Amalia Sa'ar

University of Haifa, Anthropology, Faculty Member

Followers

202

Following

Co-authors

Public Views

I’m a cultural anthropologist, a feminist, and a peace activist. In my academic capacity I’m an assistant professor and chair of the anthropology dept. at the University of Haifa. My fields of interest include the politics of gender in the Palestinian society inside Israel, women work and citizenship, feminist security and feminist theory more generally, generational relations in Israeli feminism, , urban anthropology, and participatory action research. My book Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment (Berghahn Books 2016) documents the social economy field in Israel and explores the paradoxes that inhere in neoliberal empowerment projects. Outside academia, I’m a long-time member of the Haifa Feminist Center Isha l-Isha (woman to woman).
Address: https://sites.google.com/edu.haifa.ac.il/amalia-saar/home?authuser=0

less

Noel B. Salazar

KU Leuven

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Giulia Sissa

Ucla

Katerina Rozakou

Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences

Daniel M. Knight

University of St Andrews

Dimitris Dalakoglou

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Yael Navaro

University of Cambridge

Anna Horolets

University of Warsaw

Rodrigo Toniol

Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)

Interests

Uploads

Papers by Amalia Sa'ar

Responses

American Anthropologist, Mar 1, 2016

Economic Citizenship

Carefully on the Margins: Christian Palestinians in Haifa between Nation and State

American Ethnologist, May 1, 1998

Recent studies of nationalism focus on issues of national representation-of the objectitication a... more Recent studies of nationalism focus on issues of national representation-of the objectitication and regulation of power relations within nations (Foster 1991). A relatively new anthropological focus on marginality as diagnostic of the core provides another angle from which to approach the analysis of national politics. This shift in conceptual boundaries stems from the growing recognition that politics stretches beyond centers of power, formal institutions, and organized activity. In conjunction with class, race, ethnicity, and gender, national minorities within nation-states constitute an important locus in the study of contemporary societies. In the particular case of Israeli social sciences, which have traditionally focused on the center, there has been a growing interest in studying the formation of new peripheries. Moreover, the study of minority groups and borderland situations is increasingly seen as relevant to the understanding of society as a whole. 1 Two examples of this type of study are Emmett's ethnography (1996) of the women's peace movement in Israel and Rabinowitz's work (1994a) on Jewish-Palestinian relations in Upper Nazareth. In the present article I hope to contribute to this revisionist approach. As a religious minority within a national minority, the Christian Palestinian community in Haifa bears contradictory characteristics. Although the Christians constitute only a small statistical minority among the primarily Muslim Palestinian community nationwide, being largely urban and better situated economically they have been highly represented in its elite. For the most part, the Palestinian national discourses of cultural unity have downplayed, or even denied, internal religious differences. Yet the internal Christian discourse of survival reveals that, despite the attempt to silence these differences, the Christian Palestinians have not necessarily lost their sense of being a minority. 2 As a national minority in the Israeli state, the Palestinians-Christians and Muslims alike-have never been fully accepted as Israelis. Christian Palestinians in Israel are a religious minority within a national minority. Among the Palestinians of Haifa, however, they are a majority and an elite. By examining practices of children's socialization, I follow the ongoing process of boundary maintenance among Christian Palestinians in the city of Haifa as they navigate among their potentially conflictual affiliations with the Israeli state, the Palestinian nation, and the Christian religious community. Christian Palestinians vacillate between Christian ethnocentrism on the one hand and Palestinian national identification on the other. I argue that these seemingly contradictory attitudes and practices are responses to and a utilization of the broader political economy of Israeli Palestinians, which has itself been dynamic and even contradictory. Furthermore, I argue that we can use the perspective of such a group on the margins to highlight some of the conflictual aspects of the broader nation-state system.

Download

Women under and against the Occupation

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Nov 1, 2019

Space and Mobility in Palestine. Julie Peteet. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. 239 p... more Space and Mobility in Palestine. Julie Peteet. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. 239 pages. ISBN 9780253025111 No Place for Grief : Martyrs, Prisoners, and Mourning in Contemporary Palestine. Lotte Buch Segal. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 211 pages. ISBN 9780812248210 Women, Reconciliation, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Road Not Yet Taken. Giulia Daniele. London: Routledge, 2014. 179 pages. ISBN 9780520285262 Sustaining Conflict: Apathy and Domination in Israel-Palestine. Katherine Natanel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. 252 pages. ISBN 9780520285262

Gendering Israel's Outsourcing: The Erasure of Employees' Caring Skills by OrlyBenjamin. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 207 pp., eBook 978‐3‐319‐40727‐2, €83,29

Gender, Work and Organization, Apr 17, 2019

Download

Low-Income “Single Moms” in Israel: Redefining the Gender Contract

Sociological Quarterly, Aug 1, 2009

This article on low-income "one-parent mothers" in Israel is based on 32 in-depth interviews and ... more This article on low-income "one-parent mothers" in Israel is based on 32 in-depth interviews and supportive data from a longitudinal study. Findings problematize scholarly treatments of "single mothers" as a universal category, showing it to be culturally specific and polysemic. It is argued that low-income one-parent mothers embody a central tension in the Israeli male-breadwinner/ female-caretaker gender contract, as its initial class bias is exacerbated by the dissolution of marriage. By simultaneously adopting and reformulating the hegemonic schema that frames their femininity as deficient, they expose the dual character of the contract as resistant to change and dynamic.

Download

Postcolonial Feminism, The Politics of Identification, and the Liberal Bargain

Gender & Society, Oct 1, 2005

The article focuses on the complex positioning of people from disempowered backgrounds with respe... more The article focuses on the complex positioning of people from disempowered backgrounds with respect to liberalism and liberal dividends. The author offers the term liberal bargain, paraphrasing Deniz Kandiyoti’s “patriarchal bargain” and Cynthia Cockburn’s “ethnic bargain,” and dwells on the interconnections between the three. The liberal bargain indicates the particular consciousness and symbolic whitening that “colorized” (i.e., excluded/oppressed) people tend to adopt when they attempt to cash in on the liberal promise. Within the discourse of postcolonial feminism, the concept is intended to promote the discussion of power differentials among women, through refining the analytically dissatisfactory color metaphors habitually used to address issues of hegemony and ethnocentrism.

Anti-Crisis by Janet Roitman.Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 176 pp

American Anthropologist, Mar 1, 2016

An important addition to the ethnographic study of Muslim and Pakistani Americans as well as the ... more An important addition to the ethnographic study of Muslim and Pakistani Americans as well as the broader anthropological study of immigrant lives and transnational identities, Lone Star Muslims trains a remarkably wide lens on Pakistanis and Pakistani Americans in Houston. To his considerable credit and using multisited methods, Ahmed Afzal ensures diverse coverage of various sectors of Houston Pakistani communities. Moreover, by disrupting the cultural assimilation narrative and by deconstructing homogenizing notions that tend to privilege Sunnis, middle-class professionals, and heterosexuality in Muslim communities, the book complicates how we understand Pakistani American immigrants in ethnically diverse metropolitan cities today. As indicated above, the book focuses on understudied subjects such as the identity work of Ismaili professionals, gay Pakistani men, and participants in Pakistani festivals and Houston-based Pakistani radio stations as case studies in the examination of Pakistani Muslim American cultures. This diverse coverage ensures that we cover considerable theoretical grounds in terms of race, class, work, gender, sexuality, religiosity, and sectarian identity. The author is a Pakistani American academic with firsthand experience as a racialized Pakistani Muslim male who has struggled through difficult immigration and employment experiences in the United States. He conducted thorough ethnographic fieldwork in Houston, including interviews, impromptu conversations, observations, and archival analysis in a variety of Pakistani settings. The Introduction delineates the racial, political, and religious context of Pakistani Muslim American lives in the United States and in Texas. Afzal juxtaposes the post-9/11 uptick in racism and state and cultural surveillance with the framing of Pakistani Americans as an educational and economic "model minority." Chapter 1 sets the geographic scene of the Houston area in relation to its Pakistani and

Download

Security as care: communitarianism, social reproduction and gender in southern Israel

Feminist Theory

The article engages with feminist care theories and practices of community building in the contex... more The article engages with feminist care theories and practices of community building in the context of armed conflict. Based on an ethnographic study (2016–2018) of the security concerns of Israeli citizens living in the Gaza Envelope and their positions regarding the siege on Gaza, we find that in this region, vernacular security is closely linked with care, social reproduction and communitarianism. Communitarian ethics is intertwined with separatist, state-centred discourses on national ‘trauma and resilience’. In this context, Jewish-Israeli women care for their own communities as a way to ensure survival and civilian resilience. They generally disengage from moral dilemmas concerning the suffering of Palestinians. On a deeper level, the practice of security as care combines the hegemonic Israeli security paradigm of women’s soldierhood with an institutional and cultural obsession with trauma-oriented activities. Showing strong ethno-nationalist identifications, these women tend t...

Economic Citizenship at the Intersection of Nation, Class, and Gender

Current Anthropology

This paper looks at the adaptation of the idea of economic citizenship (EC), or the conditioning ... more This paper looks at the adaptation of the idea of economic citizenship (EC), or the conditioning of civil inclusion on economic participation, to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who as a national minority are subject to long-standing political discrimination. I focus on two categories of women—low-income, poorly educated women and middle-class professional women—to explore the articulation of EC at the intersection of gender, class, and nationality. I argue that in the current phase of Israeli neoliberal ethnocracy, EC is offered as a bypass mechanism intended to allow the state to sustain the Jewish-and-democratic complex by reducing “democratic”to a free-market version, with minimal public and legal accountability, while continuing to buttress the “Jewish” component. However, the ethnographic zoom on women’s complex reactions shows that they invest the idea with practical meanings that complicate its connotations. They do develop expectations that paid employment will expand their social inclusion yet remain savvy regarding their perilous position as Palestinians in Israeli society and, depending on class, the profitability of permanent employment. Their experiences show that while the economic path hardly seems to undermine the Palestinians’ political rejection, it provides a new channel for their continued uncanny membership of the citizenry.

Anti-consumerism as a class practice: Parental investment in a private kindergarten in Israel

Current Sociology, Dec 4, 2022

This article documents a cultural script of ‘non-materialistic parental investment’ in a private ... more This article documents a cultural script of ‘non-materialistic parental investment’ in a private kindergarten in Israel, and the paradoxes that accompany it. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the analysis reveals an inherent tension between an anti-materialistic ideology and the immersion of the kindergarten in a hyper-consumerist culture. While the explicit discourse emphasizes simplicity and unmediated emotional nurturing, the kindergarten in effect comprises an arena of intense elite consumerism of upper-middle-class parents who wish to give their children high-quality, expensive education. As a prestigious private business, it, therefore, plays a direct role in class differentiation processes, although ‘social-class’ is not part of the conscious pedagogical agenda.

Millennial femininity and the harmonious state of mind

Current Sociology

The article depicts feminine subjectivity among women of the millennial generation. Content analy... more The article depicts feminine subjectivity among women of the millennial generation. Content analysis of an open question relating to the answers of 623 Israeli participants reveals perceptions of femininity as at once gender conscious and non-political. Respondents express a strong sense of entitlement to gender equality yet retain an essentialized perception of gender differences. They are aware of the contradictory demands directed at women, but avoid problematizing them, instead priding themselves on their capacity to encompass both feminine and masculine traits without losing femininity. We identify in the women’s framing a strong commitment to a harmonious worldview and a non-political outlook and trace it to the influences of the global, late-modern generational preoccupation with personal transformation, self-governmentality, and positive thinking.

“Doing Market” across National and Gender Divides : Consumption Patterns of Israeli Palestinians

Consumption and Market Society in Israel

Fencing In and Out: Israel's Separation Wall and the Whitewashing of State Violence

Review of international American studies, 2018

This essay uses the case of Israel’s Separation Wall to address the role of walls in the articula... more This essay uses the case of Israel’s Separation Wall to address the role of walls in the articulation of security, violence, vulnerability, and danger. In Israel, “security” refers exclusively to the Jewish citizens, whether they are fenced in (residing within the Green Line) or outside it (such as West Bank settlers). For the Palestinians, by contrast, the wall is yet another instrument of structural and symbolic violence. While Israeli Jews are vaguely aware of “the occupation,” they largely remain blissfully unaware of the violent under-side of everyday civil security, which the wall represents. Tracing the ways in which Jewish citizens living inside the Green Line experience and accommodate the wall, this essay analyzes its role in whitewashing state violence and in the ongoing construction of subject positions with respect to the security-violence complex.

Emotionalising national security, depoliticising the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Emotions and Society, 2021

This study explores the growing presence of emotional terminology within Israeli popular discours... more This study explores the growing presence of emotional terminology within Israeli popular discourses on national security, as reflected in the daily talk of Israelis living on the border with the Gaza Strip. It is based on ethnography conducted in 2016–18 as part of a multi-site, multidisciplinary study on articulations of security in frontier communities. Findings reveal that the grassroots discourse of national security is saturated with emotional language, and that this, in turn, is interlaced with relationships terminology. Residents report high levels of insecurity (fear, trauma, and constant disquiet), alongside pride in their families’ and communities’ strong care and solidarity, which they perceive as a great source of resilience. Parenthetically, the state and the military, too, are made concrete through relational emotions. We argue that the language of emotional-relationality frames national security and resilience as mental dispositions, and that this subsequently renders...

Download

Cooperation and Conflict in the Zone of Civil Society: Arab-Jewish Activism in Jaffa

Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 2006

This paper presents a bottom-up perspective on local articulations of civil society in a deeply e... more This paper presents a bottom-up perspective on local articulations of civil society in a deeply ethnicized and classed setting. Ethnographic documentation of grassroots ArabJewish activism in Jaffa, Israel, reveals a discourse that combines aggressive factionalism and strong appreciation of ethnic diversity, and is saturated with strong gender undertones. I characterize the action-pattern of local groups as "cooperative conflict/' This concept, which originates in Sen's work on household economy, facilitates the incorporation of subjective, identity-bound aspects into the process of civil society, where bargaining has been long regarded as a central practice. In the local discourse, the dual character of discord and togetherness translates into endemic debates. A symbolic reading of these debates exposes a pattern of conceptual contradictions, which share a semantic structure and draw on a similar gender schema. I use this reading of the subtext of civil activism to tra...

Economic Citizenship

Gender/Nationality Intersections in Attitudes Toward Gun Carry among Israeli Citizens

Sociological Perspectives, 2021

The study explores how nationality and gender effect attitudes on the presence, use, and misuse o... more The study explores how nationality and gender effect attitudes on the presence, use, and misuse of guns by security forces and civilians in Israel. Using data from a national survey ( n = 721), we find that Israelis, Jews, and Arabs have more positive attitudes toward military firearms than civilian gun carry. The vast majority agree that display of military arms increases the public sense of security. Numbers are much lower regarding civilian carry. Most respondents, Jews and Arabs, would interfere if witnessed public misuse of firearms. An intersectional analysis finds (1) a gender gap, men have higher odds of reporting a firearm in the household than women; (2) Jews have more positive attitudes toward firearms than Arabs; (3) Jewish men have more positive attitudes toward civilian carry than Jewish women. This gender gap does not appear among Arabs; (4) Jews are more favorable of self-protection as a justification to use arms than Arabs.

Download

Women under and against the Occupation

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2019

The Ḥawākīr of Nazareth: The History and Contemporary Face of a Cultural Ecological Institution

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2018

This article documents the ḥawākīr of Nazareth. Once widespread in the city, these traditional do... more This article documents the ḥawākīr of Nazareth. Once widespread in the city, these traditional domestic gardens were integral to households of all economic backgrounds. They served as a space for work and socializing, constituted a center of collective (extended family) life, and provided a wide diversity of crops. However, in recent decades ḥawākīr have disappeared rapidly as new houses were built overtop them and residents’ tastes changed. Today people prefer gardens with green lawns and flowers. Intended strictly for recreation and ornament, this new kind of garden acts as a marker of privacy and economic success. We use ethnographic data to provide detailed descriptions of historical and contemporary examples of the traditional garden. The analysis dwells on the resonances between changing practices around and meanings of ḥawākīr and the changing character of the urban landscape, on the value of ḥawākīr as sites of attachment and identity, and on the potential of their revival t...

Responses

American Anthropologist, Mar 1, 2016

Economic Citizenship

Carefully on the Margins: Christian Palestinians in Haifa between Nation and State

American Ethnologist, May 1, 1998

Download

Women under and against the Occupation

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Nov 1, 2019

Gendering Israel's Outsourcing: The Erasure of Employees' Caring Skills by OrlyBenjamin. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 207 pp., eBook 978‐3‐319‐40727‐2, €83,29

Gender, Work and Organization, Apr 17, 2019

Download

Low-Income “Single Moms” in Israel: Redefining the Gender Contract

Sociological Quarterly, Aug 1, 2009

Download

Postcolonial Feminism, The Politics of Identification, and the Liberal Bargain

Gender & Society, Oct 1, 2005

Anti-Crisis by Janet Roitman.Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 176 pp

American Anthropologist, Mar 1, 2016

Download

Security as care: communitarianism, social reproduction and gender in southern Israel

Feminist Theory

Economic Citizenship at the Intersection of Nation, Class, and Gender

Current Anthropology

Anti-consumerism as a class practice: Parental investment in a private kindergarten in Israel

Current Sociology, Dec 4, 2022

Millennial femininity and the harmonious state of mind

Current Sociology

“Doing Market” across National and Gender Divides : Consumption Patterns of Israeli Palestinians

Consumption and Market Society in Israel

Fencing In and Out: Israel's Separation Wall and the Whitewashing of State Violence

Review of international American studies, 2018

Emotionalising national security, depoliticising the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Emotions and Society, 2021

Download

Cooperation and Conflict in the Zone of Civil Society: Arab-Jewish Activism in Jaffa

Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 2006

Economic Citizenship

Gender/Nationality Intersections in Attitudes Toward Gun Carry among Israeli Citizens

Sociological Perspectives, 2021

Download

Women under and against the Occupation

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2019

The Ḥawākīr of Nazareth: The History and Contemporary Face of a Cultural Ecological Institution

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2018

Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment

This ethnography of social economy in Israel documents a growing field of cultural production tha... more This ethnography of social economy in Israel documents a growing field of cultural production that features collaborative efforts by social change activists, state agencies, and business philanthropists to reduce poverty and increase social solidarity by working within, not against Capitalism's logic. The book offers a thick description of the journeys of low-income Jewish and Palestinian women, who participate in economic empowerment projects, how they adapt cultural scripts of feminine subjectivity, and how their efforts to create meaningful lives inevitably immerse them in emotional capitalism and encourage them to adopt an apolitical outlook. I likewise dwell on the manifold paradoxes that accompany institutionalized attempts to enhance social justice and social solidarity through teaching such women to fend for themselves. At the end I offer an integrated discussion of the idea that inclusion and entitlement should be measured by economic self-sufficiency, using the concept of economic citizenship. I look at how this globally circulating concept moves through vastly different ideological circles and how it settles into a cultural setting that ultimately articulates citizenship in very different terms.

Download

Amalia Sa'ar

Related Authors

Uploads

Papers by Amalia Sa'ar

Log In