Secularisation and resistant politics of sacred space in Guangzhou's ancestral temple, China

Abstract

Recent theoretical advancements in geographies of religion have reconceptualised secularisation as a multi‐scaled, grounded process of place‐making that reconciles the “agent‐in‐place” with large, institutional differentiation and fragmentation. This paper contributes to this re‐theorisation by examining the context of urban regeneration in which macro‐ and meso‐scaled secularisation is performed, negotiated and contested at the scale of the local community. The empirical research focuses on state‐enforced secularisation imposed on the ancestral temple of a lineage village during the urban regeneration project in Guangzhou, China. This paper considers the resistance conducted by local villagers to defend the sacredness and authority of their ancestral temple and to reclaim their own space from the totalising party‐state. We suggest that the effect of secularisation at the micro‐scale implies the formation of new religiosities as new legitimising religious thoughts and discourses of the sacred arose within villagers’ embodied practices of resistance. This paper therefore highlights both secularisation and re‐sacralisation as scalar constructs that mutually interact at different scales.

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