Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives
- Stability, Continuity, Place: An English Benedictine Monastery as a Case Study in Counterfactual Architecture
- The Biggest Mosque in Europe!: A Symmetrical Anthropology of Islamic Architecture in Rotterdam
- Golden Storm: The Ecstasy of the Igreja de São Francisco, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil
- Works of Penance: New Churches in Post-Soviet Russia
- Divining Siddhivinayak: The Temple and the City
- The Djenné Mosque: World Heritage and Social Renewal in a West African Town
- The New Morabitun Mosque of Granada and the Sensational Practices of Al Andaluz
- The Israelite Temple of Florence
- The Mosque in Britain Finding its Place
- About the Authors
- Index
Golden Storm: The Ecstasy of the Igreja de São Francisco, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives
- Stability, Continuity, Place: An English Benedictine Monastery as a Case Study in Counterfactual Architecture
- The Biggest Mosque in Europe!: A Symmetrical Anthropology of Islamic Architecture in Rotterdam
- Golden Storm: The Ecstasy of the Igreja de São Francisco, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil
- Works of Penance: New Churches in Post-Soviet Russia
- Divining Siddhivinayak: The Temple and the City
- The Djenné Mosque: World Heritage and Social Renewal in a West African Town
- The New Morabitun Mosque of Granada and the Sensational Practices of Al Andaluz
- The Israelite Temple of Florence
- The Mosque in Britain Finding its Place
- About the Authors
- Index
Summary
Without the sacred, the totality of the plenitude of being escapes man, he would be no longer anything but incomplete.
Georges BatailleAlthough I am slightly embarrassed to admit it, there is no denying the fact that when I entered the Igreja de São Francisco in Salvador, Bahia – one of the most famous baroque churches in Brazil – I had an immediate bodily reaction: my nipples hardened. No goose bumps, no gasping for air, no shivers down my spine (bodily responses which somehow feel more admissible to open an academic discussion) but hard nipples. And mind you, it wasn't even the first time I entered this church.
‘The erection of nipples’, writes the Wikipedia entry on the subject (where I hastily sought to objectify the curious response of this unruly body of mine), ‘is due to the contraction of smooth muscle under the control of the autonomic nervous system’. The site also reassures me that hard nipples are
… more akin to a hair follicle standing on end than to a sexual erection. Nipple erections are a product of the pilomotor refl ex which causes goose bumps. Th e erection of the nipple is partially due to the cylindrically arranged muscle cells found within it.
For whatever this information is worth, the important fact to note here is that an architectural space worked my ‘autonomic nervous system’. A religious building made my ‘cylindrically arranged muscle cells’ respond, quite independent of what I deem appropriate for visiting a church or consider becoming for opening an academic inquiry. What this oddly detached encyclopedic language effectively brings to the fore, then, is that in situations where people enter religious buildings, the body is as much a medium as the church. Both are sensationproducing instruments. Rather than sticking to the sender (church)-receiver (visitor) model, we are dealing with the intersection of two mediating systems.
In this contribution, I want to draw attention to what seems to be the sovereign power of an aesthetic formation such as a church building over (the body of ) its visitors–more in particular the sense of loss and disorientation that comes with it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Religious ArchitectureAnthropological Perspectives, pp. 63 - 82Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013
- 1
- Cited by