Place

In this chapter, the author adds a theory of place to the analysis of female ritualistic experience and materiality of sacredness. Place is basic in the ritual, as the experience is always shaped and designed within a particular scheme and its architecture. Jonathan Smith stressed the importance of place for ritualistic performance, especially of constructed ritual environments, to a proper understanding of the ways “empty” actions become rituals. Rituals, poetry, aesthetics, embodiment, identity, and class formation are all expressed in a certain architecture, which is why the forms and meanings of rituals can be both expected and unexpected. Rituals can create shared experience in one physical context and impose exclusion and separation in another. In the various female shrines discussed here, the ritual is both created by and affected by the politics of the place. In the context of Israel/Palestine, this is mostly the politics of struggle, conflict, and hostility between different ethnic groups. In this realm, the ritual is a form of communicating territorial claims, demands justified via the visitors’ own bodies, using symbols of fertility of land/soil, and rituals of nascence and recreation. These actions emphasize the visitors’ belongings and claims to native lands. Rituals maintain place attachment. It is through ritual performance that the environments attain meanings and configurations. Sacredness and embodiment are spatialized, and sacred places become a path to claim land. In Israel/Palestine, this dynamic of sacred places is becoming central.