Connie Gagliardi

Connie Gagliardi is a PhD Candidate in the Anthropology Department and in the Collaborative Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.  She has a B.A. in Art History from McGill University and her M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Toronto,  and this background informs her dissertation, which examines the traditional crafting of Byzantine iconography in the Christian Holy Land of Palestine/Israel and its contemporary resurgence amongst Palestinian Christians. Connie presents a visual economy of Byzantine iconography, as it traces a Palestinian Christian cartography of iconographic imagining. The dissertation begins with a semiotic investigation of the icon of “Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls.  The icon of “Our Lady”, which was written atop the Palestinian face of the Israeli Separation Wall in Bethlehem, is explored as a material sign, manifesting presence and performing its signification in time and space as a “living presence” on the Wall. However, Connie takes the locally-made Byzantine icon to be both an ethnographic object and a site of ritualized praxis, and she argues that the crafting of iconography is an ethical poiesis (making) of the Christian theological mystery of the Incarnation. The ethical bounds of this ritualized praxis come to bear on the Byzantine icon as ethnographic object, especially as a commodity sold as souvenir in Bethlehem’s many souvenir shops. Connie’s dissertation offers a novel approach to lived religion and Christian phenomenology, and the novelty of her dissertation is ultimately predicated on her approach to material culture and materialism, as she highlights the interplay between object, human and social context. The locally-made Byzantine icon, which theologically oscillates between divine omnipresence and divine absence, is a material sign, and dynamically performs its signification upon the fractured Palestinian landscape.