Milk and honey : technologies of plenty in the making of a Holy Land / Tamar Novick.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Novick, Tamar, author.

Series:

Inside technology

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Agricultural innovations--Israel--History.

Agricultural innovations.

Agricultural innovations--Palestine--History.

Agricultural innovations--Religious aspects.

Agriculture--Religious aspects.

Agriculture.

Technology--Religious aspects.

Technology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (320 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2023

Summary:

An innovative historical analysis of the intersection of religion and technology in making the modern state, focusing on bodily production and reproduction across the human-animal divide. In Milk and Honey, Tamar Novick writes a revolutionary environmental history of the state that centers on the intersection of technology and religion in modern Israel/Palestine. Focusing on animals and the management of their production and reproduction across three political regimes -- the late-Ottoman rule, British rule, and the early Israeli state -- Novick draws attention to the ways in which settlers and state experts used agricultural technology to recreate a biblical idea of past plenitude, literally a "land flowing with milk and honey," through the bodies of animals and people. Novick presents a series of case studies involving the management of water buffalo, bees, goats, sheep, cows, and people in Palestine/Israel. She traces the intimate forms of knowledge and bodily labor -- production and reproduction -- in which this process took place, and the intertwining of bodily, political, and environmental realms in the transformation of Palestine/Israel. Her wide-ranging approach shows technology never replaced religion as a colonial device. Rather, it merged with settler-colonial aspirations to salvage the land, bolstering the effort to seize control over territory and people. Fusing technology, religious fervor, bodily labor, and political ecology, Milk and Honey provides a novel account of the practices that defined and continue to shape settler-colonialism in the Palestine/Israel, revealing the ongoing entanglement of technoscience and religion in our time.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey

Interlude: Bygone Buffalo and Lingering Value-A Prehistory of Plenty

1 Bible, Bees, and Boxes: Technologies of Movement and Obstruction

2 Getting Their Goat

3 The Rise and Fall of Hebrew Shepherding

4 Holy Cow! Milk Yield and the Burdens of the "New Jewess"

5 Urine and Gold: Infertility Research and the Limits of Plenty

Conclusion: The Synesthetic Experience

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

ISBN:

0-262-37456-0

0-262-37455-2

OCLC:

1353637895