Working Land, Making People? Cross-cultural Perspectives on Religion and Cultivation-Special Issue Editor’s Introduction

Cultivation as a metonym is related to developments of human culture through practices of cultivated nature. This special issue addresses cultivation’s interplay with religion through a grounded, material approach, by asking how religious actors, groups and institutions are engaging in projects of cultivation, and to what ends? Through case studies from Myanmar, Israel, South Africa and the United States, we propose that the interplay between religion and cultivation reveals the importance of addressing the labor, the intimacy and the temporality, in projects in which the two intermingle.