Recreating the Judean Hills? English hermits and the Holy Land

This article explores the place of the Holy Land in the devotions of medieval English hermits and recluses between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. It first outlines the importance of physical travel to Palestine in the career of anchorites, with pilgrimage to Jerusalem followed by seclusion held up as a powerful ideal in literary sources. It then suggests that some of the dwellings of English solitaries formed deliberate monumental recreations of the holy places of Palestine. It considers the extent to which the cells of recluses were understood as recreations of the tomb of Christ, functioning as living Easter Sepulchre structures, and the dedication of churches used or built by hermits and recluses. Finally, it notes possible links between the hermitage of St Robert of Knaresborough and Jabal Quruntul (Mount Quarentayne), the site of Christ's temptations in the wilderness.     

Three jihads: Islamic,Christian, and Jewish (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

In this guest editorial, the author weighs up to what extent Christian and Jewish life practice equivalents to jihad and to what extent this is a feature of our contemporary secular lives.     

Anthropocene and the dawn of a planetary civilization

This exploratory article invites anthropologists to renew their curiosity about the human condition and creatively decode today's contemporary myth-making practices. After a decade of active academic engagement with the Anthropocene, we would do well to turn our endless curiosity about the world and its diversity to the Promethean stories ecomodernists are spreading with accelerated ease within the public sphere. To burst out of our media-saturated environment, the author asks: what patterns of deglobalization and reglobalization will emerge from the stories we tell each other about the Covid-19 pandemic and the health of the planet? In what ways do these stories inform us about the society we want to create, inhabit and pass on? The author shows how redeploying our skills as storytelling analysts and ethnographers of embodied and collective experiences helps us to renew questions about place and mobility. As we enter a new era of symbolic manipulation, remembering the importance of myths may help us contribute to the emergence of a planetary civilization that the earth appears to be calling for.