Milk and Honey

Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land

by Tamar Novick

$45.00 Paperback
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278 pp., 6 x 9 in, 10 color illus., 27 b&w illus.

Paperback
9780262039079
Published: August 8, 2023
Publisher: The MIT Press

$45.00

eBook
9780262374569
Published: August 8, 2023
Publisher: The MIT Press

$44.99

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Open Access

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 Palestine/Israel. 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 humanimal body.

Novick presents a series of case studies involving the management of water buffalo, bees, goats, sheep, cows, and people. 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.

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

“Novick enlists bees, goats, sheep, women and cows in a multispecies political history of remaking the land in modern Palestine, revealing the religion ingrained in the purportedly secular technosciences of modern nation-building. Enthralling!"
Francesca Bray, co-author of Moving Crops and the Scales of History

General info

The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding and support from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License

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