From Spatial to Spatiotemporal Poetics: A Review of Mark George's "Israel's Tabernacle as Social Space"
Scholars of the ancient Israelite sanctuaries often discussion the construction, plan, and symbolism of those spaces, yet one of the more interesting recent readings of a sanctuary is Mark K. George’s Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space , in which he develops a “spatial poetics” to discuss the social dynamics of the tabernacle in terms of “spatial practice,” “conceptual space,” and “symbolic space.” He models his categories off of the French Marxist spatial theorist, Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace [ The Production of Space ], who spoke of spatial practice, representations of space, and spaces of representation with the heaviest emphasis on the last category, which Lefebvre saw as having the greatest revolutionary potential against capitalism. Spatial practice refers most directly to the physicality and materiality of space—how humans shape spaces (such as buildings, parks, and roadway systems) and how those buildings in turn shape human behavior, or, for our purposes, th...