Religion on the Cultural Landscape
Answer these research questions as a result of your field work
1) What patterns are there in the placement of places of worship in your community/neighborhood?
2) How do places of worship influence place in your community?
Materials
•San Antonio Map or map of your community (Tip: Go to Google Maps or some other Web-based mapping and zoom into your area. Press Alt+PrtSc to copy the Web page as a screen capture. Open Word. Paste the screen capture into Word.)
•Digital camera.
Activity
1) On your map plot the location and branch/denomination/sect of places of worship in your community/neighborhood that you discover on your own.
2) Photograph at least two of the places of worship so that your photos support your research questions. You need to be in the photos. Photos must be labeled.
3) Report your findings in writing to answer the two questions above.
Patterns: Look for patterns in the locations of the places of worship you plot. Are they clustered? Where are they clustered? How are they distributed around your community? Are there any patterns in where denominations are located? What other patterns can you determine? Is the hegemony evident in the trace patterns? What spatial associations can you discover?
(Associations are things such as socioeconomic level of the neighborhood and place of worship location, potential history of the place of worship in relation to its location, where are the new places of worship? Where are the old ones, etc? In other words, what two or more things can you discover about the location of places of worship?)
How does place influence the places of worship? How do the places of worship influence place? Associate the context with the culture and their relationship to place. How do they intersect? What are the fluid states of transition? How do the traces tie the place to the cultural identity of the groups who made them? Are the traces of these places challenged?