Ethnographic Encounters in Israel: Poetics and Ethics of Fieldwork [Paperback]

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.

Challenges and dilemmas of studying life in Israel

Fran Markowitz is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She is author ofSarajevo: A Bosnian KaleidoscopeandComing of Age in Post-Soviet Russiaand editor (with Michael Ashkenazi) ofSex, Sexuality and the Anthropologistand (with Anders H. Stefansson) ofHomecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return.

Ethnographic Encountersoffers outstanding ethnography, persuasively close to its subject but at the same time posing wider themes and questions vital to Israel and to the practice of anthropology in an intensely edgy contemporary society.

[I]ntroduces readers to a variety of ethnographic settings that are not often part of discussions about Israel.March 2015

A collection of first-person accounts . . . [of the] contradictions of religion, politics, identity, kinship, racialization, and globalization in the fascinating and often vexing dimensions of the Israeli experience.Summer 2014

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 dolã)