Sacred Places Around the World

If place-making is a way of constructing the past, a venerable means of doing human history, it is also a way of constructing social conditions and, in the process, personal and social identities. We are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine (Basso 1996:7).

Of course the radio says that everything comes directly from God. But just as the king has his ministers, God has his [pious ones]. If you need a paper from the government office, which is better? Do you go straight to the official and ask for it? You might wait a long time and never receive it. Or do you go to someone who knows you and also knows the official? Of course you go to the friend, who presents the case to the official. Same thing…if you want something from God (Eickelman 2002: 274)

This saint-worship…has long been frowned upon by the devout urban Moslems; as early as the mid-thirties restrictions were placed on its practice…Most important was the fact that the rituals were unorthodox and thus unacceptable to true Moslems. If you mentioned such cults as the Derqaqoua, the Aissaoua, the Haddaoua, the Hamatcha, the Jilala or the Guennaoua to a city man, he cried, “They are all criminals! They should be put in jail!” without stopping to reflect that it would be difficult to incarcerate more than half of the population of any country… Each brotherhood has its own songs and drum rhythms, immediately recognizable as such by persons both within and outside the group. In early childhood rhythmical patterns and sequences of tones become a part of an adept’s subconscious, and in later life it is not difficult to attain the trance state when one hears them again (Bowles 1957:28-29)

Immediately when you arrive in the Sahara , for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem faint-hearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is the always the focal point of the landscape…

Alone…Presently, you will either shiver or hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives in there has undergone and which the French call le baptême de la solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here… even memory disappears; nothing is left but your won breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came (Bowles 1957: 128-129)

In calling up images of the past, I find that the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes; yet these plains are pronounced by all wretched and useless. They can be described only by negative characters; without habitations, without water, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants. Why then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on my memory? Why have not the still more level, the greener and more fertile Pampas, which are serviceable to mankind, produced an equal impression? I can scarcely analyze these feelings: but it must be partly owing to the free scope given to the imagination. The plains of Patagonia are boundless, for they are scarcely passable, and hence unknown; the bear the stamp of having lasted, as the are now, for ages, and there appears to be no limit to their duration during future time. If, as the ancients supposed, the flat earth was surrounded by an impassable breadth of water, or by deserts heated to an intolerable excess, who would not look at these last boundaries to man's knowledge with deep but ill defined sensations?
(Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 1836)