ABSTRACT
From its inception, the AT project aimed at testing and developing further a general model of the common pattern of long-term intercommunal interaction of Antagonistic Tolerance that Robert Hayden had proposed in a 2002 article in Current Anthropology. That is, we focused on interactions between groups of people who identify themselves as Self and Other communities, primarily on the basis of belonging to different religions (but with those distinctions often reinforced by different practices in realms such as naming, dress, diet and occupation, among other considerations), and who live intermingled but rarely intermarrying. In such situations, we anticipated that dominance of one group over the other would be indicated by control of key religious sites, and that when dominance was threatened or changed, the identifying characteristics of these religious sites would also change. Thus, the historical trajectory of the development of such religious sites was expected to track that of the political and social history of the interactions of the communities who utilized them. Following the pioneering work a century ago of F. W. Hasluck, we also anticipated that sites would be used by members of different groups simultaneously but that their usage would differ, with control over the place, and use of it, being exercised by members of the dominant community, since “rights to rites” are determined politically (Friedland and Hecht 1998). We hoped to refine the concepts further, and also to develop indicators to determine relative dominance of groups vis-à vis each other.
