Sharing the <i>Sacra</i>

The Politics and Pragmatics of Intercommunal Relations around Holy Places

Glenn Bowman

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781782387442
• eBook ISBN: 9780857454874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

"Shared" sites, where members of distinct, or factionally opposed, religious communities interact—or fail to interact—is the focus of this volume. Chapters based on fieldwork from such diverse sites as India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, China, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and Vietnam demonstrate how sharing and tolerance are both more complex and multifaceted than they are often recognized to be. By including both historical processes (the development of Chinese funerals in late imperial Beijing or the refashioning of memorial commemoration in the wake of the Vietnam war) and particular events (the visit of Pope John Paul II to shared shrines in Sri Lanka or the Al-Qaeda bombing of an ancient Jewish synagogue on the Island of Djerba in Tunisia), the volume demonstrates the importance of understanding the wider contexts within which social interactions take place and shows that tolerance and intercommunalism are simultaneously possible and perpetually under threat.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction: Sharing the Sacra
• 1. Combining Practices and Beliefs: Muslim Pilgrims at Marian Shrines
• 2. Everybody’s Baba: Making Space for the Other
• 3. Chthonian Spirits and Shared Shrines: The Dynamics of Place among Christians and Muslims in Anatolia
• 4. The Work of Mending: How Pharping People Manage an Exclusivist Response to the Procession of Vajrayoginī
• 5. Efficacy, Not Confessionality: On Ritual Polytropy in China
• 6. Saints, Sites and Religious Accommodation in Sri Lanka
• 7. The Ghriba on the Island of Jerba or the Reinvention of a Shared Shrine as a Metonym for a Multicultural Tunisia
• 8. “Sacred Week”: Re-experiencing Jewish-Muslim Coexistence in Urban Moroccan Space
• 9. New Ancestral Shrines after the Cold War
• Notes on Contributors
• Index