The great majority of the world's holy cities and sacred shrines attract pilgrims from
culturally circumscribed catchment areas, and thus host pilgrims united by strong degrees of
cultural homogeneity. Jerusalem, on the other hand, draws pilgrims from a vast multitude of
nations and cultural traditions. During religious festivals - which tend to be imbricated
because of the antagonistic engagement of Judaism, Christianity and Islam - Jerusalem's
streets swarm with men and women displaying a rainbow of secular and religious costumes,
speaking a cacophony of languages, and pursuing a plethora of divine figures. Other sacred
centres which attract pilgrims from areas as heterogeneous as those which provide
Jerusalem's pilgrims - eminent among these Mecca (which nonetheless services only the sects
of a single religion) - funnel their devotees through ritual routines which mask differences
beneath identical repertoires of movement and utterance2. Jerusalem's pilgrims, on the other
hand, go to different places at different times where they engage in very different forms of
worship. The result is a continuous crossing and diverging - often marked by clashes - of
bodies, voices and religious artifacts. Jerusalem does not, in fact, appear so much as a holy
city as as a multitude of holy cities - as many as are the religious communities which
worship at the site - built over the same spot, operating at the same moment, and contending
for hegemony
