Milk and Honey Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land

by Novick, Tamar

• ISBN13: 9780262039079
• ISBN10: 0262039079
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780262374569
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2023-07-11
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• More Book Details

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 peoplein 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.

Author Biography

Tamar Novick is a senior research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey 1
Interlude: Bygone Buffalo and Lingering Value--A Prehistory of Plenty 15
1 Bible, Bees, and Boxes: Technologies of Movement and Obstruction 23
2 Getting their Goat 47
3 The Rise and Fall of Hebrew Shepherding 77
4 Holy Cow! Milk Yield and the Burdens of the "New Jewess" 99
5 Urine and Gold: Infertility Research and the Limits of Plenty 125
Conclusion: The Synesthetic Experience 147
Notes 157
Bibliography 225
Index 257