Clayton Goodgame is an anthropologist of religion, political economy, the environment, and the Middle East. He is currently finishing a project on the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, an ancient church and major landowner in Palestine/Israel composed of a Palestinian laity but controlled by a Greek monastic hierarchy. The project is culminating in a book manuscript called “The Orthodox Line” which examines the church’s religious and political dynamics in relation to land. It advances a view of the Orthodox tradition as a sacred lineage defined not by blood but stones, trees, and saints embedded in the earth, arguing that such genealogical forms profoundly shape the struggle for ownership over both property and history in Christianity’s oldest church.
At Yale, Clayton is developing a new project in the borderlands of Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, and Syria. This project examines the relationship that Druze, Muslim, and Christian communities maintain with the mountain landscapes in which they have lived for centuries. It contrasts these relationships with the biblical frame of “the holy land”, seeking to clear the ground for new ways of understanding the sacred landscapes of the Eastern Mediterranean and their social, political, and environmental dimensions.
Clayton received a PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics and has previously held fellowships at the LSE and Princeton University.