Sharing the Sacra

To challenge the underlying premises of popular writers who construct reality as constant and inevitable warfare between peoples or beliefs, anthropologists and other social scientists describe examples of how groups thought to be hostile share space sacred to both. Among their topics are Muslim pilgrims at Marian shrines, how Pharping people manage an exclusivist response to the procession of Vajrayogini, ritual polytropy in China, the Ghriba on the Island of Jerba or the re-invention of a shared shrine as a metonym for a multicultural Tunisia, and new ancestral shrines after the Cold War. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Glenn Bowman is Director of Research at School of Anthropology and Conservation the University of Kent where he is also Programme Convenor for BA Liberal Arts. He has done extensive field research on Jerusalem pilgrimages as well as on intercommunal shrine practices in the Middle East and the Balkans. In addition to this research on holy places he has worked in Jerusalem and the West Bank on issues of nationalism and resistance for nearly thirty years and has carried out fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia on political mobilization and the politics of contemporary art.