"The Politics of Ownership: State, Governance and the Status Quo in the Anastasis (Holy Sepulchre)"

Recent discussions of shared holy places naturalize situations of either antagonistic dispute or syncretistic mixing. Although each respectively recognizes more or less extended periods of sharing or of conflict, there seems in each formulation to be an underlying logic—either temporal or spatial—of “antagonistic tolerance” or of “syncretistic sharing.” This essay, partially ethnographic and partially historical, focuses on the Holy Sepulchre or Church of the Anastasis (resurrection, in Greek), the “mother church” of Christianity, in an attempt to shift the analytic logic away from the identities of communities that cohabit sites toward institutions that attempt to own, or at least control, those sites. A multitude of Christian sects claim the Anastasis as their own, but such claims are always mediated through structures of state power, and these shape choreographies of conflict or of sharing.