4 - Reverencing the Landscape

Summary

Chapter 4 looks at the ways in which sites such as places of worship construct affective responses of reverence, respect and awe. The multimodal nature of these sites is particularly instructive, being in many cases a combination of architecture and spatial organization, linguistic signposting or instruction, and communal behavior (“ritual,” broadly understood). Reverence as a semiotic affect can also be seen in quasi-religious sites and landscapes such as memorials to persons or events of consequence to a nation or community, certain sites of office or power, even certain popular and grand natural phenomena.