The Politics of Sacred Places

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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.