Imagine being able to remotely and anonymously search through locals in your area, browse through pictures of them, and chat with those who also found you attractive. Imagine if you could use your smartphone to do this from the comfort of your own home. For those not familiar with Tinder, it’s a hugely popular dating app that allows users to swipe through seemingly endless potential partners and form matches with those who were attracted to you. Tinder functions by accessing the user’s location and showing Tinder users based on age, gender, and distance preferences from 1 to 160 kilometres away. It only allows you to be approached by people who you have chosen. As a woman, you are more or less guaranteed matches, conversation, and dates. Imagine the kind of safe, manageable contact with new people you might have. Now imagine, what this might mean for an ethnographer conducting research in a militarised war zone that is both socially and religiously conservative, divided by strict borders and with little to no contact between the divided populations.

My research looks at everyday life and the politics of space amongst Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank. Palestinians with West Bank ID cards are forbidden to exit the West Bank without permits, which are difficult to obtain from the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). Meanwhile Jewish Israelis are forbidden to enter areas of the West Bank designated as Area A – the largest Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem, Jenin, and so on. The remaining 60% of the West Bank is “shared” between Palestinian towns and villages, illegal Israeli settlers, and the IOF.

This setting offers me the unique experience of learning about two culturally different but geographically proximate groups who, despite regular outbreaks of hostility between them, have relatively little contact with each other. As an ethnographer, conducting research among both Palestinians and Israeli settlers is not an option in terms of building trusting relationships or managing my own emotions about the conflict. Movement after sundown in the West Bank is restricted to those who have cars, and the dangers of night-time IOF raids, checkpoints, and the surge of attacks on settlers have to be factored in to travelling between spaces. Safely building relationships and knowledge about members of both communities without arousing suspicion or compromising my well-being is a difficult task, not to mention building personal and even romantic relations with those around me.

Luckily Tinder is not restricted by the occupation’s enforced ethnic separation, placing Palestinians, Israelis, and IOF soldiers on a relatively equal playing field of access.

In addition, since smartphones have become more ubiquitous than personal computers in Palestinian and Israeli society, their owners have been afforded independent and private Internet use. A new kind of private communication between individuals can now occur, including romantic and sexual exchanges, occurring on such popular messaging platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and Viber, which provides instant messaging features for known people. Conversely, Tinder opens up the potential of messaging between unknown individuals, with an explicitly romantic and/or sexual interest.

We are no longer living in the days of fieldwork as a remote exile of Malinowskian standards. While loneliness in the field may be inevitable, smartphones and social media have also changed the way we conduct fieldwork – we have to work a lot harder to distance ourselves from our friends and family if we conduct our research abroad. Once in the field, I found myself using my phone just as much as ever to keep in touch with friends and family. Having lived in London for the past few years I was accustomed to using Tinder, where it has become fairly common among single young people. Naturally I was curious about how it was being used locally and I found plenty of nearby users. I created a new profile with pictures of me in various neutral locations, removed any personal information (such as school or university that are automatically included from your Facebook profile). I also included a short introductory sentence on my profile in English explaining that I was new to the region and adjusted my settings to include male users aged 24-35 within 45 kilometres of me. While I did experiment with viewing both women and men, Tinder does not make it possible to converse with users unless they “match” you, which means that as a woman trying to talk to other women who identify as heterosexual is difficult.

With the range of distance that Tinder allows, I discovered users over Israel’s Apartheid Wall in Jerusalem (14km), Tel Aviv (45km), Amman in Jordan (75km), and the south of Lebanon (140km). Searching closer to home, Tinder provided an unpleasant reminder that for those who stay within their West Bank cities, illegal and often hostile Israeli settlers are everywhere. I was horrified and yet fascinated as I swiped my way through hundreds of profiles to see Israeli man after Israeli man, as close as 2 kilometres away, inside Palestine. As an anthropologist looking at everyday life, daily routines, and how people use and understood the ethnically segregated space around them, I was hooked.

While there has been considerable discussion of how we use social media within anthropological circles, in my review of the literature I found that little attention has been paid to Tinder as a tool, whether used personally or professionally.

Tinder and similar location-based apps allow us to see how users present themselves to the world and have remote contact with otherwise inaccessible populations. Of course, such access in a romantic and/or sexual context also raises some important ethical and methodological questions. How can we harness popular social media platforms for research purposes? Can we differentiate between using them both personally and professionally? What are the ethical ramifications of using something like Tinder as a research tool?

Social mapping

If you stay inside Palestinian cities and you have no personal connections with Israelis, the spatiality of the occupation can be hard to understand. There is no longer an area called Palestine that is populated solely by Palestinians. There are very few maps illustrating the demographic breakdowns of the Occupied West Bank, not to mention up to date ones as the illegal Israeli settlements continue to expand. “Area A”[1] is limited to the biggest cities, shrinking and often violated. The spaces between and encroaching into these cities (“Area C”, about 60% of the West Bank) are now populated by approximately 600,000 Jewish settlers, including the ultra-Zionist, the ultra-orthodox, and increasingly the right-wing working classes, all attracted to the settlements’ government subsidisation of housing (for Jewish citizens only). The populations are mixed, but not mixing, and education about either side is detrimental and/or non-existent.

Some shared Facebook or other social media interests as well as some peace-building initiatives bring people into contact who might not have been otherwise, but Tinder shows you from the privacy of your home exactly which users are around you (again, filtered through personalised options of gender, age range, and distance). For those who didn’t grow up here, watching the settlements arrive and expand, it is very difficult to conceive of the space not always having been the way it is now, nor the extent of the settler presence.

Tinder assisted in my understanding of just how invasive and close Israeli presence has come to one of the last strongholds of Palestinian space since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948.

Nationalism

The nationalism I discovered on Tinder was somehow both alarming and fascinating. Most Israeli men I saw had at least one picture of them posing proudly with their guns in army uniform, images from their three years of mandatory national service. Israeli users also often used nationalist memes in lieu of a personal photo or had the Israeli flag washed over their picture. I found far more Israelis than Palestinians[1], and those Palestinian male users generally preferred to use nationalist or romantic memes and quotes, or images of men with keffiiyehs over their faces throwing stones – the archetypal image of the Palestinian resistance actor. Presumably these photos also serve to provide anonymity; Tinder necessitates its users to post pictures on their profile, but it does not discriminate on the content of the picture. Stock images, jokes, and memes are also often used to maintain user privacy. In both conservative Jewish and Muslim cultures, Tinder creates a context where young men and women may be alone together, going against social convention. Therefore its users may prefer to keep themselves anonymous while browsing other users.

Israeli Tinder users appear to concretise a Zionist ambition of recreating Jews as independent and defensive. Israeli mandatory reserve service requires male citizens to be lifelong soldiers, defenders of the Jewish State. The male Israeli body should be strong, muscular, and powerful. The theme of the male body as defender is also present among Palestinian users. Denied a national army permitted to engage in combat with its occupier, Palestinian men are often civilian soldiers, responsible for the protection of their homes and land. However, as the Israeli occupation government criminalises the right of resistance, the Palestinian soldier hides his face behind his keffiyeh or hides his identity entirely behind a selection of romantic quotes and ideas.

It must be acknowledged that because Tinder users are most likely in pursuit of romance and/or sex, the ways in which users communicate with each other may be flirtatious, sexually forward, or presenting a more attractive and accommodating version of themselves. One could say politely that it’s a ‘less than professional’ context. My matches often directed our conversations towards things we had in common or places we could go, paying me compliments, asking when we could meet, and extolling their personal virtues in an attempt to get my phone number and/or meet.

The way we present ourselves on Tinder is not necessarily the way we may present ourselves in other formats and platforms – for example we may be more flirtatious, try to appear more outgoing, more funny, or otherwise more appealing to the opposite sex. But since this behavioural adjustment may also happen in face-to-face encounters between anthropologists and their interlocutors, does this mean we cannot use it as a form of legitimate empirical data collection? As an example, if I ever confessed my own politics or residence in Palestine to my Israeli matches, they often attempted to ‘convert’ and ‘explain’ to me their side, or quickly label me a terrorist sympathiser. The Palestinder Project^[2] documents the average content of such exchanges, and while presented in a comedic fashion, the creators use screenshots of conversations between the two groups to emphasise the miseducation and mistrust among the populations. Tinder conversations in general are marketed as stereotypically brief and light, flirtatious. Here in the West Bank chats between Tinder users can quickly turn into a heated political argument unless directed away from the issues on the ground: the occupation, the Wall, the mobility restrictions, the IOF, my work. In this sense I too was adjusting the way I communicated with Israelis in order to get them to communicate with me.

Cultural knowledge

Tinder is also useful for expanding my knowledge of Israeli culture, as a kind of social gauge, a way to keep in touch with Israelis on my own terms with a relatively anonymous profile. When chatting with Israeli Tinder matches that I chose for both personal and professional reasons, I would tell them I lived in Jerusalem. And as I got to know the city better, I was able to provide more convincing details about where I might live, as well as which details to leave out. If I felt like provoking a political discussion I could even ‘come clean’ about my real work or location. I was even lucky enough to find a few who lived in the settlement I planned to conduct further research in. Whenever I did tell settlers I was researching them, they told me either that there was ‘nothing there’ or that they were ‘monkeys.’

Upon learning I was a foreigner, most men wanted to know my opinion about the regional political situation. My answer was usually that it was ‘complicated,’ and many responded with the view that ‘Arabs wanted war’ and they were proud to have served in the IOF that violently oppresses them. “Palestine”, for these men, was simply a place referred to as where the “hostile Arabs” live and where they went when serving in the IOF, not a place where foreigners might safely go or where Tinder might happen.

I only ever met up with one match who fulfilled my research criteria, and because I was on the fence about whether it was a research or romantic interaction, I didn’t tell him about my work. It became clear to me during our date that we weren’t a romantic match, and since he still seemed interested in pursuing a romantic path I decided it was unethical to continue to meet with him as a research contact. I explained the situation to him but he expressed a desire to continue to pursue a romantic relationship despite my decision against it. Aside from the fact that he didn’t accept my rejection, I felt uncomfortable trying to build a working relationship with someone who would be waiting for me to ‘change my mind’ about him. Although the situation of unrequited attraction between researchers and interlocutors may well be common, Tinder’s remoteness allowed me to navigate this discomfort in a new and potentially safer way – I never had to use my real name, phone number, or feel rude disappearing afterwards.

Language practice

Tinder is exceptionally useful for keeping up on language skills. While I currently work in Palestine, my two years of Hebrew study have deteriorated – apart from conversational practice on Tinder. As similar Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic are two languages that are not to be confused, so this text-based method saved me the embarrassment of mixing up spoken Hebrew and Arabic with the wrong people. Using Tinder, I could have small conversations in Hebrew and keep my vocabulary alive without needing to speak out loud and avoiding confusing vocabulary. It’s not perfect, but it has certainly been useful.

Tinder as a methodological tool

Accessing my research subjects in this remote and limited manner allows me to multi-task, ethnographically, and ‘go over to the other side’ occasionally to check in with my informants on my own terms. If I want, I can pick an Israeli seemingly at random from Tinder, travel the short distance across the Apartheid Wall to West Jerusalem, talk to them, and then return to my own fieldsite where dating is difficult and contact with Israelis is limited, as is even leaving the West Bank for most. Despite maintaining honest relations with my Tinder matches, I feel a twinge of guilt when using data I’ve gleaned from conversations or people I’ve met from Tinder, as if this is somehow not legitimate anthropological knowledge.

Ethically, we must wonder if it is acceptable to meet potential research subjects in a dating or romantic context when you might have no intention of becoming involved with them romantically.

Or alternatively, is it ethically acceptable to meet potential research subjects in a dating or romantic context when you do have the intention of becoming involved with them romantically? I have been, for the most part, honest and open with those I have met regarding my intentions and profession, but this doesn’t necessarily stop people’s feelings from being hurt, or worse. Whatever my intention is in a new conversation with a Tinder match or Tinder interlocutor, I have always informed them that I’m a researcher of Israelis, which I can then position myself as politically neutral or otherwise – this is also a tactic I use outside the realm of Tinder, depending on who I’m talking to. If necessary I can hide the elements of my work that might trigger an argument or the portrayal of myself as a person opposed to Israel. This is achieved by highlighting the less political elements of my work and focusing on Israeli culture, which tends to flatter my (Israeli) Tinder contacts and potentially gain insight into their experiences. These are techniques that anthropologists may also employ in face-to-face interactions. And thus far it has worked, in that my interlocutors on Tinder have been accepting and interested in my work, often offering to meet and tell me about their lives. Establishing the context of research before a date or a romantic interaction where either party is free to reject the company of the other party felt like an interview situation to me, where the premise is similar.

So the question is, how do other people use Tinder and any similar social media/apps for their work? Where do we draw a line with what is and isn’t deemed scientific, objective, anthropological data? What are the anthropological uses for Tinder other than in the investigation of divided populations? These days ethnographic fieldwork is often accompanied by our smartphones, WIFI, Facebook, and the ability to stay in regular contact with our loved ones, colleagues, and new research contacts. Alongside this we have new ways of meeting and staying in touch with our interlocutors, new ways of meeting new people that can come with certain contexts or expectations, which requires us to investigate the ways we collect data and the ramifications behind them. Using romance as a context through which we can explore the cultures that we live in, and in my case, the ones that we don’t, can open otherwise closed doors. Meanwhile the remote quality of smartphone communication gives an added protection of distance and safety for ethnographers unable to move freely between spaces.

Tinder might not be the most perfect way of conducting ethnographic research, but it certainly opens up a new space for safe cultural exploration for ethnographers in difficult locations.

 

[1] This is discernable from name, language used on profile, and general physiology/use of national symbols in profiles.

[2] A tongue-in-cheek look at several foreigners’ Tinder and Grinder conversations with Israelis while living in the Palestinian West Bank during the 2014 Gaza War.

[1] The Occupied West Bank was divided into Areas A, B, and C after the 1994 Oslo Accords. Area A contains the major Palestinian cities, Area B is designated mixed industrial space, and Area C, which over 60% of the West Bank is designated, is mixed Palestinian and settler space, where Palestinians are forbidden from building new structures.

Interested in more? Don’t miss Anya’s follow-up post.

 

Featured image (modified) by israeltourism (flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

This post was first published on 2 May 2017.

Following the unexpected popularity of my May article Tinder as a Methodological Tool I was asked by Allegra to write a follow up, expanding on the subject and addressing the feedback. The original article was the culmination of 8 months’ fieldwork in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank during which I experimented with location-based dating app Tinder as an alternative way of understanding and navigating the space and people around me. Tinder turned out to be crucial for understanding the social divisions of occupied space, in which illegal Israeli settlers and native Palestinian population live alongside each other but not together. This unconventional methodological approach gave me a unique opportunity to understand the spatial politics of the Israeli settlement project, while simultaneously affording me a great amount of safety and privacy in navigating this complicated political landscape. In my article, I hence explored the practicalities, safety concerns, and preliminary findings from using the app, while addressing some of the necessary ethical issues of using an app associated with sex and romance to conduct fieldwork. The article went viral with a reach of over 20,000, almost 2,000 reads, and an overwhelmingly positive response on social media that was both touching and encouraging.

I have been interested in exploring the uses of social media in methodology, both practically and theoretically, since I began my PhD studies and I am excited to see others sharing the same enthusiasm. With its salacious reputation of easy-access sex and superficial photo-based interface, Tinder can often be something of a sensational topic – this being a dimension that might have ultimately contributed to the popularity of my original article. However, it appeared that many commenters were already using Tinder or thinking about Tinder in relation to ethnographic practice, and were therefore already thinking about the relation between romance, ethics, and methodology.

Little is written about anthropologists pursuing romance or sex in the field, and even less on the complex ethical issues involved in the construction of ethical relations between parties in such situations[1].

We are encouraged to be reflexive, to consider our own subjectivity and influence on situations as gendered, sexual, and racialised bodies, but not where this concerns not only our romantic or sexual encounters, but also our use of romantic or sexual dynamics with our interlocutors when in the field.

Some commenters of the article cited that Tinder is “ethically problematic” and “unsafe,” so I explore here what I think some of these ethical problems and safety concerns might be, and why some readers may be uncomfortable with the idea of a sex-oriented app as a research method.

I suggest that perhaps those who participated in the rapid adoption of such technologies or at least live in areas where they have been well integrated into urban life may be more comfortable than those who are less familiar with them. This potential comfort-gap between frequent and novice- or non-users of location based apps and social media functions may well remain wary of them and the safety of their use.

Making “authentic” contact

Before I began my fieldwork I was familiar with the political but not the cultural or spatial environment of the West Bank. During the early months of my work I learned just exactly how the Israeli and Palestinian populations I worked with are geographically mixed but rarely socially mixing. Although Israeli settlements are often built directly in the middle of pre-existing Palestinian communities, they are surrounded by a high wall and an extensive security infrastructure supported by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). Some Palestinians may work inside settlements in service industry or manual labour positions but the majority of Palestinians are barred entry. In turn, Israelis are legally denied entry to Palestinian cities in Area A[2] by the Israeli occupation regime. Inside the West Bank there are no means of public transportation that will deliver a person from an Israeli settlement to a Palestinian space, and though they are often metres apart, walking is not safe. Palestinians are not welcome on settlement-bound Israeli public transport as Israelis, especially settlers, tend to be, at best, wary of Palestinians and often arm themselves against them. In contrast, I have frequently experienced Palestinians referring to Israelis as “akhwat,” (“brothers,” Palestinian dialect Arabic) acknowledging their shared Semitic roots. The occupation administration and the settlers it protects, however, would prefer that the populations do not mix, and enforce legal and spatial restrictions by way of walls, checkpoints, armed private guards, and army protection around Israeli spaces. Tinder allowed me to safely navigate this enforced spatial and social separation without attracting a large amount of attention to myself or putting myself at risk. By browsing profiles from my living room, relatively anonymous, I could screen my Tinder matches not only for their relevance to my research but also by cross-checking their names with Facebook or Instagram profiles, talking with them, as well as exercising common sense – anyone who messaged me with explicitly sexual content, who did not want to meet in a public place, or who seemed in any other way threatening I could easily ignore and remove from my matches list.

Since Tinder is by no means a traditional means for ethnographers to meet research interlocutors in our fieldsites, perhaps some of the discomfort in using it for research purposes originates in a feeling of ‘necessary ethnographic toil.’ Tinder bypasses the more conventional and perhaps less convenient means of locating informants and gatekeepers in person through trial and error, perseverance, and often happy accident. These steps are perhaps seen as a is a part of the rite of passage of the discipline to initiate ethnographers to struggle, to learn for themselves the methodological and culturally appropriate means of establishing contact and trusting relations with a subject community in traditional academic methods.

Using new media technology

The adoption of user location-based social networking apps is impacting the way we conduct ethnographic research. As I mentioned in the original article, social networking services can reduce felt distance between our home countries and our fieldsites as well as presenting new ways of meeting new people, whether socially or professionally.

In many cities and countries meeting strangers from the internet is now a regular and unremarkable part of everyday life[3]. Apps like Uber, Deliveroo, Tinder, Grindr, AirBnb, Couchsurfing, and Facebook have all become hugely popular methods of locating strangers and meeting up with them in person for various purposes. Having used Tinder in London I was well briefed in necessary safety measures we took as women there – meeting in a public place, letting someone else know you’re meeting someone from Tinder, perhaps sending their picture to a friend. Prior to meeting anyone, regardless of location, I would put them through a basic screening system – extended conversation prior to a date, disclosure of a real phone number or Facebook profile, Googling their name, meeting in a place that I knew and knew how to get away from safely.

It is possible that some of the safety concerns that using Tinder exacerbates exhibits a potential generational or experiential gap where digital literacy is concerned. I am reminded of the popular Tweet examining rapid shifts in internet use and conceptions of safety (pictured). This Tweet received over 100,000 retweets and 150,000 likes and was widely circulated online. It highlights a temporal shift in conceptions of internet safety and actual internet practice, and also draws attention to the encroachment of social media into how we perform certain every day activities. Tinder is very much part of this encroachment, and while I would never deny or downplay the dangers involved, like other such stranger-summoning apps it does contain a reporting function for users harassing other users or deemed dangerous.

Ethnographer safety

As Wilson and Kullick discuss with regard to female researchers being propositioned by potential interlocutors or gatekeepers, “this kind of encounter takes on a special urgency, because the impulse to respond to them as one might at home can conflict with the anthropologically distilled awareness that one is dealing with culturally grounded interactional forms that one may not fully understand, and with fear that, therefore, any reaction might be interpreted as a socially destructive over-reaction” (1995: 7). Occasionally in offices or peoples homes, conducting relatively routine fieldwork visits, my safety was threatened and I was harassed, and I felt unable to respond as I would in a Western country or a different circumstance.

I felt unwilling to threaten my relationship with the gatekeeper or interlocutor at that time, and was not prepared with any means or conception that I could refuse or move away from such situations from my university’s pre-field training.

Certainly these were conditions and risks I was aware of before embarking on this research. I was often offered lifts home by the families I visited, and several times harassed by the (male) driver, either a husband, brother, or cousin, who I had presumed to be a non-risk because their wives had offered or condoned the ride, and they were recommended to me by gatekeepers who took personal responsibility for my safety. To refuse such offers of hospitality and instead take a taxi home would be considered rude when the family were extending their own expense and inconvenience to keep me safe. Conversely, in a date environment, relations are more easily broken, occurring in a public place and with a single individual (as opposed to a family) who is less likely to be a gatekeeper or reasonably expect me to get in their car. The date premise feels more experimental, the boundaries of social practices are more blurred in that it is down to the two individuals present on the date to decide and act upon what is and isn’t inappropriate; I can get up and walk away from a table in a cafe or bar with relatively little impact on my work or reputation.

Ethics and values

Ethnographic success is often measured by an anthropologist’s ability to get people to ‘open up (Wilson and Kullick 1995), but what about the ethnographer’s own ability to open up? While we have traditionally objectified the sex and romantic lives of others (Mead 1935, Malinowski 1989, Weiss 2011) there is value in exploring our own sexual and romantic practices, especially as they change and adjust to life in the field. Desire is a useful sensory means by which an anthropologist might explore his or her own position as a transitioning and cultured self. If romantic or sexual feelings emerge in the context of a Tinder date, how should we make use of them? Are they inappropriate, instinctively unethical, or abusive of the relationship?

As Dubisch points out, there is a “disciplinary disdain for personal narratives” (1995: 3), especially those of women, which are often regarded as inappropriate, indicative of a lack of professionalism, or abusive of the unavoidable power relations experienced between outsider anthropologist and native informant (Manderson 1997).

However, if we are to embrace the examination of the impact of fieldwork and ethnography upon the self, it does not to me make sense to ignore feelings of desire and sexuality as if they are not a part of fieldwork or influential upon both our establishment and pursuit of interlocutor relations. As I pointed out in my original article, it would be naïve to assume that the way my interlocutors interact with me is not informed by my position as a single European woman, so why do we not consider it naïve to ignore out own feelings about our individual interlocutors?

Finally, it is also worth considering that Tinder was a gatekeeper to conducting participant observation in a field of discourse that it was not easy for me to access based on my own subjectivity. As a student of everyday life in the West Bank, romance, sex, and love practices certainly interested me and were something I considered to be a part of everyday life. However, as an unmarried woman, it was rarely appropriate for me to take part in extended conversations about sex and married life, with groups of women often splitting into married and unmarried sections when such conversations occurred. The use and gradual understanding of such practices also opens a window to collective morals and values of the subject community, namely, the understanding through practice of what is and isn’t appropriate as far as romantic and sexual practices are considered. Through my use of Tinder, I was able to gain insight into differences in sexual and love related practices in both Israeli and Palestinian populations, often by contrasting which practices were and weren’t adopted by either population. As an example, the very practice of dating is less common in Palestinian communities and partners often meet through chaperoned meetings organised by family members of interested parties. However, the widespread adoption of sex and romance based apps by Israelis is indicative of a less family-driven and more secular approach to dating and love, something I was able to determine not only by my own participation in this field, but also discussing common dating practices with those Tinder users I spoke or met with.

 

References

Btselem. “What is Area C?” (May 18, 2014). June 15, 2017.

Dubisch, J. (1995) Lovers in the field: Sex, dominance, and the female anthropologist. In (Wilson, M., and Kullick, D., editors) Taboo: sex, identity and subjectivity in anthropological fieldwork. Routledge : New York.

Khalifeh, S. (2008). The End of Spring. University of Cairo Press : Cairo, Egpyt.

Malinowski, B.. (1929). The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia. New York : Harcourt.

Malinowski, B.. (1989). A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Stanford : Stanford University Press.

Manderson, L.. (1997). [Review
 of Taboo: sex, identity and subjectivity in anthropological fieldwork, by Wilson, M. and Kullick, D.] Oceania 67(4): 334-335.

Mead, M.. (1935). Sex and Temperament: In Three Primitive Societies. New York : W. Morrow & Company.

Weiss, M.. (2011). Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality. Durham, NC : Duke University Press.

Wilson, M., Kullick, D.. (1995). Taboo: sex, identity and subjectivity in anthropological fieldwork. : New York : Routledge.

 

[1] Kulick, D., and Wilson, M.. (1995) Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in the Field.

[2] Areas under the exclusive administration of the Palestinian Authority and the areas of most dense Palestinian populations in the West Bank, approximately 18% of the West Bank according to 1967 borders (Btselem, 2014).

[3] Sophie-Claire Hoeller, “The top 15 cities around the world for Tinder users”, (June 6, 2017).

Catherine Clifford, “These Are the Best Cities for Uber and Lyft Drivers”, (June 6, 2017).

 

Featured image (modified) by israeltourism (flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

How can we conceive of the contemporary relationship between race, poverty, and bureaucracy? Smadar Lavie’s latest publication, an account of her experience as a Mizrahi single mother dependent on Israeli state welfare, provides a valuable contribution to all those concerned with bureaucracy, neoliberalism, and the on-going occupation of Palestine by Israel. By shedding light on the little-known but demographically dominant Mizrahi population of Israel, Lavie answers questions that the audience may have perhaps not anticipated. She also provides a vital contemporary overview of Israel’s racial hierarchy and its impact on regional politics.

Lavie sets the ethnically complex scene by differentiating between Ashkenazi (those of European origin) and Mizrahi (those who emigrated from Arab and Islamic areas) Jews. She then distinguishes between those Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and within what is known as “’48”, or present-day Israeli borders. Locating the majority of the Mizrahim as socioeconomically inferior to the Ashkenazim, Lavie explains the arrival of Mizrahi Jews to Israel in the 1960s as a result of the Ashkenazi elite’s need to establish a Jewish labour force and demographic buffer to the fleeing Palestinians. As a civilising ideology, Zionism aimed to reform Israel’s growing population to an Ashkenazic paradigm, using the notion of ‘chosen people, chosen land’ to establish a binary construction of ethnicity that opposes Jews to Arabs. Therefore, upon their arrival to Israel, the Mizrahim were encouraged to shed their Oriental habits and languages and ‘Ashkenazify’, or ‘Europeanise’, themselves according to the Zionist standard.

The Arab Mizrahim were largely settled in the border areas of the new Israeli state and were financially and socially neglected in favour of the Ashkenazim. With less hereditary wealth, larger families, and lower incomes, the Mizrahim are now a demographic majority but a cultural minority, underperforming and underrepresented in most areas.

With a higher number of single-parent families combined with a higher rate of unemployment and a lower rate of professionalisation and education, Lavie explains how the Mizrahim are rendered dependent on a state that is reluctant to support them. Following the Oslo Accords of the early 1990s and the waves of global neoliberalism that preceded it, the Israeli state began to retract its welfare programmes, allowing NGOs to fill its previous functions while outsourcing labour to cheaper foreign markets. Neoliberalisation also impacted the legal protections afforded to single parent families, with no legal function enabled to extract child support payments from absent fathers. These cuts impacted the large population of Mizrahi single mothers hardest, rendering them dependent on ever decreasing welfare payments. The impoverishment of the Mizrahim and their shared Arab heritage with the native Palestinian population might give cause for collaboration between the two groups, but in fact the Mizrahim remain predominantly Zionistic and anti-Arab in outlook.

A relatively new subject in anthropology, existing work on the Mizrahim tends to focus on their marginalisation (Khazzoom 2003, Chetrit 2000) and their transition as immigrants to Israel (Shohat 1999, 2003). Lavie’s alternative focus on single mothers is particularly interesting, as a more religiously traditional community but with a high number of single parent households, the Mizrahi single parent is dependent on the state for financial support and kept as such by being made increasingly marginal to the workforce. Particularly interesting is Lavie’s account of her own positionality in relation to her subject: due to a series of unpredictable circumstances, Lavie finds herself trapped in Israel, unable to secure employment despite her previous status as a Berkeley professor due to her Mizrahi status, and thus suddenly forced into the position of auto-ethnographer. Acknowledging that auto-ethnography is often rejected by the British and North American academies as somehow more unreliable than the narratives of informants, Lavie utilises the particular circumstances of her position to provide a unique insight into the pain of the experiences shared by her and her fellow welfare mothers. This is emphasised by her use of a more unconventional ethnographic style, which includes letters, diary entries, the use of anger in ethnographic writing, encounters with other Mizrahim both in her personal and professional life, and her own struggle against the state’s reclassification of her identity in its own terms.

What is crucial to understanding the plight of Mizrahi Jews, and what Lavie skilfully makes clear, is how the Israeli state denies its Jewish citizens the right to an identity politics outside the boundary of ‘Jewish’.

As the Zionist state operates on an ethnic binary of ‘Jew’ opposed to ‘Arab,’ the Mizrahim are in an especially complex position as former Arabs, encouraged to shed their ‘uncivilised Arab ways’ but also unable to completely deny themselves their past, and perhaps unable to identify how the Ashkenazi-led state uses this as a tool against them. Lavie describes her informants as trapped in such a position without any agency, unable to speak out against a state that oppresses and denies them their ever shrinking welfare allowances while fashioning itself as their protector.

It is here that lies my chief criticism of both the book and the practice of auto-ethnography itself: while the depth of Lavie’s own experience as a Mizrahi welfare mother is fascinating, it leaves the breadth of knowledge of others lacking.

Where we understand intimately the emotional and financial aspects of Lavie’s own demotion to the role of welfare-dependent single mother and what this entails, the use of auto-ethnography as means of representing all Mizrahi single mothers silences their voices by omission. While some testimony of her contemporaries appears, it is used primarily to show their politics in relation to the Palestinians and the Ashkenazim, not as voices of their interactions with the state. Though Lavie’s privilege as a half-Mizrahi academic émigré to the United States is clearly acknowledged, in her use of auto-ethnography we are denied the experiences of those Lavie claims to speak for. Consequently her privilege in her ability and status to voice the pain she seeks to document and share also serves as a means by which to silence her fellow Mizrahi single mothers.

However, this is not to the detriment of the analysis of the pain inflicted on her by the bureaucratic encounter. Describing with a Geertzian thickness the myriad ways in which welfare dependency exhausts and humiliates its beneficiaries, Lavie expands upon the work of Handelman (2004) to expose the concept of bureaucracy as a modern instrument of torture. Adapting Scarry’s (1985) plus-minus model of torture to show how the bureaucrat unwittingly abuses the mother in a plus-plus (mutually repellent) relationship whereby the bureaucrat is unable to simply and efficiently solve the single mother’s needs, and the mother is unable to avoid this encounter, and indeed is forced to undertake it with increasing regularity in order to survive. As a result the bureaucratic encounter becomes self-perpetuating and ritual-like in form, requiring the Mizrahi welfare mother to repeatedly submit to its punishment in order to eke out the meagre provisions of the state.

Lavie then theorises the essence of this bureaucracy: GendeRace, a neologism for the dual means by which the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi distinction is formed and thus Mizrahi single mothers are prevented from achieving the social mobility attained by their Ashkenazi contemporaries. Consequently, Lavie shows that the unilateral front against the Arab enemy that the regional ethnic privilege of Jewish identity demands overpowers the call for an internal identity politics for those damaged by the gendered and racialised aspects of the Israeli bureaucratic engine.

Lavie’s ethnography fills a chasm in the anthropology of Israel that documents the inter-ethnic hierarchies and how these are impacted and enforced by the state. In doing so she situates the Mizrahim not only in relation to their own subordination within Israel, but also in relation to the on-going inability of the Israeli government to forge peace with Palestine. What is fascinating is the detail given to the ways in which the Mizrahim are played off against the Palestinians in Israel’s media as a means of deflecting attention towards and away from the conflict depending on the needs of the government in the eyes of the national and international media.

As a relatively new topic in anthropology, an auto-ethnographic account of the Mizrahim provides a unique insight, and Lavie is particularly well qualified in detailing a peculiarly unusual removal of status and privilege and how this might impact upon one’s identity in relation to neoliberalism and the ethnic binary of Jew versus Arab formulated by the Israeli state. Beginning and ending the book with scenes from Mizrahi protest against their treatment by the Israeli state, Lavie shows how the single mothers are manipulated and bought off to be silenced, ominously indicating at one point that a Palestinian suicide bomber is capitalised upon, even given a security exception, by the government as a distraction technique. Ultimately, as an institutional ethnography of bureaucracy, Lavie paints an intimate and personal picture of the pains of poverty and state-dependency, using her privilege to speak for those with less. However, as an ethnography of an under-privileged population, especially a majoritarian one, I wonder if Smadar Lavie might be able to share with us in the future more testimony from the broad umbrella of experience that is to be a Mizrahi Israeli. 

 

References

Chetrit, S. (2000) Mizrahi politics in Israel: Between integration and alternative. Journal of Palestine Studies 29(4): 51-65.
Handelman, D. (2004) Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events. Oxford: Berg.
Khazzoom, A. (2003) The great chain of Orientalism: Jewish identity, stigma management, and ethnic exclusion in Israel. American Sociological Review 68(4): 481-510.
Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shohat, E. (1999) The invention of the Mizrahim. Journal of Palestine Studies 29(1): 5-20.
Shohat, E. (2003) Rupture and return: Zionist discourse and the study of Arab Jews. Social Text 21(2): 49-74.

Lavie, Smadar. 2014. Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 214 pp. Hb: $39.95. ISBN: 9781782382225.

 

Author’s Response

Writing book reviews is integral to the circulation of ideas and dialogue between scholars. This daunting job often goes unappreciated. I am grateful to Anja Ryding for the time and care she put into this important public service and for her cogent summary and analysis of Wrapped in the Flag of Israel.

There seems to be two errata, however, that I would like to address for potential readers of my book.

First, although I am currently a scholar-in-residence at U. C. Berkeley and completed my Ph.D. at this fine institution in 1989, I was not a professor at Berkeley before my forced stay in Israel from 1999 to late 2007 — The book states clearly that I was an associate professor at U. C. Davis. Since, as the reviewer aptly points out, my background and personal experience are the basis for the autoethnographical component of Wrapped, it seems important to be clear on this matter.

Second, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel dedicates a whole chapter to discussing the socio-economic effects of Mizrahi labor migration to Palestine from 1882 onwards. 1882 marks the beginning of Ashkenazi Zionist settlement of Palestine as well. The book does not discuss Mizrahi immigration to the state of Israel in the 1960s, as the reviewer claims in her opening paragraph. Indeed, Chapter One emphasizes the importance of understanding the role of pre-Nakba Mizrahi migration to Palestine, rather than the large waves of 1950s migrants.

Prof. Smadar Lavie

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Featured image (cropped) by couturiere7 (flickr, CC BY 2.0)