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REVIEWS PARKIN, David, Sacred Void: Spatial Images of Work and Ritual Among the Giriama of Kenya, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, 259 pp., $54.50, 0 521 40466 5 This book `argues that to talk about the sacred is to think and talk about space, and to some extent vice versa: that when people speak and write about the sacred, they tend to essentialise it in terms of places occupied by it; and that discussion of human spaces is likely, eventually, to refer to a central point imbued with extra-human, or spiritual, significance' (2). Parkin makes this rather Durkheimian argument by examining the ways that the Giriama of eastern Kenya contrast their tribal space in terms of a ritual center and two contrasting, polar areas to the west and east of that center. The Giriama have themselves constantly moved over their lands. Those living. to the east on the densely populated coast are involved in intensive agriculture, cash cropping, modernizing education, conversion to Islam or Christianity, and mixing with ethnic out- siders, thereby abandoning what other Giriama see as their true heritage. Those living in the less crowded cattleraising areas to the west adhere more closely to tradition, reside
Journal of Religion in Africa – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 1994
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