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.

The Materials of Rituals

Materials and objects representing female saints and images are scattered all around the shrines the author visited. This chapter concentrates on these sacred objects and analyzes the structure and architecture of sacred places. What do these objects symbolize or represent? Why are they placed in specific places? And how do they produce particular effects or permit certain behaviors, cultural practices, and religious rituals? The author follows recent studies that center upon various items and their properties and materials, and that look at how these material facets give rise to human sensations, a consideration that is central to an understanding of culture and social relations in sacred places. In this view, sacred tombs and shrines pose an opportunity to explore the intertwined and dialectical relationships between people and things, pilgrimages, and sacred objects as they are arranged and experienced in the place of devotion.

Conclusion

This chapter concludes the main arguments of this book. The author claims that in contemporary society, the veneration of female saints is growing worldwide. As we learn from the ethnography, current veneration still contains these same features. However, in contrast to other times in history, nowadays, femininity, reproduction, and fertility are associated with the modern state, land, borders, and national demands.

Landscape

This chapter focuses on female rituals and how are they materialized and encrypted in the Holy Land landscape. The author shows that the debate on ownership of territories is not only integrated with the discourse of motherhood, fertility, maternal feelings, and intimacy but is also associated with local power relations and demands. All the same, human ritualistic performances, whether they are encrypted in sacred caves, holy mountains, enchanted forests, rivers, or trees, mark all their symbolic and physical traces on the landscape. These ritualistic sacred traces create human sacred maps that are alternatives to all other human maps, such as route maps, urban maps, maps of state borders, transportation maps, and other official maps. The power of rituals to create alternative maps, more specifically alternative female sacred maps, and their construction in the landscape is at the heart of this chapter.

Contextualization

This chapter contextualizes the different levels of the work. The author use in order to study the sacred places and rituals in the Holy Land, the nation state and Middle Eastern context. The author start this chapter with the explanation of the relations between state and religion, and go on to explaining the sacred archetypes of holiness by interpreting relations between texts and lands. The author go on to discuss the eschatological and pragmatic forces in the Holy Land and the idea of the Holy Land in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. She goes on to contextualize the veneration of female saints by means of prototypical illustrations at different levels of resolution—Holy Land, Middle Eastern, and the idea of the state and its construction. The author concludes this chapter with the discussion of religion and the variety of ritualistic performance in Israel/Palestine.

The Experience

In this chapter the author analyzes the ritualistic inner experience in female sacred places. The author shows the centrality of the body and the “ritual of the body in motion.” As mentioned in the book’s introduction, in the Holy Land, places of veneration and rituals are based on canonical texts or mythologies of particular saints. As such, the assumption was that rituals are a product of texts and their translation into action. However, this chapter shows different dynamics of these rituals. Although the canon and its physical manifestations are robust, it is mostly “the body in motion” that shapes the experience.

Introduction

This chapter is an introduction to this book. The author explains the main question of the book, terms and theories. The theoretical explanations are divided into 4 fields, Body-Based Rituals, Materiality, Place, and Landscapes. She goes on to explain the Comparative Analysis and Methods of This Book and the case studies chosen for the analysis of this book.