SHARED SACRED
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    • Bojan Baskar
    • Dionigi Albera
    • Emrah Gökdemir
    • Yael Navaro
    • Ethel Sara Wolper
    • Yuri Stoyanov
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    • The Xenia Series
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The Separation Series:
The Walls and Tunnels around ‘Rachel’s Tomb’, Bethlehem, Palestine

by Tom Selwyn

These five photographs show the walls surrounding a building in Bethlehem known as ‘Rachel’s Tomb’. The walls have effectively destroyed a formerly busy and prosperous neighbourhood in the city and are outgrowths of the concrete wall separating citizens of Israel from those of Palestine. They promote a view that the means to achieve “security” in the region is by violently imposed separation. David Grossman, the distinguished Israeli writer, asserts that this bleak notion symbolically affirms the “triumph of despair over hope” by driving out the “healing power of the everyday, of the basic human desires for family, livelihood, and study: the fabric of life”. Yet, as they appear in the bible, Rachel herself and Ruth – the “Two Women of Bethlehem” of Selwyn’s paper – both speak precisely of the assertion of life over death, in so doing revealing themselves as figures deeply engaged in the fundamentally contemporary struggle between separation and sharing.
Picture
© Tom Selwyn
Picture
© Tom Selwyn
Picture
© Tom Selwyn
Picture
© Tom Selwyn
Picture
© Tom Selwyn
Professor Tom Selwyn, an anthropologist, is Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London and a Visiting Professor at Breda University, The Netherlands, and Bethlehem University, Palestine. He was awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Professorial Research Fellowship in 2014.
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  • Home
  • About
  • Exhibition
    • Dionigi Albera
    • Maria Angel
    • Philippe Antoine Martinez
    • Glenn Bowman >
      • Al-Khadr (series)
      • Sveti Nikola (series)
    • Helen Cornish
    • Susannah Crockford
    • Lene Faust
    • Jackie Feldman
    • Maria Chiara Giorda, Luca Bossi, Daniele Campobenedetto & Equoatelier
    • Emrah Gökdemir
    • Safet HadžiMuhamedović
    • Vanja Hamzić
    • Guy Hayward
    • Jens Kreinath
    • Federica Manfredi
    • Ashim Kumar Manna
    • Reza Masoudi
    • Jason Minton Brown
    • Manoël Pénicaud
    • Marlene Schäfers
    • Jesko Schmoller
    • Tom Selwyn
    • Olga Sicilia
    • Konrad Siekierski
    • Yogesh Snehi
    • Yuri Stoyanov
    • Jill J. Tan
    • Samuel Tettner
  • Symposium
    • About the symposium
    • Yogesh Snehi
    • Glenn Bowman
    • Tom Selwyn
    • Ioan Cozma, Maria Chiara Giorda and Silvia Omenetto
    • Bojan Baskar
    • Dionigi Albera
    • Emrah Gökdemir
    • Yael Navaro
    • Ethel Sara Wolper
    • Yuri Stoyanov
    • Manoël Pénicaud
    • Jens Kreinath
  • Panel
  • Contact
  • Related Projects
    • The Xenia Series
    • CIP Summer School in Inter-Faith Relations
    • Cambridge in Your Classroom
    • Anthropology of Travel, Tourism and Pilgrimage Summer School
    • Bosnian Landscapes