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Catholic Spaces: the Sacralization of Moral Geography in a Sardinian Town

Tracey Heatherington
Harvard University

Paper Abstract

In a central Sardinian town, the Catholic church moves through and into physical spaces which are simultaneously social and conceptual spaces, thus weaving itself into local experience and identity. With funeral processions, wedding processions and festival processions, a Catholic vision of the community is superimposed upon local geography and integrated into individual life stories. A politically significant representation of community life becomes visually manifest to both townspeople and outsiders, reifying Catholic practices as authentic local traditions. Parishioners collaborate to overwrite the traces of transgressive outlaws and violent events, investing an alternative and positive reading of the town's past in the many chapels spread across the town and the surrounding hillsides. Studying the use of local space by the church in Sardinia, then, offers insight to the anthropology of religion by suggesting a process by which "real" places are inhabited so as to naturalize the relevance of Catholicism to both local history and modern social relations, enlisting the senses in the project of enfolding the whole town within the moral framework of the church.

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  Dept. of Anthropology
  Davidson College
  Box 6969
  Davidson, NC 28035 USA

  office: Chambers B12
  tel. 704-894-2035
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