Voices of the Ritual

Devotion to Female Saints and Shrines in the Holy Land

Nurit Stadler

Oxford Ritual Studies

Offers a unique analysis of modern rituals venerating female saints
Examines the importance of the body and material experience in ritualistic practice
Analyzes the revival of female saint shrines among religious groups in Israel and Palestine

Voices of the Ritual

Devotion to Female Saints and Shrines in the Holy Land

Nurit Stadler

Description

Voices of the Ritual analyzes the revival of rituals performed at female saint shrines in the Middle East. In the midst of turbulent political contention over land and borders, Nurit Stadler shows, religious minorities lay claim to space through rituals enacted at sacred spaces in the Holy Land. Using ethnographic analysis, Stadler explores the rise of these rituals, their focus on the body, female materiality, and their place in the Israeli-Palestinian landscape.

Stadler examines the varied features of the practice and implications of the rituals, looking at themes of femininity and material experience. She considers the role of the body in rituals that represent the act of birth or the circle of life and that aim to foster an intimate connection between the female saint and her worshippers. Stadler underscores the political, cultural, and spatial elements of this practice, bringing attention to how religious minorities (Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Druze, among others) have utilized these rituals to assert their right to the land. Voices of the Ritual offers a valuable assessment of religious ritual practice that encrypts female themes into a landscape that has historically been defined by war and conflict.

Voices of the Ritual

Devotion to Female Saints and Shrines in the Holy Land

Nurit Stadler

Oxford Ritual Studies

Voices of the Ritual

Devotion to Female Saints and Shrines in the Holy Land

Nurit Stadler

Oxford Ritual Studies

Author Information

Nurit Stadler is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is the author of Yeshiva Fundamentalism: Piety, Gender and Resistance in the Ultra-Orthodox World and A Well-Worn Tallis for a New Ceremony, and has published numerous papers on sacred shrines and pilgrimage.

Voices of the Ritual

Devotion to Female Saints and Shrines in the Holy Land

Nurit Stadler

Oxford Ritual Studies

Reviews and Awards

"Voices of the Ritual is a wonderful achievement by a fine scholar. It enriches the study of ritual, place, gender, borders, politics, religion and more. Stadler takes us with her among pilgrims and ritualists honoring female saints in female spaces. At least, that is their ambition. Frustrations, marginalization and transgressions compose constraints and contests over the fragile creativity and enchantment of intimate devotion performed materially by bodies in places." -- Graham Harvey, author of Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life

"In this ethnographically rich study, Nurit Stadler accompanies us through the complex ritual worlds of different religious communities and their female saints and shrines. Through her exploration of bodily practices and the ritual appropriation of contested spaces, we discover unexpected dimensions of devotion in the Holy Land." -- Anna Fedele, author of Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France

"Stadler's remarkable work contains one of the richest accounts of ritual I have encountered in years. This is a book about sacred space, landscape, gender, borders, the politics of possession, and much more-all woven into a text that guides us through the contested shrines, streets and territories of a Holy Land that constantly appeals to the past and yet is ever-changing." -- Simon Coleman, Chancellor Jackman Professor, University of Toronto

"A path-breaking journey within the embodied interiors of women's shrines and into their rituals of death, fertility, and rebirth in the Holy Land. Stadler's remarkable study demonstrates decisively how these rituals, intended to create and protect family units, torque with intensity into struggles over the lived-in terrain of Israel/Palestine." -- Don Handelman, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, The Hebrew University