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• Spirituality and the State: Managing Nature and Experience in America's National Parks ( "North American Religions" series) New York University Press (New York, NY), 2016

1. Spirituality and the state : managing nature and experience in America's national parks LCCN 2015047789 Type of material Book Personal name Mitchell, Kerry (Kerry Archer), author. Main title Spirituality and the state : managing nature and experience in America's national parks / Kerry Mitchell. Published/Produced New York : New York University Press, [2016] Description xi, 247 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm ISBN 9781479886418 (cl : alk. paper) 9781479873012 (pb : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER BL65.N35 M58 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-mitchell-3a463036/

  Kerry Mitchell
  Global Director of Academic Affairs at Long Island University
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  Long Island University
  Co-Director of Asia Pacific Australia Program
  Long Island University
  January 2016 – Present (1 year 7 months)
  Long Island University
  Director of Capstone Program
  Long Island University
  January 2014 – Present (3 years 7 months)
  Long Island University
  Global Director of Academic Affairs
  Long Island University
  September 2010 – Present (6 years 11 months)
  Long Island University
  Director of Comparative Religion and Culture Program
  Long Island University
  September 2009 – December 2015 (6 years 4 months)
  Long Island University
  Associate Director of Comparative Religion and Culture Program
  Long Island University
  September 2007 – August 2009 (2 years)
  College of Charleston
  Adjunct Professor
  College of Charleston
  September 2004 – May 2007 (2 years 9 months)
  Education
  University of California, Santa Barbara
  University of California, Santa Barbara
  M.A. and Ph.D., Religious Studies
  1996 – 2008
  Indiana University Bloomington
  Indiana University Bloomington
  B.A., Religious Studies and French
  1989 – 1994

• Long Island University - http://www.liu.edu/Global/Academics/Program-Locations/New-York-City/Faculty

  Kerry Mitchell oversees the Capstone Semester as Global Director of Academic Affairs. He is also Co-Director of the Asia-Pacific Program. He is an experienced teacher, working with undergraduates since 1997, with particular skills in social scientific approaches to the study of religion. Kerry received a B.A. from Indiana University and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he wrote a dissertation on the state production of spirituality in national parks. His book, Spirituality and the State: Managing Nature and Experience in America's National Parks, was published by NYU Press in 2016.

• Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Spirituality-State-Managing-Experience-Religions/dp/1479873012

  Kerry Mitchell is Director of the Comparative Religion and Culture Program at Global College, Long Island University.

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Print Marked Items
Secularism and Religion-Making
Nurullah Ardic
Insight Turkey.
16.1 (Winter 2014): p216.
COPYRIGHT 2014 SETA Foundation for Political, Economic, and Social Research
http://www.insightturkey.com/
Full Text:
Secularism and Religion-Making
Edited by Markus Dressler and Arvind-Pal Mandair
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 288 pages, ISBN 9780199782925.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
RECENT scholarship in the sociology of religion has produced fresh perspectives on the understanding of religion
and its inter-relationships with society. Largely influenced by post-structuralist social theory, these new perspectives
call for a reevaluation of existing theoretical and methodological approaches as well as empirical analyses, as
reflected in the oft-used terms to describe their projects, including "rethinking," "imagining" religion and its
"invention" and "manufacturing" a la "invention of tradition". The term "religion-making" is one such concept that
questions the traditional ways of studying religion (and its constitutive other, secularism). It refers to the reification by
political and intellectual actors (with different motivations) of a religion (its beliefs and practices/rituals) based on
certain taken-for-granted (binary) concepts, such as the religious/secular divide, within the discursive field of world
religions. The collection of articles edited by Markus Dressler and Arvind-Pal Mandair brings together eleven
theoretically-informed and empirically-focused studies on religion-making in different socio-historical contexts. It fits
nicely, and contributes to, the above-mentioned recent trends in the sociology of religion and secularism.
A strong trend within this scholarship is a critique of the "secular critique" of the Enlightenment-inspired
secularization theory, which also implies a critical re-evaluation of the (secularist) notion of a clear-cut distinction
between the religious and the secular. This is also a common theme among the articles brought together in this edited
volume: each study questions from a post-structuralist angle (but focusing on a different aspect of) the assumption of
the 'boundedness' of "religion" and "secularism" and their opposition to one another. The theoretical aim of the
volume, according to the editors, is to problematize this dichotomous assumption and demonstrate instead the
codependency of "secular" and "religious" discourses. Its empirical aim is to "examine the consequences of the
colonial and postcolonial adoption of Western-style objectifications of religion and ... the secular, by non-Western
elites" (p. 3), but it also contains cases of Western actors. Moreover, the editors' lengthy Introduction contains a useful
discussion on the philosophical foundations (from Kant to Heidegger, from Hume to Hegel) and current
manifestations (in Taylor, Habermas etc.) of the epistemological hegemony of the religious/secular dichotomy and of
the "universalization" of the concept of religion out of Western Christianity.
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The analyses contained in the volume address the processes of religion-making at three different levels. First,
"religion-making from above" refers to the discursive strategy of reifying religion(s) from powerful positions
rendering them an instrument of governmentality. This is often undertaken by nation-states in their efforts to reframe
existing religious traditions in a docile manner. As the editors note, this strategy is also applied by individual political
actors, intellectuals and NGOs, as exemplified by the famous American think-tank RAND Corporation's call for
"rebuilding Islam" in a manner that would not constitute a threat to American interests worldwide. The same advice
was reiterated in 2004 by Daniel Pipes, a member of the Zionist lobby in the US who was close to the Bush
administration, who argued that the ultimate goal of "the war on terror" was "religion-building," implying the neocon
elites' desire to "civilize Islam" (p. 22). These examples show not only the fact that the notion of religion-making from
above is extremely relevant to current global geopolitics but also a paradigmatic symptom of the secular-liberal
hegemony over religion in Western imagination: all religious traditions are encouraged and/or forced to "fit in" the
existing socio-political structures in the form of "protestantization" -i.e. becoming an apolitical,
"modernized"/secularized and docile religion with no agenda for change in the status quo. Therefore, this hegemonic
secular discourse does not so much aim to cleanse the public sphere and politics from religion as to make the latter fit
in with the existing system and, if possible, function as a source of legitimization for hegemonic powers.
The second set of discourses, "religion-making from below," refers to how subordinate social groups draw on religion
and secularism in order to establish themselves as legitimate social formations and to claim certain rights vis-a-vis
hegemonic groups and often assimilationist policies. Such discursive efforts at religion-making from below are often
perceived as acts of emancipation from and resistance against religious and secular "knowledge regimes." The articles
in the volume that focus on this level invite the reader to rethink the discursive struggles between global/hegemonic
powers and local/subordinate actors as two-way, dialectical relationships reserving room for the agency of the latter,
particularly in the case of local knowledge produced when encountered with Orientalist discourses.
Third, "religion-making from (a pretended) outside" refers to the scholarly discourses that justify either one of the first
two types. Though "awareness of academia's complicity in the essentialization of particular others" (p. 23) has
increased after Edward Said's influential work on Orientalism. Eurocentric discourses on non-Western contexts,
particularly religious ones, are still prevalent in the Western academia, especially in the post-9/11 era of "neoimperialism"
(to use Michael Mann's description in Mann 2003). This presents a significant challenge particularly to
Religious Studies programs and World Religions courses/studies that have historically framed non-Western religions
in highly politicized terms. It is in this context that such concepts as the "invention of world religions" are meaningful
and help deconstruct given concepts and theoretical approaches, and create a space for a critical self-reflection in
academia.
Though the articles contained in the volume address one or two of these three different kinds of discourses, the
collection is organized around three different themes: Chapters 2 to 4 focus on the relationship between colonialism
and modernity while chapters 5-7 explore the liberal imaginary's connections with the construction of a modern(ist)
conception of "religion" by Western elites. Finally, chapters 8-12 examine how the boundaries between religion and
secular(ism) are contested by politico-legal state apparatuses and local communities in different cases. A brief
summary of each of these empirical chapters is in order.
In his article "Imagining Religions in India: Colonialism and the Mapping of South Asian History and Culture,"
Richard King explores the workings of colonial modernity in the case of discourse production on Hinduism and
Buddhism, whose representation were transformed as a result of the intense encounter with European colonialism. He
argues that European discursive hegemony was centered on the concept of "religion," which is a product of
secularization that functioned as a cognitive map for understanding and classifying South Asian traditions, and
allowing for a 'useful' (for colonizers) distinction between the religious and the secular (pp. 5152). He thus
deconstructs this universalized concept and its counterpart in the Western discourses, which function as a justifying
element of colonialism in India.
In Chapter 3, titled "Translations of Violence: Secularism and Religion-Making in the Discourse of Sikh
Nationalism," Arvind-Pal Mandair focuses on the production of discourses on violence and Sikh religious-nationalism
by the (secular) state in India. Demonstrating that traditional Indian concepts and practices are labeled as "religious"
and often associated with violence, thereby being left outside the public sphere, he asks if it is possible "to retrieve
through a different kind of enunciation those terms or concepts that were prohibited as nonmodern, nonWestern,
primitive, and so on or translated as 'religion'?" (p. 83). He also explores the possibility of the articulation of 'premodern'/precolonial
forms of subjectivity via indigenous concepts, such as "gurmat" or "bhakti" which for the author
may open up new channels for experiencing the political, and perhaps also altering the nature of democracy itself.
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In her piece titled "On the Apocalyptic Tones of Islam in Secular Time," Ruth Mass examines the discourses on the
compatibility of Islam with laicite in France, particularly those of "reformist" French-Arab intellectuals and their role
in the domination of religion by the liberal-secularist discourse. Focusing particularly on the subordination of Islamic
conceptions of time by secular temporalities, she demonstrates how these apologetic figures' discourses effectively
connect an image of a barbarous Islamic past (traditional heterogeneous temporalities) with the "apocalyptic tones" in
the secular present. She also argues that separating the 'Islamic conception' of time from the modern secular one, and
the "collapsing of different historical referents [are] sustained by terror-producing discourses about the violence of
Islam" (p. 97). She adds that even the cases of Palestine, Bosnia, and Algeria are cited by these 'apocalypticist'
intellectuals to justify the superiority of secularism over 'destructive' religion, ultimately serving the French state's
secularist policies in the public sphere. She ends her examination by exploring the possibility of novel discursive
formations that might help get away from "dyadic tensions between violent origins and cataclysmic futures" (p. 100)
imposed by secular, homogenous, linear temporalities.
In a similar fashion, Brian Goldstone questions, in his essay titled "Secularism, 'Religious Violence,' and the Liberal
Imaginary," the discursive production of the category of "religious violence" by Western terrorism experts through a
fundamental opposition between a barbarous, religious past and the 'Enlightened' life style of a modern believer. He
thus argues that "in its liberal democratic guise secularism['s] relationship to religion cannot be captured in terms of an
outright antagonism" for it is always "specific kinds of religion" that are denounced or empowered. Furthermore, he
argues, "the demand of liberal democratic states is less that religious signs and subject be evacuated from public
spaces than that the beliefs and behaviors of those subjects be refashioned ... in accordance with the transcendent
values of a particular way of life" (pp. 105-6), which we have referred to as "protestantization" above.
In his essay on "The Politics of Spirituality: Liberalizing the Definition of Religon," Kerry Mitchell focuses on the
academic study of religion as practiced in North America, particularly by Robert Wuthnow, Wade Roof and Leigh
Schmidt, in an attempt to unearth liberal assumptions in it. Drawing on Foucault and Luhmann's perspectives,
Mitchell deconstructs liberal religionists' biases, including particularly the taken-for-granted (and celebrated) concepts
of "self" and "freedom," which are typically associated with spirituality as opposed to dogmatic devotion. He thus
argues that one needs to locate spirituality (and the self and freedom) within the matrix of social networks and power
relations in order to avoid the "metaphysical positivism that informs liberal discourse on these concepts" (p. 127).
Similarly, Rosemary Hicks's piece on "Comparative Religion and the cold War Transformation of Indo-Persian
'Mysticism' into Liberal Islamic Modernity" examines how religion-making/reification in Western academia may be
informed by political and religious interests in the case of two influential Islamicists, Wilfred C. Smith and Seyyed H.
Nasr, whose different perspectives nevertheless "converged in their projects to establish rational Indo-Persian
mysticism as an ideal practice of Islam" (p. 162). Hicks demonstrates how Islamic, especially Indo-PersianSufism has
been "conflated with moderation" by Orientalists and how some Islamic Studies programs, established within the
context of a growing US involvement in the Middle East and South Asia during the Cold War, helped "reinforce
Persian and South Asian Sufism as the Islam of liberal modernity" (p. 142).
Chapter 8, titled "Apache Revelation: Making Indigenous Religion in the Legal Sphere," by Greg Johnson analyzes a
legal dispute between the Apache community and US museums on the display of traditional objects where the
representatives of the former successfully drew on an intensely Christian (i.e., majority) discourse, basing their
arguments on Genesis, Revelation, and the Ten Commandments as well as their own minorityspecific discourse.
Johnson's analysis thus shows how a majority discourse could be used as part of a process of "religion-making from
below" by the subordinate minority, which also implies a critique of secular liberalism's discourse of religion (p. 182).
Likewise, Markus Dressler's article on "Making Religion through Secularist Legal Discourse: The Case of Turkish
Alevism" explores how Alevis draw on the Turkish legal system's definition of religion to advance their cause for
recognition by reconceptualizing their identity in religious terms. Focusing on a number of legal disputes on Alevi
identity, and drawing on Talal Asad's influential work on secularism, Dressler demonstrates both that the laicist
discourse on religion in Turkey has been implicated in, and interacting with, the religious discourse in the negotiation
of Alevism's legitimacy as a religious identity, and that Turkish secularism is more concerned with "distinguishing
between legitimate and illegitimate forms of religion in line with nationalist, state-centered interests" than separating
the religious from the secular (p. 187). He concludes that the recent "religionization of Alevism" has been informed by
the discourse and categories of Turkish laicism (p. 202).
Similarly, Mark Elmore's chapter on "Bloody Boundaries: Animal Sacrifice and the Labor of Religion" explores the
definition of what constitutes a legitimate religious practice by the nation-state in the case of a debate over animal
sacrifice in northwestern India. Demonstrating how the struggle over defining the boundaries of religion might take
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the form of preserving "national unity" by the state vis-a-vis the traditional, communal particularisms, Elmore argues
that this struggle, or "labor of religion" (p. 210), must be understood as a dynamic process and be placed in its proper
historical context. He also suggest that a proper analysis should take this process in terms of a struggle between
different regimes of truth in the Foucauldian sense, focusing on the power relations that condition and are legitimized
by them.
Unlike many others, Alicia Turner's contribution, titled "Religion-Making and its Failures: Turning Monasteries into
Schools and Buddhism into a Religion in Colonial Burma," investigates a failed case of religionmaking: the British
colonial administration's unsuccessful attempts at transforming the Buddhist education in Burma in the second half of
the 19th century. By analyzing how Buddhist religious actors successfully resisted against European-imposed
definitions and teaching of religion, which were a crucial disciplinary technique of European colonialism, Turner thus
demonstrates that the "creation of religion as a universal category is a historical process tied to the creation of the
secular and social and the processes of governmentality" (p. 238).
The final chapter by Michael Nijhawan on "Precarious Presences, Hallucinatory Times: Configurations of Religious
Otherness in German Leitkulturalist Discourse" examines the anti-mosque movement in Europe to show how
religious otherization takes the form of a more 'refined' and refracted Orientalism, rather than a simple dichotomy of
the West vs. Islam. Focusing on the debates in German civil society, he argues that though European discourses on
religious others (mostly Muslims) are sometimes inscribed with "affection," they still produce differentiated and often
stigmatized subjectivities, such as an "organicist religious subjectivity" for Southeast Asian Muslims, which implies a
lack of agency and is associated with an "Orientalist imagery of inferior-mindedness" (p. 246). He thus demonstrates
that power relations shaping the lives of religious minorities are closely linked to the discursive definitions religion
and secularism as well as the negotiation of their boundaries.
All in all, each chapter in the collection contributes to the understanding of a wide range of topics in different
historical-geographical contexts with their empirical analyses, as well as to the exploration of the field of religion and
secularism with a fresh theoretical perspective. On the whole, they are successful in demonstrating the implications of
the politics of knowledge produced by both political elites and scholars as well as local communities. The book also
contributes to the debunking of liberal biases underlying the (secular) discourses on religions and their statuses in the
modern society--biases that are prevalent among Western(ized) intellectuals and political elites. Though not intended
as an easy read for non-specialists, individual chapters in the book might be of greater use for graduate courses on
individual cases and/ or in the upper-level sociology of religion classes. Perhaps a negative feature of the book is its
language, which is heavily influenced by the postcolonial and post-structuralist social theory (particularly by Michel
Foucault and Talal Asad), whose concepts and style might be difficult to grasp by non-specialist readers. Still, the
book must be counted as a valuable contribution to the study of religion and secularism.
Ardic, Nurullah
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Ardic, Nurullah. "Secularism and Religion-Making." Insight Turkey, vol. 16, no. 1, 2014, p. 216+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA362274470&it=r&asid=a7e766c6a4789a6730e666df7a0beefe.
Accessed 4 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A362274470

Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture. Dec2007, Vol. 1 Issue 4, p431-449. 19p.

Managing Spirituality:
Public Religion and National Parks _____________________________________
Kerry Mitchell
Global College, Long Island University,
9 Hanover Place, 4th floor, Brooklyn, New York 11210-5882
kerrymit@mail.com
Abstract
This article outlines four techniques through which the National Park Service
manages the spirituality of park visitors: (1) the maintenance of bodily
discipline; (2) evocation of the natural sublime; (3) implication of global
interconnectedness; and (4) facilitation of individual differentiation. These
techniques work together to construct spirituality as a private investment
in the public space of the park. I argue that the National Park Service thus
creates structural links between the individuality of visitors and a certain
way of organizing the parks, a way that appears natural and is highly
managed by the state. In this way a private, individualistic nature spirituality
takes on the character of public religion.
In recent research involving participant observation, interviews with
park rangers, and surveys of over three hundred visitors in three national
parks, I found that a high percentage of national park visitors (74%)
described their experience as religiously and/or spiritually significant.
Further, I found that Park Service officials were well aware of this fact
and sought to facilitate such experience in order more deeply to invest
visitors in the parks. Thus I argued that visitor spirituality is managed
by the National Park Service (Mitchell, n.d.).1
This article focuses on the
techniques used by the Park Service to manage visitor spirituality, which
I have placed into four categories: (1) the maintenance of bodily disci-
1. The studied parks are all in California: Sequoia/King’s Canyon National
Parks, Yosemite National Park, and Muir Woods National Monument. These parks
were chosen to capture a range of geographical types, including wilderness, large,
developed natural areas, and small, population-dense natural areas.
432 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2007.
pline; (2) evocation of the natural sublime; (3) implication of global
interconnectedness; and (4) facilitation of individual differentiation.
These techniques, I contend, work together to foster spirituality as a
sense of personal connection between the visitor and the public space of
the park. As the form of spiritual attachment expressed by visitors
depends upon a certain way of managing park lands, I note that the
spiritual value that visitors ascribe to nature inheres in a state-managed
organization of space. Thus I argue that visitor spirituality constitutes a
form of public religion.
While I found the intent among park rangers to foster a spiritual
connection between visitors and the parks, I do not contend that park
rangers intend such a connection to extend to the state. Rather, I note
that the facilitation of an individualistic, privatistic, spiritual connection
to nature proceeds through a state-managed environment, which would
make the spirituality of such visitors structurally dependent upon the
state.2
So it is not so much a ‘conspiracy’ to attach visitor spirituality to
the state, but rather a result of the structure of the public sphere that
makes the state, de facto, the nurturer of a religious individualism often
called ‘spirituality’.3
Bodily Discipline
In the national parks, the maintenance of bodily discipline refers to the
way the bodies of visitors are subject to pedestrian and vehicular traffic
management in order to place them with respect to each other and the
environment in sensually effective ways. Such placement minimizes the
presence of social others so as to individualize park experience and
thereby foster a sense of private possession of public space. This spatial
management of bodies takes different forms depending on the particularities
of the park environment.
In order to camp within certain wilderness areas within the parks, for
example, one must acquire a permit. These permits limit the number of
campers so as to ensure a sense of privacy. Here the Park Service has
incorporated an aesthetic sensibility into the land management principle
of ‘carrying capacity’. As the authors of an influential Park Service
planning document wrote,

2. A presentation of the content of visitor spirituality will appear in forthcoming
work.
3. For scholarly discussion of this term, see the work of Roof 1993: 67-68, 76-79,
119-48; 1999: 33-35, 173-79; Zinnbauer et al. 1997: 549-64; Albanese 2001: 1-15; and
Taylor 2001: 175-93.
Mitchell Managing Spirituality 433
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2007.
This concept has long been applied with precision to the management of
domestic livestock. Likewise, since the thirties, it has been standard procedure
to base wildlife management programs on careful studies of the wildlife
ranges to determine, and operate within, their carrying capacities. ...
When the present Committee determined from observation the minimum
distance required for wilderness-type privacy between high country
campsites, it was, in effect, determining the camper-carrying capacities of
these areas (National Park Service 1994: 214-15).
Here animals and humans are managed under the same principle. In a
way analogous to the management of wildlife, the Park Service manages
the human bodies within wilderness areas so as to facilitate the creation
of a temporary territory or ‘home range’ for each camping group. This
construction of ‘wilderness-type privacy’ allows for individuals and
private groups to have the park ‘to themselves’ while they are camping.4
Further, since wilderness campers select their own camp sites, they can
attribute the privacy and solitude afforded by those sites to their own
agency and/or the environment (nature) itself, putting into the background
the role of the state and its calculation and regulation. In this
way the spiritual sense of connection to the environment reported by
visitors (Mitchell, n.d.) can be seen as a sense of private possession of
public space.
In the non-wilderness areas of national parks, the Park Service’s ability
to create privacy is more limited. Nevertheless, park management draws
on a number of techniques to minimize the sensual presence of visitors.
In terms of vehicular traffic, Yosemite Valley offers one important
example of how the Park Service manages visitation. In the Valley, the
Park Service handles 30,000 visitors per summer day by putting two,
two-lane one-way roads on each side of the river that runs through the
middle of the valley. The visitors enter the valley on the south side of the
river, driving along a windy road meandering through forest and
meadow. That the road is one-way means that drivers and passengers
need not pay attention to oncoming traffic. The winding design of the
road means that one does not see many cars in one’s field of vision. This
design also encourages slower speeds that prolong the views of the
scenery. In this way visitors’ bodies are distributed so that they fall
within each other’s field of attention much less often than they do
outside the park. Such bodily management helps to yield a pastoral
quality to an area with an otherwise high population density.
4. For a treatment of the ambiguities involved in applying the conception of carrying
capacity to both humans and wildlife, see the work of Bo Shelby and Thomas A.
Heberlein (1986: 3-5, 7ff.)
434 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2007.
A similar principle of reducing the sensual presence of others can be
seen in pedestrian traffic management. Muir Woods National Monument,
containing an old growth redwood stand only thirty minutes from
downtown San Francisco, funnels 700,000 visitors a year through a oneway
loop around the valley floor (a half-mile square in area). Once again,
the one-way design means visitors do not have to worry about running
into each other as they walk. The traffic management harmonizes with
the sound environment in such a way as to encourage visitors to whisper
or cease conversation as they enter into the center of the park, increasing
the sense of solitude through silence.5
The soaring canopy, some 300 feet
above, draws the gaze upwards, away from other visitors. These and
other tactics allow a visual and aural facsimile of having the park ‘to oneself’,
thereby encouraging a sense of private possession of public space.
Natural Sublime
This management of bodies sets the conditions for a particular aesthetic
experience, that of the sublime. Here I draw on Immanuel Kant’s conception
of the sublime where the grandeur of an object of one’s gaze is not
enclosed by any kind of frame.Unbound by limits or distinctions, such
an object is characterized by purity and singularity.6The object extends
unimpeded into the subjectivity of the viewer, thus evoking a fusion of
viewer and spectacle that is characterized by a sense of awe, or what
park rangers call the ‘wow’ experience. This sublime experience is a key
element in creating a sense of investment in the park, an attachment to it.
In the wilderness areas of the parks, experiences of the sublime may
appear as a ‘natural’ result of the environment. However, such experiences
depend upon management for their purity. The limitation on the
number of people given permits for wilderness camping has been mentioned
above, and these limited numbers allow for a more frequent sense
of solitude than might otherwise occur. One might also note that laws
governing wilderness restrict the erection of artificial structures that
might otherwise contaminate the landscape.7
The combination of solitude
5. I observed this tendency of visitors to fall into a whisper during my field
observations in the summer and fall of 2002. Ranger Mia Monroe commented that she
found this tendency to be a reflection of the sense of respect for the space that she was
trying to promote (conversation with author, 14 October 2002).
6. ‘The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in limitation;
the sublime, in contrast, is to be found in a formless object insofar as limitlessness
is represented in it, or at its instance, and yet it is also thought as a totality’ (Kant
2000: 128, original emphasis).
7. Citing the Wilderness Act of 1964, an interpretive panel outside Sequoia/
King’s Canyon National Park describes wilderness as an area that ‘generally appears
Mitchell Managing Spirituality 435
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2007.
and a purified environment sets the conditions for the sublime, giving
visitors an opportunity to encounter the public space of the park in a
highly charged, personal, and private way.
Beyond wilderness, and beyond the parks in general, the facilitation of
sublime experience can be seen in the design of vista points. As one
stands at a curved railing (as opposed to a straight one) other visitors
and structures tend to fall further back in one’s peripheral vision,
thereby minimizing the perceptual buffers between oneself and a scenic
panorama. The Park Service actively impedes the growth of any frame
between visitors and panoramas by cutting down trees that would
otherwise obscure the view or create a prominent foreground. The Park
Service further nurtures the sublime aspect of such experience by maintaining
the purity of panoramic views. In order to avoid a sense of
division between the natural and the artificial within the panorama, the
Park Service restricts the building of structures that can be seen from
vista points. Such management proceeds through the concept of a
‘viewshed’. A term used within urban planning and landscape architecture,
a viewshed indicates the field of vision available to a particular
point or area. The term borrows on the power of ‘watershed’, a term
used in conservation biology to manage land so as to ensure the flow
and purity of water. In its application to the flow and purity of light, the
concept of viewshed places aesthetic questions within a discourse of
natural preservation.8

Nor is the sublime a completely visual phenomenon. The sounds of
other visitors can create an auditory frame for experience. To minimize
the experience of such a frame, the design of Muir Woods concentrates
visitor traffic and noise in the transition zone between the parking lot
and the forest proper. Visitors thus encounter a steep drop in auditory
sensation when they start out towards the center of the grove. This
sudden drop encourages visitors to soften their voices. Along with the
to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work
substantially unnoticeable’. Note the emphasis on experience and perception. Wilderness
should ‘appear’ natural and artificial structures should remain ‘unnoticeable’.
8. This analysis stems from my interview with Ranger Mary Beth Shenton:
Mitchell: You said ‘viewshed’? / Shenton: Yeah. Some of them are actually written
down as things that we want to maintain. In other words we'll cut down trees to
maintain the ability for somebody being at point A to have this, whatever it is, 120, 90
degree view of Yosemite Falls, or in the case of Tunnel view, Bridal Vail Falls, El
Capitan, and Half Dome, and down to Yosemite Valley. Sorry, I think it's a term that
landscape architects use. / Mitchell: ‘Viewshed’ sounds analogous to ‘watershed’ and
it seems like it puts that in a context of protection. You protect a watershed, you have
to protect a viewshed. / Shenton: Absolutely (interview with author, 9 September
2002).
436 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2007.
visitor spacing created by the one-way loop through the valley floor, this
design feature creates frequent silences for the visitor. When they stare
up into the 300-foot canopy, they often encounter a view framed by
neither artificial structures nor random conversation.
At this point the reader may wonder what all this has to do with religion.
Here I turn to a case study that I find particularly illustrative: the
official orientation film for Yosemite National Park, entitled Spirit of
Yosemite. This film draws on the techniques of bodily discipline and the
facilitation of the sublime in particularly striking ways. Further, it uses
religious language and symbolism to give meaning to park experience.
For this reason, and also in recognition of the centrality and prominence
of this film within the park environment, a detailed analysis follows.

Ardic, Nurullah. "Secularism and Religion-Making." Insight Turkey, vol. 16, no. 1, 2014, p. 216+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA362274470&it=r. Accessed 4 July 2017.

• Thomas S Bremer
  http://www.tsbremer.com/spirituality-in-national-parks/
  Word count: 415

  Spirituality in national parks: a review of Kerry Mitchell
  January 10, 2017 by Thomas S. Bremer 1 Comment

  Kerry Mitchell, Spirituality and the State: Managing Nature and Experience in America’s National Parks (New York University Press, 2016).

  Redwood trees
  Redwood trees in Muir Woods National Monument (Photo by “Rudydale,” 2016; courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
  Kerry Mitchell examines state power through a lens of “spirituality” in America’s national parks. His book is piled high with intellectually intriguing questions about spirituality, nature, and the state, which, he tells us, evinces a broader concern with “religion under conditions of secularity” (p.3). Americans love their national parks for much more than their secular recreational value. The National Park Service, Dr. Mitchell reveals, plays a key role in facilitating transcendent experiences of the natural world for park visitors.

  National parks and the love of country
  Spirituality and the State by Kerry Mitchell

  This book’s greatest value, though, may be its insights about more fundamental issues, not just regarding American national parks, but more generally about the human relationship to environments that people occupy and impact. “Through spirituality,” Mitchell concludes, “visitors invest in the environment and themselves at the same time.” This also has a nationalistic dimension. Affection for national parks, Mitchell demonstrates, relies on a love of nature which is also a love of oneself and of one’s nation. In this regard, national parks stand as patriotic temples of democracy where a love of natural, divinely endowed landscapes reinforces a love of country.

  The stories people tell
  Kerry Mitchell takes readers into some pretty heady intellectual ground. But I most appreciated how he builds his analysis on stories of people enjoying national parks. Page 1 begins with an invitation to a campfire. From these sorts of informal encounters to more structured social science research efforts, Mitchell develops a strong sociological basis for his argument. The opinions and stories of people he talked to give the book not only credibility, but they also offer insights into actual experiences of spirituality that contribute to the special status of American national parks.

  This academic book raises important questions about spirituality in contemporary American culture, especially regarding the role of the state in urging a transcendent view of the natural world. It offers insights into the attraction of national parks for visitors who join Mitchell’s campfire host in recognizing the wilds of nature as “my church.” ♨

• Reviews by Amos Lassen
  http://reviewsbyamoslassen.com/?p=48222
  Word count: 552

  “Spirituality and the State: Managing Nature and Experience in America’s National Parks” by Kerry Mitchell— Connecting to Nature
  Leave a reply
  spirituality and the state

  Mitchell, Kerry. “Spirituality and the State: Managing Nature and Experience in America’s National Parks”, NYU Press, 2016.

  Connecting to Nature

  Amos Lassen

  There is something about America’s national parks that makes them inspirational and I think we can probably say that this is true because of the power and beauty we find in them. It is easy to connect to oneself and to nature while in the parks but many of us do not know that it takes a lot of work to make nature appear natural. To maintain the apparently pristine landscapes of our parks, the National Park Service must involve itself in traffic management, landscape design, crowd-diffusing techniques, viewpoint construction, behavioral management, and more just to be able to preserve the “spiritual” experience of the park. This labor is invisible to us.

  Writer Kerry Mitchell analyzes the way that the state manages spirituality in the parks by the use of techniques that are subtle, sophisticated, unspoken, and powerful techniques. The park officials are aware of the secular ethos that brings about spirituality and have developed strategies that facilitate deep spiritual connections between visitors and the space, Using indirect communication, the design of trails, roads, and vista points, and the management of land, bodies and sense perception, the state gives the visitor ways of experiencing reality that is seen as natural, individual, and authentic. This is one way to naturalize the exercise of authority and the historical, social, and political interests that lie behind it. By doing this, a personal, individual, nature spirituality becomes a public religion that is particularly liberal.

  Mitchell has used surveys and interviews with visitors and rangers as well as analyses of park spaces to investigate the production and reception of nature and spirituality in America’s national park system. He gives us a fresh take on the politics of religion in America and provides a “counter-narrative to scholarly celebrations of spirituality that is respectful of his subjects and acknowledges the fact that very few of us, if any, have a clear understanding of why we do what we do”. He denaturalizes the concept of spirituality, and shows that piety is not simply made-up. Rather, piety accomplishes an incredible amount of work in some places where it is necessary to naturalize the nation state and socialize the feelings of individuals. We also read about negative aesthetics or how concealment can be revelatory and “how the vagueness of nature serves to connect a range of individuals by way of a shared humanity that is rather specifically defined”.

  I have not spent much time in National Parks in this country so much of this was new to me. I found Mitchell’s analysis of the relationship between state-organized nature and individual spiritual experience fascinating especially how it contributes to the understanding of the secular and the religious. Mitchell pays great attention to the concepts and practices and shows how the ideas and practices of a loosely-defined nature-based spirituality are part of a secular ethos that has become part of the American way of life.

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