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The current global agrifood system is increasingly fragile and despite a plethora of scientific research, progress in national and global policies setting commendable goals towards more sustainable agriculture is still sluggish. This paper argues that if the efforts continue to concentrate on farmers and rest solely on “fixing” modes of production at the farm level, the chances of arriving at significant changes are meagre. By conjugating Lefebvre’s triad of spaces and geographic explorations on politics of scale with data harvested over three years of qualitative research in farms, this paper explores Israeli farmers’ conduct in the field as they face many challenges at various scales. The paper presents their vulnerability against forces on a multiscalar level which present numerous obstacles in operating their farms. Addressing these challenges to allow them to integrate more sustainable modes of operation would require upscaling the debate and the taking of responsibility from all stakeholders concerned, from the farm level to global players.

This paper explores recent transformations in Islamic pilgrimage patterns in Israel/Palestine. The meanings assigned to traditional Muslim sites, and the conduct and practices of the dwindling number of pilgrims who visit them, are the struggling victims of strategic socio-political erasures caused by dramatic geo-political changes. Since 1948, the hegemony of the State of Israel has perversely politicized sacred Islamic sites beyond their traditional religious functions. Muslim pilgrims, for their part, engage in rituals that have become a counterweight to Israeli ethnocratic imperatives. The reconstruction of an Islamic pilgrimage map presents a shared imaginative landscape as lieux de mémoire that undergird political and social resistance. The dogged survival of Islamic pilgrimage comprises a counterweight to state power. Muslims fight to affirm Palestinian identity, reclaim heritage spaces as anchors for identity, and actively engage with land claiming.

Abstract Materiality has become a compelling register through which to examine religious manifestations and matters of belief. There is a mounting awareness among scholars of both the tangible aspects of religion and the ways in which material objects are never neutral. Following these theoretical developments, I argue that materiality can serve as a form of agency for a particular version of knowledge to become conventional and accepted as true. This emerging materiality codifies a certain version of the truth. However, such validation through matter is often challenged and categorized as fake or a myth. To illustrate my argument, I explore the newly emerging site of Rachel's Tomb in Tiberias and the competing versions of truth surrounding it. I contend that its new materiality, which has evolved in recent years, serves as a way of validating the site's new mythology. However, among locals, who are familiar with the site's previous materiality, this new knowledge is pejoratively labeled as fake or mythical.

This article examines the social dynamics at sacred \"womb tombs\" in an effort to discern this architectural form's impact on contemporary religious experience, politics, and landscapes. With this objective in mind, Christian veneration at Jerusalem's Tomb of Mary is compared with Muslim worship at Maqam Abu alHijja in the Galilee. Drawing on our ethnographic findings, we posit that the ancient structure of these shrines mimics the poetry of the human body as well as death and regeneration. While pilgrims to these womb tombs seek preternatural intervention for infertility, sickness, pain, and other misfortunes, the venues concomitantly serve as an outlet for voicing indigenous claims to the land and help minorities bolster their sense of belonging. In the process, we have taken stock of a wide range of ethnographic findings: the sites' architectural representation of the human body, the manner in which the tombs are venerated and experienced by local Christians and Muslims, and the politicization of fertility and well-being rituals by minorities within the context of sociopolitical struggles over, above all, territorial rights.

Materiality has become a compelling register through which to examine religious manifestations and matters of belief. There is a mounting awareness among scholars of both the tangible aspects of religion and the ways in which material objects are never neutral. Following these theoretical developments, I argue that materiality can serve as a form of agency for a particular version of knowledge to become conventional and accepted as true. This emerging materiality codifies a certain version of the truth. However, such validation through matter is often challenged and categorized as fake or a myth. To illustrate my argument, I explore the newly emerging site of Rachel’s Tomb in Tiberias and the competing versions of truth surrounding it. I contend that its new materiality, which has evolved in recent years, serves as a way of validating the site’s new mythology. However, among locals, who are familiar with the site’s previous materiality, this new knowledge is pejoratively labeled as fake or mythical.

In a memorial lecture for Charles Beckingham, David Morgan 1 evoked one of this prolific travel literature scholar's astute observations: “[T]he study of travel narratives, especially travel narratives about a culture quite different from the traveller's own, can be very revealing, not only about the culture he observed, but about the culture to which he belonged”. 2 This insight indeed undergirds my own approach to the descriptions of cities by both insiders and outsiders. Narratives of cities, indeed of any landscape, are but interpretative and hermeneutics texts which can be surely used to narrate the very landscape, but also as texts which may be used to understand the culture and perceptions of the narrator. Over the course of this paper, I examine two accounts (texts) of residents of Mamlūk provincial cities in al-Shām. These texts will be placed under the scrutiny of the data and the existing literature of those cities. In other words, the ‘conceptualised city’ as narrated by the sources will be compared with the ‘tangible city’. The latter we may unearth from various other sources (mostly texts) as well as the city's built environment. Thus, this chapter examines the ways in which Mamlūk cities of al-Shām were scripted and narrated by two local ‘storytellers’ and ‘image-makers’ of the city. 3 In this context, ‘storyteller’ is an umbrella term for those who left us with a narrated legacy of their city. I decided to call them storytellers for the purpose of accentuating their inherent subjectivity. Informed and accurate as some of these narrators may have been, all of their experiences with and accounts of the urban landscape were guided by a personal understanding and their own cultural background. Since each of these texts is about spatial practices and spatial arrangement (landscape) of the city, the argument can be made that they all fall under the heading of travel writing. 4 What is more, any narrative with a spatial dimension (Michel de Certeau would argue that there is no such thing as a narrative without one) is a story that organises space. Against this backdrop, the objective of this chapter, above and beyond presenting ‘spatial stories’ of cities of Syria, is to demonstrate the complexity of the reading landscape and particularly the ways landscape descriptions need always be taken as subjective, culture-based, culturally constructed, and a constant negotiation between the traveller/story-teller/source narration, the ‘actual’ built environment and the political context.

This article examines the social dynamics at sacred \"womb tombs\" in an effort to discern this architectural form's impact on contemporary religious experience, politics, and landscapes. With this objective in mind, Christian veneration at Jerusalem's Tomb of Mary is compared with Muslim worship at Maqam Abu al-Hijja in the Galilee. Drawing on our ethnographic findings, we posit that the ancient structure of these shrines mimics the poetry of the human body as well as death and regeneration. While pilgrims to these womb tombs seek preternatural intervention for infertility, sickness, pain, and other misfortunes, the venues concomitantly serve as an outlet for voicing indigenous claims to the land and help minorities bolster their sense of belonging. In the process, we have taken stock of a wide range of ethnographic findings: the sites' architectural representation of the human body, the manner in which the tombs are venerated and experienced by local Christians and Muslims, and the politicization of fertility and well-being rituals by minorities within the context of sociopolitical struggles over, above all, territorial rights.

This article examines the social dynamics at sacred `womb tombs' in an effort to discern this architectural form's impact on contemporary religious experience, politics, and landscapes. With this objective in mind, Christian veneration at Jerusalem's Tomb of Mary is compared with Muslim worship at Maqam Abu al-Hijja in the Galilee. Drawing on our ethnographic findings, we posit that the ancient structure of these shrines mimics the poetry of the human body as well as death and regeneration. While pilgrims to these womb tombs seek preternatural intervention for infertility, sickness, pain, and other misfortunes, the venues concomitantly serve as an outlet for voicing indigenous claims to the land and help minorities bolster their sense of belonging. In the process, we have taken stock of a wide range of ethnographic findings: the sites' architectural representation of the human body, the manner in which the tombs are venerated and experienced by local Christians and Muslims, and the politicization of fertility and well-being rituals by minorities within the context of sociopolitical struggles over, above all, territorial rights. Reprinted by permission of the Journal of anthropological research, University of New Mexico. © University of New Mexico

This article examines the social dynamics at sacred “womb tombs” in an effort to discern this architectural form’s impact on contemporary religious experience, politics, and landscapes. With this objective in mind, Christian veneration at Jerusalem’s Tomb of Mary is compared with Muslim worship at Maqam Abu al-Hijja in the Galilee. Drawing on our ethnographic findings, we posit that the ancient structure of these shrines mimics the poetry of the human body as well as death and regeneration. While pilgrims to these womb tombs seek preternatural intervention for infertility, sickness, pain, and other misfortunes, the venues concomitantly serve as an outlet for voicing indigenous claims to the land and help minorities bolster their sense of belonging. In the process, we have taken stock of a wide range of ethnographic findings: the sites’ architectural representation of the human body, the manner in which the tombs are venerated and experienced by local Christians and Muslims, and the politicization of fertility and well-being rituals by minorities within the context of sociopolitical struggles over, above all, territorial rights.