Dustin M. Wax » culture

The Meaning of Food

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Seth Godin wanted to know:

What’s the deal with brown rice? How do people become so attached to the social implications of food that they are willing to starve or suffer from malnutrition rather than take a step backward? The price of rice has soared, yet it seems like people are still demanding white rice, instead of the more nutritious (and almost certainly cheaper) brown rice. How high does the price have to go before people make a different choice?

This is what I emailed him, which seemed to do the trick for him:

I can’t speak specifically to the brown rice vs. white rice, but I can speak to the larger issue. You seem to be saying that people should make food choices in a rational, best-option sort of way, according to best price, availability, nutritional value, etc — but that’s not how cultures view food at all. Along with sex, food is one of the most meaning-laden parts of any culture. Every culture makes a selection from the potentially edible “stuff” in its environment as to what is and what is not “food”, and those foods are further categorized according to factors ranging from class and status to regional and ethnic identity.

Consider this, for example: I live in Las Vegas. We have a lot of hungry people in Las Vegas. A few years ago, there was a locust swarm for several weeks in the summer. Now, locusts are nutritious and, according to many cultures, delicious — they’re a special treat in the Bible, if you recall. Imagine the uproar, though, if Mayor Goodman or then-Governor Guinn arranged a press conference and stepped up to the mike saying “Our hunger problems are solved! Teams of food procurement specialists are right now gathering locusts for distribution to our soup kitchens, food pantries, and Meals on Wheels centers. For the next few weeks, our poor eat like Biblical kings!”

Yeah, right. Locusts aren’t food in our culture — like dogs, horses, and parrots (and, I can’t help but mentioning, people).

Then there’s the question of status and meaning — what does the food you eat say about who you are? In a film I use in my classes, _People Like Us_, there’s a scene in a food pantry where the manager asks a shopper if she’d like to try some of the organic sourdough that the food pantry gets by the case and can’t get rid of. The look on her face is priceless — he might have asked her if she’d like to sell her womb to raise money to provide hearing aids to the rich. Remember, everything at the food pantry is *free* — but the organic sourdough is “fancy” food, too crusty, too non-pre-sliced, too hoity-toity for this woman to take home to her hungry family.

I don’t know where the breaking point is. At some point in the starvation chain, of course, people will eat whatever’s put in front of them. Bugs, live rodents, even, yes, human flesh. But war, famine, environmental disaster, and other cataclysmic events have rarely been enough to cause anything more than a short, non-systemic turn to substitutes, even when a long-term switch might be better in dozens of ways. After all, we humans eat so that we can make meaning, not the other way around.

I’m not entirely happy with that last line; what I mean is that humans are meaning-making creatures, and eating sustains us so we can do more meaning-making. In any case, Godin quoted the last paragraph in his post and added:

To which I add: If people near starvation are willing to make choices based on self-esteem, I wonder what that says about those customers you think are focused only on the lowest price?

I’m not sure I agree with that, actually — it’s not just self-esteem at play, here. There are things that we simply don’t consider as food, no matter how high or low our self-esteem is. The meaning that we make of and with food is far more complex than simply an individual’s self-esteem!

Related Thoughts:

But They’re Crunchy!
Call for Help from Strange Quarters
Organic Sex?

Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War — Coming Soon!

dustin — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 19:57:53 +0000

I was flipping around on Google today and found a link to my forthcoming book, Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War, on Amazon. And there’s a cover image! This is the first I’ve seen it, so I was pretty excited. The book isn’t due out until February 2008 (Amazon says January, so maybe they know something I don’t), and I haven’t even seen the page proofs yet, but you can sign up at Amazon to be notified when it comes out.

Update (12/1/07): The cover image on Amazon is not the final cover — I guess it was a mockup or something. I’ve just approved the actual cover, which will look similar but different.

Related Thoughts:

Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War Now Available in UK
“Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War” Now Available in the US
The Making of Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War

When Monogamy Isn’t Monogamous

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Originally posted at Savage Minds on November 16, 2005.

Every time I teach the section on marriage in my Intro to Anthro class, I inevitably face the same question. The book lists four types of marriage: monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, and group marriage. and someone always asks “What about swingers?” (Of course, I live and teach in Vegas…) The question points to a limitation of the concept of marriage not just for anthropological understanding but even within our own everyday usage.

Writers Em and Lo confront these limitations in their current New York Magazine piece The New Monogamy, addressing the kinds of open relationships that some married couples are evolving in order to both maintain their commitment to each other and manage their attractions to other people. Em and Lo’s “new monogamists” represent a new twist on the more well-established swinger scene, combining professional lifestyles, post-feminism, and a modern psychotherapeutic understanding of sex, relationships, and the self in an attempt to navigate the pitfalls of tradtional marriage in a society increasingly ill-equipped for long-term exclusive bonding.

There are a couple of irritating quibbles in the article that I’d like to get out of the way before moving onto the meat of the topic. First, the framing of the New Monogamy as not just a move away from cultural norms but from human universals is not only gratuitous but wrong. “For much of human history,” the authors write, “monogamy (or, at least, presumed monogamy) has been the default setting for long-term love.” We do not know what sexual/emotional relationships were like “for much of human history”, but judging from the ethnographic evidence gathered over the last century or so among today’s populations, the norm has likely been serial monogamy (as we find in many foraging societies today; see e.g. Marjorie Shostak’s Nisa), likely with numerous temporary relationships “on the side”, and polygyny, which is today accepted and often preferred in 80% of contemporary cultures, with no reason to assume it was any less common in “much of human history”. Monogamy as practiced in the United States is a function of our particular history, especially the inheritance of British agricultural traditions and the impact of the 19th century Industrial Revolution.

The other issue I have is the constant reiteration of stereotypes of open relationships as the province of either “earnest, hairy polyamorists” or “doughy, middle-aged swingers”. While there are obviously precendents for today’s New Monogamists in the Haight-Ashbury hippie culture of the Free Love generation and in the key parties and wife-swapping of ’70s suburbia, various kinds of open relationships have been practiced from the dawn of American history (to their credit, Em and Lo mention the 19th century utopian Oneida Colony) and have cut across a wide range of American social strata. The point that their subjects come from neither a bohemian subculture nor a suburban middle-class but rather a professional, urban, and upwardly mobile mainstream can be made without the repeated images of purple muumuus and Tupperware.

With those objections out of the way, I can move onto the more substantial topics at the heart of the article. Em and Lo speak with a selection of couples — straight and gay, as well as mixed straight/bi relationships (on which more later) — who are struggling to accomodate their decidedly non-monogamous sexual desires while continuing to nurture the marriage commitments that they still find meaningful. Ranging from shared fanstasization about Friends–style fantasy lists of famous people and collaborative surfing of online personals to fully open sexual relations, each of the couples has attempted to divorce their sexual desires from the romantic committment of their marriage without divorcing their spouses. For instance, Diane and her boyfriend have agreed to allow flirting, dirty phone talk, and cybersex over IM, “as long as no one ends up actually making out with anyone else”; Mike and Jessica indulge in three–ways, four–ways, and even a full-blown orgy; William and Dan have a closed relationship — unless one or the other is out of town; and Siege and Katie follow a code of “body-fluid monogamy”, indulging in safe sex with whomever they like, even in their home while the other is busy in the other room.

The key to these relationships — as Ann Landers could have told you, if the word menage-à-trois had been in her vocabulary — seems to be communication. Many of the partners had seen previous relationships dissolve when their partner cheated on them, and in retrospect many felt that it was not the cheating so much as the erosion of trust and honesty which had created the problem. So they share fantasies, experiences, and even partners, all under the aegis of pre-negotiated rules, in order to preserve the trust relationship and (hopefully) forestall jealousy, suspicion, and betrayal.

Trust, sharing, communication, honesty, commitment — the language is straight out of Oprah and reflects an intersection of ’70s self-realization, 80s self-help and relationship manuals, and ’90s post-feminism. The women in these relationships are active professionals, empowered both by their social status and by their own sexualities, unwilling to limit their sexual urges for the sake of a husband like their mothers and grandmothers were typically expected to do — and like their fathers and grandfathers were not expected or obligated to do. The arrangements featured in this article have been designed as much out of the women’s need to assert and satisfy their sexual needs and desires as for the men’s, and explicitly with equality in mind.

One of the pull-quotes in the article notes that, with all the concern for communication and equality between partners, “perhaps this time around, seventies-style swinging and slutting will actually be feasible — and fair.” And yet it bears asking whether this assumption of equality has been realized in actuality. The easy response is that given the label “slutty” and the lack of an equivalent label for men engaged in the same behavior, there is still an obvious inequality — but I think the issue runs much deeper than that.

How much deeper begins to be clear when Em and Lo breach the subject of bisexuality. In many of these set-ups, the men are straight and the women bi, and rules have been adopted limiting both husband and wife to female extramarital partners. For the men, the thought of another man involving himself in their relationship is threatening in a way that another women’s involvement is not; consider Siege’s statement that “I just don’t want her messing around with other guys. Because I don’t find men attractive, my only instinct would be to punch them.” All of the mixed-sex couples seem much more willing to experiment with her sexuality than with his.

While the article suggests a couple of explanations for this double-standard, only one of them really seems to get at the reality of sexuality in the 21st century. It’s unlikely that women are, by nature, simply “more fluid” sexually, especially given the incredible restraints around any expression of male homosexuality; it’s also unlikely that women have more sexual freedom than men in our society, given the way so many other aspects of their lives are socially programmed. At the same time, none of the women seemed to express the feeling that she was being made to perform for the benefit of her partner — and given their economic and personal independence, I find this a doubtful proposition in any case. But I think the authors are moving in the right direction when they guess that “It could be that sexually speaking, women are just not taken seriously: Hot, yes, but as sex toys, not real romantic threats.”

The idea of women as “sex toys”, as objects to be acquired, used, and either discarded or grown out of jibes well with the commodification of sex in general in our increasingly consumeristic society. Sex has come to stand alongside other entertainments as a way of expressing our individual identities, like the choice of a double grande mocha latte, the latest art house film, or an indie CD. One person likes Fellini, another likes fellatio — to each his own. (Or her own, but that would ruin the rhtyhm of the cliche now, wouldn’t it?)

The marketing of sex as product, though, is much more easily achieved in the case of women’s sexuality than men’s. As John Berger noted (Ways of Seeing, 1972), gender roles in Western societies can be summed up by the simple maxim: “men act and women appear” (47). To commodify a woman’s sexuality, to objectify it and make it available for consumption, is easy because we are already predisposed to do so; men’s sexuality, however, is wrapped up with notions of virility, strength, and power — aspects of character as much as or even more than of appearance. I had a graphic illustration of this in a recent classroom discussion on gender, when I asked why so many women find John Goodman sexy. “He has character,” one of my female students responded. When I noted that Roseanne Barr has lots of character and asked if she was also sexy, I received a chorus of “no’s” — and the same student replied that “Character doesn’t count for women.”

Many of the women Em and Lo spoke with summed up this attitude quite nicely, saying they were “sexually, but not romantically, attracted to other women”. That is, they were interested in other women because they found them physically attractive, but were unwilling or unable to imagine other women as potentially meaningful partners in life. For their male partners, then, there was little risk in seeing their wives getting it on with other women — no more risk than seeing their wives pick out a brand of coffee or a DVD. You don’t lose your wife to a product.

You lose your wife to other men, though. Men are agents, not products, and neither the men interviewed nor most of the women could as easily divorce their sexual attraction to men from the potential for romantic involvement the way they could with women. This resonates well with the way many men fetishize lesbianism, even as they deeply fear anything that even faintly smacks of male homoeroticism. When a woman makes out with other women, she’s “bi”; any contact with another man though, especially a gay man, is tinged with panic that the encounter might reveal a man to be — or even worse, turn him — “gay”. Because male sexuality is premised on character and not superficial appearance, a man’s attraction to another man — or a women’s attraction to another man — implies a deeper level of commitment than the consumerism satisfied by the consumption of other women as “living, breathing sex objects”.

The danger of shifting commitment obviously poses a threat to the marriages that the men and women in Em and Lo’s piece are struggling to negotiate. In a society like ours, with personalities both shaped by enculturation practices to be independent and self-serving and to be focused strongly around sexuality as the core of the self, marriage as traditionally understood seems artificially limiting — and we have been trained to see such limits as challenges. The commodification of sexuality is not just a temptation threatening to destabilize the institution of marriage, but can be seen also as an accomodation to that institution, a way of allowing expression of our consumeristic, sexualized selves without further destabilizing the relationship. The stress on “cheating” is important in this regard — in their former relationships, without the possibility for acceptible extramarital sex, the partners were forced to resort to secrecy and dishonesty, which eventually undermined their emotional bonds with their partners, making it all the more likely that they would seek romantic, as well as sexual, release with their new partners. By limiting extramarital encounters to the purely sexual, these couples are trying to prevent the erosion of their romantic relationships — thus making the extramarital relationships into a supplement, rather than a replacement, for their relationships with their spouses.

Of course, we might ask why such a supplement is necessary in the first place, but I think it’s fairly clear. If we did not seek something new, different, and exciting, we would not be very good consumers — and we are very good consumers! And if we did not do everything in our power to attain the objects of our desires, if we did not view social restrictions as obstacles to be overcome, we would not be very good individualists — and we are not only good individualists, but we have to be to function in our highly mobile, highly specialized society. As women have become more and more expected to function as workers and participants in the public sphere, the role of monogamous wife has become as untenable as the role of monogamous husband has been for centuries.

It may be that the institution of marriage itself is becoming untenable, and the couples in this article are not the vanguard of a New Monogamy but are rather leading a fighting retreat. More and more people find marriage simply unnecessary to their lifestyles — what with professional obligations requiring more and more frequent travel, the difficulty of finding satisfying work in the same place as your partner, the risk of boredom in the face of lifelong commitment, and the failure of more than half of the marriages in oursociety, marriage seems particularly ill-suited to modern living. Increasing numbers of people are turning to short-term relationships, casual encounters, and alternatives to long-term monogamous relationships that better fit the demands of their lives. The rise of polyamory — semi-closed networks of friends and lovers often spread out over several cities — represents one adaptation to these demands. It may well be that the only thing supporting traditional marriage in Western society is the fear of disease; as new treatments for STDs become available, we may well see the end of marriage altogether, or at least its diminishment as a primary organizer of social relations.

Related Thoughts:

One Way Anti-Same-Sex Marriage Statutes Hurt Us All
Bottoming from the Top, or: Do FemDoms Dream of Electric Toasters?
How to Have a Happier Relationship

Categories Worth Questioning, Part I

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Categories are arguments. The process of putting “things” (objects, people, ideas, places) into categories involves several claims: first, that the things in category x are meaningfully similar to each other; second, that the things in category x are more like each other than they are like the things in category y or z or simply non-x; third, that the similarities that define the things in category x as members of that category are more important than the differences between them. Good categories appear pre-given to us — who can argue that a ripe Rome Beauty apple or a traditional fire engine doesn’t belong in the category of “red things”? And most of them work, most of the time — enough so that the few hard-to-categorize exceptions don’t generally cause us to lose faith in the categories altogether. More likely, when presented with such exceptions, we are likely to blame the exception for not fitting — it’s a deviant, a freak, un-natural — rather than re-think our categories.

Categorization is important — the ability to generalize from past experience in order to make decisions about the present or future, for instance, is central to all learning, planning, and acting in the world. From our first conscious experiences, we are learning to categorize the world — self and other, kin and non-kin, safe and unsafe. Some categories arise out of our individual experience, others are imposed on us by our language, our social structures, our cultural beliefs — verb and noun, bedroom and living room, soup spoon and teaspoon, sin and mitzvah. Because categories are so important, and because culture works to make its operation transparent, its easy to forget that categories are something the human mind imposes on the world, and that often the categories that seem most natural, most “real”, are not natural at all, and may even work against us.

If we are concerned with changing the way people interact with the world and with each other — or even if we are only interested in understanding people’s actions — it is worthwhile to challenge the categories that seem most central to our sense of our selves, the ones that seem most obvious. These are the categories that we use as “shorthand” for who we are, the ones that we habitually and non-reflexively assign ourselves to repeatedly in the course of our day-to-day lives.

male/female: Anne Fausto Sterling’s research has shown that as many as one of every hundred people are born in an intersexed condition of some sort, either ambiguously sexed or bearing external genitalia that do not match internal organs or chromosonal sex. In addition, a large number of both men and women choose to medically or cosmetically assume appearances at odds with their chromosonal sex. Categorizing people as either “male” or “female” is more and more difficult, relying as it does on the culturally-informed interpretation of a set of markers — ranging from the use of make-up to the possession of a penis — that differ from culture to culture and from person to person. Since few of us have access to the kind of equipment to determine chromosonal sex — and since chromosonal sex is such a poor indicator of behavior, social role, appearance, and so on — we are forced to “work backwards” from appearance, role, behavior, etc. in a manner that is fraught with power and danger, only to be forever uncertain of our conclusions.
gay/straight: I live in a society (the United States) that has long been obsessed with maintaining “proper” sexual orientations, an obsession matched in intensity by the uncertainty about what, exactly, those orientations entail. Many, many men routinely have sexual relations with other men while denying that they are gay or even bisexual. Behavior does not correlate with internal mental states or with identity. Consider the Catholic Church’s recent denial of ordination to gay men — even if they are celibate and have been for up to 3 years. Given the non-determinativeness of sexual behavior (despite the fact that it’s what “orientation” is supposed to predict) especially among the willingly celibate, the Church looks to “participation in gay culture” — which, of course, you don’t have to be gay to do. Many non-gay people participate in sexual behaviors associated with homosexuality, whether its anal sex, mutual masturbation, oral sex, even intercourse with a member of the same sex. Bisexuals and transgendered people give even out gays and lesbians category crises — can a woman who has slept only with men be bisexual? If a gay man has sex with a women, is he bisexual?
In lieu of behavior, categorization as gay or straight relies on self-identification — but of course, we are not always the best suited to identify ourselves, either. Those of the category “asshole” rarely recognize themselves as such. Gay men and women may, for a variety of reasons, avoid identifying themselves — even to themselves. Or they may decide to “give up” their homosexual behaviors, again for a variety of reasons — does this make them straight? Likewise, straight people, especially men (in our society), seem pressured to continually re-affirm their straightness — but, of course, this too is no indicator of whether or not a man is “truly” straight. Judith Butler was onto something when she described gender and sexual orientation as performative, but even that is giving too much credit to the categories — sexual orientation is a matter of desire in the moment, a state of mind that may or may not be transitory. Identities may be built on these states of mind — or they may not be.
child/adult: Adulthood is defined by access to a set of specific rights and the taking on of a set of specific obligations — rights and obligations which change from culture to culture. The withholding of these rights and obligations from children is justified by an appeal to the incomplete mental, emotional, and (in some societies, such as ours) sexual development of the young. As with gender and sexual orientation, however, childhood describes a mental state that can only be guessed at by the rest of society. Just as it is possible to be a strong, aggressive woman or an asexual gay man, it is possible for some children to be more self-aware and better able to make crucial decisions than many adults — except that they are barred from doing so. While a gay woman may exhibit the outward behavior of a straight woman (or of a straight man, for that matter), an unusually mature child may not demonstrate the behaviors of an adult — not legally.
In our society, many of the limitations imposed around the categories of child and adult are sexual: a child lacks the ability to meaningfully consent to sexual relations. This is based on an increasingly tenuous belief that minors do not have sex, and therefore cannot fully grasp the implications of their actions. And yet the arbitrariness of the border between the ability to consent and the inability to consent is apparent in the flexibility with which the age of consent is established — a 14 year old might well be gifted with the ability to meaningfully consent while find him- or herself lacking that ability in another. Further, a 17 year old may find her- or himself able to meaningfully consent to relations with a person their own age but not someone a year older. The meaninglessness of these distinctions is apparent — but the breach of these categories is considered far more threatening than the breach of gender or orientation.
black/white: Technically, all racial distinctions need questioning, but in the US blackness has been the crucial marker of “race”, and racial distinctions have generally fallen into a continuum from white to black. Race is an unusually strong category, given the almost complete lack of scientific data in support of racial distinctions — people simply cannot get their heads around the idea that such clearly visible differences could make so correlate with so little substantive difference. Unlike the categories mentioned above, race is not merely a matter of subjective experience of self — it is as much ascribed by society as it is experienced as identity. Although them, too, race is understood to be additive — one can be both black and white — even as the need for categorization forces such “additives” back into one or the other.
Actually, just one — “black and white” in the US still largely equals “black”. Bob Marley, Frederick Douglass, and Ralph Ellison all had white parents — and are all considered, without a moment’s hesitation, “black”. Walter Mosley, another child of white and black parents, told the Las Vegas Mercury last year, “I’m a black man in America. There’s no question about that, and I don’t have any choice about it.” Perhaps the permeability of the white-black border — like that between child and adult — offers a clue to why it continues to be guarded so closely, even to the point of demanding a one-or-the-other answer to the question of “white or black” even as we recognize the possibility of the “white and black”.

The categories above all rest on an assumption of biological imperative; they are, in a word, “natural”. My second post (hopefully tomorrow, but who knows?) will address a couple of other categories worth questioning that aren’t embedded in biology — including the category of “natural” itself — and close with some further thoughts on categorization. Till then…

Related Thoughts:

No, Really, How Gay am I?
Social Construction
(Not) The Only Gay Navajo

Cuteness and Culture

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The Cute Factor, Natalie Angier
Angier struggles to find some deeper biological meaning in our responsiveness to “the cute”, ostensibly evolved as a means of assuring adult human responsiveness to defenseless and oh-so-cute human babies.

Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness.

Though I am willing to concede the possibility of a “hard-wired” responsiveness to cuteness, the idea begs the question of why this responsiveness waxes and wanes over time and from culture to culture. Why do some people even in our currently cute-obsessed culture see cuteness as a thing to be destroyed (e.g. kids who kill puppies), and why is cute so fashionable at the moment (as documented by Angier) but wasn’t before the 1960′s (again, acc. to Angier)? How do cultures like the one described by Nancy Scheper-Hughes become able to disregard the influence of cuteness and the parental attentiveness it supposedly engenders?

Related Thoughts:

Found Dog, Lost Owner
Book Review: "The Giver" by Lois Lowry
How Does it Feel to Be Like Mike?

Other Judaisms

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Ella Shohat is a professor of Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies at CUNY, and is one of the co-founders of Ivri-NASAWI, an organization devoted to the cultural life of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewry. I know of her indirectly, as one of my partner’s professors and as the author of an incredible essay on Sephardic second-class status in Israel, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” in Dangerous Liaisons, which she co-edited.

Shohat is also an Israeli Jew of Iraqi parentage, living and working in the US, and in “Reflections of an Arab Jew” she writes of her awkward position as the three nations she is connected with embroil themselves in war. She writes of her relatives living in both Iraq and Israel, of her experiences during the first war against Iraq, of being at the same time Arab and Jew and American, with all the split loyalties and ambivalent (amtrivalent, maybe) desires that engenders. Shohat talks of her kind of Jewishness as an elision, an invisible yet uncomfortable presence in Jewish consciousness.

The same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands and national-political rights, was linked to the dispossession of Middle Eastern and North African Jews of their property, lands, and rootedness in Muslim countries. As refugees, or mass immigrants (depending on one’s political perspective), we were forced to leave everything behind and give up our Iraqi passports. The same process also affected our uprootedness or ambiguous positioning within Israel itself, where we have been systematically discriminated against by institutions that deployed their energies and material to the consistent advantage of European Jews and to the consistent disadvantage of Oriental Jews. Even our physiognomies betray us, leading to internalized colonialism or physical misperception. Sephardic Oriental women often dye their dark hair blond, while the men have more than once been arrested or beaten when mistaken for Palestinians. What for Ashkenazi immigrants from Russian and Poland was a social aliya (literally “ascent”) was for Oriental Sephardic Jews a yerida (“descent”).

Stripped of our history, we have been forced by our no-exit situation to repress our collective nostalgia, at least within the public sphere. The pervasive notion of “one people” reunited in their ancient homeland actively disauthorizes any affectionate memory of life before Israel. We have never been allowed to mourn a trauma that the images of Iraq’s destruction only intensified and crystallized for some of us. Our cultural creativity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is hardly studied in Israeli schools, and it is becoming difficult to convince our children that we actually did exist there, and that some of us are still there in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Iran.

It’s a short but enlightening read and a good remedy for the binariness that threatens to engulf us in times of war, when all things seem to boil down into “us” and “them”, matters of pure survival. And it’s an especially good corrective for the all-too-facile use of terms like “Arab world” and “Muslim sphere” that have been thrown around far too much since 9/11, as we grapple with the simple-minded question of why “they” hate “us”.

Related Thoughts:

Fabulous Free, and Fun: Trips to Israel for Jewish Youth
How Will We Know When We’ve Won?
Naomi Klein on Iraq