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Humanities at Stanford
About the Authors
Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert is an Associate Professor and Graduate Director of Religious Studies. She is also Co-Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. Her research interests include gender in Jewish culture, the discourses of orthodoxy versus heresy and the connection between religion and space. She is author of Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature and is currently working a book entitled, Replacing the Nation: Judaism, Diaspora and the Neighborhood.
Byron Bland is Associate Director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation and a Research Associate at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. His research interests include conflict resolution, negotiation, peace processes and post-conflict peace building and he is author of Marching and Rising: The Rituals of Small Differences and Great Violence in Northern Ireland.
Thinking Twice : BOUNDARIES
November 2009
In each edition of Thinking Twice two Stanford scholars explore the same issue from their uniquely informed point of view.
| FORUM QUESTION: | As societies become more globalized, how important will boundaries be? |
Territory and Religious Identityby Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert | What then should we do?by Byron Bland |
One of the critical issues in current cultural politics is the relationship between religious identities and territorial claims. On a national scale this often conflicted relationship engenders territorial disputes, and in the worst case scenario territorial wars, whether one thinks of the Middle East, of Ireland, or India and Pakistan, to name but a few examples. What, however, happens once we adjust our focus to a smaller scale, namely the local? And what is the relationship between the local and the national identity, once religion enters the picture? Consider these two examples: In 1999, the year before I arrived at Stanford, the local Jewish orthodox community advocated the establishment of ritual parameters to circumscribe the neighborhood comprising most of the Jewish homes associated with the synagogue. The establishment of such parameters (referred to in Hebrew shorthand as eruv), based mostly on preexisting markers in the urban landscape such as fences, walls, telephone poles and their wires, creeks, etc., would allow Sabbath observant Jews to circumvent an otherwise strict prohibition for that day, namely to carry or push anything out of their home into the public sphere. Prohibited items include items such as strollers, wheelchairs, keys, etc. | In the summer of 1997, I stood in the Drumcree community of Portadown (Northern Ireland) and watched the Orange Order march down the Gravaghy Road. The road had been cleared of republican protestors, and a major riot had erupted in the aftermath. It was the biggest outbreak of violence in more than a decade. Because most of the fighting took place around 1:30 AM, I was late getting to the barracks and therefore barred from the front-lines by several rows of armed British soldiers. I struck up a conversation with two boys whose youth prevented them from participating in the violent confrontations breaking out around us. With surprising glee, they told me about the petrol bombs stored on Obins Street and what they would do with them if they could only get there. I asked if I might take their picture, and they struck a pose by turning their backs in order to remain anonymous and holding high an empty coke bottle as a symbol of the petrol bomb they might one day throw at their arch enemy. Their individual identities were submerged in the communal identity being violently forged that morning.
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