The Ancestors of Christianity: ISM Fellows Lunch Talk with Clayton Goodgame

This paper argues that Christianity is an ancestral faith. Of course, it is a global religion with many denominations and over two thousand years of history. And yet, when compared with other traditions, it continues to be described in modern terms as a religion defined by transcendence and individual belief. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper presents an alternative characterization of the church through an ethnography of the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem. It suggests that for Palestinians and Greeks in Jerusalem’s Old City, Christianity is defined by saints who are also ancestors and faith that is inherited. The divergence of this church, one of the oldest in the world, from the model of the solitary believer can provide a different view of the religion as a whole and its relationship to non-Christian traditions.

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.