1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910901881603321

Autore

Novick Tamar

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge, MA : , : The MIT Press, , 2023

ISBN

0-262-37456-0

0-262-37455-2

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (320 pages)

Collana

Inside technology

Disciplina

338.1/6

Soggetti

Agricultural innovations - Israel - History

Agricultural innovations - Palestine - History

Agricultural innovations - Religious aspects

Agriculture - Religious aspects

Technology - Religious aspects

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

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.