Jacob Kinnard offers an in-depth examination of the complex dynamics of religiously charged places. He argues that places are sacred because we make them sacred, and that they remain in perpetual motion, transforming themselves from moment to moment and generation to generation.

Jacob Kinnard offers an in-depth examination of the complex dynamics of religiously charged places. Focusing on several important shared and contested pilgrimage places-Ground Zero and Devils Tower in the United States, Ayodhya and Bodhgaya in India, Karbala in Iraq-he poses a number of crucial questions. What and who has made these sites important, and why? How are they shared, and how and why are they contested? What is at stake in their contestation? How are the particular identities of place and space established? How are individual and collective identity intertwined with space and place? Challenging long-accepted, clean divisions of the religious world, Kinnard explores specific instances of the vibrant messiness of religious practice, the multivocality of religious objects, the fluid and hybrid dynamics of religious places, and the shifting and tangled identities of religious actors. He contends that sacred space is a constructed idea: places are not sacred in and of themselves, but are sacred because we make them sacred. As such, they are in perpetual motion, transforming themselves from moment to moment and generation to generation. Places in Motion moves comfortably across and between a variety of historical and cultural settings as well as academic disciplines, providing a deft and sensitive approach to the topic of sacred places, with awareness of political, economic, and social realities as these exist in relation to questions of identity. It is a lively and much needed critical advance in analytical reflections on sacred space and pilgrimage.

"The contributors to Things in Motion, collectively, demonstrate the dynamic capacity of things in motion, from the point where things emerge from source material, to their circulation in the contemporary world, including their extended circulation through reproduction in other media. The various chapters show that examining the itineraries of things multiplies the assemblages things form and multiplies the sites at which we can recognize things in motion. None of the things discussed seem to ever have died. Their itineraries are continued by their movement in and out of museums and curation facilities, where many of them have come to rest temporarily, the circulation of their images, and their adaptation in sometimes unexpected contemporary material culture. Their itineraries also include the scholarship about them, to which this volume contributes, making it another site assembled by these active things"--Provided by publisher.

A social history of cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia's ethnically diverse port cities, seen within the global context of the interwar era.

An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.

What happens when tourists scream with fear, shout with anger and frustration, weep with joy and delight, or even faint in the face of revealed beauty? How can certain sites affect some tourists so deeply that they require hospitalisation and psychiatric treatment? What are the inner contours of tourist experience and how does it relate to specific emotional cultures? What are the consequences of the emotional cultures of tourists upon destinations? How are differences in emotional culture mobilized and played out in the transnational contact zones of international tourism? While many books have engaged with the structural frames of tourist practice and experience, this is the first to deal with the emotional dimensions of tourism, travel and contact and the ways in which they can transform tourists, destinations and travel cultures through emotional engagements. The book brings together an international array of scholars from anthropology, psychiatry, history, cultural geography and critical tourism studies to explore how the movement to, and through, the realms of exotic people, wild natures, subliminal art, spirit worlds, metropolitan cities and sexualised 'others' variably provoke emotions, peak experiences, travel syndromes and inner dialogues. The authors show how tourism challenges us to engage with concepts of self, other, time, nature, sex, the body and death. Through a set of ethnographic and historic cases, they demonstrate that such engagements usually have little to do with the actual destination but rather, are deeply anchored in personal memories, repressed fears and desires, and the collective imaginaries of our societies.