Landscapes of the Sacred by Lane
“Participation in deliberate ritual activity is what invariably occasions the transition from experiencing a place as topos to encountering that same place as chora. For most people in the United States, for instance, a McDonald’s restaurant offers a classic example of topos, a place without any distinctive sense of presence. … But if you have proposed to someone you love in a particular McDonald’s restaurant or experienced a life-changing conversation in another, that topos suddenly becomes a chora, intimately a part of your life.” (Lane, 2002, pg. 39)
This example made the concept of a topos becoming a chora a little confusing to me. How is it that a place as generic as McDonald’s can become a chora? The definitions describe a chora as “carrying its own power, and summoning its participants to a common dance.” (Lane, 2002, pg. 39) When someone proposes to another person that, to me, is a conscious decision that the person is making and the actual place has nothing to do with that moment. It might happen to be where they are at that very moment but I’m not sure if that experience would make a man made place, such as McDonalds a chora. Experiences such as that don’t seem to give a chora as much justice as it deserves. Choras are places where things happen unexpectedly and it is because of the power of the actual place that affects humans to act, not the other way around. I don’t think that McDonald’s or any other generic places such as that can be said to have its own “energy and power.” (Lane, 2002, pg. 39)
Friday, April 27, 2007
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