"Here I shall consider such places as manifestations of sacral ‘social space’. First articulated by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in the 1890s (1893; cf. also 1995, 440–48), the theory of ‘social spaces’ is now well established in sociology and anthropology and has recently seen increasing use in the study of historical religions. The concept of ‘social space’ is that the ‘space’ in which people live and function, both individually and communally, is not merely volume —‘a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things’— but in fact is fundamentally dependent on the actors that live within it, who create it by overlaying subjective values onto objective reality (Foucault 1986, 23). As such, social space is constituted of two discrete but interrelated aspects, which we may refer to as objective and subjective spaces.
Objective space (also called ‘physical’ or ‘material’ space) is an absolute, physical quality, quite literally the volume in which actors operate. The objective space of a single location is typically referred to as a ‘site’. By contrast, subjective (or ‘mental’) space is the result of social groups assigning subjective values to objective areas: the building with the altar, steeple and graveyard is regarded as ‘holier’ than the one with the bar, although there is no inherent, objective reason for it to be so. Rather, the ‘shared values and attitudes’ of the social group render the area holier than others (Johnston 2000, 763), making such spaces the direct result of group behaviour, the ‘product of social action’ (Löw 2008, 25). The subjective space of a single location —that is, a site invested with cultural value— is typically referred to as a ‘place’ (Brink 1997, 390).
Such spaces and places are not constructed in a unilateral process, but reinforce and affect the very attitudes which created them (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003, 14), as when a newcomer takes their behavioural cues from those around them, both reacting to and helping shape the social space they find themselves in. As social space is dependent on subjective value, not only does it differ from culture to culture (Smith 1987), but it is contingent on users of the space perceiving difference between inside and out (Löw 2008, 26), typically on a sliding scale between two extremes — such as ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’. A somewhat simplified summary is that objective reality is overlaid with an area of subjective reality, creating a space that can be differentiated from the other space around it by the subjective value(s) attached to it by those doing the valuing/ differentiating. Thus social spaces are not ‘in the landscape, but simultaneously in the land, people’s minds, customs, and bodily practices’ (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003, 6).
In the Scandinavian world, then, the subjective value differentiating sacral spaces from their surroundings — what Brink understands as ‘metaphysical energy or godly power or [the belief ] that god(s) were supposed to dwell there’ (2001, 88) — was produced by religious beliefs and cultural constructions operative within the society which originally engendered the spaces."
