8. Wenger’s and Maltwood’s Cosmogeographic Interpretations: Associated Questions of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics11

In relation to the manner in which Maltwood and Wenger have interpreted and transformed the possibilities of perception in relation to the landscapes with which they have worked, certain questions arise. These questions center on their conception of the sacred significance of these landscapes and the manner in which they came to these conclusions. Do their perceptions represent the play of the mind in its efforts at creating for itself a reality which might not exist but which it wants to imagine as an anchor in the flux of experience? Are they both inspired largely by the history of the association of the sacred with these sites to create their own imaginative forms in a spirit of mutual delusion which they share with the ancient conceptions or are they stimulated by these associations into an awareness of levels of significance that are actually embodied by these landscapes? Do they represent an awakening to what Ivakhiv describes as the “nonhuman life” of sacred landscapes, “an otherness that alternately reveals and conceals itself behind a pageant of beliefs, images, and place myths”?12

These questions are made more complex and fascinating by the fact that both women arrive at similar conceptions through different routes. Wenger claims to experience the Oshun forest as a manifestation of the presence of numinous realities Her claims for the apprehension of the sacred, are, therefore, fundamentally subjective since they focus on her own interior responses. They could also be seen as intersubjective in that they draw upon the subjective responses of the Yoruba to the forest on account of which it has become a sacred ground for them.

Maltwood,on the other hand, claims a more empirical and objective route as her source. She does begin from the subjective, or intersubjective ground represented by Arthurian narratives, which constitute a subjective framework on account of the fact that as works of literature they operate by stimulating the subjective worlds of their audiences. They are also intersubjective because they represent the coalescence of the combined subjectivities of generations of creators, adapters and consumers of Arthurian myth. She tries, however, to move beyond this subjective and intersubjective base to a seemingly objective interpretation of the character of the landscape with which the narratives are associated by corroborating her claims with the use of survey maps of these landscapes which are meant to demonstrate her interpretations in an empirical manner13.

---

11 In referring to phenomenology and hermeneutics, we are sensitive to the value of these frameworks for interpreting the oscillation between experience and interpretation that is obviously at play in the work of Wenger and Maltwood. Adrian Ivakhiv, Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Bloomington: Indiana UP,2001).p.20,suggests the significance of these explanatory strategies for elucidating this subject in his observation that The actual embodied experience of [navigating a] landscape…. the movements and physical exertion needed to maneuver one’s way through its particular topography; the changing visual, auditory, olfactory, kinesthetic qualities[and encounters] at different stages of a …route; the temporal ,or durational factor, as one prepares [to journey and the experiences one undergoes in the process of journeying and after arrival at the destination, the process of] returning home; all these factors and qualities as they change over daily, seasonal, and annual cycles[provoke in the subject] experiential and interpretive data [that is collected] and … sedimented [within the interpretive framework of [ the individual].

12 Adrian Ivakhiv, Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) Jacket blurb.

13 The constitution of perspectives through interpretive choices made in the course of navigating in space suggests the Heideggerean idea that the “world is [both] a structure of meaningful relations in which the individual exists and which he or she partly creates” as described in Arild Holt-Jensen,Geography: History and Concepts (Lonson:Sage,1999)p.150