Integration of Spaces

We have begun our survey of Bhaktapur's symbolic civic organization with a discussion of its space. The meaningful spaces we have been considering in this chapter are related to many ideas and actions in Bhaktapur's civic life that will be elaborated on in later chapters.

We have presented nested, bounded spaces, each representing some kind of "solidarity" in contrast to an outside. In all societies individuals find themselves belonging to different groups depending on the context, and thus in opposition to some contrasting group. Bhaktapur, however, not only organizes these oppositions, most generally, by successively inclusive levels—nuclear family, household, phuki , people of the twa: as neighborhood or village, people of the mandalic^[*] section, people of the antagonistic mirror cities of the city halves, the citizens of the total city, and finally the people, creatures, and forces of the city plus its environment—but also gives most of these a spatial definition and anchoring. It is this anchoring that is one of Bhaktapur's significant "typological" characteristics.

There are two general ways that Bhaktapur's spatial units and levels are realized in symbolic action. First, they are the places where certain kinds of actions are typically and repeatedly performed during the course of the year (chap. 16), or of a lifetime (app. 6). The house, twa: , crossroads, and so on, emerge as meaningful areas in the course of these repeated actions. However, people are also aware that all or most other houses, or twa: s, or mandalic^[*] sections, or whatever unit, are doing the same thing at the same time or in some fixed sequence. The spatial unit becomes significant in its identity and contrast with similar units; it

Map 12.
The integration of space. The pradaksinapatha^[*] , the city's festival route, is marked by a dotted line.
It ties together the upper "Bad Text" the extreme western one). Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.

becomes a member of a class of like spaces. In the first kind of representation, the same person is, in various contexts, a member of different kinds of spaces, and there are systematic ways in which he or she moves or is moved from one kind to another. That movement tells some kind of a story. The second kind of representation, a static one, is that of different persons doing the same thing . These are two different ways of using and marking space. We will consider them again in the chapters on annual events.

One way of tieing together different units in space is through traditional processional routes. These exist in each twa: , each mandalic^[*] section, and for the city as a whole. We have discussed the major city-wide processional route, the pradaksinapatha^[*] , in connection with the relation of low-status groups and the boundary of the city, and noted that in contrast to the situation in some other Hindu communities it is within the city (map 12) where it binds all but the most westerly and probably most recently settled of the city's twenty-four major twa: s together.^[30]

Bhaktapur's spatial divisions both give meaning to and take meaning from their special divinities, symbolic enactments and their associated legends and myths. Some of the meaning they contribute to this dialogue of forms derives from some of the universal potentials of spatial meaning, widely exploited throughout the world. The meanings of the face-to-face neighborhood, the uncanny nature of thresholds, borders and crossroads, the danger of the beyond-the-borders, the antagonisms of balanced and opposing civic units, and the primacy of the center and the hilltop are all very general semantic possibilities for space, aspects that can be understood in a fairly direct way. Yet others of the meanings contributed by the spatial units are, of course, local matters, local histories, legends, and forms and require special knowledge to be grasped.

We will trace these dialogues of meaning throughout the following chapters.^[31]