Abstract
Sacred landscapes are natural or cultural spaces designated for religious worship, often believed to have special power or to be inhabited by spirits that serve as intermediaries between humans and the Divine. This paper explores the significance of sacred landscapes in popular beliefs, folklore, and cultural heritage in Palestine, with specific focus on the roles that such places played in traditional healing rituals and everyday healing practices. Specifically, this paper asks: what role did sacred places play in healing practices, how do these practices vary across different times, places and religious traditions. In pursuing these questions, this paper seeks to better understand how the meaning of these sites and practices have transformed due to increased alienation from both the sacred and natural worlds due to modernization and urbanization in the context of Israeli settler-colonial dispossession and military occupation. Notably, this paper highlights the continuity and blending of ancient pagan practices and monotheistic beliefs, and their legacy in Palestinian cultural heritage. Further, this paper argues that healing practices in Palestine help us to conceptualize sacred sites, not as static spaces, but dynamic socio-spatial assemblages made up of diverse human and non-human elements which vary in affective intensity at certain times and places, blend the physical and metaphysical realms and as well as the realms of culture and nature. To demonstrate this, we draw upon historical ethnographic writing from the 19th and 20th centuries as well as traditional folk knowledge passed down through oral and practical tradition into the 21st. To document this knowledge and experience, oral history interviews were conducted with elder residents of rural villages and mountainous areas of central Palestine. Through this combined approach of historical documentary research and oral history interviewing, we aim to link the past with the present, exploring popular memory in Palestine to reveal the roots of rituals and beliefs related to healing in sacred sanctuaries, as well as how such practices evolve and change over time.
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