Emily Mckee

Dwelling in Conflict (eBook, ePUB)

Negev Landscapes and the Boundaries of Belonging

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Land disputes in Israel are most commonly described as stand-offs between distinct groups of Arabs and Jews. In Israel's southern region, the Negev, Jewish and Bedouin Arab citizens and governmental bodies contest access to land for farming, homes, and industry and struggle over the status of unrecognized Bedouin villages. "Natural," immutable divisions, both in space and between people, are too frequently assumed within these struggles.

Dwelling in Conflict offers the first study of land conflict and environment based on extensive fieldwork within both Arab and Jewish settings. It explores planned towns for Jews and for Bedouin Arabs, unrecognized villages, and single-family farmsteads, as well as Knesset hearings, media coverage, and activist projects. Emily McKee sensitively portrays the impact that dividing lines-both physical and social-have on residents. She investigates the political charge of people's everyday interactions with their environments and the ways in which basic understandings of people and "their" landscapes drive political developments. While recognizing deep divisions, McKee also takes seriously the social projects that residents engage in to soften and challenge socio-environmental boundaries. Ultimately, Dwelling in Conflict highlights opportunities for boundary crossings, revealing both contemporary segregation and the possible mutability of these dividing lines in the future.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 264
• Erscheinungstermin: 10. Februar 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780804798327
• Artikelnr.: 48420441

Autorenporträt

Emily McKee is Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department and the Institute for the Study of Environment, Sustainability, and Energy at Northern Illinois University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
The book begins with an introduction to the lived experiences of Negev land
conflict and the pessimism with which many residents view prospects for
amelioration. The introduction reviews existing sociopolitical explanations
for Palestinian-Israeli conflict and explains the added benefits of
considering this conflict as environmental, too. It lays out the book's
argument that environmental discourses have been used by people on all
sides of the conflict to naturalize a binary division between Jews and
Arabs. The text explains the political dwelling perspective that guides the
book's analysis, drawing phenomenologically oriented notions of landscapes
as the embodiments of residents' dwelling tasks together with political
ecology's keen attention to the material and ideological importance of
power in shaping relations between people and their environments.
Discussion of the study's multiple field sites and its design of boundary
crossing frames a discussion of methodology and of the ethics of
researching within ongoing conflict.
1Narrating Present Pasts
chapter abstract
This chapter examines the use of several dominant environmental discourses
in competing Zionist and counter-Zionist Negev land claims. A historical
examination of three key discourses within the Zionist movement explains
the layered meanings that references to key topics such as farming,
territory, wilderness, and rootedness, hold today. This discursive
genealogy continues to influence the tactics and strategies of contemporary
land struggles, particularly for Bedouin Arab residents telling histories
of the Naqab. On one level, reminiscences counter erasures in Zionist
narratives, peopling the barren wastelands of Zionist accounts with vibrant
Bedouin Arab communities. However, even those accounts that most forcefully
oppose Zionist histories on the surface often rest on environmental
discourses shared with Zionism, such as the power of labor in land to
bolster claims.
2Seeking Recognition
chapter abstract
This chapter compares two cases of "illegal" land use to consider the
stakes of environmental discourses and the land claims they support. In one
case, Jewish farmstead owners built houses on agricultural land and in the
other, Bedouin Arab residents built on lands declared as state-owned. In
both cases the government threatened eviction, and residents sought
governmental recognition of their land claims, but they faced very
different public and governmental responses. The chapter develops the idea
of de-cultural accommodation to demonstrate the social and political
production of laws and illegality. Following the discursive genealogy in
chapter one, this chapter demonstrates how dominant environmental
discourses in Israel, despite being contingent because they are
historically shaped and not naturally given, hold great power to carve the
Negev into socially and geographically segregated spaces.
Bridge: Distant Neighbors
chapter abstract
A bridge introduces the second half of the book, which zooms in on the
everyday dwelling practices and experiences of residents in the Negev in
order to explore how residents shape and are shaped by the state-planned
landscapes within which they dwell. The bridge introduces the social and
spatial distance between the two case study towns that provide the bulk of
this dwelling analysis. It depicts the region's divided landscapes by
narrating the disjointed journey necessary to move from one town to the
next, but it also shows residents ability to creatively use these
landscapes by describing two atypical ventures into the largely abandoned
buffer zone between the towns.
3Coping with Lost Land
chapter abstract
Chapter three focuses on life in 'Ayn al-'Azm, a government-planned
township for Bedouin Arabs. Recalling former homes with more rural
lifestyles, many residents viewed their moves into the planned township as
a shift from freedom to restriction, intra-family closeness to inter-family
friction, and self-sufficiency to dependence. Government plans for
"modernization" and efficiency created landscapes that felt uncomfortable
to many residents and prevented agricultural and pastoral dwelling
practices. Residents coped with this urban planning with taskscapes that
ranged from acquiescence (e.g., establishing a nuclear family household and
taking up wage labor) to "making do," in de Certeau's sense of the term
(e.g., staking a tent in front of one's concrete block house), to public
advocacy (e.g., a heritage tourism venture). Most formed ambivalent
attachments to the township, feeling felt strong ties to family and
neighborhood, but alienation from the township as a collective landscape.
4Reforming Community
chapter abstract
This chapter presents the Jewish moshav of Dganim, settled by new
immigrants from Cochin, India in the 1950s. Striving to meet Zionist
priorities of nation building, moshav residents built a cooperative farming
community. However, this farming role collapsed in recent years, leaving
not just agriculture but also cooperative work in jeopardy of disappearing
from the moshav. As residents have sought out new endeavors to support the
moshav, many have viewed Cochini heritage tourism as the moshav's best hope
for cooperative success within Israel's new economic climate. In the course
of their economic transitions, residents have chosen taskscapes that
affirmed moshav lands as Jewish and separated them from nearby Bedouins.
Throughout the chapter, comparisons and contrasts drawn between Dganim and
'Ayn al-'Azm show how two very different experiences with government
planners have led residents to develop different senses of place and
different understandings of their own power to shape place.
5Challenging Boundaries
chapter abstract
This chapter probes the potential of deliberate engagement with the
everyday politics of dwelling to shift dominant environmental discourses.
It examines three environmental justice campaigns run by Bustan-political
and environmental educational tours, an alternative energy campaign, and
sustainable design classes-attending to their successes and stumbles.
Through practical involvement in home building, energy provisioning, and
personal and governmental planning, these campaigns aim to change norms of
land ownership and ethno-political identification in Israel. The group
proceeds through "bricolage activism," resourcefully re-deploying existing
ideas, practices, and rhetoric about Bedouins and Jews, citizenship, and
society and nature. This activism attempts to re-signify divisive
discourses with more inclusive frames of co-residence, stewardship, and
socio-environmental sustainability. The chapter considers the potential and
limitations of Bustan's efforts to challenge the status quo of land
conflict through a politics of boundary softening, rather than purely
confrontational activism.
Conclusion:
chapter abstract
The conclusion pulls analysis forward to more recent developments in the
Negev. Analyzing debates about a government proposition for settling Negev
land claims known as the Prawer Plan and a proposal to develop new Negev
towns, it demonstrates that well-worn binary oppositions between Jew and
Arab, progress and tradition, and culture and nature continue to guide
discussion in implicit and explicit ways. The conclusion suggests how the
insights of the book's political attuned dwelling analysis can be used to
develop interventions, such as integrated planning and boundary softening,
that may be capable of achieving just and lasting solutions to the stymied
conflict.