Summary 
Drawing from my ethnographic research in West Bank Palestine and Central Macedonia (FYROM), I here investigate inter-communal mixing around four shrines (two from each nation) so as to discern both what draws Christians and Muslims into close, often intimate, proximity and what can work to divide the communities into, in at least one instance, antagonistic polarities. In none of the sites I look at is the state of mixture or separation fixed; in all cases relations have been and continue to be shaped by social and historical forces acting not only from within the immediate communities but as well as from more or less distant ‘outside’ agencies.   

Glenn Bowman, Emeritus Professor of Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, has carried out field research in Jerusalem and West Bank Palestine since 1983 and in Former Yugoslavia since 1991. Early research focussed on practices of ‘Jerusalem Pilgrimage’ and on the multiple shapes such reverencing took, but subsequent work engaged with internal and exilic forms of Palestinian nationalism and with the forging under occupation of a national movement out of religiously diverse commmunities. In the early ‘90s, he began to examine a counter movement - the fragmentation of the federated state of Yugoslavia into antagonistic constituent parts - but was drawn, in looking for analogous practices around religious sites to those he’d studied in Palestine, to investigate the congeries of Sufi, Sunni and Orthodox Christian worshippers gathering around historically indeterminate shrines in Macedonia.