Religion in the Commons: Seasonal Solidarity in Jerusalem’s Old City: ISM Fellows Lunch Talk with Clayton Goodgame

As cities around the world struggle to adapt to a rapidly changing climate, ancient urban centers have become sites of particular distress while also producing new forms of solidarity. Drawing on fieldwork among Palestinian Christians in the Old City of Jerusalem, this talk explores how space is shared in a context where different national, religious, and ethnic communities live together in a very small, very contested built environment.

In the Old City, Jerusalemites avoid the heat in the summer and seek out the sun in the winter through collective trips to “take the air” beyond the city walls and in the courtyards of convents and large families. In the process, privately owned domestic or religious spaces transform into the shared domain of kin, neighbors, friends, and strangers, but only at certain times of the year. The paper suggests that this dynamic represents a form of commons that is obscured in academic theories which view domestic and religious idioms of sharing space as incompatible with true political solidarity. The search for a “true” commons, however, may overlook already existing pathways of collaboration and mobilization, including the partial ways in which the publicness of “green” spaces can expand and contract as social and environmental conditions change.

This event is free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided.

Open to Yale Community only.

Contact: Katya Vetrov

Speaker Bio:

Clayton Goodgame is an anthropologist of religion, political economy, the environment, and the Middle East. His first project is a historical ethnography of the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, an ancient church and major landowner in Palestine/Israel composed of a Palestinian laity but controlled by a Greek monastic hierarchy. The project is culminating in a book manuscript, “The Orthodox Line”, which examines the church’s religious and political dynamics in relation to land. It advances a view of the church as a sacred lineage in which both property rights and divine presence are inherited by one generation of Christians and passed on to the next.

At Yale, Clayton is developing a new project in the borderlands of Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, and Syria. This project examines the relationship that Druze, Muslim, and Christian communities maintain with the mountain landscapes in which they have lived for centuries. It contrasts these relationships with the biblical frame of “the holy land”, seeking to clear the ground for new ways of understanding the sacred landscapes of the Eastern Mediterranean and their social, political, and economic dimensions. Clayton received a PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics and has held fellowships at the London School of Economics and Princeton University.