Grounds for Sharing --Occasions for Conflict: An Inquiry into the Social Foundations of Cohabitation and Antagonism

Grounds for Sharing -- Occasions for Conflict: An Inquiry into the Social Foundations of Cohabitation and Antagonism Glenn Bowman School of Anthropology and Conservation University of Kent Canterbury, United Kingdom Although the title of this collective project refers to ‘shared spaces’, we are for the most part discussing places rather than spaces when we talk of the social aspects of cohabitation and/or antagonism. Places in this context are lived in spaces or, in more academic terms, sites of inhabitance, while space denotes an area, of general or unlimited extent, indifferently providing the physical setting for such places; hence the Oxford English Dictionary notes that ‘place’ is “a space that can be occupied…a particular spot or area inhabited or equented by people; a city, a town, a village”1. Spaces are far more easily ‘shared’ than places, if ‘sharing’ is the correct term to use when referring to co-existing in contiguous space. When suitably organised, entities can move past and around each other in space without effecting significant contact. Movement in shared places, however, entails negotiation, commensality and at times conflict insofar a persons occupying place not only co-exist with each other but are very much aware of the fact of that co-existence. In Michael Sorkin’s fascinating discussion of ‘traffic’ in Giving Ground: the Politics of Propinquity we see a modernist mode of organisation which channels persons and vehicles into non-intersecting pathways in order to give priority to unimpeded flow at the expense of relations between entities moving across the same terrain. Counterposed to this Sorkin shows us a more ‘traditional’ setting in which flow is impeded by repeated intersection and the necessary and mutually aware sharing of place: Modern city planning is structured around an armature of…conflict avoidance. Elevated highways, pedestrian skyways, subway systems and other movement technologies clari relations between classes of vehicles for the sake of efficient flow….The result is a city altogether different om the older Indian cities with their indigenous styles of motion….Typically Indian traffic is completely mixed up, a slow-moving mass of cows and pedicabs, motor-rickshaws, trucks and buses, camels and people on foot, the antithesis of ‘efficient’ separation. Motion through this sluggish maelstrom does not proceed so much by absolute right as through a continuing process of local negotiation for the right of passage (Sorkin 1999: 2). In the latter case we are shown not only a space occupied by persons and entities but a place in which those inhabiting the terrain are linked together by what he terms “a primal rite of giving ground…the deference to one’s neighbour that urban existence daily demands” (Ibid). Here, rather than a skein of distinct and mutually disengaged pathways encompassed within a common space we see a place inhabited by a diversity of persons and objects, shared through processes of mutual recognition and accommodation. I’d like to look further at this issue of ‘giving ground’ in the context of shared holy places so as to evaluate how such places are shared, what sorts of situations support that sharing and what sorts of events or developments disrupt it. Barbara Karatsioli’s paper, in this volume, investigates neighbourhood and the way that within a neighbourhood a multitude of different groups of people are tied together into community by networks which variously engage them as individuals and groups. Foregrounded by her examination of how shared practices of being in a neighbourhood enable both the recognition of the difference of others and the aming of that difference as something rarely conflictual or problematic is the issue of whether we can see local communities, and the set of relations which constitute them, as ⒈ place, n.1. OED Online. March 2013. Oxford University Press (accessed April 19, 2013), see also Casey 1997, Casey 2002 and Massey 2005. Bowman: Grounds for Sharing -- 1 -- forms of what Bourdieu called habitus². Bourdieu, in the rather dense terminology of his Logic of Practice, writes that [t]he conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, a principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or and express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them (Bourdieu 1990 [orig. 1980]: 53). Practices of interaction and negotiation of place experienced through living in a community imprint themselves in individuals as pre-conscious dispositions to act, and interpret, in the future in accordance with those earlier experiences. A person’s dispositions are neither habits nor consciously applied rules but tacit knowledges, oen embodied (see Mauss 1979 [orig. 1935]), learned through the “prestigious imitation…[of ] actions which have succeeded and which he has seen successfully performed by people in whom he has confidence and who have authority over him” (Ibid. 101). As Mauss, and Bourdieu aer him, make clear, it is this process of internalising social practices (actions, interpretations, selfpresentations) which impose the social on the individual and which, in effect, map the neighbourhood -and its modes of incorporating and negotiating with internal difference -- onto the selves who traverse it. ‘Giving ground’, recognising the right of the other to be in the same place as oneself as well as the rites of negotiating her presence, is a core element of the habitus of neighbourhood. Two ethnographic studies, one on South India and one on the North, exempli the ways in which neighbourhoods constituted by nominally distinct religious communities (communities which are elsewhere mutually antagonistic) are able to share place peacefully. The first text, Jackie Assayag’s At the Confluence of Two Rivers -- Muslims and Hindus in South India (2004), discusses what might be called a situational syncretism whereby Muslims and Hindus are able to co-celebrate at each others’ religious festivals because, in the course of the communities living together for nearly a millenium, cultural elements which might have in the past been the exclusive properties of distinct communities have become part of an annual cycle of neighbourhood practices and thus, in effect, common property: “The religion of Mohammed insinuated itself very gradually in a Hindu environment already segmented by numerous castes, sects and local traditions. This mixture of discreet elements gave rise to many subtle and complex forms of acculturation caused by alteration, addition, superimposition and innovation, which vary om region to region. So by absorbing elements that were no longer either strictly Hindu or Muslim, but may have been the result of an earlier assimilation, these cultural forms allowed movement between systems of action and representation that seemed to be mutually exclusive but were capable of changing over several generations” (Assayag 2004: 41). Anna Bigelow’s Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India (Bigelow 2010, see also Bowman 2013) treats a seemingly more conscious process of inter-communal cohabitation in the town of Malerkotla, located in a far more conflicted region (the Punjab). Bigelow notes that the town’s cultivated tolerance follows om Malerkotlan residents’ horror of the sectarian cleansing that afflicted the Punjab during Partition (as well as of the violence of subsequent sectarian riots taking place in the region over the past few decades) and om their recognition that “all religious groups are in some regard vulnerable…[they are therefore] cognizant that their well being depends on their positive relations with others” (Bigelow 2010: 10). She also, however, demonstrates fulsomely that overt intercommunalism is ⒉ The concept of habitus, itself a Latin translation of the Greek hexis, has a long genealogy stretching back nearly two and a half millenia om Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977 [orig. 1972]) and Logic of Practice (1990 [orig. 1980]) via Mauss’ Les Techniques du Corps (1935, see also 1979) and Aquinas’s Summa Theologica (la2ae, 49-54) to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (1098b33). Bowman: Grounds for Sharing -- 2 -- very much grounded on the town’s “practice of everyday pluralism” (Ibid: 217) and is a projection of “the vibrant community life in the streets and homes and shrines of a locale” (Ibid: 223). In each case the ‘cultural property’ of one sectarian community is seen by members of adjacent communities as theirs as well, not because they wish to appropriate it but because, via a process of living with the ‘owners’ of the property and engaging with them in their quotidian lives, that property and the practices surrounding it have come to be seen as common. Whereas in some cases, such as those described by Assayag, sharing is for the most part unconscious because the traces of the ownership of significant elements of cultural property have been effaced by time, in others, as in Bigelow’s Malerkotla, practices of mutual engagement in religious festivals and shrine worship are conscious moves to affirm community solidarities across sectarian borders. In both instances, however, sharing in religious celebrations and festivities is an extension of the habitus of a shared communal life³ This is not, of course, to say that an identical ‘script’ of community response is instilled in all a community’s members by their participation in a neighbourhood. While the term ‘disposition’ suggests a tendency to interpret situations and act in response to them in certain ways familiar om past engagements with similar events, Bourdieu’s work, like Mauss’ before it, makes clear that there is ‘play’ in the system of application allowing for accommodating specificities of context, of individuality, and of intention. A disposition is a proclivity rather than an imperative. Part of what accounts for the lability of persons’s response in communities in general and mixed communities in particular is the multitude of identities at play in any individual’s experience of everyday life. The concept of ‘situational identities’⁴ enables us to recognise a multitude of identity contexts existing in even the least complex of societies, and when a community complexifies to the extent of encompassing multiple ethnic and/or religious identities the opportunities for a proliferation of identity strategies expands commensurately. At different moments of interaction within the community, different dispositions will be called to the fore. Thus in one instance you might be working with someone as a co-worker or in an employee-employer relation whereas in another, sometimes even contiguous with the first, you might be called on to represent a family or a religious denomination. Each of these situations will call on distinct dispositions and may in fact call for enunciating those dispositions in ways that improvise on previous enactments. What is important to stress is that none of these enacted identities are primary other than in situations -- some of which will be elaborated below -- in which the primacy of one of those identities is staged as more important than, and either subsuming or obviating, others. Recognition of the situatedness of identity articulations allows us to understand the ways numerous linkages can be made between diverse persons within a community, but also to see that certain events or developments might render previously amenable identities incommensurate and thus conflictual. Nonetheless Karatsioli’s study of neighbourhood bonds, like Bigelow’s investigation of Malerkotla’s “daily work of community maintenance” (2010: 122), indicates that in most instances communities will seek to perpetuate communal cohesion. The concept of habitus makes clear that the degree to which people are who they are is a consequence of the appropriateness of their learned dispositions to settings the same as, or not unlike, those in which they imbued those dispositions. Radical reworkings of those settings -- either through intercommunal conflict and separation or through migration or exile -- threaten selfhood. There are, of course, circumstances which bring about the ⒊ See too the essays collected in Albera & Couroucli (2009 and 2012) and Bowman (2012). ⒋ ‘Situational identity’ is a concept generally assumed to have been generated by, if not specifically used in, Erving Goffman’s theory of the dramaturgical construction of social identity developed in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). Max Gluckman had, however, elaborated the concept of ‘situational selection’ in 1940 whereby individuals shape their behaviours, in different social contexts, so as to conform to the values and practices of groups they there associate with: “the shiing membership of groups in different situations is the functioning of the structure, for an individual’s membership of a particular group in a particular situation is determined by the motives and values influencing him in that situation. Individuals can thus live coherent lives by situational selection om a medley of contradictory values, ill-assorted beliefs, and varied interests and techniques” (Gluckman 1958 [orig. 1940]: 26) Bowman: Grounds for Sharing -- 3 -- agmentation of communities, but these oen come about, as Karatsioli points out, through external influences which, through direct action or the indirect impact of rumours or propaganda, creates distrust and antagonism between elements of the community (compare Tone Bringa’s film “We Are All Neighbours” [Bringa 1993]). Le to its own devices a community will not only celebrate its social arrangement as natural and heimlich (homelike) but may, as in the instances described by Marcel Mauss in his study of magic, imagine the domain of its everyday life as knitted together by a skein of connections deing scientific conceptions of cause and effect and allowing efficacy at a distance through the manipulation of objects or settings associated via contiguity, similarity or opposition (see Mauss 1972 [orig. 1950]). Here persons, powers and things associated in everyday experience are seen as connected even when literally apart. For Mauss magic works by laying over the place of the everyday a distorting mirror which not only draws together diffuse elements but also allows power to operate across its surfaces. “In society there is an inexhaustible source of diffuse magic….Everything happens as though society, om a distance, formed a kind of huge magical conclave around [the magician]” (Ibid: 138). For Mauss rites can bring about “direct, automatic efficacy, without the presence of differentiated spiritual intermediaries” (ibid 136) so that, in the case of Dayak women engaged in war dances to support their men, who have gone off to battle, “time and space no longer exist; they are on the field of battle….Their sensibilities are overwhelmed by the awareness of their existence as a group of women and the social role they are playing in relation to the warriors, an awareness which is translated into sentiments about their own power and the relation of this power with that of their menfolk” (ibid). *** I mention this embodied sense of a habitus accessible through magic and ritual not so much to explain the mechanisms of how shrine practices can effect cures or the redirection of fortune but to suggest that the powers people imagine as working in and on their world are social powers, imagined in the image of their own experience of the world. Let me expand on this using an ethnographic encounter I had in Kicevo, Macedonia in April 200⒍ I had been researching, with the help of Elizabeta Koneska of the National Museum of Macedonia, Muslim and Orthodox Christian uses of Sveti Bogoroditsa Prechista (the church of the Holy Mother of God Most Innocent) outside of Kicevo, itself a mixed Muslim and Christian town. In the course of examining the context of shared shrine practices, we interviewed the imam of the local Sunni mosque. He, trained in the renowned Faculty of Islamic Studies in Sarajevo, responded to our queries about Muslims attending the nearby Sveti Bogoroditsa monastery by asserting strongly that he had never gone there, and never would. He nonetheless went on to explain that he would advise congregationists to go to the shrine for help with particular problems because “the world of demons, like our world, is made up of Christians and Muslims. When someone is afflicted by a Muslim demon I can deal with the problem, but when someone is troubled by a Christian demon there is nothing I can do, so I send them to the church” (interview Kicevo, 30 April 2006). What is of interest here, besides the concept of a mirror world of demons which replicates the demography of the lived world, is that -- in this local context -- the imam seems to see no contradiction between this vision of the interaction of the demonic and the human worlds and that of a more Orthodox Sunni theology with its considerably more strict definition of domains, borders and pollutions. When, as I will show later, the world of religious orthodoxy impinges upon local practices it disrupts this inter-communalism, asserting property and propriety issues at the expense of sharing. Here, however, relations between the human and the demonic world are analogous to those occurring in the quotidian world of social interaction, and rites and obeisances made in the human world engage an economy or reciprocity with the demonic. Just as the demonic world mirrors the intermixing of Muslim and Christian whilst maintaining the difference between the two, so too do movements within the ritual space of the church maintain that differentiation, even as Muslims ‘tap into’ Christian rituals to ward off Christian demons. Bowman: Grounds for Sharing -- 4 -- Sharing the space of the Sveti Bogoroditsa monastery’s chapel does not entail a syncretic blending of identities, just as interacting on the streets and in the markets of Kicevo and its satellite villages does not effect an effacement of sectarian identities (compare Lockwood 1975: esp. 195-211). Muslims within the walls of the church seem, on initial observation, to go through the same procedures of reverencing the saints and the sites of power as do the Christians: they circulate through the church, they light candles in ont of the icons (particularly those of the iconostasis before which they lay gis of clothing, towels, and sometimes money), they proceed to the rear le of the church where, like the Christians, they pass a string of cross-inscribed beads over their bodies three times before crawling three times through a passageway beneath a pair of healing icons towards a well om which, in leaving, they take water to splash on their faces and carry home in bottles for healing (see Bowman 2010: 206-209 for a more detailed description). Closer observation reveals that this apparent mimicry is subtly but significantly differentiated; Muslims, holding back om Christian groups, introduce small but important differences of deportment. They do not cross themselves, they bow their heads to but do not kiss the icons, and in praying they silently mouth Muslim prayers while holding their hands close to their chests in ont of them with their palms up. Muslims here ‘work’ an environment they know through the social world they share with their Christian neighbours and in so doing both engage in ritual acts which they’ve learned are efficacious om their neighbours (and their imam) and render appropriate obeisance to the powers resident in the place (the Virgin Mary, the saints, the Mother Superior and the nuns). At the same time they refuse to violate their own identities by sacrilegiously adopting the signifiers of Christians as though they were their own. Here, in a religious setting we have (albeit invisible on the part of the saints and the Virgin) an interaction analogous to what Sorkin describes in the dense streets of Indian cities -- “the continuing process of local negotiation for the right of passage” (Sorkin 1999: 2). *** The ‘sharing’ described above -- a sharing extending into religious places the same modes of inter-communal mixing one sees in the everyday interactions of neighbours in the streets and workplaces of the region -- differs substantially om the types of interactions one sees between strangers in sites they commonly revere, but not ‘in common’. I’ll try to resolve that seeming contradiction through the use of Slavoj Žižek’s rendering of Saul Kripke’s concept of the “rigid designator” (Kripke 1980). Žižek contends that the name for a phenomenon -- the rigid designator -- constitutes the ideological experience of the thing rather than the thing itself. Thus it is the word which, as a word, on the level of the signifier itself, unifies a given field, constitutes its identity. It is, so to speak, the word to which ‘things’ themselves refer to recognize themselves in their unity….It is not the real object which guarantees as the point of reference the unity and identity of a certain ideological experience − on the contrary it is the reference to a ‘pure’ signifier which gives unity and identity to our experience of historical reality itself (Žižek 1989: 95-−96 and 97, see also Vološinov 1973 [orig. 1929]: 79-80). Generally, in a world of shared experience, ‘rigid designators’ suffice to indicate objects and experiences common to those sharing that world, subsuming idiosyncrasies of personal experience or contextual application. However where quotidian experience is not shared, identical signifiers may conjure up very different signifieds for the communities using them, and the differences may in fact prove to be incommensurabilities. In earlier examinations of the politics of Palestinian identity before and aer Oslo (Bowman 1988 and Bowman 1994) I wrote of the ways the name ‘Palestine’ variously signified both a future homeland and a reunified people to communities in different locales of exile, both outside and inside the borders of historic Palestine. So long as those populations remained isolated om each other those disparities of understanding remained relatively unproblematic, but once Oslo effected a regathering of the Palestinians om the various sites of their dispersion serious conflicts erupted between groups over what Palestine should be, what Palestinians should be like, and who in fact was even truly Palestinian. Bowman: Grounds for Sharing -- 5 -- Something very similar happens at holy places with constituencies which gather om dispersed locales. Rather than neighbours sharing a sacred place we here talk of strangers coming together in the same space. The Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, known to Orthodox Christians as the Anastasis, lies at the centre of an extended web of narratives dealing with the death and resurrection of Jesus⁵. When I carried out field research on Jerusalem pilgrimage in the early 1980s, the Holy Sepulchre, as well as sites throughout the ‘holy city’ of Jerusalem, was visited by pilgrims om twenty seven distinct Christian denominations (these for the most part further divided into distinct national and linguistic communities) as well as by a multitude of tourists, many om Christian backgrounds but also many non-Christians. Five sects had places within the church -- the Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Armenians occupying the most territory with the Coptic and Syrian Orthodox holding tiny chapels -- while a sixth, the Ethiopians, held two external chapels and a rooop. Despite that sectarian topography the church was swept daily with crowds of pilgrims and tourists flowing indiscriminately through the corridors and chapels⁶. Such heterodoxy within a limited space could give rise to ‘traffic problems’ (pushing, expressions of hostility, and occasionally fights, usually between individuals not travelling in organised groups), but for the most part conflicts were avoided by what appeared to be spontaneous traffic management. This took place not through ‘local negotiation’ but because groups moving through the church effectively ‘enclaved’ themselves into mobile units flowing past and alongside each other without either engagement or significant recognition (see Bowman 2011: 376-377). These groups, oen made up of people coming om the same locale or brought together prior to the visit by an institution or a leader, constituted ‘in-groups’ able not only to insulate themselves om others but also, under the authority of a spiritual or secular guide associated with the respective groups, to ensure that their perceptions of the sites and events they encountered confirmed and built upon their expectations. Such a mode of engaging with holy sites⁷ protected the integrity of the connection between rigid designators and the experiences they signed while preventing the cognitive dissonance of other’s readings of those shared designators om disrupting that alignment. While individuals within these groups shared with each other an experience of place, they simultaneously related to members of other groups like bodies in space, moving past and around them without effecting significant contact. Thus while this site might nominally be termed a ‘shared space’, the character of this interaction throws doubt on the applicability of the phrase ‘shared’. *** The relations described above rarely become conflictual because, while those involved share the same space, they rarely share the same place. For the majority of pilgrims travelling in mobile enclaves the experience of holy places provides an intimate confirmation of the ‘reality’ of those sites and of the pilgrims’ personal relations to that ‘reality’; seeing the ‘real’ place, without being forced to acknowledge the dissonance of others’ interpretations of its reality, provides a sense of spiritual ownership that visitors take back to their places of origin⁸. ‘Strangers’ do not need literally to own the place because they do not live there. For them it is enough to experience the place and possess the knowledge of its reality. Relation to place is very different for the monks and priests who move through and live in the immediate vicinity of the church. They see themselves as ‘owning’ the holy places in a much more literal ⒌ Despite the difference in name the ‘place’ of the crucifixion, tomb (‘sepulchre’) and resurrection (‘anastasis’) of Jesus is established at the heart of New Testament biblical narratives so that that ‘place’ can be seen to function as a rigid designator even when ideas of its actual location can differ by several hundred metres (as with the Anglican Garden Tomb). ⒍ the Greek Orthodox Katholicon was, however, normally closed to all but the Greek Orthodox. ⒎ and these strategies were carried out throughout Holy Land pilgrimages and, one suspects, across other forms of organised travel -- see Schmidt 197⒐ ⒏ Those whose experiences do not live up to their expectations, or in fact seem to refute them, may be impelled to deny that the sites are the ‘real’ sites (either because the real sites are elsewhere or because they’ve been effaced by time) or may be forced to question their previous assumptions and beliefs. Either way, their response is to renounce any claim to the literal places. Bowman: Grounds for Sharing -- 6 -- way, and their conception of property -- and of propriety (a etymologically related term) -- can but be conflictual when others who are not of the same community have similar claims on the places and on modes of proper deportment within them. The Franciscan, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox brotherhoods who care for their respective chapels within the building⁹ are brought into daily, oen conflictual, contact with others whose senses of the place’s significance, the legitimacy of its possession, and the appropriateness of ritual activities carried out therein differ on numerous points. Although these men cohabit the Holy Sepulchre and its neighbourhood, they do not share locale and dispositions in the ways set out in the opening of this paper. Jeff Halper describes the monasteries of the Christian Quarter in the late Ottoman period as each enclosing radically different lifeworlds, redolent of the nations of the monks’ origins (Greece, France, Armenia) rather than of Jerusalem (Halper 1984). In many ways, at least in terms of self-sufficiency and ideological closure, the situations in the monasteries have not changed much. These insulated habitus produce literal neighbours who are, in effect, strangers. Unlike, however, pilgrims who move past each other in the holy places as migratory strangers, these hierophants are continuously forced to deal in ‘their’ holy sites with the presence of others who see those places as their own. For the monks and priests the holy sites in the ‘shared’ space of the Anastasis or Holy Sepulchre are organically connected to the ‘pure’ cultural spaces of the monasteries, and the presence of others in ‘their’ spaces, much less the attempt of those others to claim the spaces as ‘their’ own, is anathema. Whereas in the above cited situations of urban Indian traffic and Macedonian shrine sharing mutual investment in ‘common ground’ gives rise to generally amenable and decorous ritual processes of negotiation over copresence, in the Holy Sepulchre quotidian encounters between representatives of the respective churches are only prevented om routinely breaking into open violence by the regimen of the Status Quo, a system of spatial and temporal regulations initially imposed by the Ottoman state and currently maintained through fear of the open inter-communal warfare and state side-taking which its rejection would provoke¹⁰. At the core of this conflict is not a simple issue of property ownership; literal property can -- as the tenets of the Status Quo themselves assert -- be shared, albeit through complex ritual regimes. We are instead looking at issues more closely tied to propriety, and through that to identity. Monks and priests associated with the Holy Sepulchre are able, when outside of domains demarcated as sacred, to relate to secular locals and even to members of other aternities in non-conflictual -- sometimes even amenable -- manners. In contexts where religious identities are foregrounded, however, particularly in the choreographies of movements through the spaces of the holy sites, they become representatives of their particular religious community or, in the terms members of the Greek Orthodox Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre defined themselves to me in the wake of a fight with Armenian monks over territory, ‘defenders of the holy places’ (fieldnotes, 31/12/84). In these contexts they, and the places they ‘protect’, manifest the truth value of their church and its theology; their presence in the places, and the rituals they carry out there, are seen to ‘suture’ their dogma and their orthopraxy to the real of Christian revelation. The presence of others carrying out their apostate rituals and asserting their authority in those places constitutes what Laclau and Mouffe term an “antagonism” (Laclau & Mouffe 1985: 93-148) -literally a radical denial of their own assertions of identity as the sole vehicles of the true church. In a situation of antagonism the presence of the other prevents me om being what I conceive myself as being: "in the case of antagonism … the presence of the 'Other' prevents me om being totally myself. … (it is because a peasant cannot be a peasant that an antagonism exists with the landowner who is expelling him om his land). Insofar as there is antagonism, I cannot be a full presence for myself" (Ibid: 125). It is this context that property, and the propriety of liturgical demeanour therein, becomes an issue ⒐ The Coptic, Syrian and Ethiopian Orthodox, who possess chapels because of historic precedent, are small communities with little political or economic power, and their presence in the church is rarely challenged by the dominant religious communities (although they fight amongst themselves over the territories they do control -- see Bowman 2011: 389-391). ⒑ see Fisher-Ilan 2004 for one of many examples, Cohen 2008 and Bowman 2011 for different interpretations of how and why the Status Quo is maintained. Bowman: Grounds for Sharing -- 7 -- of overarching concern. Concern with overcoming the antagonism the presence of other belief communities presents is what motivates the insistence of the various religious communities that they ‘own’ holy places as well as drives the demands of religious authorities worldwide that shrines and holy places be purged of heterodox practices and persons. The politics of the ‘rigid designator’ consists of the insistence that there is but one signified for the signifier. While this may appear to take the shape of straightforward demands for sole possession and inhabitance of a holy place, beneath that demand is the assertion of the truth value of a core identity and the insistence that no other representation can lay claim to the place where that identity manifests and celebrates itself. As a Greek monk told Nikos Kazantzakis when he visited the Anastasis in 1927: "this entire church belongs to us, the Orthodox. All the sacred shrines are ours….[W]e're going to throw the Armenians out….Whatever the Latins tell you is a lie. All their shrines are fakes. I hope to God the day comes when we can throw them out" (Kazantzakis 1973: 153). *** The concept of ‘property’ functions in various ways in sites we refer to as ‘shared’. In the case of Sveti Bogoroditsa Prechista, Muslims attending the church do not in any way dispute the Macedonian Orthodox Church’s ownership of the site, visiting and using it with due deference to the nuns who live there. The Mother Superior and the majority of the nuns are in no way threatened by the presence of Muslims in the shrine, appreciating their generosity (“they give more than the Christians”) and recognising coexistence within the shrine as a welcome consequence of the long term good relations of Muslims and Christians in the nearby town and surrounding countryside (see Bowman 2010: 209¹¹). In another Macedonian site I’ve written on, Sveti Nikola in Makedonski Brod, Sufi and Sunni Muslims praying in the church recognise the authority of the Orthodox caretakers, yet simultaneously associate the edifice and the tomb within with the Bektashi saint Hadir Bābā. Relations between the Christian visitors om the town and the Muslim visitors om neighbouring settlements are cordial, and lubricated -- as at Sveti Bogoroditsa -- by the generosity of Muslims whose copious gis to the shrine are auctioned off to support the town’s main church. Intriguingly, in the case of Sveti Nikola/Hadir Bābā mutual commitment by both communities to the continued sharing of the site is manifest in the simultaneous display of Sufi and Christian iconography within the church although, as I describe in my study of the site, perceived imbalances of display are able to give rise to aggrievement and potential hostility (Bowman 2010: 203-206). In both instances, as at the shrine of Haider Shaikh in Malerkotla described by Anna Bigelow, the local communities as well as the officiants at the religious sites commit themselves to maintaining forms of inter-communal cooperation in the shrines cognate with those taking place beyond their perimeters. Changes in that wider context of social relations, resulting in a breakdown of conviviality, can acture that commitment, making way for one or the other community to attempt to force the other om the shrine; such an expulsion would mirror that effected in the surrounding social world. In other instances religious authorities, oen backed by individuals of influence over local members of one or the other local religious community, may exploit ictions or fissures in the local community to push for the ‘purification’ of a shrine. Even, however, in such instances the perceived sanctity a shrine may be retained by the general population so that not only might members of the religious and ethnic communities banished om the shrine return, covertly and sometimes overtly, but also, as relatively amicable inter-communal relations in the surrounding locale are re-established, the shrine may again begin to be shared (see Bowman 2012: 215-217). Shrines such as the Anastasis or Holy Sepulchre are very different insofar as rather than being perceived as properties of the local community (in both the sense of belonging to the local milieu and being characteristic of that social formation) they are presented as standing outside of their immediate context, belonging instead to ideologically constituted communities which may originate, and even reside, at a substantial physical and cultural distance om their literal site. For pilgrims visiting such sites om afar the holy places ‘belong’ to them in a spiritual or devotional sense. They ideologically image the place ⒒ Although one university-trained novice, recently relocated to the monastery om Skopje, expressed hostility to Muslim visitors, claiming they were planning to ‘steal’ the church (Ibid). Bowman: Grounds for Sharing -- 8 -- as a spiritual possession which, once witnessed, can be ‘taken home’ with them for meditation and validation, but their desire to literally possess the place rarely extends further than their wish to collect relics (oil, candles, carved olive wood crosses) to metonymically connect them with the place. For resident clergy, however, such holy places not only ‘belong’ to their sects in a spiritual sense but must literally belong to their churches, since possession of the site both confirms their core identities as guardians of the holy places and authorises and amplifies the sanctity of the site through their provision of appropriate liturgical practices (and their blockage of heterodox practices). Here the presence of others not only presents an integral challenge to their identities but also desecrates the sanctity of that central site (see Hassner 2009). The argument about ‘antagonistic tolerance’ put forward by Robert Hayden and his collaborators applies in this instance, but it only applies when this specific form of antagonism, linked to a specific conception of property, is in operation. ‘Tolerance’, as they point out, is anything but toleration in this context as it is in effect no more than enforced cohabitation. *** The distinction between ‘space’ and ‘place’ set out at the opening of this paper is key to understanding the emergence of antagonism in shared sites. Space, as an encompassing container, is able to hold a number of entities without their having any relation aside om that of contiguity. Place, as a site of inhabitance, can contain differentiated bodies, but these, by sharing place, enter into relations with each other. Pilgrim groups, converging on the same holy sites om different places of origin, are able to flow around and past each other, each pursuing their own realisations of their own envisionings of the significance of the sites they temporarily occupy. The ‘place’ each group inhabits is effectively rendered discontinuous with the ‘places’ of others, and interaction is kept minimal and impersonal. Neighbours of different sectarian affiliation can meet in local holy places, engaging with each other through media of negotiation and mutual recognition analogous to those they use in their everyday interactions outside of holy ground. Here each group simultaneously occupies the same place and must engage modes of mutual accommodation rendering that coexistence as non-conflictual and mutually beneficial as possible. In the instance of the Holy Sepulchre or Anastasis, a situation not unlike others worldwide in which religious powers work to present a site as a pure signifier of an exclusive identity which must be defended om the pollution of other forms of worship¹², two or more communities attempt to construct, and inhabit (literally and ritually), exclusive places in the same place. Such cohabitation is, in the terms of their respective discourses, an impossibility, and thus the presence of the other presents a literal antagonism which must either be overcome through expulsion or succumbed to by withdrawal. 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