Unholy Struggle on Holy Ground: Conflict and Interpretation in Jerusalem

Abstract

Glenn Bowman is a social anthropologist currently completing a doctorate on Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land for St. John's College, Oxford University. His fieldwork in Jerusalem, Israel and the Occupied Territories took place between October 1983 and June 1985. I was still in the field when Jonathan Webber's 'Religions in the Holy Land: Conflicts of Interpretation' appeared in the April 1985 issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY. It is an odd article to read on returning from the Old City of Jerusalem to Oxford, in large part because Webber's Jerusalem and the one I have been observing for the past two years seem worlds apart. Webber's Jerusalem is one still dominated by the ageold dhimmi system wherein identity is dictated by religious affiliation and contact between different confessional groups is restricted to melees over the sanctity of their respective holy places: The business of each of the old native populations of Jerusalem is to manufacture and maintain its set of holy places, and to codify and organize perceptions of events and the existence of other communities according to that fundamental principle... religious communities in Jerusalem talk past each other [and] refuse to take each other into account... Other communities merely offer members of any one particular group the opportunity to state and restate their own distinctiveness versus the rest. Hence the spectacle of inter-communal violence... (pp 5-6).