House, Church, Cave: Coptic Landscapes and the Demands of Pluralism in Upper Egypt

Abstract

House, Church, Cave examines the relationship between pluralism and placemaking in the context of a majority-Christian town in Upper Egypt. Coptic Christians, a religious minority in Egypt, have historically faced restrictions regarding how they can modify the places they inhabit. However, in the town of al-‘Aziya (pop. 55,000, Asyut Governorate), there are few Muslim neighbors and little state oversight. Building off eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, House, Church, Cave examines how Christian residents in al-‘Aziya use this freedom to order space by building, inhabiting, modifying, and bringing into (mis)alignment houses, churches, and other elements of their landscape. It is the first ethnography of a majority-Christian town in Egypt.

By maintaining an analytic focus on this particular town, House, Church, Cave offers a reassessment of the ways scholars of religion and Christianity approach their basic units of analysis. In this study, houses, churches, caves, and other dwellings exist in dynamic tension: an aspect of Coptic placemaking that, while often invisible in other settings, is here on display. The freedom residents experience in shaping the town’s landscape is often expressed and negotiated in sites of proximity to the sacred. In this framework, the near-sacred – as found in a house converted into a church, or an icon turned into a piece of art – becomes a privileged site of communal reflection on what it means to be a Christian in Egypt. By focusing on the complex ways that these basic social units are created and transformed, House, Church, Cave provides a fresh approach to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.

In creating a society in the relative absence of Muslims, these residents engage in two forms of pluralism, both of which act as a generative force. The first appears in the unusual challenges created by the absence of the Muslim Other. Having flipped from minority to majority, the Christians of al-‘Aziya claim to experience social disorder, but also the ability to redraw spatial, social, and doctrinal boundaries that elsewhere might appear firm. The second appears in the presence of various Christian denominations: Orthodox Copts, Catholics, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals. This configuration of religious and denominational difference introduces demands that ripple across a multitude of social fields: history and historiography, gender, kinship, ritual practice, expressions of religious authority, aesthetics, and political economy. At each step, the town’s pluralism raises the question of how divisions are established and redrawn. By examining pluralism and placemaking in tandem, the dynamism of this process – of defining religious identity through the shaping of space – is revealed.