A Nation from the Sands

Abstract

Since its birth ninety years ago Tel Aviv has been a leading symbol ofthe Zionist, and subsequently, Israeli claim to be a modem, progressive, and essentially ‘Western’ nation. The power of this image has obscured both the intimate connection between the modern(ist) architectural and town-planning discourses upon which its identity has been constructed and the exclusivism of Zionism as a nationalist movement, and the fact that the neighboring town ofJaffa, long considered Tel Aviv’s ancient and backward alter ego, was in fact developing along similar lines as the Jewish city until its conquest in 1948.     

以色列贝都因人的原住民话语:发展与争议

以色列自建国后没收了贝都因人在以色列南部内盖夫地区的大量土地,将这些土地犹太化,内盖夫地区的土地权争议与族群矛盾由此催生。与此同时,促进和保障原住民权利的国际组织机构相继出现;多元文化主义加剧了以色列的社会分裂;以色列知识精英不断批判犹太复国主义的霸权政治;非政府组织大量涌现,公民社会中的不平等现象日益引起关注。在此背景下,以色列贝都因人提出他们作为内盖夫原住民的话语,要求以色列政府承认他们在内盖夫的土地权。政府对此做出相关举措,解决贝都因人的土地权诉求。政府对待贝都因原住民的态度是以色列处理境内族群矛盾的缩影。     

From ‘Russianness’ to ‘Israeliness’ through the landscape of the soul: therapeutic discourse in the practice of immigrant absorption in Israel with ‘Russian’ adolescents

This article explores the increasing incorporation of professional therapeutic knowledge and practices into the state-led apparatus of absorption of new immigrants in Israel. Singling out this phenomenon is the seemingly unexpected alliance between the therapeutic ethos, which leans on individualist, a-national and universal values, and state-led absorption practices, based on a Zionist, collectivist and local ethos. According to the Zionist ethos, the newcomer ‘returning to an historical homeland’ is expected to become part of a territorially bounded collective entity and to adopt a new national identity that will predominate over other identities. The therapeutic ethos undermines moral authorities promoting collective redemption through identification with community goals and challenges a patronizing attitude towards new immigrants. Analysing the rhetoric and practice of Na'aleh – a decade-and-a-half-old project for adolescents immigrating from the former Soviet Union, characterized by a ‘therapeutic absorption policy’, this article examines the meaning of ‘therapeutic’ absorption in shaping a new Israeli citizen within the current social context. In order to clarify the historical uniqueness of this phenomenon, Na'aleh's absorption paradigm is compared to Youth Aliyah – the project that absorbed youngsters in a distinctly different ideological period of Israeli history (early 1940s), particularly with regard to the status of Zionism. A locus of comparison is the perceptions of the absorbing personnel and the absorbed immigrants in both ventures. The main claim of this article is that the psychologizing of the absorption apparatus both challenges and fortifies the traditional role of statist Zionism under global, postmodern conditions, typified by the erosion of the nation-state and questioning the moral status of its constitutive ethos. Therapeutic absorption transforms the newcomer into the object of therapeutic intervention rather than assimilative education. However, it simultaneously enables the ‘Russian’ teenagers from a ‘pre-therapeutic society’ to internalize a ‘therapeutic habitus’, which grants them the skills and competency to become a ‘local’ and to attain symbolic goods significant in their new social environment. Therapeutic personnel, characterized by emotional skills and cultural proximity to the absorbed pupils, rather than ideological identification with Zionist project, serve as a newer version of traditional agents of Israeli socialization, by virtue of their own unique course of absorption in Israel that blends the process of ‘becoming Israeli’ with socialization into a professional/therapeutic culture.     

The Search for the National in Canadian Multilateral Cinematographic Co-productions

According to opinions expressed in the trade literature, international co-productions-made to appeal to a wide audience - are less likely to be identified as 'national productions' than domestic films. Yet in the past, co-productions not only helped the emergence and guaranteed the very existence of national film industries but, in some countries, they have also been seen as 'a mechanism for nation building'. The concepts of 'nation' and 'identity' have become increasingly problematic but, as a close examination of the reception of Canadian films made under the co-production agreements with France and the UK in the last decade shows, in the age of commercial mediation, even internationally-made cultural products can be turned into symbolic bearers of national identity.     

Mad Max: The Car and Australian Governance

This article argues that the car is an intimate aspect of the governance of Australia. The term 'governance' is defined as the techniques used to know, order and manage individuals. The film Mad Max II: The Road Warrior is used as a prism to separate out the roles that the car performs in governance. Three roles are identified: the car as identity, the car as myth and the car as power. Applying this framework to Australia reveals the car's complex involvement in Australian governance, from the knowing and ordering of others, to collective myths of possession and future prosperity, to the knowing of place from space, to the removal of indigenous children. The significance of the car means Australia can be characterised as the petrochemical, chrome-plated cyborg republic of Oz.     

Generating social identity in times of war and terror

The social-political analysis in this paper addresses many of the ambiguities that a critique of ideology and values, especially in the fields of education, media and morals, tends to evoke. Crises in identity and values accompanying the Jewish State since the beginning of the twentieth century have characterised the modern history of Israel as a continuing conflict between Israeli and Palestinian societies. In the search for a new post-colonial identity, Post-Zionism has emerged as a global ethos that challenges the ethno-religious Zionist ethos. Another aspect of the modern Israeli phenomenon is the Israeli addiction to power making the use of military power unavoidable. This appears on centre stage in terms of both public life and the Israeli psyche and resulted in the rise of the concept of power in the Israeli ethos.     

Navigations: Insularity versus Cosmopolitanism in the Bahamas: Formality and Informality in an Arichipelagic Nation

Bahamians have traditionally considered themselves as one people, despite the fragmentation of the territory they inhabit, and the porous nature of the islands' natural boundaries. Paradoxically, the inhabitants of the archipelago are far more cosmopolitan and globally integrated than their apparent isolation would suggest. This article looks at how variation throughout the archipelago makes the imagination of a single identity difficult. Issues of identity, for instance, are rendered fluid by the islands' separation from one another. Thus, the means by which identity is created and maintained, and the various symbols used to cognise, legitimise and incorporate this fragmentation into a consciousness of self, are both fluid. The following examples are used to show how Bahamians make sense of these paradoxes and so knit a common bond from the apparent fragmentation of their land: racial and ethnic identity, the manipulation of symbols such as 'family' and 'home', communication and discourse among the islands, and questions of national versus local politics.     

Malta: Language,Literacy and Identity in a Mediterranean Island Society

Available documentation for the early modern period indicates that the Malta harbour towns achieved literacy earlier than the countryside. The Maltese townsmen lived on a trading route, and it was necessary for them to learn the lingua franca, as the language of trade in the Mediterranean. The educated élite were able to acquire fluent speaking knowledge, as well as the ability to write, Tuscan (a dialect then in the process of becoming standard Italian), while continuing to employ their local Maltese 'dialect' on numerous occasions. By and large, the erosion of the position of Maltese as the subordinate language was an inevitable by-product of this development. The Maltese language was able to attain the function of a literary language in the nineteenth century but it had no standard orthography until 1931 and was only adopted as Malta's official language in 1964.     

Remapping American-ness: Heritage Production and the Staging of the Native American and the African American as Other in 'Historyland'

The American tourism industry in the 1950s helped to produce certain notions of America, or what it meant to be American, at a time when these identities were in flux. Visitors to 'Historyland', an attraction that reconstructed a nineteenth-century Wisconsin logging town, could experience a living lumberjack community, as well as an 'authentic' Indian Village and a dining car restaurant with black waiters. The Native Americans and African Americans, by performing their 'historic' roles, were staged as examples of 'the other' which European American tourists could encounter, and against which they could define their own sense of American-ness.     

Discursive Strategies around 'Community' in Political Propaganda: The Case of Lega Nord

Michael Billig's book Banal Nationalism (1995) set out to expose the covert ways in which established nation-states reinforce their legitimacy by constantly 'flagging' the national identity to their citizens. He terms this kind of nationalism 'banal', in contrast with more obvious 'hot' nationalist movements. This article applies Billig's theory of 'banal nationalism' not to an established nation-state but to present-day Catalonia, an 'historic nation' which now enjoys a large measure of autonomy. The article argues that in Catalonia, forms of 'banal nationalism' are generated by Catalan institutions, exist in competition with the 'banal nationalism' of the Spanish State, and might be partly responsible for the 'cooling' of Catalanism which is currently worrying some Catalanists.     

No Community is an Island,Every Intellectual is an Island: The Story of Bobby O'Malley

This article explores a number of anthropological themes -- specifically suburbanism, the island nature of socio-cultural milieux, and intellectualism -- by way of a novel, The Story of Bobby O'Malley , which narrates the tale of an intellectual boy growing up in a Newfoundland suburb. Intellectuality may be described as a condition of neither leadership nor followership, but of displaying a certain disengagement. It is in this way that Edward Said distinguishes 'the intellectual' from 'the expert', the latter being concerned with giving answers to questions out to him by others while the former exiles himself from the domain of conventional questions as such, in order to pose his own. The intellectual condition, Rapport argues, tells of an interactional-cum-cognitive displacement, an eschewing of the conventions, the habiti, of expression and exchange. To put it differently, the intellectual may be said to make for his vantage-point upon everyday life a certain 'island-ness', an 'elsewhere': intending, in Philip Larkin's words (1990, p. 104), that 'elsewhere underwrites my existence'.     

Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs: Towards a New Framework

The article surveys Tsarist, Soviet and Western historiography of Russia and how this affected the national identities and inter-ethnic relations among the three eastern Slavs. Western historiography of Russia largely utilised an imperialist and statist historiographical framework created within the Tsarist empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although this framework was imperialist it was gradually accepted as 'objective' by the Western scholarly community. Yet, this historiography was far from being 'objective'. After 1934 Soviet historiography also reverted to the majority of the tenets found in Tsarist historiography. Within Tsarist, Western and Soviet historiographies of 'Russia' eastern Slavic history was nationalised on behalf of the Russian nation which served to either ignore or deny a separate history and identity for Ukrainians and Belarusians. In the post-Soviet era all 15 Soviet successor states are undertaking nation and state building projects which utilise history and myths to inculcate new national identities. The continued utilisation of the Tsarist, Western and Soviet imperial and statist historiographical schema is no longer tenable and serves to undermine civic nation building in the Russian Federation. This article argues in favour of a new, non-imperial framework for histories of 'Russia' territorially based upon the Russian Federation and inclusive of all of its citizens.     

Subverting rules and reinforcing stereotypes: Italianness in Madonna of the Seven Moons

This article focuses on a key Gainsborough costume melodrama, Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944). Following the critical revaluation of the ‘woman's film’, feminist film scholars have celebrated Madonna's feminine aesthetics and extravagant Italian setting, seen as an alternative to the austerity of Britain's wartime self‐definition. Using this position as a point of debate, I explore some hitherto ignored implications of the film's representation of Italianness, arguing that Madonna actually reinforces national boundaries by relying on long‐established notions of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Italianness’, and owes its box‐office success to the validation of Italy's ambivalent place in British fantasy.     

Breaking with English: the nation as ethnoscape1

Broken English and the bone people, a New Zealand film and novel respectively, fall into the category of nation‐building texts. Many narratives in this ‘genre’ accomplish cultural reunification through the family. However, these two works are particularly intriguing because they use land and specific spaces in order to work through these transcultural shifts as they are played out within the main characters' relationships. ‘Breaking with English’ is therefore not only a linguistic concept, but also a metaphor for the transculturation of bodies and land undertaken throughout these two titles.     

Fetishised liberty,the fear of the other and the global juridical rule in Iraq

The US-led military invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was a further development in the global economy of violence which has progressively not only made Iraqis redundant as national-political subjects but has also stripped them of civility, without which no form of power can become legitimate, and turned them into a 'disposable population'. The projection of global disorder onto Iraqi national borders made the country a testing ground for the USA to establish its sovereignty in the global space that had become 'paranoid' in post-11 September 2001. The promotion of democracy and freedom, the ethical companions of this imperial expansion, was a global transposition of the national role assumed by the liberal state as the agent that constitutes free people. Thus, the Truth of the liberal state as the giver of liberty was deployed by the imperial power as the agent destined to turn the Truth into the Goal (Telos) of history, of which everyone, Iraqis or otherwise, becomes a subject at the expense of being a historical subject -- acting in history. Far from expanding, however, a democratic politics in which power and right are kept apart through recourse to the notion of legality, the military invasion was a juridical exercise of power in which right becomes the right of the ruler to rule. Without politics and a hegemonic construction of the universal mediated by association of citizens the fear of the Other remained uncivilised. While the global ruler has perpetuated and normalised this fear through recourse to the notion of 'just war' the Iraqi 'surrogates' for popular intervention have launched with a deadly consequence their own version of this notion.     

Citizens of Nowhere in Particular: Cosmopolitanism,Writing, and Political Engagement in Eighteenth-Century Europe

This article explores the connection in the late eighteenth century between the invention of citizenship and the obfuscation of local, corporate or national identity under the guise of cosmopolitanism. The common premise in much recent writing on nationalism is that the nation, even if it is an 'imagined' community, provided the critical framework in which political identity and, hence, political participation first became possible for ordinary people. However, it is clear that in absolutist Europe, private subjects were often best able to make themselves into political actors on either the national or the continental stage by de-situating themselves rhetorically, that is, claiming to speak from no place, no position, and no name except 'friend of humanity' or 'citizen of the world'. Moreover, this literary strategy of insisting on one's fungible individuality—the notion that one was no more than a generic 'simple citizen' and no less than 'the plenipotentate of my own ideas' in a culture obsessed with social position and family name—ultimately helped to bolster an alternative (and often historically overlooked) way of thinking about relations among states and the individuals within them that marked an early challenge to the hegemony of national interest.     

Witnessing an Islamic Rite of Passage and a Local/Non-Local Articulation

This paper examines power relations predicated on the recourse to a Muslim identity by the Luri inhabitants of a remote, inaccessible place in south-western Iran known for their tenuous observance of the Islamic rules propagated by the faith's gate-keepers at the centre. The Muslimhood is asserted by the Lurs as an articulation of localness within the wider national context through a ritual practice characterised by spatial paucity that facilitates the deployment of an image of a 'historical' precedent, an abstract narrative of the Muslim community (ummat) in diverse contexts. Thus, the specific spatial and temporal limits that condition their differentiated access to sources of power based on class, gender and race are superseded by the Lurs in an imagined 'horizontal comradeship' with others creating an anti-structural domain and a 'plebeian public sphere' in which ordinary people appear as the agents as well as beneficiaries of the expanding domain of politics through a forged brother/sisterhood. Effective in this universalisation of politics is the use of slogan as a genre devised to overcome the structural inequalities that characterise the encompassing national system. The greater the structural gap, the paper argues, the more appealing the ritualistic use of slogan as an accessible anti-structural device susceptible to articulate the sacred with the profane. The 'plebeian' use of slogan, therefore, increasingly exposes the contradictory practice of becoming a Muslim in a peripheral location.     

Establishing roots at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport Garden: Landscapes of national identity

With the understanding that the planning of public space is a discursive practice, this article examines the cultural meanings encoded in the design of the grounds around Israel's main airport, Ben Gurion International. Using the example of Terminal 3, the article discusses how the State of Israel leverages landscaped space as an ideological tool in the struggle for control over symbolic expressions of national identity. The design decisions here are framed in the context of the all important Zionist trope of ‘redemption’, or land reclamation in the image of Zion. The airport's ‘Seven Species Garden’ is explained as part of a widespread mythology of an autochthonous people/land bond, deeply rooted in Jewish-Israeli consciousness, which draws upon the Bible for territorial legitimacy and national identity. Finally, the Orientalist bias betrayed in the airport grounds effectively bars entry of the county's largest minority to the ‘gateway’ of Israeli national space because such references are based on ethnicity.     

A 'Countryside Bright with Cosy Homesteads': Irish Nationalism and the Cottage Landscape

The new Irish state, like other nations, invoked 'folk roots', returning to a pre-colonial golden age located in the rural west. Indeed, the state and the Church promoted an 'ideology of the rural' despite limited modernisation. An ancient and authentic west was evoked in travel writing, and especially in paintings of the Irish cottage landscape. National identity was not only embodied in but maintained through cottage landscape imagery by means of what Michael Billig terms banal nationalism, that is, the daily inculcation of nationhood by means of an array of barely-noticed signs. The cottage landscape, constantly reproduced and taken for granted daily recalled citizens to their heritage.