Nurit Stadler is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is the author of Yeshiva Fundamentalism: Piety, Gender and Resistance in the Ultra-Orthodox World and A Well-Worn Tallis for a New Ceremony, and has published numerous papers on sacred shrines and pilgrimage.
"""This book is recommended for advanced students and scholars interested in ritual practice, pilgrimage, and studies of gender and religion."" -- J. Alkorani, University of Toronto, CHOICE ""Voices of the Ritual is a wonderful achievement by a fine scholar. It enriches the study of ritual, place, gender, borders, politics, religion and more. Stadler takes us with her among pilgrims and ritualists honoring female saints in female spaces. At least, that is their ambition. Frustrations, marginalization and transgressions compose constraints and contests over the fragile creativity and enchantment of intimate devotion performed materially by bodies in places."" -- Graham Harvey, author of Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life ""In this ethnographically rich study, Nurit Stadler accompanies us through the complex ritual worlds of different religious communities and their female saints and shrines. Through her exploration of bodily practices and the ritual appropriation of contested spaces, we discover unexpected dimensions of devotion in the Holy Land."" -- Anna Fedele, author of Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France ""Stadler's remarkable work contains one of the richest accounts of ritual I have encountered in years. This is a book about sacred space, landscape, gender, borders, the politics of possession, and much more-all woven into a text that guides us through the contested shrines, streets and territories of a Holy Land that constantly appeals to the past and yet is ever-changing."" -- Simon Coleman, Chancellor Jackman Professor, University of Toronto ""A path-breaking journey within the embodied interiors of women's shrines and into their rituals of death, fertility, and rebirth in the Holy Land. Stadler's remarkable study demonstrates decisively how these rituals, intended to create and protect family units, torque with intensity into struggles over the lived-in terrain of Israel/Palestine."" -- Don Handelman, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, The Hebrew University"