Sacred Space: The Sacred Space of Cook Islands Christian Churches

<p>The current literature about sacred space suggests that it is produced through either substantive definitions of space (the poetics of space) or situational definitions of space (the politics of space). I conducted ethnographic research in the Cook Islands to consider how these two constructions of space interact to produce the sacred space of the Cook Islands Christian Church. I have shown that the production of sacred space can be described through three modes of spatial production: the politics of space, the poetics of space and the performance of space. They are enacted through social practices in an inter-related process. Based on these findings I propose a spatial triad model. I suggest that by moving beyond traditional dichotomous constructions of space such a spatial triad model can contribute to new understandings of how sacred and profane space is produced and reproduced.</p>

A Systematic Investigation of Sacred Space in the Kama-Vyatka Region: Udmurt Materials

This article summarises the results of long-term studies of cult places and reconstructions of sacred space at the turn of the 20th century. The studies were carried out by the Udmurt Institute of History Language and Literature, Urals Department of the Russian Academy of Science. The article starts by reflecting on the meaning of the word ‘sacred’ in Russian and Udmurt. It then explains the main approaches and research methods used when looking at spaces that have become sacred as a result of a particular activity, for example through symbolical domestication and transformation of the environment; or because of the natural, social, cultural and spiritual milieu; or as a particular creative transformation of the hierotopy, including hierophany as the presence of a divine (or mystical) component. In reconstructing the traditional sacred space of the Udmurt, we used systematic, and structural/semiotic methods. The first sees sacred space as a complicated natural, historical and cultural, religious and mythological set, while the second reveals the semantics of these cultural places, objects and rituals. We pay particular attention to the study of structure, of the main indicators and the semantics of the Udmurt traditional space at the turn of the 20th century. We have followed the means of organising sacred landscapes, which assumed the existence of networks of shrines and cult objects, a systematic organisation of ceremonies and rituals at each of them, and the holding of family and calendar rituals. We have revealed circles (levels) of sacredness (family, patronymic, conditional clan, village, regional, tribal and territorial), showing how the mythological opposition between sacred and profane is relative within each local area, existing implicitly within the limits of a wider area of sacredness. We have briefly characterised how extensive study has been of the different types of religious landscape, and the present state of the art.

Profaning the Sacred: The Unorthodox Financial Activities of Catholic Clerics During the Napoleonic Period, 1796–1814

This article reveals for the first time how Catholic clerics survived financially during the Napoleonic period in Italy (1796–1814). Despite the very rich, 200-year historiography on one of the Church's most critical periods, there is almost nothing on how religious clerics coped at this time. Their institutions had been despoiled by the French, often in collaboration with locals, negating traditional forms of clerical income, such as alms or rental income from non-ecclesiastical properties. This caused clerics to search out unorthodox – at times, non-canonical – ways of eking out a living, either for themselves, their religious communities or both, as such distinctions were often blurred. Masses were monetized and traded; ecclesiastical paraphernalia composed of precious metals were smelted and commodified, and relics were sold for profit. The uncovering of these controversial acts by men who in normal times were upstanding reveals the desperation of the times and provides insight into the rich discussion on determining the degrees of separation (and overlap) between the sacred and profane.

Scriptural Exegesis or Speculative Philosophy

Summary Dogmatic debates in early Christianity shaped philosophical discourse just as Greek philosophy offered the conceptual tools to engage and, accordingly to crystalize early Christian practice, into a formal system of belief. Thus, in the recently-published The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics, Johannes Zachhuber notes that “Patristic thought as a whole can be identified as a Christian philosophy.” Following suit – though not without nuance – this paper suggests treating Patristic scriptural exegesis as an exercise of speculative philosophy, as evidenced in Augustine’s interpretation of the figure of the cross at Eph 3.18, where the cross progressively becomes a simple yet compelling paradigm of divine manifestation. This paradigm can be framed according to Augustine’s mature articulation of the ‘ontological principle’ of manifestation in s. 165: “From the depth which you cannot see rises everything that you can see.” By engaging in scriptural exegesis, within a gestalt where Wisdom, sacred and profane alike, merge in the incarnate God manifest in Christ, Augustine articulates unprecedented philosophical principles.

TRADISI PENGHORMATAN DEWA DALAM MASYARAKAT TIONGHOA BEKASI

This article discusses the practice of the cult of temple”s deity. This cult is said to be a reinvented tradition. The tradition is created because it is formed by the elements that come from the original tradition. By tracing the process of discovering the Hobsbawm tradition from the sacred and profane aspects of Durkheim and its relation to totemism, it is evident that this tradition has a new form and function. The original function of tradition was to strengthen identity, but the new function of the reinvented tradition appears to be an integrative function. The reinvented tradition also occurs in an effort to attract public interest or attention to make it more popular in the community. The temple community carries out an invented traditional process so that the tradition of the cult becomes more attractive, and is preferred more popular, through the appearance of entertainment shows at festivals.

“Crusaders” and the Islamic State Apocalypse

Islamic State propaganda manipulated and combined a culturally embedded sense of Islamic history with a heady, potent mixture of classical and radical apocalyptic, and real and supposed Islamic authority, both sacred and profane. Tapping into a widespread belief in the approach of the Last Hour, the group attempted to change an established “crusader master narrative” by giving “crusaders” and their “crusade” integral roles in Islamic sacred history and an impending Islamic State apocalypse.

Sabbath

In Judaism, the Sabbath is the seventh and the sacred day of the week, a recurring seven-day temporal unit. The concept of Sabbath influenced the Christian Sunday and the Muslim Friday, and with the expansion of both, the seven-day week became a globally common temporal unit. As such, the Sabbath is identified with two highly influential ideas: the seven-day week institution of cyclical temporality almost disconnected from nature, and the dichotomy of sacred and profane days. The Jewish Sabbath is famously introduced by the first biblical story of creation, as God sanctifies the seventh day and rests from his labor of creation. Therefore, some etymologists suggest the Hebrew word Shabbat is derived from rest (Shevita), and some point to its similarity to the number seven (Sheva). However, the information in the Bible regarding the Sabbath is limited and deals mainly with the prohibition of labor. It is only by the Second Temple period and later in rabbinical writings that the Sabbath is seen as a day of communal worship, complex practices, rituals, and limitations that are not directly related to cessation from work. The academic scholarship on the Sabbath, which is the focus of this bibliography, usually concentrates on contextualizing the elements of the Sabbath to specific periods and locations. Thus, academic scholarship does not present the Sabbath as a whole, but instead picture it as a multilayered social institution, gradually developed across thousands of years, with no clear starting point and, of course, as ever changing. Already by the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the “Sabbath question” was an urgent scholarly discussion regarding its Mesopotamian origins, its parallels in other cultures, and the idea of the week. Through these debates, the specific Jewish concept became a universal category for thinking of time, society, and religion. Moreover, the academic scholarship created a direct link between the Jewish concept of Sabbath and the Christian concepts of Sunday and the seven-day week. Therefore, instead of leading to difference and confrontation, as in earlier periods, the Sabbath became a Judeo-Christian idea, separating this group from the rest of the world. In the second half of the 20th century, scholarship shifted from the big question of origin to more minor aspects of it, shading light on the different stages of Sabbath development, like the Second Temple period, classical rabbinic writings, and Kabbalah. It seems that the last centuries present the popular current phase of the Sabbath as a rest day in capitalist and secular modern societies. A unique case here is the formation of the modern State of Israel, which recreated the Sabbath as a national rather than a religious category, being another intriguing turn in the relationship between the Sabbath and Jewish identity.

Sacred and Profane: Tabooing in Russian Magical Manuscripts of the 17th–18th Centuries (Incantations and Herbals)

Linguistic taboos (euphemisms, omissions, and other) are an essential part of Slavic verbal and written culture. In this article, we analyze cryptography as a form of tabooing in the magical texts of the grassroots manuscript tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries (handwritten incantations and herbals). Our main objective is trying to see a system behind separate examples and define which kinds of texts are usually tabooed in incantations and herbals, their topics, and messages. We have managed to find out that the function of keeping secrecy is not relevant for the magical tradition; rather, encryption was used to emphasize the elements that are of special importance. In the book of incantations called the Olonets Codex, dating back to the 17th century, ciphering was used for the names and titles of sacred and demonological characters, antagonists, descriptions of certain rituals, closing phrases for the incantations (amen, “key”), etc. We hypothesize that the encryption is used in the Olonets Codex as a means of retaining the magical strength of all the texts in the manuscripts, protecting from hostile beings, sacralizing where necessary, tabooing what was considered sinful for religious reasons, accentuating the main meanings of the incantations, etc. In the herbals, cryptography is basically used for tabooing of “sinful” or trappy topics (love magic, magic used against courts and authorities, some contexts concerning sorcery, jinx, and “secret” knowledge), and in the texts that had to bear sacral meaning (incantations and prayers).