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 Israel/Palestine. 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 bodies of animals and people.
Novick presents a series of case studies involving the management of water buffalo, bees, goats, sheep, cows, and peoplein Palestine/Israel. S
