Author: Stein-Rebecca-Luna
Date: 1999
Institution: Stanford-University (0212)
Subject:
Social Sciences
Language: English
Abstract:Based on fifteen months of field research, this dissertation investigates the cultural politics of peace in contemporary Israel during the Labor administration of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres (1992 - 1996) as the government negotiated the terms of the Middle East Peace Process with the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states. Through an ethnographic approach, I argue that the Peace Process era was a critical time of cultural and epistemological reconfiguration in Israel, when new maps and meanings of the nation were generated, and when the terms of national inclusion were hotly contested by a variety of Israeli communities and institutions with very different histories in the nation-state and access to its symbolic and material resources. Tourism was at the center of peace culture in Israel, and provides an important and unexamined lens through which to investigate the historical conditions, effects, and meanings of peace in Israel during the mid-1990s. Through this lens, I study the shifts in dominant Jewish culture and practice that both catalyzed and followed the diplomatic and economic realignment of the Middle East. I investigate the popular imaginations, geographies, ways of mapping, and objects of knowledge that the Middle East Peace Process has produced among heterogenous Israeli communities; the ways that regional and domestic policies of the state were negotiated and contested through cultural practices; and the new meanings of Israeli identity, space, culture, and history that these political processes generated. Using ethnography as my base, this project combines the tools and literatures of political economy, cultural and literary criticism, and cultural geography in an account for the interrelationship of cultural, economic, and political processes.