Full Description
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.
Contents
Introduction: Edgy Ethnography in a Little Big PlaceFran Markowitz
Part I.Confrontations and Conversions
1. How Christian Pilgrims Made Me IsraeliJackie Feldman
2. Mission Not Accomplished: Negotiating Power Relations and Vulnerability Among Messianic Jews in IsraelTamir Erez
3. Doing Dimona: An Americanist Anthropologist in an Africanized IsraelJohn L. Jackson, Jr.
Part II. State Categories and Global Flows
4. Seeking Truth in Hip Hop Music and Hip Hop EthnographyUri Dorchin
5. The State of the Family: Eldercare as a Practice of Corporal Symbiosis by Filipina Migrant WorkersKeren Mazuz
6. Diasporas Collide: Competing Holocausts, Imposed Whiteness and the Seemingly Jewish non-Jew Researcher in IsraelGabriella Djerrahian
Part III. Fieldwork to the Point of Worry
7. Traveling Between Reluctant Neighbors: Researching with Jews and Bedouin Arabs in the Northern NegevEmily McKee
8. On the Matter of Return to Israel/Palestine: Autoethnographic ReflectionsJasmin Habib
9. Some Kind of Masochist: Fieldwork in Unsettling TerritoryJoyce Dalsheim
10. The Impurities of Experience: Researching Prostitution in IsraelHilla Nehushtan
11. Falling in Love with a Criminal? On Immersion and Self-RestraintVirginia R. Dominguez
