Neo-Structuralism and the Contestation of Sacred Place in Biblical Israel

Abstract

One of the most interesting features of anthropological discussions (and those in related disciplines) of sacred place has been the issue of contestation both in relation to the construction of sacred place and in the construction of theorizing about such spaces. This aspect, however, has often been ignored or underplayed in structuralist or structuralist-functionalist analyses (as for example in many of Victor Turner's discussions of pilgrimage). This is also in part true of my earlier structuralist analysis of this subject, God's Place in the World (1998). That volume examined a range of different models of sacred space found in Judaism from the Biblical to the modern period. While the discussion of Biblical use of sacred space did touch on alternative models of space (centralized and decentralized models), the issues of contestation and a theoretical basis for a more complex understanding of structure were not developed.