Glenn Bowman
Biographic Data
| ID | 3617484 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Glenn Bowman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Glenn |
| FAMILY NAME | Bowman |
| SIGNATURE | BOWMAN G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kent |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6521-4363 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 125 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Post-Ottoman Coexistence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict
In Southeast Europe, the Balkans, and Middle East, scholars often refer to the "peaceful coexistence" of various religious and ethnic groups under the Ottoman Empire before ethnonationalist conflicts dissolved that shared space and created legacies of division. Post-Ottoman Coexistence interrogates ways of living together and asks what practices enabled centuries of cooperation and sharing, as well as how and when such sharing was disrupted. Cont…
Sharing the Sacra: The Politics and Pragmatics of Intercommunal Relations around Holy Places
“Shared” sites, where members of distinct, or factionally opposed, religious communities interact—or fail to interact—is the focus of this volume. Chapters based on fieldwork from such diverse sites as India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, China, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and Vietnam demonstrate how sharing and tolerance are both more complex and multifaceted than they are often recognized to be. By including both historical processes (the development of Chin…
Strategies of dealing with the other: Coexistence and exclusion
The specific character of Ortiz’s theory of transculturation is dependent on the Cuban context in which, and for which, it was elaborated. This article, opening with a sketch of Ortiz’s place of upbringing, Menorca, as a site of brutal struggles for identity hegemony over centuries, looks at the Mediterranean context of intercommunal mixing and antagonism, arguing that rather than an ajiaco (stew) it is a field of contest wherein the coexistence …
After Society
In the early 1980s, when the contributors to this volume completed their graduate training at Oxford, the conditions of practice in anthropology were undergoing profound change. Professionally, the immediate postcolonial period was over and neoliberal reforms were marginalizing the social sciences. Analytically, the poststructuralist critique of the notion of ‘society’ challenged a discipline that dubbed itself as ‘social’. Here self-ethnography …
After Society: Anthropological Trajectories Out of Oxford
"In the early 1980s, when the contributors to this volume completed their graduate training at Oxford, the conditions of practice in anthropology were undergoing profound change. Professionally, the immediate postcolonial period was over and neoliberal reforms were marginalizing the social sciences. Analytically, the poststructuralist critique of the notion of 'society' challenged a discipline that dubbed itself as 'social'. Here self-ethnography…
After Society: Anthropological Trajectories Out of Oxford
Shared Shrines and the Discourse of Clashing Civilisations
Since I began, in the early 1980s, to research Muslim-Christian cohabitation of religious sites, I have been convinced of the political importance of making practices of intercommunal ‘sharing’ ethnographically visible. Thirty-five years of that work, spread across the Eastern Mediterranean (Israel/Palestine, Yugoslavia and its successor states, and both sides of the Cyprus divide), have not only revealed contemporary and historical choreographie…
Encystation: Containment and Control in Israeli Ideology and Practice
The radical closure of Gaza serves here as an extreme example of a process of isolation and immiseration of national enemies that is deeply rooted in Israeli ideology and practices of state formation. I use encystation to reveal the dual meaning of the term-that of radical isolation of diseased elements and that of protecting a fetus within a womb-and to show how the two meanings connect with respective Israeli policies toward Palestinians and Je…
Rage A Psychoanalytical Interpretation
Violence before Identity: An Analysis of Identity Politics
Violence is a force for creating integrities as well as one that violates, pollutes and destroys already existing entities. In this paper I address the role of what Ariella Azoulay terms the 'political imagination' in constituting social aggregates committed to the defence of a community itself brought into being by the imagining of a force dedicated to its destruction. Such a group's perception of what Laclau and Mouffe call an 'antagonism' spur…
Walking Palestine: 25 Journeys into the West Bank, and Palestine (Bradt Travel Guides)
Additional informationNotes on contributorsGlenn BowmanGlenn Bowman is a reader in social anthropology at the University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom, and has been engaged in fieldwork in Jerusalem and Bayt Sahur since 1983
A Weeping on the Road to Bethlehem: Contestation over the Uses of Rachel's Tomb
This paper examines the case of Rachel's Tomb, a shrine revered at various times by various combinations of Muslims, Christians and Jews, looking at how the increasingly incommensurate ideas of local inhabitants and immigrant Jews about how the holy place should be approached led initially to a spatial separation within the shrine and then to violent, and exclusive, battles over sectarian (and increasingly 'national') properties
Popular Palestinian Practices around Holy Places and Those Who Oppose Them: An Historical Introduction
A long history of intercommunal relations around local holy places in historic Palestine (a history which sadly seems to be coming to a close in the current day) draws attention to what precisely is the character of the attachment felt by local residents to sacred sites. Muslim-Christian 'sharing' of holy places (maqam, plural maqamat) can be seen to express a dependency on powers perceived of as resident in a site, and the nominal affiliation of…
Sharing the Sacra
“Shared” sites, where members of distinct, or factionally opposed, religious communities interact—or fail to interact—is the focus of this volume. Chapters based on fieldwork from such diverse sites as India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, China, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and Vietnam demonstrate how sharing and tolerance are both more complex and multifaceted than they are often recognized to be. By including both historical processes (the development of Chin…
After Yugoslavia
An investigation of recent developments and trends within the Yugoslav successor states since the signing of the Dayton Agreements in Autumn 1995. This book offers a distinctive and desirable perspect
Sharing the sacra: The Politics and Pragmatics of Inter-Communal Relations Around Holy Places
In Dubious Battle on the Plains of Heav'n: The Politics of Possession in Jerusalem's Holy Sepulchre
Debates about the "divisibility" or "sharing" of religious sites continue to engage historians, political scientists and anthropologists. This paper assesses the issue of agency in two of the more salient critiques of religious coexistence before approaching the Holy Sepulchre, or Anastasis, as a site for investigating the way various constituencies, most significantly visiting pilgrims and resident monks, have dealt with issues of "sharing". It …
Identifying versus identifying with ‘the Other’: Reflections on the siting of the subject in anthropological discourse
Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval
At Home Abroad. The Field Site as Second Home
Israel's wall and the logic of encystation
It seems vital, in the face of escalating Israeli expansionism in the Palestinian Territories and obstructionism in the "Peace Process," to theorize the cultural foundations of a process of containment and dispossession of Palestinians that can no longer convincingly be seen as mere strategy. Symptomatic of the Israeli state program is the "wall" (a.k.a., "the Security Fence" or the "Apartheid Wall") and its radical encroachment into territory de…
Constitutive violence and the nationalist imaginary. Antagonism and defensive solidarity in 'Palestine' and 'former Yugoslavia
Precis: this paper examines the processes through which nationalist movements developed among both the Palestinian people and those national communities which made up the late Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia so as to examine the role played by 'antagonism' in what the paper terms the 'nationalist imaginary'.Fundamental to the text's respective analyses of nation formation and state dissolution is the concept that the imagined violence…
A Statement From the Incoming Editor
About a Wall
In the summer of 2003 I spent several weeks in Beit Sahour, the West Bank town in which I've carried out fieldwork since the late 1980s, observing -amongst other things -the rapacious hunger with which Israel's 'Anti-Terrorist Fence' (more commonly known as 'The Wall') consumed Palestinian lands and infrastructure, biting off roads, wells, housing projects, community centres and other supports of Palestinian life (see my photographs on http://www…
Anthropology as art, art as anthropology: Tate Modern, London
Conference reviewed:Fieldworks: Dialogues between art and anthropology: Tate Modern, London, 26-28 September 2003
Fucking Tourists: Sexual Relations and Tourism in Jerusalem's Old City
Nationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-Occupied Territories
This article approaches transformations of social identity in situations of nationalist conflict through an examination of Christian and Muslim Palestinian interpretations of, and practices at, two shrines on the Israeli-Occupied West Bank. The semantic multivocality of one holy place, studied in the early 1980s, is seen to reflect the diversity of interests of the various communities which revere it. The other shrine, studied during the Palestin…
In Dubious Battle on the Plains of Heav'n: The Politics of Possession in Jerusalem's Holy Sepulchre
Debates about the "divisibility" or "sharing" of religious sites continue to engage historians, political scientists and anthropologists. This paper assesses the issue of agency in two of the more salient critiques of religious coexistence before approaching the Holy Sepulchre, or Anastasis, as a site for investigating the way various constituencies, most significantly visiting pilgrims and resident monks, have dealt with issues of "sharing". It …
Constitutive violence and the nationalist imaginary. Antagonism and defensive solidarity in Palestine and former Yugoslavia
Constitutive violence and the nationalist imaginary. Antagonism and defensive solidarity in 'Palestine' and 'former Yugoslavia
Precis: this paper examines the processes through which nationalist movements developed among both the Palestinian people and those national communities which made up the late Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia so as to examine the role played by 'antagonism' in what the paper terms the 'nationalist imaginary'.Fundamental to the text's respective analyses of nation formation and state dissolution is the concept that the imagined violence…
Israel's wall and the logic of encystation
It seems vital, in the face of escalating Israeli expansionism in the Palestinian Territories and obstructionism in the "Peace Process," to theorize the cultural foundations of a process of containment and dispossession of Palestinians that can no longer convincingly be seen as mere strategy. Symptomatic of the Israeli state program is the "wall" (a.k.a., "the Security Fence" or the "Apartheid Wall") and its radical encroachment into territory de…
Encystation: Containment and Control in Israeli Ideology and Practice
The radical closure of Gaza serves here as an extreme example of a process of isolation and immiseration of national enemies that is deeply rooted in Israeli ideology and practices of state formation. I use encystation to reveal the dual meaning of the term-that of radical isolation of diseased elements and that of protecting a fetus within a womb-and to show how the two meanings connect with respective Israeli policies toward Palestinians and Je…
Migrant labour: Constructing homeland in the exilic imagination
This article uses case studies of the 6th-century BCE return of the Babylonian exiles to Judea and of the 19th century elaboration by Theodor Herzl of the project of Zionism as means of examining the wider issue of the relation of identity to the experience of exile. It argues that persons and communities which perceive themselves as displaced construct their `authentic' identities in terms not of some sort of originary culture but with defensive…
Post-Ottoman Coexistence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict
In Southeast Europe, the Balkans, and Middle East, scholars often refer to the "peaceful coexistence" of various religious and ethnic groups under the Ottoman Empire before ethnonationalist conflicts dissolved that shared space and created legacies of division. Post-Ottoman Coexistence interrogates ways of living together and asks what practices enabled centuries of cooperation and sharing, as well as how and when such sharing was disrupted. Cont…
The two deaths of basem rishmawi: Identity constructions and reconstructions in a muslim-christian palestinian community
This article illuminates political transformations in a West Bank Palestinian town over the past decade by examining the ways stories of a killing which took place in 1981 produced radically different conceptions of community during the period of intensive intifada mobilization and subsequently as the Palestinian National Authority established its rule in the wake of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Agreements. The paper examines how political arrang…
Shared Shrines and the Discourse of Clashing Civilisations
Since I began, in the early 1980s, to research Muslim-Christian cohabitation of religious sites, I have been convinced of the political importance of making practices of intercommunal ‘sharing’ ethnographically visible. Thirty-five years of that work, spread across the Eastern Mediterranean (Israel/Palestine, Yugoslavia and its successor states, and both sides of the Cyprus divide), have not only revealed contemporary and historical choreographie…
Beyond Othering
Unholy Struggle on Holy Ground: Conflict and Interpretation in Jerusalem
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…
Violence before Identity: An Analysis of Identity Politics
Violence is a force for creating integrities as well as one that violates, pollutes and destroys already existing entities. In this paper I address the role of what Ariella Azoulay terms the 'political imagination' in constituting social aggregates committed to the defence of a community itself brought into being by the imagining of a force dedicated to its destruction. Such a group's perception of what Laclau and Mouffe call an 'antagonism' spur…
Anthropology as art, art as anthropology: Tate Modern, London
Conference reviewed:Fieldworks: Dialogues between art and anthropology: Tate Modern, London, 26-28 September 2003
Icaes, Williamsburg
Unholy Struggle on Holy Ground: Conflict and Interpretation in Jerusalem
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…
Pilgrimage Conference
Fucking Tourists: Sexual Relations and Tourism in Jerusalem's Old City
Christian, Muslim Palestinians Confront Sectarianism: Religion and Political Identity in Beit Sahour
C: Reviews and notes bibliographies and works of reference
WORLD DIRECTORY OF MINORITIES. Edited by MINORITY RIGHTS GROUP. (Longman International Reference.) London, Longman, [1989]. 427pp. £40. CONCORDANCE ET INDICES DE LA TRADITION MUSULMANE. Tome VII: INDICES. Edited by WIM RAVEN and JAN JUST WITKAM. Leiden, Brill, 1988. XV, 421pp. Hfl. 400.‐ ISLAMIC NAMES. By ANNEMARIE SCHIMMEL. (Islamic Surveys.) Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1989. xii, 137pp. £25. MORISCOS: REPERTORIO BIBLIOGRÁFICO. Compil…
Social/Cultural Anthropology: The Saint of Beersheba. Alex Weingrod
Nationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-Occupied Territories
This article approaches transformations of social identity in situations of nationalist conflict through an examination of Christian and Muslim Palestinian interpretations of, and practices at, two shrines on the Israeli-Occupied West Bank. The semantic multivocality of one holy place, studied in the early 1980s, is seen to reflect the diversity of interests of the various communities which revere it. The other shrine, studied during the Palestin…
Nation, xénophobie et fantasme: La logique de la violence nationale dans l'ancienne Yougoslavie
Le rationalisme moderniste ne nous aide pas dans l’analyse du nationalisme ou de la haine nationale. A la suite des élections yougoslaves de 1990 sont arrivés au pouvoir des partis politiques prétendant représenter le peuple, le groupe national dominant dans chaque république et affirmant que leur développement était freiné par les autres. Si la haine nationale a été provoquée d’en haut, la réponse populaire a tout de même été enthousiaste. Après…
To Rule Jerusalem
Icaes, Williamsburg
The two deaths of basem rishmawi: Identity constructions and reconstructions in a muslim-christian palestinian community
This article illuminates political transformations in a West Bank Palestinian town over the past decade by examining the ways stories of a killing which took place in 1981 produced radically different conceptions of community during the period of intensive intifada mobilization and subsequently as the Palestinian National Authority established its rule in the wake of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Agreements. The paper examines how political arrang…
Migrant labour: Constructing homeland in the exilic imagination
This article uses case studies of the 6th-century BCE return of the Babylonian exiles to Judea and of the 19th century elaboration by Theodor Herzl of the project of Zionism as means of examining the wider issue of the relation of identity to the experience of exile. It argues that persons and communities which perceive themselves as displaced construct their `authentic' identities in terms not of some sort of originary culture but with defensive…
The violence in identity
Implicit in all the above senses of the term ‘violate’ is the concept of an integral space broken into and, through that breaking, desecrated. Thus, in its passive grammatical sense, ‘violate’ indicates something ‘characterised by impurity or defilement’ as in, to use the Oxford English Dictionary’s own example, ‘Take home the lesson to thee. . . . Who makest of this lovely land, God’s garden, A nation violate, corrupt, accurst’.2 The primary Oxf…
Beyond Othering
Constitutive violence and the nationalist imaginary. Antagonism and defensive solidarity in Palestine and former Yugoslavia
About a Wall
In the summer of 2003 I spent several weeks in Beit Sahour, the West Bank town in which I've carried out fieldwork since the late 1980s, observing -amongst other things -the rapacious hunger with which Israel's 'Anti-Terrorist Fence' (more commonly known as 'The Wall') consumed Palestinian lands and infrastructure, biting off roads, wells, housing projects, community centres and other supports of Palestinian life (see my photographs on http://www…
Anthropology as art, art as anthropology: Tate Modern, London
Conference reviewed:Fieldworks: Dialogues between art and anthropology: Tate Modern, London, 26-28 September 2003
A Statement From the Incoming Editor
At Home Abroad. The Field Site as Second Home
Israel's wall and the logic of encystation
It seems vital, in the face of escalating Israeli expansionism in the Palestinian Territories and obstructionism in the "Peace Process," to theorize the cultural foundations of a process of containment and dispossession of Palestinians that can no longer convincingly be seen as mere strategy. Symptomatic of the Israeli state program is the "wall" (a.k.a., "the Security Fence" or the "Apartheid Wall") and its radical encroachment into territory de…
Constitutive violence and the nationalist imaginary. Antagonism and defensive solidarity in 'Palestine' and 'former Yugoslavia
Precis: this paper examines the processes through which nationalist movements developed among both the Palestinian people and those national communities which made up the late Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia so as to examine the role played by 'antagonism' in what the paper terms the 'nationalist imaginary'.Fundamental to the text's respective analyses of nation formation and state dissolution is the concept that the imagined violence…
Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval
Identifying versus identifying with ‘the Other’: Reflections on the siting of the subject in anthropological discourse
In Dubious Battle on the Plains of Heav'n: The Politics of Possession in Jerusalem's Holy Sepulchre
Debates about the "divisibility" or "sharing" of religious sites continue to engage historians, political scientists and anthropologists. This paper assesses the issue of agency in two of the more salient critiques of religious coexistence before approaching the Holy Sepulchre, or Anastasis, as a site for investigating the way various constituencies, most significantly visiting pilgrims and resident monks, have dealt with issues of "sharing". It …
Sharing the Sacra
“Shared” sites, where members of distinct, or factionally opposed, religious communities interact—or fail to interact—is the focus of this volume. Chapters based on fieldwork from such diverse sites as India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, China, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and Vietnam demonstrate how sharing and tolerance are both more complex and multifaceted than they are often recognized to be. By including both historical processes (the development of Chin…
Sociology (24 works) · History (21 works) · Political science (19 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Ancient history (12 works) · Politics (12 works) · History (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Archaeology (8 works)