An exploration of the production and reception of nature and
spirituality in America's national park system America's national
parks are some of the most powerful, beautiful, and inspiring spots
on the earth. They are often considered "spiritual" places in which
one can connect to oneself and to nature. But 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
engage in traffic management, landscape design, crowd-diffusing
techniques, viewpoint construction, behavioral management, and
more-and to preserve the "spiritual" experience of the park, they
have to keep this labor invisible. Spirituality and the State
analyzes the way that the state manages spirituality in the parks
through subtle, sophisticated, unspoken, and powerful techniques.
Following the demands of a secular ethos, park officials have
developed strategies that slide under the church/state barrier to
facilitate deep connections between visitors and the space,
connections that visitors often express as spiritual. Through
indirect communication, the design of trails, roads, and vista
points, and the management of land, bodies and sense perception,
the state invests visitors in a certain way of experiencing reality
that is perceived as natural, individual, and authentic. This
construction of experience naturalizes the exercise of authority
and the historical, social, and political interests that lie behind
it. In this way a personal, individual, nature spirituality becomes
a public religion of a particularly liberal stripe. Drawing on
surveys and interviews with visitors and rangers as well as
analyses of park spaces, Spirituality and the State investigates
the production and reception of nature and spirituality in
America's national park system.
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