The Politics of Sacred Places: A View from Israel-Palestine

(Hardback)

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A study of the socio-political dimensions of sacred sites in Israel-Palestine, drawing on over 20 years of in-depth ethnographic research which introduces cutting-edge theories on secularization, struggles for recognition, and diversity issues. This book focuses on contemporary sacred sites and their socio-political meanings for minorities within a hegemonic and a secularizing state-system. It argues that sacred places and the ample socio-religious-political practices they entail provide a space which is less scrutinized by the state and hegemonic powers within it, where alternative visions of the socio-political may be produced. In this spatially-oriented inquiry, places are understood and explored through a mostly phenomenological lens as fundamental to all socio-political processes. Places are explicitly understood as always in flux, and as constantly being produced, contested and in a perpetual dynamic process among forces to be found in a complex scalar matrix. These sites are explored in various contexts from the individual body to the global. This book offers a critical-analytical study of the socio-political aspects of sacred sites in contemporary societies within the broader understanding of scale and the spatial turn in the study of religion.

Author Bio

Nimrod Luz is Head of the Research Authority at Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee, Israel.