DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.7160/KS.2023.210202
Author: Nimrod Luz
Address: Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee, Zemach, Emek HaYarden 15132, Israel
E-mail: luznimrod@mx.kinneret.ac.il
Language: English
Issue: 2/2023 (21)
Page Range: 32–61
No. of Pages: 30
Keywords: Sacred places; Geography of religion; Contested nature; Religion; Socio-political-spatial meanings; Israel; Palestine
Abstract: This paper explores the contested nature of scared places as a starting point for developing a research agenda for geographers of religion in the 21st century. Following a discussion of the contested nature of scared places, the paper theorises place and scale in the study of religion. It is argued that by conjugating these two crucial concepts, geographers of religion (and surely other disciplines as well) would be better able to engage with the rich socio-political-spatial meanings of contemporary religions. Sacred places, as one of the key features of religion, serve as an entry point into the current discussion. The empirical context and case studies are drawn from over two decades of research in the contested region of Israel/Palestine. They serve to illustrate my main argument that sacred places and their contested nature are central to understanding broader socio-political processes. I will therefore briefly engage in a scalar analysis of sacred places from the body to the global scale.
Prof. Nimrod Luz is a cultural and political geographer specialising in cultural theories, landscape and the built environment, cities and urbanism, religion and food. His interdisciplinary research and interests lie in the multiple and reflexive relationships between society, culture (politics) and the built environment, with a particular focus on the Middle East, past and present. His publications cover a wide range of topics including cities and urban theory, religion and politics, sacred landscapes, anthropology of food and comparative analysis of religious landscapes. His current research focuses on the infrastructures of the urban ReligioCity of Acre. He has held numerous research positions and fellowships in international institutions, including Fulbright Scholar in Residence at Indiana University South Bend, Max Planck Fellow. He is currently the Director of Research at Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee.
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Introduction
To date, the study of geography of religion is an immensely vibrant research field sprawling far and wide and covers multiple topics from around the globe. This was not always the case and as late as 1990 in her first of three decadal surveys Lily Kong, one of the doyens of the field, summed up rather harshly the bleak state of this geographical sub-discipline and found it very wanting: “The interface between geography and religion yields an immensely large and varied set of questions, many of which have yet to be explored”.[1] This notwithstanding, twenty years later in her third survey of 2010 Kong was already describing an academic sphere bursting at the seams:
The last decade has seen much growth in geographical research on religion. No longer can the geographies of religion be considered a moribund interest within the larger geographical enterprise, as evidence of renewed interest and energy appears increasingly in the pages of journals across the discipline. In a few short years, several special issues of journals have appeared focusing on questions of religion as have new books and journal articles.[2]
This tectonic change within the discipline follows a deeper engagement with new theorization of culture and space which emerged since the 1980s.[3] Geography of religion, as a subdisciplines of cultural geography, was therefore reinvigorated through these new retheorized perceptions of culture now dominating the field. In her second survey of the sub-discipline in 2001, Kong painted a colourful roadmap for much-needed future studies. Accordingly, she suggested geographers to explore different sites of religious practice beyond the ‘officially sacred’ (churches, temples, mosques, synagogues and the like); different sensuous sacred geographies; different religions in different historical and place-specific contexts; different geographical scales of analysis; different constitutions of population and their experience of and effect on religious place, identity, and community.[4] Within the many topics and themes currently explored the sacred as a dominant religious realm and its spatiality still looms large in the field. It is with sacred places and their ample socio-political meanings that this paper revolves around. This follows my main argument that sacred places provide a vibrant and dynamic arena through which individuals, groups, indeed societies and various socio-political processes may be explored. Further, in a continuously globalizing world and against the tidal waves of immigration and on-going struggles within nation-states on the road ahead sacred places remain, as they always were, essential to most of humanity. This, as I discuss in what follows, was far from agreed upon among scholars of religions for the better part of the 20th century.
The pre-modern understanding of the sacred and its pivotal role in humans’ lives, saw sanctity and magic everywhere. Against the changes brought forth by newly emerging philosophies, most notably the Enlightenment, and their entanglement with the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century, there developed a different understanding of the sacred realm and its role in daily life. Put simply, the sacred, the holy, and surely the magical, were deemed to be losing their influence and authority over human life. Schiller defined this process as the de-divinization of the world, and along the same logic, Max Weber referred to it as disenchantment.[5] These theoretical constructions try to encapsulate the historical process that characterizes Western culture of that time, according to which nature and all areas of human experience are becoming less mysterious and more comprehensible and measurable. Classification of the phenomena that surround us, greater understanding of causality in nature and the entire universe through scientific theories and empirical discoveries, entangled with the growing impact of more egalitarian political theories combined and separately were leading to the secularization of modern societies, or so it seemed. As Saler puts it:
wonders and marvels have been demystified by science, spirituality has been supplanted by secularism, spontaneity has been replaced by bureaucratization, and the imagination has been subordinated to instrumental reason.[6]
This understanding preponderated among students of religion for the better part of the twentieth century under what might be loosely termed the secularization theory.[7] The dominant working hypothesis among scholars was that modernization and all that it brings under its wings would amount to the decline of religion. Be that as it may, along with a growing critique by post-modern and post-colonial theorists of Weber’s (and other early modernist theorists) binary approach to modernity vs. religion, secularization theory is losing its sway. Surely, modernization has had some secularizing effects and yet scholars have begun to accept that the relations between religion and modernity are far from the binary approach according to which they were previously explained.[8] The world apparently still holds magic and awe for the majority of humanity, who attest in survey after survey that faith and indeed religion are still vital to their existence.[9] In this sense, this paper should be seen as another brick in the growing edifice of desecularisation theory and a contribution to a re-theorised cultural geography of religion.
In his opus magnum, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Elementary Forms of Religious Life), Durkheim was searching (among other things) for the role and definition of religion within contemporary societies. He suggested focusing on the functional aspects of religion for society by emphasizing the role of the sacred in boundary making, regulating, and constructing attractions.[10] Set within a Durkheimian understanding of the importance of the sacred in religious practices, this paper highlights the role of scared places in contemporary societies and the potential they have for sustaining a deeper engagement with geography of religion. Hence, this paper conjugates the contested nature of scared places with politics of scale theories as a starting point to develop a research agenda for geographers of religion for the 21st century. Following a discussion on the contested nature of scared places the paper theorizes place and scale in the study of religion. By conjugating these two crucial conceptions geographers of religion (and surely other disciplines as well) would be able to better engage with the ample socio-political-spatial meanings of contemporary religions and belief systems. The empirical context and case studies are drawn from over two decades of explorations in the contested region of Israel/Palestine.
Theorizing Place and the Contested Nature of Sacred Places
Places are essential to any human activity! Humans simply cannot operate without places and one of the main characteristics of humans is place-making.[11] The necessity of a spatial language for any human activity may be demonstrated, for example, in the deployment of spatial terms such as sites and domains even when we moved to virtual realities. As such, place and space loom large in theories of human geography and certainly since the spatial turn in the social sciences.[12] Geographical definitions of place since the 1970s have focused on the combination of location and meaning and the human subject’s crucial importance in the construction of place.[13] This was partially motivated by the overly mechanistic and quantified approach to places which dominated the field until the late 1960s.
Leading theorists such as Relph argued that to make human geography fully human, geographers needed to be more aware of the ways in which we bring a particularly human range of emotions and beliefs to our interactions with the physical world.[14] Central to this awareness is the geographical concept of place. Place is certainly a phenomenon, a location, but at the same time it is a concept, a product, and a process in which humans are involved. The following is a rather useful definition for understanding place as a socially constructed entity: “place is space to which meaning has been ascribed”.[15] As a product, place cannot be reduced to its mere physical qualities. It is the result and process of human endeavour.
The making of places necessitates, then, a variety of human efforts: interactions, politics, design of memory, myth and more. Places are socially constructed locales, but at the same time they are processes, in which many forces are constantly working and therefore in a perpetual possibility of change. This understanding entails an acknowledgment of power as a crucial component in the way places are constructed, promoted, understood, and—surely—contested.
Thanks largely to the seminal work of Foucault, Lefebvre and de Certeau, which prioritised space as critical to the modernist and capitalist (and postmodernist) project, conceptualisations of spatialities emerged, mostly among human (Marxist and cultural) geographers.[16] In his invariably persuasive manner, Foucault observed that place is fundamental in any exercise of power.[17] Put differently, places are by their very nature political entities, or at least are politicized through various human agencies. These understandings have inspired mostly Marxist geographers, who argue that place is not merely socially constructed and influenced by an array of human feelings such as attachment (sense of place) but also bound up with power.[18] If this is the case, then surely place is the outcome and process of construction which therefore implies that it is invested with meaning, with ideology, and certainly with politics.
By its very nature, place is replete with power and symbolism. It is a complex web of relations, of domination and subordination, of solidarities, and cooperation.[19] At the same time, place is inexorably linked with controversies, conflicts, struggles over control, and debates (as well as actual physical conflict) over meaning and symbolism. Being a “web of signification”[20] inevitably transforms place into a site where that significance and its “true” nature is up for grabs by those already in power or in search of it. Places are spatial metaphors through which people (singular and plural) can represent themselves and thus concretize their culture: through places, cultural ideas and the abstract become concrete. Therefore, the struggle over the ownership of places and their control must also be seen as a cultural struggle for autonomy and self-determination.[21]
Place provides both the real, concrete settings from which culture[22] emanates to enmesh people in webs of activities and meanings, and the physical expression of those cultures in the form of landscapes. Additionally, we must consider that places are not only spatially constructed but also have a temporal dimension. In other words, the articulation of social relations that we are naming as a particular place has a history.[23] Further, any claim to establish the identity of a place depends upon presenting a certain reading of history. Thus, in various conflicts over the contemporary meaning of place, the past as memory, or at times a mythology of a certain past, is involved. The on-going conflict over the ownership of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif between Israelis and Palestinians is a pertinent case in point. Current claims from both sides rest on a very specific, fragmented, and surely political, reading of the past of the place.
Thus far I have established that places are always on the “way of becoming”[24], that is, they are always in the process (or possibility) of changing, and that conflict and competition are inherent to spatiality, along with collaboration, negotiation, and indeed, production of understanding and meaning. Sacred places make for a rather intriguing example of the socio-political and constructed character of a place. Chidester and Linenthal suggested a binary approach of substantial and situational.[25] While the “substantial” relates to the insider’s perspective and focuses on the poetics of place, the situational operates from an outsider perspective and locates the sacred at the nexus of human practices and social projects and focuses on the politics of place. The situational approach follows the Durkheimian tradition, which theorizes the sacred as an empty signifier and therefore susceptible to any form of interpretation and assigned meaning.[26]
I will address the substantial through the work of the famous historian of religion Mircea Eliade. His structuralist approach promotes binaries of sacred and profane. For him, “man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself as something wholly different from the profane”.[27] Thus, space is not homogenous and the sacred is an interruption into the heterogenous profane space of the everyday. This manifestation of the sacred-hierophany in his vocabulary – that is, the intrusion of the sacred into the profane – is often found in the Axis Mundi. Think, if you will, of the sacred centre in Jerusalem where, in Jewish tradition, the Rock of the Foundation connects heaven and earth. This is echoed in the Muslim tradition by the concept of the Mi‘raj, which refers to the Prophet Muhammad’s ascent from Jerusalem to the heavens. The sacred emerges as an ontological given, a known and fixed local around an axis mundi which interrupts into the mundane landscape, thus creating an almost out-of-world spatiality. When believers encounter it, they are faced with the omnipotence of God which amounts to what Otto defined as the numinous: being in the awesome presence of divinity.[28] In such ways, a certain spatiality is carved out and recognized as sacred. However, as a cultural-political geographer who looks at places as ways of understanding the world and imbued with power, my general approach prioritizes and focuses on the situational, through an engagement mostly with socio-political processes as they unfold and are spatialized in sacred places. This follows and compliments recent theoretical developments loosely defined as the spatial turn.
The spatial turn refers to the shift in social thoughts that reflects significant transformation in the political, economic, and surely the cultural realm in contemporary societies. This shift implies that one cannot comprehend the production of spatial ideas independent of the production of spatiality. Following the spatial turn in the social sciences scholars increasingly criticized Eliade’s concept of the sacred as an ontological given. Along with the retheorized approach to place, a new wave of explorations emerged, accounting for a variety of spatial issues (place, landscape, and materiality) within religious studies.[29] Starting with Durkheim, who emphasized the centrality of the sacred in a variety of human projects, and surely following the likes of Lefebvre, who prioritized place as crucial to any exercise of power, a critical re-evaluation of the sacred emerged in social theories, beginning with Harvey and other critical Marxist scholars.[30] Following conflict theory and, more implicitly, Foucault, Eade and Sallnow draw our attention to the highly contested nature of the sacred: “The power of a shrine, therefore, derives in large part from its character almost as a religious void, a ritual space capable of accommodating diverse meanings and practices”.[31] Geographers dealing with religion have also pointed to the presence of conflict and contestation involved in the production of sacred sites.[32] Indeed, the very word ‚production‘, when applied to the supposedly transcendent external quality[33] of the spatiality of a sacred site, immediately grounds the site and locates it within the realm of everyday life.
Chidester and Linenthal present us with an understanding of the multivalence of sacred sites and their inherent contested nature. They claim that “a sacred place is not merely discovered, or founded, or constructed; it is claimed, owned, and operated by people advancing specific interests”.[34] Therefore, becoming a sacred place involves a process of production, but is also inescapably linked to cultural-political contests regarding the multiple meanings assigned to the place. The conflict is not just over the production, Chidester and Linenthal continue to argue, but also over the “symbolic surpluses that are abundantly available for appropriation”.[35] Therefore, sacred sites are arenas where resources are transformed into surplus of meaning. They are heavily invested with symbolism, emotions, and indeed, mystification. This also explains why sacred sites are the site of competing discourses! The stakes are too high and there is too much to lose for competing groups or influential actors. Taking over and controlling the sacred involves various forms of politics. Thus, the sacred is always to be found intertwined with political power, agency, and rather profane[36] social forces. The very concept of production of space necessitates human agency and activity, and therefore implies politics in various manifestations.
As one moves away from the substantive approach to situational theory, sacred places become increasingly central to any exploration of socio-political processes and the growing influence of religion in contemporary societies.[37] Adhering to this school of thought, the boundaries between the profane and the sacred are becoming extremely fuzzy. More importantly, it locates sacred places squarely within mundane and daily life and a plethora of socio-political processes. This leads me to address the concept of scale, its ample geographical meanings, and the ways it facilitates my analysis of sacred places.
Scale, Scalar Politics and Sacred Places
Scale is a highly charged geographical concept. Until relatively recently, the notion of scale was usually understood as a form of spatial hierarchy. In its traditional, predominantly cartographic meaning, scale is defined as the ratio of the distance on a map relative to that same distance on the earth’s surface. For geographers, scale as size has been a matter of central importance—consideration of appropriate map scales for forms of analysis and presentation. Surely, scale as size is of central importance for geographical analysis and presentations.[38] As a measurement for the size of fixed a priori phenomenon which inform the ways we understand the world, it originates initially with Kantian philosophy. His idealistic and binary approach to time and space is at the heart of how scale was conceived as part of a pre-given spatio-temporal ordering system.[39]
However, following the spatial turn and the emergence of a re-theorised human geography in the 1980s, geographers challenged this notion of scale as an unproblematic fixed hierarchy of bounded space.[40] Growing attention has been drawn to the relations between processes operating at different geographical scales (from the local to the global) and the ways they inform each other. Geographers question the validity of scale as a concept that facilitates an analysis at one geographical scale to other scales or within a different spatial frame at the same scale.[41]
The idea of scale as level, often conflated with scale as size, with a common implication of a nested hierarchical ordering of space has been put to more and more scrutiny. Within geography it was Taylor’s seminal work, aiming at setting an agenda for a relevant political geography, that charged scale with new meanings and launched a heated debate about its very nature.[42] Taylor diverted the discussion towards a deeper understanding and better theorization of the social construction of scale.[43] His most important contribution was that alterations of geographical scale mattered. Specifically, he argued that there were two types of geographical scale: the vertical and the horizontal. He suggested that people’s experiences of everyday life were mediated by the nation-state, the global economy, and the local environment and, on the other hand, that different places could be categorized on the basis of their relative positions within the world economy. Taylor argued that scale is intimately tied to political economic processes.
Following him, it was Smith who revolutionized the field by introducing an innovative conceptualization of scale. Scale was understood at times as a metaphor, rather than a result of social and material activities. [44] Smith profoundly changed the way we look at scale by arguing that scale is a non-fixed entity constituted within broader capitalist processes. He introduced what is now a common currency i.e., scalar politics, alternatively known as “politics of scale”.[45] This take on scale is a way to grasp the complex interplay of existing power structures and political struggles, in which scale is used not only as a mechanism of constraint and exclusion but also as a weapon of expansion and inclusion.[46] These endeavours include what he called scalar jumping or jump scale.
Following these two important developments, the discipline was heavily engaged in theorizing and in attempts at refining the concept of scale. These took several interrelated lines of analysis. The first was a focus on the “politics of scale.” The second line was the broadening and loosening of understandings of strict scalar boundaries (e.g., urban, nation state, global) and the increased integration of vertical scalar productions with horizontally conceived social networks.[47] Marston argued for a scalar exploration which entails an understanding of scale from the urban downward to the home, the street and more importantly in the current context, the body. This, she claimed, would allow to “engage in the ways power relations and power structures, outside the main purview of the field which tended to concentrate on relations of capital and labor”.[48] In tandem with the growing body of works engaging with scale, critique of certain aspects of scale which were deemed problematic arrived. Jones questioned its ontological nature and suggested that we should understand it as a representational trope.[49] For her, scale was epistemological—a way of classifying the world—and not a fundamental given of the world.[50] This intervention proved to be highly significant, and scholars indeed began to conceptualize scale as a discursive or representational device.[51]
Geographers have sometimes appeared to offer rather crude scalar frameworks, which appear to act as pre-given spaces or domains of social and economic life. And yet, issues of scale continue to permeate not just geography but also the broader social sciences and, with the advent of the spatial humanities, the humanities as well. I study sacred places through scale, as I think it is conducive to any critical discussion of the spatialities (and other aspects) of the politics of scared places. Against previous calls to expunge scale altogether, geographers continue to do so simply because it is a common-sense idea, and it is also the way the people we study understand their world. Scale is, therefore, suggested in this paper, as a process that involves politics; it is constantly being fought over by contesting forces. Scale is the spatial configuration in which socio-political relations are contested.[52] Scalar configurations are not pre-given platforms upon which social life simply takes place. They are constantly being reshaped by socio-political struggles. Scale and the production of scale (scaling) are indeed political and social projects. Scale is socially constructed, which implies that in each and every level of analysis—that is, from the personal to the global—our understanding of scale is the outcome of social processes and political struggles. The question of scale and the setting of scale is a matter of political struggle and involves power relations and the change or the contestation of existing power geometries.
Scale and scaling are not politically neutral. They are both the result and the outcome of struggles for power and control. Scale is a constitutive dimension of socio-political processes. It demarcates the site of social or political contest. It is also about setting a context to the struggle. Scale is an active progenitor of specific social processes; it sets the boundaries for struggles over identity, and control over places. Jumping scales, for example, allows the subordinate or the controlled to dissolve spatial boundaries that are largely imposed from above and that contain, rather than facilitate, their production and reproduction of everyday life. Marrying together place as a dynamic process of becoming entangled with the contested nature of sacred places and against politics of scale enables an understanding of how places are constructed at each level and between them from the body scale to the global. This understanding will furnish the final part of the paper in which I will give but two examples of this research paradigm. The first entails an analysis of the body scale in one particular place of worship and the second engages with the Islamic Movement in Israel’s efforts to glocalise the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif.[53]
The Body Scale and Embodying the Sacred
In his predominantly Marxist project Lefebvre holds the body as pivotal to the production of space. Social space proceeds from the body in the same way that the body is constituted by the “weight of society’s demand”.[54] Lefebvre’s articulation of the body in space enables us to see how the body is crucial to construction of space:
Can the body with its capacity for action, and its various energies, be said to create space? Assuredly, but not in the sense that occupation might be said to manufacture spatiality; rather, there is an immediate relationship between the body and its space, between the body’s deployment in space and its occupation of space. Before producing effects in the material realms (tools and objects), before producing itself by drawing nourishment from that realm, and before reproducing itself by generating other bodies, each living body is space and has its space: it produces itself in space and it also produces the space. This is truly a remarkable relationship: the body with the energies at its disposal, the living body, creates or produces its own space; conversely, the laws of space, which is to say the laws of discrimination in space, also govern the living body and the deployment of its energies.[55]
These ideas became very vivid during the interview with R., a very articulate woman who frequents the Tomb of Rachel in Tiberias. She originates from a religious family but did not adhere to a religious lifestyle while growing up. She “made a U-turn” (to use her own words) and adopted religion again following her husband, who grew up as a secular person and embraced religion as an adult. Her lengthy and lucid descriptions of her reasoning and experience of visits of sacred places echo Lefebvre’s point about how the place makes the body at the same time the body constructs space. The following is her response when asked why she visits the Tomb of Rachel:
I am very happy for this opportunity of being able to leave the house on a Friday noon, complete a round of visits to righteous people’s graves (Hebrew: tsaddiqim), a bit of shopping, [plunging] in the Sea of Galilee, and returning home fulfilled by the places that fulfil me. This [Tomb of Rachel] place certainly fulfils me, that is, a shopping mall would not give me the same spiritual satisfaction and the pleasure of communication [with transcendence] because there is nothing in it save matter and materialism. Here, one may find a kind of distillment and refinement… I have here in my bag a book about Leonardo da Vinci and it discusses how he feels divinity in everything he does, and divinity is not something you can prove but the world proves it to you… This place is a place of divinity… it is a symbol (like da Vinci’s Sistine Chapel [sic]) for those who do not always understand… This is a place that „tells“ you: here lived, acted, created, and died someone whose life was larger than other people’s life. And why? Because it is beyond… when I pray here, I aim at these [inner] places …[Rachel] left the house of her father, who was one of the richest men of the land, to follow a shepherd who did not know until the age of forty how to read or write… And he could not become such an eminent scholar [Hebrew: gedol ha-dor] if it were not for her belief in him … when I pray here, I aim at these standards, that I would be able to do the same for my husband … I try to connect to the essence of this particular place…[56]
R.’s response and explanation of her own personal motivation to visit sacred places in general and the Tomb of Rachel in particular, resonate Geertz’s approach to religion as a cultural system. While addressing the role of sacred symbols he alludes to the ways sacred materials inform people’s perceptions of reality:
sacred symbols [which] function to synthesize a people’s ethos – the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood – and their world view – the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order.[57]
For R., the sacred place is a spatiality that allows her to transcend daily realities and enables her to connect to what she perceives as a more profound existence as she eloquently states: “I try to connect to the essence of the place.” She is certain the site is indeed the tomb of a righteous Jewish woman; a narrative which has only recently begun being promoted by the current impresario of the site.[58] It is intriguing to see how the ephemerality and non-routinized character of the place inform corporeal responses in space. This is quite clear from R.’s description of a recent visit to the site accompanied by two friends who do not share her religious belief, as follows:
People take off their shoes when they enter a sacred place, and it seems obvious and understandable… But here we are with our shoes on, and I am speaking loudly while you record me … because there is a different sense of sanctity here, it is a different place and there are also couches here … incidentally, I arrived here with two friends not long ago, one of them was totally wasted and she just fell asleep on the couch. I, in the meantime, went to the Sea of Galilee [a short walk from the Tomb, N. L.] and later came back and picked her up. And this is cool, she fell asleep on the couch, and nobody told her anything. She was here wearing trousers [and not a long dress which is the custom among religious Jewish women, N. L.] took off her shoes and lay down on the couch… this is an accommodating space. I think that the north [of Israel] is much more tolerant, open-minded and breathes more freely.[59]
- is immersed here in a rather critical reading of the map of sacred places in Israel and makes a distinction between the way she experiences the more “official” and hence rigid and routinized sacred places in Jerusalem and its environs, versus the non-routinized and hence less restricting sacred places she encounters in the north of Israel. This feeling of intimacy and of a “different sense of place” that R. relates to, and even more so, the way she experiences the sacred space is exactly what Lefebvre argued about the importance of the body in the construction of space. Let us now explore a more complex scalar setting to see how sacred places can serve as arenas where current socio-political processes are spatialised. I will address the sacred site in Jerusalem most holy to Jews and Muslims alike; Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif.
Glocalization as Overthrowing the State: Local to Global Flows of Sanctity
The notion of “glocalization” emerged during the 1990s in the wake of the scholarly interest in globalization.[60] This neologism is a linguistic hybrid of globalization and localization, which was hypothesized originally by a Japanese economist to theorize Japanese global market strategies. Glocalization is generally understood as the simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems. It has come to suggest the interaction between the local and the global to produce unique hybrids in different socio-political and geographical settings.[61] As the global and the local are assumed to mutually constitute each other, hence “glocal” relates to a process where the global and the local entangle together to construct a new reality. This loaded concept is often understood as a two-level system (global and local), which through dialectical processes such as hybridization result in greater interconnectedness.[62] As a theoretical framing device, glocalization have become increasingly prevalent across various disciplines even though, to date, it is still used in a rather unclear manner and has received numerous interpretations.
Unlike Robertson, who appears to treat the global scale as an independent variable, Swyngedouw argues against an a priori privileging of spatial scales. For him, scales are historically constructed and mediated through social relationships, forming possible terrains for action and inaction.[63] Swyngedouw’s rationale for emphasising the importance of place is based on his critique of how the local and the global are represented: place is socially frozen, whereas globalisation is precisely the opposite. Neil Brenner’s approach to glocalisation complements Swyngedouw’s characterisation of the national scale under conditions of glocalisation. He follows Swyngedouw’s criticism of state-centrism because the naturalization of the nation state blocks a potentially more nuanced analysis of social formations’ relationship to globalization’s time-space compression.[64] However, he calls for a decentering analysis of the state to move away from state-centred approaches and towards more territorially nuanced enquiries that recognise complexity.[65] In this way, the orthodoxy of nested territoriality is challenged, as a decentred state analysis rejects the a priori privileging of one scale over another. Instead, changing scalar architectures produces new forms of nested territorialities that serve to shape other spatial scales’ opportunities and constraints. Which brings us to the question of power and power-geometries while trying to fathom glocalization.
Power indeed does not rest in the single scale of a spatial container. Beck stresses power in his analysis of globalization and defines it as a locale’s ability consistently and persistently to originate waves across the world stage. This he describes as a locale “globalizing” itself from within.[66] In overcoming the state and using glocalization as a scalar strategy, I want to suggest that minorities may venture to “overthrow” the state by reaching beyond the national scale. This involves a slightly different approach to glocalization, which neither looks at how the global is affecting the local nor at how the local is accommodating the global, but rather how the local is approaching the global to overcome constraints and power structures of lesser scalar levels. Let us explore this understanding. To do so, I return to October 2000 in Israel/Palestine.[67]
Following the failure of the second Camp David Summit on July 25, 2000, the region was quickly succumbing to another round of armed conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon, then a member of the Israeli Parliament and later Israeli prime minister, visited the Haram al-Sharif under high-profile media coverage. This was the final spark in the already highly explosive atmosphere which led to the combustion of the Second Intifada. Civilian acts of resistance and defiance of Israeli state authority spread among Palestinian communities within and without the Green Line. When interviewed about the riots (also known as the “October 2000 Events”) and the reactions among Israeli Palestinians, ‘Abd al-Malik Dahamshe, MK and head of the Islamic party in the Israeli parliament at the time, supplied the following rejoinder:
It is a war that every Muslim should be part of. There is no Green Line when it comes to Al-Aqsa, and this [the reactions] will continue throughout Israel … I cannot see this murderer entering the holiest place in this land and watching idly from the sidelines. Am I not a human being? Am I devoid of emotions, am I not a Muslim? He entered the most holy mosque of the Muslims in order to defile it as a murderer, as a powerful man, a Zionist. Do you honestly believe that we will not face up to it? This act is addressed against our very existence, but we do exist. Our sole culpability is that we are humans and that we have a life and that we have a mosque and a land.[68]
Dahamshe engages here with an intriguing spatial language and weaves a complex multi-scalar configuration. He elaborated on those issue during an interview conducted with him a few years later:
I was on my way to meet with people in ‘Amman and this reporter caught me as I was just passing the bridge [one of the international entries between Israel and Jordan—N. L.]. This was indeed a very emotional response, as the events touched upon the very core of my being. This is something Israelis do not like to acknowledge … I will tell you: the problem ends there and does not begin there. It starts between us, between Jews and Arabs – if the Jews would ever agree to see us as equals, brothers for life, for geography, for existence, for a shared destiny, real partners … once there will be peace and cooperation, all those things [violence, confrontations—N. L] will be taken down from our daily lives, this place will return to its former capacity as a religious place and a mosque.[69]
However, this is but one approach to be found among members of the Israeli Islamic Movement. Many of those I met with, and certainly among the more influential leaders, oppose all negotiations and even dialoguing with Israel, and Israeli Jews for that matter. But at this point I want to address Dahamshe’s spatial language and his engagement with the scalar politics of the holy site in Jerusalem. He begins on a global scale by asserting that the defence of Al-Aqsa against the transgression of desecration is the task of all Muslims. He then moves to a supranational scale and addresses the role of Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. Subsequently, he touches on the national scale by focusing on the Israeli Palestinians’ role within Israel. I call these efforts glocalisation, which I understand as the contested restructuring of the institutional level from the national scale upwards to supranational or global scales, and downwards to the scale of the body or the local, the urban or the regional configuration. Therefore, glocalization is also concerned with the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This is achieved through the reconfiguration and the contestation over spatial scale. Since all social life is inevitably situated and locally placed, the global is local at every moment.[70] The global always takes place at the local, as the local is constantly being shaped and altered by the global. That well may be, but regardless of the importance and magnitude of world globalization, we need to pay special attention to the localities in which these changes are taking place.[71] Glocalization, as I conceptualize it, refers to the changes and struggles over scalar configurations and entails the possibility of jumping scale and moving the local into the global sphere. This understanding is informed by the notion that scale is a constitutive dimension of socio-political processes. It demarcates the site of social or political contest. It is also about setting a context to the struggle. Scale is an active progenitor of specific social processes; it sets the boundaries for struggles over identity, and control over places. In the face of a scale superimposed by a hegemonic power, subaltern groups may opt to thwart this power by actively jumping scales.
Against the backdrop of Israeli control over the Haram, Dahamshe moves between scales as a way to subvert and resist a given geographical production of scale in that specific place. Jumping scales allow subordinate or controlled groups to dissolve spatial boundaries that are largely imposed by the state (national scale) and that contain rather than facilitate their production and reproduction of everyday life. This scalar politics and scalar jumping at the Haram al-Sharif, is mostly executed by the Israeli Islamic Movement and its charismatic leader, Shaykh Raid Salah.[72] Since 1996 when he became the leader of the Northern Branch of the Israeli Islamic movement Salah was engaged in positioning himself and his movement as the most devoted adversaries that constantly challenge and contest the hegemonic position of the state of Israel therein. One such endeavour is the annual rallies organised by the movement under the title „al-Aqsa is in danger“. In the 2008 rally Salah’s delivered the following speech:
I say to the Israeli occupation, and those representing it on behalf of all the people here, that your plan, which we exposed, despite your dream to destroy the mosque, your occupation will not last for long… [to PA president Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh—N.L.] What we are asking from you both for this holiday [the upcoming Ramadan–N.L.] is a gift for every Muslim and every free man, is to renew the dialogue and reconcile … [to the Arab world] Where is your manliness? For 40 years the al-Aqsa Mosque calls to you and asks where you are. Do you accept that we, the besieged, must ask permission from the Israeli occupation to enter the mosque? Must ask for permission to pray in the mosque?[73]
Positioning himself as the champion of al-Aqsa and East Jerusalem at large and the defender of endangered Islamic endowments transformed Salah’s status, not only into a leading figure of what are commonly called “the Palestinians of 1948,” but has placed him on the Islamic world stage. He keeps pushing this agenda numerous articles and public speeches as indeed in the following one in which Salah vows to defend the Haram with his life and warns against even the smallest concession of any of its parts:
This is the destination of the nocturnal journey of the Prophet (isra’) and from here he ascended to heaven (mi‘raj). This place witnessed the conquest of Jerusalem by ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab and the liberation of Jerusalem from the hands of the Crusaders by Salah al-Din… and because it is so important it is beyond negotiation and no voice will rise higher than the voice of al-Aqsa. And to those of feeble character that say that America is stronger than them, the blessed al-Aqsa answers and says: God is stronger. And the Western Wall from within and from without is part of al-Aqsa and so are the other buildings and mosques within it, including al-Musalla al-Marwani. This being the true nature of al-Aqsa, we will renew our covenant with God and our covenant with al-Aqsa and we will pin our hopes on our Islamic umma and our Arab world and our Palestinian people and reiterate: We shall redeem you in spirit and blood.[74]
Rhetoric of this nature positions the Israeli-Palestinian Islamic movement as the most hawkish and reluctant Palestinian player regarding any concession over the Haram. Salah also makes a connection among the local, the regional and the global scales as part of his strategy to thwart or resist Israeli control over the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif.
Claims and counterclaims about the present character of a place depend in almost all cases on rival interpretations of the past. The past of a place is up for grabs, and it is in the present that we may produce a certain understanding of it, such a one that promotes our most urgent needs and political necessities. In the case in point, Salah is promoting a twofold understanding regarding the place. Firstly, its religious and political significance for Palestinians and Muslims worldwide. Secondly, total denial of any Jewish heritage in the compound. Salah’s skilful use of the media, and certainly his constant efforts in and around the Haram al-Sharif, have enabled him to attract the attention of regional and global Islamic organisations and governments. He hosts delegations from around the Muslim world and frequently dialogues with the Islamic international community. Delegations from the Northern Branch are often invited to participate in Islamic conferences around the world and often visit Arab and Islamic countries. In 2005 Salah visited Malaysia, had audiences with officials while there, and lectured at Islamic institutions, during which he declared: “If al-Quds continues to be under occupation, every Muslim in the world is occupied”.[75] This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that enables the glocalization of the Haram and fleshes out a multi-scalar politics that constantly challenges the current power structure in Jerusalem. In that sense, Salah’s scalar politics is exactly what I have defined as overthrowing the state. The glocalization of the Haram al-Sharif is first and foremost an emancipatory project of rescaling the local and promoting it to the supranational and the global, while simultaneously introducing a global understanding of the place within the local. The Islamic movement in Israel is actively engaged in a process of multi-scalar configuration of the place as a way to transcend the control of the national state (deterritorialization) on the one hand, and to bring about a new understanding of the place into the national and local scale (reterritorialization) on the other. The interaction between the local and the global is mediated by signs and symbols, images and narratives, and circulating meanings. Through active engagement with the place (both in tangible and intangible ways) and circulating specific meanings of the Haram, the Islamic movement is engaged in highly affective multi-scalar politics, as it engages with the inherently contested and highly evocative nature of sacred places.
Concluding Remarks
In recent years geographical research on religion has grown considerably. Many of the gaps and lacunas in the field are now addressed and the growing impact of the sub-discipline is highly visible and influential within human and cultural geographic studies. Geographers have come to realize that religion matters in contemporary societies. Further, many of us in the field understand that it is imperative to examine not just the overtly religious places, but also other mundane aspects of everyday life that carry religious significance and influenced by religious conceptualizations. Religion is increasingly understood as a multifaceted and multiscalar sphere that permeates and influences, and is certainly influenced by, a variety of socio-political processes. The ways in which religion shapes human activities are highly variegated which means that they carry numerous implications for new research agendas. This paper argues that sacred places still offer us a promising entry point to understand a variety of socio-political processes. It offers a theoretical construction of the reading of sacred places by conjugating theories of place and scale. Following the theoretical discussion a few cases in point were discussed from Israel/Palestine.
The sacred is a central currency in contemporary societies due to two intertwined processes: desecularisation and the rise of religious nationalism. Just as Weber himself lamented what we are losing through the disenchantment of the world that he himself so astutely observed, so Durkheim recognised the possibility of the persistence or reappearance of the meaning of the sacred as a link to the (possible) re-emergence of religion in future (and contemporary) societies:
In short, the former gods are growing old or dying, and others have not been born. That is what voided Compte’s attempt to organize a religion using old historical memories, artificially revived. It is life itself, and not a dead past that can produce a living cult. But that state of uncertainty and confused anxiety cannot last forever. A day will come when our societies once again will know hours of creative effervescence during which new ideals will again spring forth and new formulas emerge to guide humanity for a time. And when those hours have been lived through, men will spontaneously feel the need to relive them in thought from time to time – that is, to preserve their memory by means of celebrations and regularly recreate their fruits.[76]
Regardless of our own personal approach to the role and presence of religion in contemporary societies, it is incumbent upon us to concur with Peter Berger’s thought-provoking remark: “those who neglect religion in their analysis of contemporary affairs do so at great peril”.[77] I will resist the temptation to delve into one of the more contentious issues among students of the field, namely the theories of secularisation vs. desecularisation. This has already furnished volumes upon volumes and a plethora of studies, and for some the jury is still out. However, I will not shy from stating my firm understanding that the paradigmatic core of secularization theory, namely the assumption that modernity entailed the functional differentiation of religion from other social systems, simply cannot be validated in my ongoing exploration of the field. It is certainly the case in Israel/Palestine, in which religion plays a pivotal role in the national claims of all parties involved. Which brings me to the second process heavily affecting the politics of sacred places, the emergence of religious nationalism.
Nation and religion are both conceptual authoritative categories, indeed ideologies, which demand submission to a certain political and social order. Against earlier theoretical notions,[78] which depicted them as diametrically opposed, it would seem today that purely secular nationalism is far from being the only political machination in existence. Further, secular nation-states can no longer be understood as the only or natural outcome of the two intertwined projects of modernization and secularization. Nationalism and religion, argues van der Veer, are better seen as valid products of a multiplicity of modernities in different parts of the world. While commonly an opposition between the secular and the religious is assumed, these categories, in certain situations, are simultaneously produced and complement each other.[79] Contrary to previous predictions, neither nationalism nor religion are disappearing, and the often-assumed dialectic relations between the secular state and religion is paving the way to new possibilities.[80] One form which is emerging in numerous countries around the world is religious nationalism. This intriguing marriage between formerly competing ideologies is heavily influencing the national political realm. Apparently, religious nationalism is not alien to the formation of the modern nation-state. In fact, it was an essential part of the formation of many modern national identities. Nationalist movements were (and are) often suffused with religious narrative and myth, symbolism, and ritual. Religious nationalism requires an institutional approach to the project of collective representation. It offers a particular ontology of power, an ontology revealed and affirmed through its politicized practices and the central object of its political concern, practices that locate collective solidarity in religious faith shared by communities of belief and conceivably among nations.[81] This may be found today in numerous nation-states around the world and Iran, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Estonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina are but notable examples that comes to mind. To conclude this reflection on the contemporary geography(ies) of religion and thinking ahead, sacred places remain a central and very rewarding topic.[82]
[1] KONG, Lily. Geography and religion: trends and prospects. Progress in human geography 1990, 14.3, p. 366.
[2] KONG, Lily. Global shifts, theoretical shifts: Changing geographies of religion. Progress in human geography, 2010, 34.6: 755-776., p. 755
[3] On these changes within cultural geography see, JACKSON, Peter. Maps of meaning. London, Unwin Hyman, 1989. See also MITCHELL, Don. Cultural Geography. A critical introduction. Blackwell Publishers, pp. 37-65. A concise narration of this crucial process, see CRESWELL, Tim. New cultural geography-an unfinished project? Cultural geographies, 2010, 17.2: 169-174.
[4] KONG, Lily. Mapping ‘new’ geographies of religion: politics and poetics in modernity. Progress in human geography, 2001, 25.2: 211-233.
[5] JENKINS, Richard. Disenchantment, enchantment and re-enchantment: Max Weber at the millennium. Mind and Matter, 2012, 10.2: 149-168.
[6] SALER, Michael. Modernity and enchantment: A historiographic review. The American historical review, 2006, 111.3: 692-716, p. 692.
[7] CHRISTIANO K. J., SWATOS W. H. Jr. Secularization theory: the course of a concept. The secularization debate (ed. WH Swatos, D. VA. Olson). Lanham, Boulder, NY, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield publishers, inc, 2000.
[8] BERGER, Peter L. The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview, in Peter L. Berger (ed.), The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, 1–19. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999.
[9] SHERWOOD, Harriet. Religion: Why Faith is Becoming More and More Popular?’, The Guardian August 25, 2018. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/27/religion-why-is-faith-growing-and-what-happens-next (accessed 10 October 2022).
[10] KOENIG, Mathias. Emile Durkheim and the Sociology of Religion, in Hans, Joas and Andreas Pettenkofer (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Emile Durkheim online edition, Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190679354.013.18 (accessed 10 October 2022).
[11] SACK, Robert David. Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness, and Moral Concern. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
[12] CRESWELL, Tim. Place: An Introduction. Willey Blackwell, 2014.
[13] AGNEW, James. Place and Politics. The Geographical Mediation of State and Society. Routledge, 1987.
CRESWELL, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Blackwell, 2004.
TUAN, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press. 1987
[14] RELPH, Edward. Place and Placelessness. Pion, 1976.
[15] CARTER, Erica; DONALD, James; SQUIRES, Judith (eds.). Space and place: theories of identity and location. Lawrence and Wishart, 1993, p. xii.
[16] FOUCAULT, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Pantheon Books, 1980.
De CERTEAU, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984.
LEFEBVRE, Henri. The Production of Place. Blackwell, 1991.
DORA, Veronica Della. Infrasecular geographies: Making, unmaking and remaking sacred space. Progress in Human Geography, 2018, 42.1: 44-71.
[17] FOUCAULT, 1980, p. 63.
[18] KEITH, Michael; PILE, Steve (eds.). Place and the Politics of Identity. Routledge, 1993.
ROSE, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Polity, 1993.
[19] MASSEY, Doreen. Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place’, in BIRD, John; CURTIS, Barry; PUTNAM, Tim; TICKNER, Lisa (eds). Mapping the Futures. Routledge, 1993: 60-70.
[20] LEY, David; OLDS, Kris. Landscape as spectacle: world’s fairs and the culture of heroic consumption. Environment and planning D: society and space, 1988, 6.2: 191-212, p. 195.
[21] ESCOBAR, Arturu, Culture sits in place: Reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization. Political Geography, 2001, 20, p. 162.
[22] Like place, culture is always in the process of becoming and may not be reified or understood as a rigid and specific setting of human ideals, norms, etc.
[23] MASSEY, Doreen. Places and their pasts. History Workshop Journal 39, p. 188.
[24] PRED, Allen. Place as historically contingent process: Structuration and the time-geography of becoming places. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1984. 79.2: 279–97.
[25] CHIDESTER, David; LINENTHAL, Edward, (eds.). Introduction. American Sacred Places. Indiana University Press, 1995: 1-43.
[26] DURKHEIM, Emille. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Free Press, 1995.
[27] ELIADE, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Harcourt, Brace, 1959, p. 11,
[28] OTTO, Rodolph. The Idea of the Holy. Penguin Books, 1958.
[29] KNOTT, Kim. Religion, space, and place: The spatial turn in research on religion. Religion and Society: Advances in Research, 2010, 1.1: 29–43.
[30] HARVEY, David. Between space and time: Reflections on the geographical imagination. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1990, 80.3: 414–34.
MASSEY, Dorren. For Space. Sage, 2005.
[31] EADE, John; SALLNOW, Michael (eds). Contesting the Sacred, Routledge, 1991, p. 15.
[32] CHIVALLON, Christine. Religion as space for the expression of Caribbean identity in the United Kingdom. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2001, 19.4: 461–83.
KONG, Lily. Negotiating conception of sacred space: A case study of religious building in Singapore. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 18: 342–58.
NAYLOR, Simon; RYAN, James. The mosque in the suburbs: Negotiating religion and ethnicity in South London. Social and Cultural Geography, 2002, 3.1: 39–59.
[33] This intangible quality is what Rudolf Otto defined as „numinous“.
[34] CHIDESTER, David; LINENTHAL, Edward T. (ed.). American sacred space. Indiana University Press, 1995, p. 17.
[35] Ibid, p. 18.
[36] Profane here should be understood as turning Eliade’s concept of the nature of the sacred on its head.
[37] CASANOVA, Jose. Public Religion in the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, 1994.
BECCI, Irene; CASANOVA, Jose; BURCKHARDT, Marian (eds.). Topographies of Faith: Religion in Urban Spaces. Brill, 2013.
[38] HAGGETT, Peter. Location Analysis in Human Geography. E. Arnold, 1965.
[39] DIKEC, Mustafa. Space as a mode of political thinking. Geoforum, 2012, 43.4: 669–76.
[40] PASSI, Anssi. Place and region: Looking through the prism of scale. Progress in Human Geography, 2004, 28. 4: 536–46.
[41] MARSTON, Sally; JONES, John-Paul; WOODWARD, Keith. Human geography without scale. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2005, 30: 416–32.
[42] TAYLOR, Peter. A materialist framework for political geography. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, 1982, 7: 15–34.
[43] SMITH, Niel. Commentary on Peter Taylor’s materialist framework. Progress in Human Geography, 1997, 21.4: 555–62.
[44] JONAS, Andrew. The scale politics of spatiality. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1994, 12. 3: 257–64.
[45] SMITH, Niel. Uneven Development. Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Blackwell, 1984.
[46] SMITH, Niel, Geography, difference, and the politics of Scale, in DOHERTY, Joe; GRAHAM, Elspeth; MALEK, Mo (eds.). Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, 57–79, Macmillan, 1984.
[47] JONES, John-Paul, ‘Scale and anti-scale’, in RICHARDSON, Douglas; CASTREE, Noel; KOBAYASHI, Audrey (eds.). International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology. Wiley, 2017, pp. 1-9.
[48] MARSTON, Sally. The social construction of scale. Progress in Human Geography, 2000, 24.2, p. 238.
[49] JONES, Katherine. Scale as epistemology. Political Geography, 1998, 17: 25–8.
[50] BLAKEY, Joe. The politics of scale through Ranciere. Progress in Human Geography, 2021, 45.4: 620–47.
[51] MANSFIELD, Becky. Beyond rescaling: Reintegrating the “national” as a dimension of scalar relations. Progress in Human Geography, 2005, 29.4: 458–73.
[52] SWYNGEDOUW, Eric. Neither global nor local: “Glocalization” and the politics of scale’, in COX, Kevin (ed.). Spaces of Globalization. Reasserting the Power of the Local. The Guilford Press, 1997, pp. 137-66.
[53] Given the complex and intricate past and present of the site and against the brief nature of the current discussion the interested reader is suggested to read, LUZ, Nimrod. Unholy religious encounters and the development of Jerusalem’s urban landscape. Between particularism and exceptionalism, in BURCHARDT, Marian; GIORDA, Maria Chiara (ed.). Geographies of encounter: The making and unmaking of multi-religious spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 29-54.
[54] Lefebvre, 1991, p. 195.
[55] Ibid, p. 170.
[56] Interview with R., March 28, 2014.
[57] GEERTZ, Cliford. Religion as a cultural system, in BANTON, Michael (ed.). Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. Tavistock Publications, 1966, p. 3.
[58] LUZ, Nimrod, Materiality as an agency of knowledge. Competing forms of knowledge concerning Rachel’s Tomb in Tiberias. Journeys. The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, 2020, 21.1: 63–84.
[59] Interview with R., March 28, 2014.
[60] ROBERTSON, Roland, Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity, in FEATHERSTONE, Mike; ROBERTSON, Roland; LASH, Scott M. (eds.). Global Modernities, 1995, pp. 25–44,
[61] ROUDOMETOF, Victor. Theorizing glocalization: Three interpretations1. European Journal of Social Theory, 2016, 19.3: 391-408.
[62] KORFF, Ruediger. Local Enclosures of Globalization. The Power of Locality. Dialectical Anthropology, 2003, 27.1: 1–18.
[63] SWYNGEDOUW, 1997.
[64] BRENNER, Niel. Globalisation as reterritorialisation: The re-scaling of urban governance in the European Union. Urban Studies, 1999, 36.3: 431–51.
[65] BRENNER, Niel. Beyond state-centrism? Space, territoriality, and geographical scale in globalization studies. Theory and Society, 1999, 28.2: 39–78.
[66] BECK, Ulrich. What Is Globalization? Polity, 2000, pp. 8-13.
[67] A full discussion of these events and their background is beyond the scope of this article. See PRESSMAN, Jeremy. The second intifada: Background and causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Journal of Conflict Studies, 2003, 23.2: 114-141.
[68] GAL, Sharon. The Arab minority has not radicalized. It has reached the limits of its endurance. Haaretz, 2000, October 3: A3.
[69] Interview with ‘Abd al-Malik Dahamshe, September 29, 2002.
[70] LATOUR, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 114-120.
[71] SWYNGEDOUW, Eric. Globalisation or “glocalisation”? Networks, territories and rescaling, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2003, 17.1: 25–48.
[72] LUZ, Nimrod. The Islamic Movement and the seduction of sanctified landscapes: Using sacred places to conduct the struggle for land’, in REKHESS Ellie; RUDNITZKY, Arik (eds.). Muslim Minorities in Non-Muslim Majority Countries: The Test Case of the Islamic Movement in Israel. ART Press, 2013, pp. 67-77.
[73] ROFFE-OFIR, Sharon. Israel defiled Al-Aqsa. Ynet News, August 22, 2008, http://www. ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3586354,00.html (accessed August 20, 2022).
[74] SALAH, Raid. Al-Aqsa is Muslim, Arab and Palestinian. Sawt al-Haqq wal-Huriyya, 2002, 25 January: 3. [Arabic]
[75] NASASRA, Mansur. The politics of claiming and representation: The Islamic movement in Israel. Journal of Islamic Studies, 2018, 29.1: pp. 54.
[76] DURKHEIM, 1995, pp. 429-430.
[77] BERGER, 1999, p. 18.
[78] See, for example, GELNER, Ernst. Nation and Nationalism. Cornell University Press, 1993.
[79] VEER van der, Peter. Nationalism and Religion, in BREUILLY John (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (online edition). Oxford Academic (accessed 20 October 2022).
[80] JUERGENSMEYER, Mark. The global rise of religious nationalism. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2010, 64.3, pp. 262–73.
[81] FRIEDLAND, Roger. Religious nationalism and the problem of collective representation. Annual Review of Sociology, 2001, 27, pp. 125–52.
[82] I develop these issues in my recent book, LUZ, Nimrod. The Politics of Sacred Place: A View from Israel Palestine. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.
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