The Antagonistic Tolerance Project
The Antagonistic Tolerance Project (2007-2013) was a comparative and interdisciplinary study of religious sites that are both shared and contested by members of different religious communities. The project analyzed sites in Bulgaria, India, Mexico, Peru, Portugal and Turkey, using the methods and theories, variously, of ethnography, history, ethnohistory, archaeology, and religious studies.
The model of Antagonistic Tolerance (AT) as developed in this project applies to settings in which groups of people who identify themselves and each other as Self and Other, primarily on the basis of religion, live intermingled for generations, but intermarriage is strongly discouraged. Political control by one of these groups is indicated by control over key religious sites. When the dominance of one group is clear, or when both are dominated by an intervening power (colonialism providing good examples), interaction is largely peaceful and sites are often shared, visited by members of both religious groups. In such situations, the symbols, iconography and ceremonial practices of one group will be dominant but religious syncretism often occurs. When dominance becomes threatened, violence often occurs; and when dominance is overthrown, major religious sites are radically transformed, either changed into the sites of the newly dominant religion (e.g. the Church – Mosque conversion of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul in 1453 or the Mosque - Cathedral conversion in Cordoba after 1236).
Participants: One way to look at the project team is as two anthropologists, three archaeologists, an historian, an art historian and a scholar of religious studies; another is as several Americans, two Turks, an Indian, a Mexican, a Serb and a Peruvian. All of us worked within regions in which we had long had research experience but also were involved in research with our colleagues in places they knew but the rest of us did not. Our intense mixing of disciplinary perspectives and regional expertise was, we think, rare if not unique: all sites were analyzed by at least one scholar who was new to the subject region and its literature as well as at least one who had long worked there.