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.
These 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.
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.
These 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.
Ethnographic Encounters in Israel: Poetics and Ethics of Fieldwork
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Overview
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.
These 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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253008893 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 229 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Fran Markowitz is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She is author of Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope and Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia and editor (with Michael Ashkenazi) of Sex, Sexuality and the Anthropologist and (with Anders H. Stefansson) of Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return.
Read an Excerpt
Ethnographic Encounters in Israel
Poetics and Ethics of Fieldwork
By Fran Markowitz
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2013 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00889-3
CHAPTER 1
How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli
Jackie Feldman
It's almost 6 o'clock and still over 90 degrees outside. I'm guiding a British charismatic ministry through the sites of Jesus's ministry around the Sea of Galilee. The packed tour bus jiggles and bounces over the patched road on its way back to the hotel. I take the microphone and turn to the group: "Ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions, about anything whatsoever that I might have explained today, please feel free to ask."
A middle-aged Salvation Army guy with an Irish brogue pipes up: "Why don't you Jews accept Jesus Christ as your true Lord and Savior?" I launch into a five-minute explanation on conflicting messianic expectations, varying interpretations of Isaiah, the plurality of Jewish sects in Jesus's day, and how the contingencies of history formed deniers and followers of Jesus into Jews and Christians. After five minutes, I put down the microphone. Dead silence. Fifty-five people crammed into the bus and not a sound but the drone of the motor.
A sweet woman in the fifth row tries to help out. "I once heard the Chief Rabbi of England say that when the Jews' Messiah arrives, he wouldn't at all be surprised if indeed he were Jesus." Well, I guess at what the Chief Rabbi might have meant. And I know that none of the group would understand it that way. For them, the Chief Rabbi had admitted that "the Jews got it wrong first time, but they'll do better next time around." In most circumstances, I would have put down the microphone and continued to the hotel in silence. I don't have to answer. But this time, I am tired. Very tired. So I take the mike and say, "You know, ladies and gentlemen, the Chief Rabbi of England is right. I wouldn't at all be surprised. But you would!" The group's pastor grabs the mike and harrumphs, "Well, let's all look at tomorrow's program ..."
At age 22, I, a once-Orthodox Jew from New York City, came on aliya to Israel to study Jewish philosophy and see if I could make my future in a Jewish homeland far away from the Jewish home I grew up in. Three years later, I had become a licensed tour guide, working for Palestinian tour agents specializing in Christian tours to the Holy Land. For reasons I only gradually learned to understand, I had chosen to make my living as a rebbe far de goyim, a rabbi for the Gentiles, presenting and representing Israel, Judaism, and Christianity to a variety of Christian groups from Northern Europe and the United States. I encountered people I probably would never have met otherwise, and played a variety of roles, which I came to see as dynamic performances not only for pilgrims but for myself as well. By presenting the land, Judaism, sacred texts, and myself to Christians, I came to appreciate and interrogate my own relations to Judaism, Israeli belonging, voyages of memory, Israeli-Palestinian politics, and religious truths in new ways.
When I first arrived in Israel, guiding seemed a natural choice. My chances of financial survival as an MA student of Jewish philosophy were slim. Tour guiding offered (or so I thought) a flexible schedule that would enable me to earn a decent living without disrupting my studies. I loved to travel and spoke several European languages, and enjoyed telling jokes and being on stage. I knew Jewish history and the Bible, had studied Second Temple Jewish thought, and had taken courses in early Christianity and New Testament Greek. I even kind of liked Jesus, especially when he acted like an apikores, a heretic in face of authority. I found some of the moralizing and coming-of-the-kingdom apocalypticism a bit heavy, but in his encounters with the Pharisees, Jesus told them what I'd have liked to say to my high school rabbis, but didn't dare. After all, straining out gnats and swallowing camels was a common pastime of quite a few of them. And anyone who overturned the tables of the money-changers in the Temple couldn't be bad.
So, after finishing the tour guide course, leading lethargic Jewish teenagers on long hikes in the summer heat, and presenting my face and business card to endless Israeli and Palestinian travel agents ("We'll call if we need you"), I was offered a real guiding job working with British Protestants, and later with German Catholics, Dutch Reformed, and American Evangelicals. Why Palestinians? Because they offered me work. Why Christians? Probably because I feared that working with Jewish visitors, most of them American, might remind me too much of where I came from. The enclave diaspora mentality that I'd come to Israel to escape might provoke allergies. Also, I thought I knew enough about Jews, and wanted to meet someone else. As for nonreligious visitors, many are "post-tourists" who delight in rapid shifts from cynical distance to serious contemplation to hedonistic enjoyment. They enjoy the play of surfaces and the inauthenticity of tourist attractions as a mark of their own connoisseurship and "coolness" (cf. Urry 1995: 140; Ritzer and Liska 1997: 107–9). Pilgrims, on the other hand, often come in search of a "hotter" authenticity (Brown 1996; Selwyn 1996), a more profound sense of self. They want to learn and experience rather than merely relax and be entertained (Turner 1973). As a student and sometimes practitioner of religion, I thought they'd be more interested—and more interesting.
Working with British Protestants (both Church of England and "nonconformist") was a learning experience. In time, I would learn to decipher their cultural codes: distasteful food was "interesting," a breathtaking sight was "lovely, isn't it?," and complaints were to be addressed by letter to the travel agent two weeks later. More challenging were the religious encounters. Pilgrims' attitudes to Judaism and Israel were shaped not so much by contemporary Israeli-Palestinian politics as by Christian theological views on Judaism that were incorporated into Western cultural understandings—even if pilgrims were not aware of them. While many interactions were determined by the institutional framework of the guided tour, the structure was flexible enough to allow guides like me to relate a variety of narratives and present myself in several different roles.
The Guided Pilgrimage Frame and Judeo-Christian Flirtation
To make sense of my own guiding performances and their interplay with Jewish-Israeli identity, I first need to outline the frame of the guided pilgrimage.
For at least 1800 years, Christian pilgrims have made their way to the Holy Land. Today, most Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land come on group bus tours. These groups are often organized by a Christian church body or travel agent catering to a Christian market. In the Holy Land, their hotels, meals, buses, guides, and services are organized by a local Israeli or Palestinian company. Their itineraries focus on sites of significance to Christian faith and history, and are frequently advertised as "a walk in the footsteps of Jesus." Such groups regularly conduct Christian worship, read Bible passages, and sing hymns in the course of their visit. They inhabit an environmental bubble, which intensifies interaction within the group while protecting it from most direct contact with the surrounding environment (Quiroga 1990; Cohen 1985; Holloway 1981; Schmidt 1979). During their stay, most Protestant and many Catholic groups are guided by Israeli licensed tour guides, mainly Jewish (see Bowman 1992). Guides accompany the groups for the full length of their stay and are responsible for carrying out the itinerary and providing explanations. They direct the bus driver, pay entrance fees, arrange lunch stops, hand out hotel keys, and are legally responsible for the safety of their group members. Beyond the guides' formal commitments, their role is shaped by what Erving Goffman termed attachments shaped by the individual guide. The sites (though not all) may be fixed in the itinerary, but the amount of time spent there, the places and objects pointed out, and the story told about them (though often based on information transmitted in tour guide school) are up to the guide, working together with the group's spiritual leader, who is usually a priest or pastor.
In his pathbreaking article on the typology of tour guides, Erik Cohen identified a variety of functions: pathfinding, mediating cultures, animating group social atmosphere, and communicating information. Unlike in other institutionalized group excursions, in which "the principal expectation of mass tourists from Professional Guides is that they provide information and interpretation" (1985: 20), for the pilgrims, the "head" of the guide is a tool for reaching the "heart." The transmission of empathy and understanding through the selection of appropriate biblical passages, suitable explanations, and appropriate feeling tones is often more valued than encyclopedic information. The knowledge pilgrims request most is knowledge that augments their faith experience. Thus, guiding pilgrims involves a greater component of emotional labor (Hochschild 1983) than in most guiding performances.
Moreover, as a Jew, the guide is marked by pilgrims in certain emotionally charged ways. Even as early as the Byzantine Period, Jews often served as guides to Christian holy sites (Limor 1996). Jews were seen as people of the Book, as bearers of the longest memory and as older natives of the land, who possess geographical and scriptural knowledge. They became witnesses and authenticators of Christian sites and truths, often in spite of themselves. Thus, the Jew may become a mediator between Christian pilgrims and the sacra of their voyage—the Bible, Jesus, and the holy places. While Christian pilgrims' views of Israel and Jews vary with their theology and their often theologically tinged politics (Feldman 2011), they are rarely indifferent.
As is frequently the case in intercultural encounters in commodified tourism, the visitors' images of the country and its inhabitants, which are at variance with the daily realities on the ground, often create pressure on the part of "native" guides and service workers to comply with touristic images (Crang 1997; Black 2000). In this Christian-Jewish-Israeli encounter, however, not only are images charged with a history of painful conflict and power relations, but some of those images are sacred symbols shared by Jews and Christians, who interpret them in very different although partially overlapping ways. Furthermore, their status as sacred symbols minimizes the range of tolerated display of role distance toward them. If you want to tell a Jesus joke, tell it to the pastor in private first. If he laughs, it's kosher. To be effective, guides will frequently suppress their skepticism or ambivalence, not only toward Christian truths, but toward Jewish beliefs and Israeli national myths as well. Better to err on the side of naïveté than on the side of cynicism.
Consequently, guides often employ subtle strategies to mark role distance without offending the pilgrims upon whom they rely for livelihood and recompense, that is, by using tips and requests for their services on return visits. Some guides will only read from the Old Testament (sometimes translating word by word from a Hebrew Bible), and always give New Testament passages to the pastor or group members to read. One guide said, "I'll never use his Hebrew name, Yeshua; Jesus doesn't belong to me. I only call him 'Jesus'" (for other examples, see Guter and Feldman 2006). Others will not guide in churches or will make sure not to stand behind the altar screen when speaking to the group, even in ruined churches. Some will systematically provide archaeological and historical explanations and turn to the pastor, publicly asking him if he would like to read the New Testament passages or deliver a spiritual message. These are semi-ritualized forms of framing that demarcate the roles of guide and pastor, through a performance of Jewish/Christian difference.
I wound up following another path. On my very first job guiding a Christian group headed by a booming-voiced evangelist from Cornwall, we approached the Catholic Church of the Beatitudes. At the time, the area around the perimeter of the church had been excavated, and workmen were injecting concrete around the foundations to protect the church from structural damage caused by settling.
"Why are they doing that?" inquired Pastor Don.
I answered, "To prevent the floor from cracking. You see, the church is built on sand."
"Oho!" he exclaimed. "There's my next sermon!"
I deduced from my successful initiation into guiding Christian groups that the planting of emotionally resonant and frequently multivocal symbols was often more important than the train of historical causation or the details of specific cultural meanings. The evocation of resonant symbols and key words was frequently commended by the group's pastor and applauded by the group members. As my wife Rachel once told me, "As a lecturer, your first task is to instruct; as a guide, it is to seduce." If, however, seduction, as Baudrillard puts it, is the attraction of surfaces, does this not entail perils for the encounter in which one party, the pilgrims, may be seeking the depths of religious experience, and demand total sincerity? Can playful attempts at seduction not be misunderstood as the desire to establish a relationship of commitment?
This issue became most acute in my work with Evangelical or Fundamentalist Protestant groups. For many, the world was divided into Christians and Heathens, and perhaps also biblical Hebrews who haven't yet seen the light. What's more, many came from "seeker churches," whose membership included many who had grown up in a variety of other denominations or even religions. For them, I was often a prime target for conversion. My "strategy of seduction" complicated matters, insofar as I spoke sympathetically of Jesus, recited by heart passages of the New Testament, or neglected to add the distancing phrase "according to tradition" before each mention of, say, Jesus's miracles at a particular site. After all, I thought, Jesus was Jewish, and my job was to bring the Bible to life throughout the land—not to expound my personal religious or political views—right?
Repeatedly, I found my position misconstrued. Even if I took care to stand to the side during their prayers and not speak of Jesus as "messiah," "our Lord," or "savior," groups would ask, "So when did you discover Jesus?" Theological explanations on Jewish Messianic beliefs rarely made a difference; the same questions and testifying would continue. To borrow Evangelical terminology, for them, if I wasn't born again yet, by talking the talk, I had demonstrated that I had "come under conviction" (Harding 2000: 59–60).
Next, I tried ritual. On the day of our visits to the Western Wall, I packed my tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin (phylacteries) in my backpack. When we arrived at the plaza in front of the Wall, I wrapped myself in the tallit, recited the blessings in Hebrew, wound the tefillin around my arm, and translated the accompanying prayer text to them. As the group photographed me, while looking at the similarly attired worshippers at the wall, I sensed the coin dropping. "Ah, he's not one of us." Even for Evangelicals, ritual did the trick; it marked the border. Afterwards, they would ask me, "So what do you Jews think of Jesus?" That was an improvement.
After a year or so of these tallit and tefillin performances at the Western Wall, I reconsidered. At age 16, my father gave me hell for not putting on tefillin for prayer each morning. "Your father put on tefillin, your grandfather wore tefillin! Your cousins all wear tefillin! Only you—no. No-good family!" I refused to wear the phylacteries to please my father. Was I now going to put them on for show to please the goyim?
The religious context of the performance (at the Western Wall, at prayer time, like that done by the worshippers at the Wall) left little room for role distance. Was I not then saying—to them and ultimately to myself—that this is what real Jews do? How then would I explain, if asked, why I did not put on tefillin every day without appearing totally irreligious and irreverent?
This interaction seemed to be a precarious tango with religious symbols across religious lines. The ritual worked in defining an effective border between myself-as-Jew and them-as-Christians because the context was perceived as religious and worthy of respect, especially since the prayer text I recited over the tallit and translated for them referred to verses that are part of their Bible as well. Because donning the tallit and tefillin and reciting the prayer could be seen as an act of commitment (which, in certain ways, it was), they might then expect me to behave as Orthodox do in order to be authentically Jewish in their eyes.
Thus, the tourist/pilgrim gaze (Black 2000; Urry 1990) on the religious symbols changes their nature for myself as performer as well. As the group's gaze moves from the leather straps on my arm to those worn by the Hasidim praying closer to the wall, what do they see? Do they reclassify me as an outsider? Have the Hasidim now become less strange? Or, perhaps, do the onlookers come to appreciate that their Jesus wore straps much like these, and was, in fact, far more Jewish than they had imagined previously? As in the case of many natives' representations of their culture to outsiders, the tourists/pilgrims' interpretation of symbols can never be fully controlled by the performers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ethnographic Encounters in Israel by Fran Markowitz. Copyright © 2013 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
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
What People are Saying About This
"A compelling anthology on the diversity of contemporary Israel by a wide range of insightful observers who challenge conventional images. The willingness of the contributors to speak openly, bravely, and critically about the dilemmas of doing research in Israel makes this volume of great value as a contribution to anthropological debates on ethnographic fieldwork."
A compelling anthology on the diversity of contemporary Israel by a wide range of insightful observers who challenge conventional images. The willingness of the contributors to speak openly, bravely, and critically about the dilemmas of doing research in Israel makes this volume of great value as a contribution to anthropological debates on ethnographic fieldwork.
A compelling anthology on the diversity of contemporary Israel by a wide range of insightful observers who challenge conventional images. The willingness of the contributors to speak openly, bravely, and critically about the dilemmas of doing research in Israel makes this volume of great value as a contribution to anthropological debates on ethnographic fieldwork.