Description
Book SynopsisBy including both historical processes and particular events, this volume demonstrates the importance of understanding the wider contexts within which social interactions take place and shows that tolerance and inter-communalism are simultaneously possible and perpetually under threat.
Trade Review “An excellent compilation… [whose] strength lies less in overarching conclusions than in its fine-grained historical and ethnographic detail.” · Times Literary Supplement
“Using ethnographic and historical approaches, the chapters in this book show that [contrary to what is often believed] religious spaces are frequently peacefully shared by different religious groups…and reveal how inter-faith and inter-religious discursive formations are produced..by believers, state officials, and transnational institutions. Thus the volume provides important theoretical and methodological tools for an anthropology of inter-religious relations.” · Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
“[This volume’s] broad range of experience is combined with a wide range of religious and territorial contexts – a welcome corrective to the tendency towards focusing on particular religions and regions…Overall, this is an excellent contribution to the growing literature on shared sacred places. It shows what a carefully constructed edited volume can achieve in an academic world where researchers are under increasing pressure to only seek publication in journals with high global exposure. It also engages with a crucial issue in a world where religion has not retreated to the private sphere – the ability of pilgrims and others to co-exist at the same highly charged place.” · Anthropological Notebook
“This is an excellent book that adds to the anthropological and historical literature on shared sacred sites. The majority of the articles are very well written, present strong arguments that are revealed with important research. The result is that the book adds to and clarifies some of the debates about the sacred sites, how they are shared as well as the role of the various actors involved in the process. The cases are varied, rich and evocative. Furthermore they are of contemporary importance and relevance.” · Karen Barkey, Columbia University
Table of Contents Acknowledgements
List of Figures and Tables
Introduction: Sharing the Sacra
Glenn Bowman
Chapter 1. Combining practices and beliefs: Muslim pilgrims at Marian shrines
Dionigi Albera
Chapter 2. Everybody's Baba: Making Space for the Other
Anna Bigelow
Chapter 3. Chthonian Spirits and Shared Shrines: The Dynamics of Place among Christians and Muslims in Anatolia
Maria Couroucli
Chapter 4. The work of mending: How Pharping people manage an exclusivist response to the procession of Vajrayoginī
Will Tuladhar-Douglas
Chapter 5. Efficacy, not Confessionality: On Ritual Polytropy in China
Adam Yuet Chau
Chapter 6. Saints, Sites and Religious Accommodation in Sri Lanka
Rohan Bastin
Chapter 7. The Ghriba in the Island of Jerba (or Djerba)or the re-invention of a shared shrine as a metonym for a multicultural Tunisia
Dora Carpenter-Latiri
Chapter 8. “Sacred Week”: Re-Experiencing Jewish-Muslim Co-existence in Urban Moroccan Space
Aomar Boum
Chapter 9. New Ancestral Shrines after the Cold War
Heonik Kwon
Contributors
