Ethnographic Encounters in Israel

Description

Challenges and dilemmas of studying life in Israel

Israel is a place of paradoxes, a small country with a diverse population and complicated social terrain. Studying its culture and social life means confronting a multitude of ethical dilemmas and methodological challenges. The first-person accounts by anthropologists engage contradictions of religion, politics, identity, kinship, racialization, and globalization to reveal fascinating and often vexing dimensions of the Israeli experience. Caught up in pressing existential questions of war and peace, social justice, and national boundaries, the contributors explore the contours of Israeli society as insiders and outsiders, natives and strangers, as well as critics and friends.

Introduction: Edgy Ethnography in a Little Big Place Fran Markowitz

Part I. Confrontations and Conversions
1. How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli Jackie Feldman
2. Mission Not Accomplished: Negotiating Power Relations and Vulnerability Among Messianic Jews in Israel Tamir Erez
3. Doing Dimona: An Americanist Anthropologist in an Africanized Israel John L. Jackson, Jr.

Part II. State Categories and Global Flows
4. Seeking Truth in Hip Hop Music and Hip Hop Ethnography Uri Dorchin
5. The State of the Family: Eldercare as a Practice of Corporal Symbiosis by Filipina Migrant Workers Keren Mazuz
6. Diasporas Collide: Competing Holocausts, Imposed Whiteness and the Seemingly Jewish non-Jew Researcher in Israel Gabriella Djerrahian

Part III. Fieldwork to the Point of Worry
7. Traveling Between Reluctant Neighbors: Researching with Jews and Bedouin Arabs in the Northern Negev Emily McKee
8. On the Matter of Return to Israel/Palestine: Autoethnographic Reflections Jasmin Habib
9. Some Kind of Masochist: Fieldwork in Unsettling Territory Joyce Dalsheim
10. The Impurities of Experience: Researching Prostitution in Israel Hilla Nehushtan
11. Falling in Love with a Criminal? On Immersion and Self-Restraint Virginia R. Dominguez

Sujets

• Middle Est
• Jewish Studies
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Israel
• History of the Middle East
• Middle East
• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 11 juin 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253008893
• Langue: English

Extrait

ETHNOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTERS IN ISRAEL
ETHNOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTERS IN ISRAEL
Poetics and Ethics of Fieldwork
Edited by Fran Markowitz
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ethnographic encounters in Israel : poetics and ethics of fieldwork / edited by Fran Markowitz.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00856-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-00861-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-00889-3 (ebook)
1. Ethnology-Israel-Fieldwork. 2. Ethnology-Israel-Methodology. 3. Anthropological ethics-Israel. 4. Israel-Social life and customs. I. Markowitz, Fran.
GN635.I78E85 2013
305.80095694-dc23
2013002205
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
Contents
Editor s Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction: Edgy Ethnography in a Little Big Place \ Fran Markowitz
Part I. Confrontations and Conversions
1 How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli \ Jackie Feldman
2 Mission Not Accomplished: Negotiating Power Relations and Vulnerability among Messianic Jews in Israel \ Tamir Erez
3 Doing Dimona: An Americanist Anthropologist in an Africanized Israel \ John L. Jackson Jr.
Part II. State Categories and Global Flows
4 Seeking Truth in Hip-Hop Music and Hip-Hop Ethnography \ Uri Dorchin
5 The State of the Jewish Family: Eldercare as a Practice of Corporeal Symbiosis by Filipina Migrant Workers \ Keren Mazuz
6 Diasporas Collide: Competing Holocausts, Imposed Whiteness, and the Seemingly Jewish Non-Jew Researcher in Israel \ Gabriella Djerrahian
Part III. Fieldwork to the Point of Worry
7 Traveling between Reluctant Neighbors: Researching with Jews and Bedouin Arabs in the Northern Negev \ Emily McKee
8 On the Matter of Return to Israel/Palestine: Autoethnographic Reflections \ Jasmin Habib
9 Some Kind of Masochist? Fieldwork in Unsettling Territory \ Joyce Dalsheim
10 The Impurities of Experience: Researching Prostitution in Israel \ Hilla Nehushtan
11 Falling in Love with a Criminal? On Immersion and Self-Restraint \ Virginia R. Dominguez
Index
Editor s Acknowledgments
E THNOGRAPHIC E NCOUNTERS IN I SRAEL emerged from a series of conversations that I had with Tamir Erez and Dafna Shir-Vertesh about the paucity of written texts dealing with fieldwork in Israel, and how we might remedy that lack. At first my aim was to compile a Hebrew language collection for use in Israeli universities. But Tamir and Dafna had a better idea. They insisted on an English language volume that would address an international audience of anthropologists-students, teachers, generalists, and specialists. I thank Tamir and Dafna for their wisdom.
Rebecca Tolen of Indiana University Press embraced this project and nurtured it at every stage. It has been wonderful to work with a sponsoring editor who is an experienced anthropologist as well as extraordinarily skilled in the nuances of the English language.
Along with my Introduction, this volume consists of eleven original essays by eleven remarkable anthropologists. Some of the contributors are at the very beginning of their academic careers; others are well established, while most are somewhere in between. It has been a great pleasure to work with all of them. My only regret is that submissions by Don Handelman, Smadar Lavie, Amalia Sa ar, and Dafna Shir-Vertesh could not be included in this book. I look forward to seeing their essays published elsewhere.
I am grateful to those of my teachers, colleagues and students who have in some way inspired this volume. Most of all, it has benefitted from the brilliance of Shmuel Ben-Dor and Tania Forte, to whose blessed memories this book is dedicated.
Contributors
Joyce Dalsheim is a cultural anthropologist who studies nationalism, religion, and the secular, as well as conflict in Israel/Palestine. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Global, International and Area Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project .
Gabriella Djerrahian is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at McGill University.
Virginia R. Dominguez is Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A political and legal anthropologist, she is a past President of the American Anthropological Association and former editor of American Ethnologist . Her many books include White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana and People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in Contemporary Israel .
Uri Dorchin is the 2012-13 Efroymson Visiting Israel Scholar in the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Cultures at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a lecturer at Zefat Academic College in Israel, and the author of Real Time: Hip-Hop in Israel/Israeli Hip-Hop .
Tamir Erez is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Jackie Feldman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is author of Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity .
Jasmin Habib is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo and author of Israel, Diaspora and the Routes of National Belonging . Born in Israel, she speaks from personal as well as professional experience about the lives of Israelis and Palestinians.
John L. Jackson Jr. is the Richard Perry University Professor of Communication, Anthropology Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America: Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity , and Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness .
Fran Markowitz is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She is the author of three monographs, Sarajevo: A
Bosnian Kaleidoscope , Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia , and A Community in Spite of Itself , and co-editor of Sex, Sexuality and the Anthropologist and Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return .
Keren Mazuz is a medical anthropologist. She held the Ginsburg Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem in 2011-12 while investigating cross-cultural experiences and expressions of pain.
Emily McKee is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northern Illinois University and a faculty associate in NIU s Institute for the Study of the Environment, Sustainability, and Energy. While on leave, she is completing a postdoctoral position at Brandeis University with the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies.
Hilla Nehushtan completed her M.A. in anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2012. Her final thesis presents an interpretive analysis of the negotiation of normalcy by women leaving prostitution in an Israeli rehabilitation hostel.
ETHNOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTERS IN ISRAEL
Introduction
Edgy Ethnography in a Little Big Place
Fran Markowitz
T HE ESSAYS IN this volume offer an experiential perspective on the variety and vitality of life in Israel by focusing on the always challenging, frequently confusing, and sometimes heart-rending dynamics of carrying out anthropological fieldwork there. Fieldwork demands that anthropologists go where they might not ordinarily tread, or that they approach anew familiar surroundings and examine them with a critical eye. In either case, ethnographic encounters destabilize, making us aware of what is usually taken for granted and upsetting the cognitive binaries and practical dichotomies that divide the world into us and them, here and there, insiders and outsiders, or normal and weird. Even as they strive to present valid, generalizable, and reliable data about those they come to study, anthropologists are often jolted by the experiences they gain. While this condition may characterize the fieldwork process everywhere (Turner and Bruner 1986), it can be particularly acute in Israel, where ethnographers conducting participant observation over the course of a year or two or three invariably confront moral dilemmas, conflicting political stances, and pressing passions.
Discussions about these experiences among anthropologists tend to be relegated to the informal domain of conversation among colleagues, occasionally turning up as presentations in department seminars, or anecdotes that spice up field methods courses. They are rarely the subject of academic publications. For ma