Distancing and approximations between Geography and Psychology in the study of religion: theoretical-methodological assumptions and possibilities of dialogueAbstract:
This article is motivated by the lack of consistent intersections between geography and psychology, particularly the psychology of religion, within the subfield of the geography of religion. A dual objective is pursued. First, the historical and theoretical-methodological junctures that contribute to the disconnect between these disciplines in religious studies are presented. Second, the potential for geographic reflection to be enriched through theoretical engagement with psychology is addressed. To this end, a common analytical lens for dialogue is emphasized. This exchange is facilitated by the concept of religious experience, in which the spatial and psychic dynamics of the religious phenomenon resonate with one another. Within this scope, a phenomenological-existential framework is adopted, aligning with established internal currents in both psychology and the geography of religion.
Keywords:
Geography of religion; Psychology of religion; phenomenology; religious experience
Resumo:
Este artigo surge da constatação, na análise dos estudos da Geografia da Religião, da inexistência de consistentes aproximações da ciência geográfica com a Psicologia de maneira geral e, mais incisivamente, com a Psicologia da Religião em particular. Nosso objetivo é duplo: apresentar as conjunturas históricas e teórico-metodológicas para o desencontro entre estas ciências no estudo da religião e abordar teoricamente como uma aproximação com a Psicologia pode enriquecer as reflexões geográficas. Para tanto, é necessário realçarmos o crivo comum pelo qual ambas as ciências podem dialogar: através da experiência religiosa que faz ressoar em reciprocidade as dinâmicas espaciais e psíquicas do fenômeno religioso. Neste escopo, seguimos a perspectiva fenomenológica-existencial que delineia correntes internas tanto da Psicologia como da Geografia da Religião.
Palavras-chave:
Geografia da religião; Psicologia da religião; fenomenologia; experiência religiosa
Resumen:
Este artículo surge de la constatación, en el análisis de los estudios de Geografía de la Religión, de la falta de aproximaciones consistentes de la ciencia geográfica con la Psicología en general y, más incisivamente, con la Psicología de la Religión en particular. Nuestro objetivo es doble: presentar los contextos históricos y teórico-metodológicos del desajuste entre estas ciencias en el estudio de la religión y abordar teóricamente cómo una aproximación con la Psicología puede enriquecer las reflexiones geográficas. Para ello, es necesario destacar el tamiz común a través del cual ambas ciencias pueden dialogar: a través de la experiencia religiosa que hace resonar en reciprocidad las dinámicas espaciales y psíquicas del fenómeno religioso. En este ámbito, seguimos la perspectiva fenomenológico-existencial que perfila corrientes internas tanto de la Psicología como de la Geografía de la Religión.
Mots-clés:
Geografía de la religión; Psicología de la religión; fenomenología; experiencia religiosa
Introduction
The impetus for this study is the identified absence of sustained engagement between geographical science and psychology, specifically the psychology of religion, within the subfield of the geography of religion.
The geography of religion is informed by various scientific and philosophical lineages. Sociological influences via Bourdieu, Durkheim, and Weber are widely recognized, as are anthropological contributions, particularly from Geertz. Within philosophy, the works of Cassirer and Eliade remain foundational. These diverse references were synthesized by Gil Filho (1999) in an expansive and seminal article.
By conceptualizing religion as a symbolic form, Gil Filho established a robust foundation for studying the lived spatialities of religion. This approach requires analyzing “subjective spatial experience” (Gil Filho, 1999, p. 105). The present study argues that these spatialities are intrinsically linked to the psychic experience of the religious phenomenon. This intersection-religious experience-serves as the primary point of contact between psychology and geography. While one discipline focuses on spatial dimensions and the other on psychological ones, this paper seeks to articulate their relationship. The primary task is to theorize how engagement with psychology contributes to understanding spatialities driven by religion.
Before this analysis, however, the omission of the psychic dimension from geographic inquiry must be examined. Although essential to the lived experience emphasized by the Gil Filho school, this dimension remains largely absent. The question of why geography has avoided an alliance with psychology is therefore addressed.
This lack of dialogue is evident in the cited literature. When publications based on Rosendahl’s (2002) framework-which prioritizes the spatial dynamics of sacred sites over religious experience-are excluded, studies employing psychological concepts or methods are exceedingly rare.
Only two articles address psychological topics. Notably, the authors, Schlögl (2013) and Oliveira (2013) , are not geographers. This suggests that although psychology is compatible with the geography of religion, its potential has been overlooked within the discipline.
The article is organized into four sections, in addition to the introduction and conclusion. The first examines the reasons for the historical non-convergence of psychology and geography during their institutionalization. The subsequent confluence of the two disciplines, beginning in the 1960s, is also highlighted.
The second section investigates why this dialogue declined and failed to take root in the field of religious geography, despite its prominence in cultural and humanist geography at the time.
To prepare the ground for interdisciplinary engagement, the foundations of the geography and psychology of religion are presented in the third section.
Finally, the theoretical potential of this approach to enrich geographic reflection is articulated. Given the broad scope of this inquiry, a specific case study is deferred to a subsequent publication.
From Divergence to Intersection: Geography and Psychology
Historical, epistemic, theoretical, and methodological factors explain the lack of convergence between Geography and Psychology in religious studies.
Although these two sciences established themselves as distinct branches of knowledge in the late nineteenth century, they followed divergent paths despite studying different objects.
Geography grounded its analytical and methodological scope in the natural sciences. While I do not intend to trace the entire history of the discipline, I aim to show how the initial construction of modern geographic knowledge allowed scholars to disregard Psychology.
Within this context, physical-environmental determinism dominated the understanding of human spatial organization, leaving no room for the psychological dimension.
Classical Geography-represented by Ratzel or La Blache-certainly problematized cultural studies. In fact, La Blache’s followers examined religion to define specific regional frameworks (Claval, 2001). Paradoxically, however, La Blache decreed that geography is a science of places, not of men and women, even after introducing the genres de vie and viewing the landscape as the interface between humanity and the environment. Similarly, studies of religion ignored religious experience, treating it as extrinsic to geographic inquiry. Once again, scholars offered little opening for psychology.
Researchers generally focused on the formal and material aspects of culture and religion, emphasizing products and artifacts over their symbolic meaning. This was central to North American Cultural Geography (Sauer, 2010), but even the Vidalian French school, with its genres of life, did not completely abandon this paradigm.
This perspective defined North American Cultural Geography, and even the Vidalian school never fully broke with this paradigm. These geographic approaches not only distanced themselves from psychology but also neglected the geography of religion-despite the work of Deffontaines and Sopher (Rosendahl, 2002).
The theoretical-methodological concepts of “New Geography” (1940s-1960s) sharpened this double distance from religious and psychological themes. Geographers sought scientific rigor and dismissed earlier currents as mere empiricism, grounding their scientific project in mathematical formulations. Following World War II, geography and science in general “succumbed to a scientism that seeks precision and the measurement of all that surrounds and defines us. Economics subsumes everything, eliminating human subjectivity [...]” (Holzer, 2016, p. 93).
Consequently, no grounds for a dialogue between geography and psychology were established.
Cultural geography acquired renewed vigor only in the 1960s. This resurgence was spurred by existentialist reflections and phenomenological philosophy, which provided geography with new analytical referents. It was in this context that an intersection of geography and psychology emerged.
Psychology underwent a similar process, oscillating between a resurgent positivism and critiques of those approaches. During its institutionalization, the discipline sought to distance itself from metaphysics to secure its scientific status. Its foundation was drawn from the natural sciences, as advocated by modern pioneers such as Wundt and James (Abib, 2009).
Nevertheless, a certain ambiguity persisted. James, the father of the Psychology of Religion, defined psychology's objective as the prediction and control of human action. Yet he surprisingly recognized that cultural-religious influences-intertwined with age, economic, and social factors-shaped religious behavior far more than any experimental model (Belzen, 2010).
This ambiguity is even clearer in Wundt. On the one hand, he sought to ground psychological processes in psychic experience itself, deriving individual processes from one another through a form of causality analogous to that of physics. On the other hand, he postulated that psychic phenomena depend on interaction within a specific culture. He even pursued a hermeneutic interpretation of psychic processes.
However, how can the laws of individual psychic functioning be used to explain cultural development? If these laws mirror those of individual psychism, what could Cultural Psychology add? (Belzen, 2010).
In this sense, Wundt’s psychology represents an intermediary science-a bridge between nature and culture. (Abib, 2009).
Because of this intermediary character, the “positivist turn” of the 1940s led scholars to abandon the premises of James and Wundt. They favored behavioral science grounded in physical and physiological principles. This gave rise to Behaviorist Psychology, which sought to explain human functioning through the relationship between stimulus and response. This framework marked another point of convergence between Geography and Psychology in the 1960s.
We must analyze this plural encounter between Geography and Psychology and ask why this intense dialogue failed to extend to the analysis of the religious phenomenon.
From the encounter between Geography and Psychology to the absence of dialogue in the study of the Geography of Religion
The configuration of the geographic field-rooted in Classical Geography and the subsequent emergence of Theoretical, Critical, and Cultural-Humanist strands-does not follow a strictly linear progression. New frameworks do not simply replace their predecessors. Since the 1960s, the intersection of Geography and Psychology has followed two distinct paths: one aligns with the phenomenological and existential prerogatives of Humanist Geography, while the other stems from Theoretical Geography and its proximity to Behaviorism.
Both Behavioral Geography and Humanist Geography establish relationships between humans and the environment through different approaches. I present these currents while addressing a central question: why did this interdisciplinary relationship fail to extend into religious studies?
Through a behavioral lens, Geography seeks to understand how specific vectors shape action. In short, this approach aims to reveal a stimulus-response unit using objective methods. Within this framework, the formulation of mathematical functions served as the primary methodological foundation.
Holzer (2016) presents an empirical model of this work by examining Downs’s study of consumer spatial behavior in 1970s shopping malls. This research begins with locational theories and formulates a hypothesis about consumer behavior patterns using cognitive categories. Finally, the researchers apply quantitative methods to identify the functions that structure consumer behavior.
From this perspective, humans are products of their physical, social, and cultural environments. To understand environmental relationships, researchers “subdivide complex stimuli and behaviors into simpler elements, believing that extensive environmental manipulation radically changes the way people develop.” (Holzer, 2016, p. 110).
One can synthesize this approach as follows: the core problem lies in behavior patterns and their determinants. However, this framework treats these elements mechanistically within cause-and-effect relationships.
Beyond the flaws of this approach-specifically, viewing humans as mere machines-religion undeniably imposes behavioral patterns on its adherents. Why, then, did the Geography of Religion not adopt this approach?
Research in this geographic subfield flourished only in the 1990s, even though the humanist momentum of the 1960s and 1970s fostered these themes within the emerging field of Cultural and Humanist Geography (Pereira; Gil Filho, 2012). Furthermore, theoretical geographers applied their proposals to economic issues and urban planning rather than to cultural phenomena such as religion.
Meanwhile, researchers in Cultural Geography “were more interested in interdisciplinarity and the creation of new links with the Humanities that the field of environmental perception offered” (Holzer, 2016, p. 85). They clearly sought to incorporate the subjective dimension that mediates the relationship between the self and the world.
A deep engagement with psychology occurred during this period. Holzer, for instance, shows how Lowenthal draws on a wide array of psychologists. Why did this systematic psychological influence fail to reach the Geography of Religion, despite its strong presence in Cultural and Humanist Geography?
Issues exist on both sides, within Geography and Psychology.
While theoretical geographers focused on developing a methodological framework through their dialogue with Psychology, cultural geographers emphasized epistemological aspects.
This contrast explains why practitioners of the Geography of Religion remained alienated from Psychology. Furthermore, as noted earlier, this geographic subfield had not yet matured.
The lack of an overt psychological methodology within these cultural studies ultimately dissolves the very psychological perspective that helped ground Cultural and Humanist Geography. Thus, the influence of Psychology traces back to a relatively concrete, somewhat fleeting inspiration. Cultural and humanist studies in Geography provide a clear outlet for psychological questions; however, the specific theories and approaches derived from Psychology-while present among the founders of Humanist Geography-gradually became pulverized over time.
This process mirrors the critique Holzer (2014) levels at phenomenological geography. By treating phenomenology as a source of inspiration-as a researcher’s attitude in the world-scholars fail to recognize that this philosophy imbues the discipline with a new ontology.
I interpret this critique as the absence of Husserl's philosophical theoretical-methodological tenets in a Geography that often claims to be phenomenological but stops halfway. This partly explains the Geography of Religion’s alienation from Psychology.
However, the Geography of Religion urgently requires an intersection with Psychology. Spatialities identified in research on religious meanings arise only from an (inter)subjective experience of the self in the world. Therefore, a psychological analysis of this phenomenon is essential.
Having addressed the reasons for this disconnect from a Geography perspective, I turn to Psychology’s angle on this divergence. I will be brief here; Belzen (2010) provides further details.
Despite their naturalistic foundations for cultural studies, Psychology marginalized the approaches of Wundt and James. Scholars did not consider them sufficiently “physical-natural.” In this context, Behaviorist Psychology gained momentum.
This shift diminished the importance of religious studies within Psychology. Consequently, the subfield of Psychology of Religion developed slowly. In fact, no publication in the Psychology of Religion has matched the scientific influence of William James (Belzen, 2010).
This subfield appears to be in crisis despite the growing number of publications on the topic (Amatuzzi, 1998). Given this reticence, we might be more lenient toward Geography for not seeking such a dialogue.
After presenting these exploratory considerations regarding the lack of intersection between Geography and Psychology, I must complete a preliminary task before theorizing how this encounter can occur: presenting the subfields of Geography and Psychology of Religion.
Introducing the Geography and Psychology of Religion
Within the field of Human Geography, the Geography of Religion is a subdiscipline that focuses on the religious phenomenon. This field views religion as an amalgam of faith and institutional structures, operating within a complex of intertwined objective and subjective relations (Gil Filho, 2007).
More precisely, the Geography of Religion examines the spatialities engendered by the religious phenomenon (Pereira, 2013). This phrase-spatialities engendered by the religious phenomenon-captures the field's core. These spatialities manifest in various forms: the territorialities of religious institutions (Rosendahl, 2002) and their adherents (Fernandes, 2017), the spatialization of religious discourse (Silva; Gil Filho, 2009), and transformations of the landscape (Araujo, 2016). Other facets include symbolic relationships with sacred spaces (Usarki, 2010), functional ties to non-sacred institutional spaces such as schools (Knott, 2010), and the emergence of new lived spatialities upon embracing a creed (Schlögl, 2013).
These facets often interlink. One can argue that the symbolic systematization inherent in religion-as a coherent creed-drives the spatialization of religious discourse. This process fosters institutional territorialities and reshapes the landscape. Simultaneously, belief structures shape specific modes of relating humanity to the Earth, as Dardel (2015) notes.
Religion itself allows for a plurality of analytical approaches. Scholars may approach it through a political lens, focusing on power relations (Leite, 2019), particularly those associated with territoriality. Alternatively, a humanist perspective (Gil Filho, 2008; Silva, 2013) treats religion as a symbolic form that underpins worldviews or socio-spatial identities (Cruz, 2018). Experiences of sacred space also define this field, whether through mythical conceptions (Oliveira, 2013) or purely devotional acts (Kong, 2010).
The choice of analytical lens highlights specific spatialities. For instance, uncovering diocesan territorial logic requires attention to the politico-institutional dimension of religion (Terra, 2009). Conversely, understanding a particular religious worldview shifts the focus from formal institutions to the “spatialization of religious sentiment in daily actions” (Silva; Gil Filho, 2009, p. 79).
This relationship is reciprocal. Unveiling specific spatialities grounds the study in particular religious elements. To understand mythical experience literally, one prioritizes the experience of sacred space itself rather than the material temple or the institution (Oliveira, 2013). Myth often bypasses formal theology and institutional space (Amatuzzi, 1998). However, analyzing landscape composition highlights religious narratives and political dimensions, including monuments.
Methodological plurality persists. Research on religious experience-from mythical encounters to everyday life-tends to rely on phenomenological, existentialist, and hermeneutic perspectives. Conversely, locational studies mapping the distribution of members often follow theoretical approaches (Franca; Fernandes; Cravidão, 2018) or the renewed Cultural Geography of the late twentieth century (Rosendahl, 2002).
Humanist geographers criticized Critical Geography1 for dismissing culture and religion as mere superstructures or ideologies. Nevertheless, many contemporary studies draw on historical materialism. This influence often underpins reflections on the political and territorial dynamics of religious institutions, even when not explicitly stated.
I focus on the phenomenological approach because it emphasizes the dimension of the “lived.” Here, an intersection with Psychology proves most fruitful.
Having introduced the Geography of Religion, I turn to the problems within the Psychology of Religion.
According to Ancona-Lopez (2002, p. 79), “the Psychology of Religion studies religious phenomena as cultural phenomena that constitute the human being.” Belzen (2010) situates the Psychology of Religion within Cultural Psychology, emphasizing the development of the psyche within its social environment.
Within this cultural perspective, the Psychology of Religion examines religious practices and beliefs using specific theoretical and methodological tools.
Like Geography, this field encompasses multiple approaches. However, these specificities do not belong exclusively to Psychology. Rather, the similarity in how both disciplines approach the object enables the intended dialogue.
Since geographers form the primary audience for this article, I will focus on the specific line of research where Geography and Psychology converge. Following Belzen (2010) , this research examines how religion becomes part of a subject's or group's psychic makeup.
Efforts focus on the process of entering, remaining in, or leaving religious life. Key questions involve the factors that facilitate religious acculturation, conversion, or the maturation of belief systems.
While this may seem purely psychological, the methodologies reveal the potential for geographic convergence. Some branches of the Psychology of Religion use standardized methods, such as scales or questionnaires, to link religiosity to depression or coping mechanisms.
However, the line I follow incorporates qualitative tools from the humanities, including interviews, participant observation, and ethnography. Geography is intimately familiar with these propositions.
This instrumental framework marks the initial rapprochement between the two fields. Crucially, both disciplines apply these tools toward a shared fundamental goal: understanding religious experience. Geography and Psychology articulate their inquiries through Phenomenology. While each discipline addresses its specific object-the spatial or the psychic dimension of religious experience-both fields ground their analyses in this common philosophical tradition.
Through its descriptive and ontological contributions, Phenomenology aims to reveal the relationships that ground religious experience. It seeks to uncover the meanings and senses of this experience.
Although I will detail Phenomenology in a future publication, I must highlight its role as the common link between Geography and Psychology. To achieve the article's primary goal, I must demonstrate how spatial experience reverberates within the psychic experience, and vice versa.
Intersections between Geography and Psychology in Religious Studies
If the dialogue centers on religious experience, one must define it.
Scholars may view it as an experience of the sacred (Oliveira, 2013) or as an encounter with the numinous.
For our purposes, this represents a specific, mythical type of religious experience-often punctual, despite its transformative power. Examples range from trances involving the Divine to miraculous healings. However, one can approach religious experience through a broader, global lens.
I define religious experience as the lived reality of religious auspices. As a symbolic form, religion institutes dogmas, values, and representations that shape how subjects understand and inhabit the world (Cassirer, 1994). It constructs ways of being. This process fosters specific forms of geographicity- the modes through which the self relates to the world.
The psychologist Amatuzzi (1998) shares this understanding. He views religious experience as a reality that dominates the entire mundane existence, rather than a purely transcendental field. Indeed, he problematizes religious experience specifically in its relation to the world.
Here, the convergence of Psychology and Geography in religious studies becomes clear.
Amatuzzi (1998) analyzes the religious psychic experience of an interviewee raised in a conservative Catholic environment “where everything was a sin”2. He identifies a simultaneous dual movement. As the woman matured through new religious experiences-engaging in church activities and anchoring new perspectives beyond narrow conservatism-she encountered new ways of experiencing the world.
Previously confined to her home, she discovered “that she could be a person” (p. 19). Once shy and voiceless, she found "a more active involvement with the community" through religion (p. 18). She discovered her humanity and the world at the same time:
In what way is this discovery of the human a religious experience? Her religion could have developed toward a greater separation between God or the world of the transcendent and the real world in which we live. But in fact, the opposite seems to have happened: it inspired this path of integration. From her faith, Lídia says that what we must discover is that we can be people and, in that connection, that everyone is important. (Amatuzzi, 1998, p. 19).
Geographic research has explored similar questions about the Bahá'í Faith (Schlögl, 2013). The author concludes that this belief system-countering exclusionary Islamic readings of women’s roles-engendered new spatialities. While Amatuzzi employs psychic development to understand these new relations with the world, Schlögl uses Jung’s concept of the archetype. She illustrates how these new spatialities allowed women to exist beyond the domestic sphere. By grounding these roles in a feminine archetype of the mother/heroine, the new religion displaced the absolute primacy of the male figure.
Other perspectives remain available. In my own research, I have used the concept of the dialogical self (Belzen, 2009). This framework situates the subject within a multiplicity of positions (I-as-father, I-as-teacher) and identities (I-as-religious, I-as-athlete). I have examined how specific positions within institutional organizations-such as the Universal Church and the Terreiro do Cobre in Salvador-influence the subjective constitution of their members. These identities (Neo-Pentecostal and Candomblecista) yield specific types of geographicity for each creed (Carvalho, 2022a; 2023a; 2023b; 2025).
Rather than detailing these empirical discussions, I aim to clarify the theoretical relationship between spatiality and the psyche.
Religion possesses an immediate objectivity, ranging from material buildings to dogmas. It also possesses an immanent subjectivity, as subjects and groups live religion as religiosity.
Researchers following Gil Filho’s lineage attend to this immanent subjectivity when they study how religious sentiment is spatialized in everyday life. Psychologists argue that the radical adoption of faith frames the experience of the world, the self, and interpersonal relations (Amatuzzi, 1998). However, this immanent subjectivity also manifests objectively. It shapes identities and behaviors. I do not interpret behavior through a simplistic cause-and-effect logic (religion-action). Instead, a structure of behavior emerges from the senses and meanings of religion as a lived reality:
One must also consider that, by elevating sacred space to a mediating role between the faithful and transcendence, an extrapolation of the physical framework's capacities is observed; in fact, the qualitative leap would lie not in locational materiality but in the psychological guidelines of homo religious. (Pereira; Gil Filho, 2012, p. 41).
Religious experience unfolds through a succession of objectified acts rather than mere egoic subjectivism. Therefore, the religious group articulates its spatial experiences of a meaningful reality.
Spatial dynamics emerge only in accordance with the psychic dynamics constructed within religious experience. They are inseparable. For this reason, Psychology, especially the Psychology of Religion, must enter into dialogue with Geography.
Conversely, geographic questions are fundamental to psychic experiences. In Lídia's case, her new religious experiences required a different setting to materialize. They could not occur in the countryside of her initial formation; they required an urban environment. Religious practices fundamentally depend on the places that permit their existence (Henkel, 2005; Hinnells, 2010).
I conclude with a critique of Geography of Religion studies focused on the “lived.” While scholars agree that symbolic forms engender spatialities, many remain ensnared in formalism.
Researchers rarely move beyond the general assertion that symbolic forms influence ways of being. They fail to specify the geographic and existential configurations of these ways of being. To point to the spatiality of a symbolic form, they often rely solely on the crystallized territories of institutions or groups.
To illustrate this point, I examine two works by Fernandes (2013; 2017). I selected these for their empirical depth and theoretical density, which incorporate concepts such as habitus, symbolic form, and the sacred.
Fernandes (2013, p. 87) states that religious practice among church youth “results in a specific way of ‘being young’ in the world.” This allows them to “reach a sense for their existence [...], shaping the reality of the one who professes the faith.” The symbolic form of “religion” provides a new “sense for the world, giving the subject who lives them the impression that a new space was constructed” (p. 70).
He intends to discuss how “the application of religious truths to understand the world creates new spaces and spatialities, giving the researcher the possibility of 'geographizing' the world of senses” (ibidem). This agency is reflected in "their social practices, paths through the city, and political choices,” and in the claim that ‘for a practicing religious youth, their religion imprints itself upon their spatialities’ (p. 81). He concludes that for these youth, the place they inhabit is not merely a functional space for residence but one marked by affective and symbolic interactions.
However, researchers often fail to “geographize” the world of senses shaped by religion. Instead, they merely spatialize them. They argue that a symbolic form becomes concrete in a specific place-whether through religious discourse that gives rise to new temples (Usarki, 2010), an exorcism that validates religious truth (Silva; Gil Filho, 2009), or territories shaped by religious culture (Fernandes, 2017).
It is symptomatic that this lineage, though fond of the phenomenological-existential perspective, almost always works with the spatialization of religious phenomena rather than their geographicity. Why does this silence regarding the religious being's modes of relation to the world persist? Affirming that religion provides ways of being and seeking the spatialization of its ideas/discourse does not exhaust the issue. Asserting that religion offers ways of being and seeking the spatialization of ideas does not exhaust the question. We must go further. We must explicit the specific geographicities of different creeds. These geographicities may vary not only by religious system but also by the diverse “dialogue” that occurs within the same religion, depending on the location.
Ultimately, I believe that examining the psychic dynamics of religious experience can sharpen reflection in this geographic field. Religions foster distinct psychological structures.
For example, the “annulment of the world” among Neo-Pentecostals-comparable to Amatuzzi's interviewee, for whom “everything was a sin”-accompanies an annulment of the Self. This stems from a rupture in the “polyphony” of the dialogical self, now centralized exclusively by religion. In this way of being, places do not just spatialize beliefs. Instead, Christians and Candomblecistas build diametrically opposed ways of living in the neighborhood, the city, and the world. Diverse perceptions and feelings crystallize within these spaces (Carvalho, 2018; 2022b). This is what it means to geographize the senses, anchored in religion. An encounter with the Psychology of Religion assists Geography by uncovering the breadth of meaning and foregrounding the spatial experience itself. It elucidates the values, sentiments, ideas, and beliefs that religions ascribe to various locales-not strictly limited to sacred spaces.
Concluding remarks
This article delineates the historical and theoretical junctures that have led to the disconnect between Psychology and Geography in the study of religion. A shared analytical framework emerges from the phenomenological-existential perspective, which informs distinct schools of thought within both Psychology and the Geography of Religion. Religious experience serves as the central dimension of this common framework.
Drawing on theoretical arguments and brief empirical observations, I demonstrate how religious experience produces a reciprocal resonance between the spatial and psychic dynamics of the religious phenomenon. A subsequent article will focus on a detailed case study.
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