Thinking through bloody handprints on saints’ graves: The political ontology of ritual artifacts in the Negev Bedouin ziyāra

Abstract

This essay explores ritual artifacts from ontological, material, and processual perspectives by applying an “operational sequence” (chaîne opératoire) approach and tracing their “conceptual affordances.” Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Bedouin people and their artifacts in the conflictual landscapes of the Negev/Naqab, this study challenges previous works that have conceptualized sacrificial blood rituals as symbolic ways to commune with the divine. It draws on the ontological and material turns in anthropology and related disciplines to show how handprints made with animal blood on ancestral saints’ graves, despite their prominent visibility, do not represent communion but embody it. Inspired by scholarship on the anthropology of blood, I explore how its material properties afford a process of becoming-with the sacrificial animal and the saint. I also discuss how the handprints can be channeled more broadly for (onto-)political purposes and territorial claims.