Shattered Sacred, Wounded Lives

What relation does violence against sacred sites bear to violence against the people who built, inhabited, or identified with that sacred space? How are spaces and built environments intimately bound up by questions of belonging, suffering, inequality, and aspiration? What are the ways in which social marginalization is shaped by and translated into spatial forms and their rubble? To answer these questions, I discard the popular understanding of destruction as an act of the process of dismantling something tangible. Through this chapter, I assert that the destruction of built structures and spaces not only disassembles matters but also disintegrates the conditions of sociality – human bodies, spatial relations, and practices – that define a particular spatial node. Here, my aim is to shed light on what is disrupted through the process of destruction. Toward that end, I will explain how the destruction of sacred space or built environments is inextricably linked with social inequalities and the manifestation of domination of one group over another in intimately segregated communities.