Within Arm's Reach: Embodying Geographies of Development and Spirituality

Abstract

This thesis weaves together embodied experiences of Christian spirituality and community development through participatory research within two place-based community groups. In recognising the importance of a 'relational politics of place’ (Massey 2005) in regard to contemporary geographies of development and the emerging debate surrounding development and spirituality, this thesis contributes an exploration and embodiment of a particular spatial framing of relationality-a spatial framing which follows that expressed in the philosophy of Irigaray. This contribution is significant in its progression towards cultivating the perception, of self and other, required to embody the 'culture of difference’ (as asserted by Irigaray 2002a) between 'human and non-human relations' (Massey 2005) that the debates underlying this research illustrate as necessary. Following Rose's (1993) articulation of the paradoxical space of feminist geography, I have used participatory methodologies and an engagement with concepts within the 'visceral philosophy' (Lorraine 1999) of Irigaray and Deleuze, to explore some of the cartographic skills that paradoxical space, particularly the embodiment of paradoxical space, requires (Rose 1993). Specifically 1 bring into conversation the concept of becoming with the cartographic articulations of embodying development space from community members within a Melanesian settlement and Anglican parish in Fiji and women within Mothers' Union groups in an Anglican Church of Tanzania Diocese. These embodied spiritual subjectivities are further explored through contextual theologies, namely Vanua: An emerging Fijian theology of place (Tuwere 2002) and the works of Womanist theology. Doing so serves to elaborate the embodied spiritual subjectivities that inform the communities' embodiments of development and particularly illustrate the character of the human and non-human relationships emphasised within those embodied cartographies. By paying attention to these subjectivities and to their expressed spiritual spatialities, I understand these embodied geographies of development and spirituality as contextually specific embodied subjectivities within the mutilated resurrected b/Body of Christ and the eschatological embodiments of messianic space time. The openness implicit within a relational politics of the spatial cannot ignore these particular articulations of spatiality without subjugating particular knowledges and truncating particular bodies 1 therefore address some of the disciplinary implications of paying attention to the embodied axis of difference formed through spirituality and paying attention to spiritual spatialities. This thesis, this weaving, therefore, makes connections between particular contemporary challenges within development studies and within human, particularly feminist geography, drawing out threads of progressive relational politics and the spatial significance within them, and weaving them together by embodying particular geographies of development and spirituality. In particular, I articulate and seek to embody the spatial dialectic, characterised by being open to the transcendence of the other, which frames Irigaray’s culture of the two and its passage to a culture of many. I contend that such a culture is highly pertinent to the challenges of difference expressed in the debates I have identified. This is because it both informs a progressive spatiality within a relational politics of place, and also challenges the comparative dissolution of the soul (that Irigaray (2002a: 122) perceives within the disembodied philosophic history of these disciplines) which has consequently frustrated such a culture of many from occurring.