Smadar Lavie
Smadar Lavie received her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. She specializes in the anthropology of Egypt, Israel, and Palestine, with emphasis on issues of race, gender, and religion. She published her book The Poetics of Military Occupation (UC Press, 1990) on resistance theatre of the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai, Egypt. The book won the 1990 Honorable Mention of the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing and is still in print and in demand. She co-edited Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity (Duke Univ. Press, 1996), and Creativity/Anthropology (Cornell Univ. Press, 1993). Lavie was awarded the 2009 Gloria Anzaldua Prize from the American Studies Association for her paper titled, Staying Put: Crossing the Palestine/Israel Border with Gloria Anzaldúa. Lavie's recent book is Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (Berghahn 2014, Nebraska 2018). It received the 2015 Honorable Mention of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies Book Award Competition and was also one of the four finalists in the 2015 Clifford Geertz Book Award Competition of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Lavie has served in several feminist and anti-racist social movements and NGOs in Israel-Palestine and the San Francisco Bay area. In 2013, Lavie won the “Heart at East” Honor Plaque for lifetime service to Mizraḥi communities in Israel-Palestine.
Address: Department of Anthropology
University of California at Davis
Davis, California 95616
USA
Address: Department of Anthropology
University of California at Davis
Davis, California 95616
USA
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Books by Smadar Lavie
Wrapped in the Flag of Israel Second Edition examines neoliberal bureaucracy in the Global South using feminist critical race theories. It interrogates the relationship between the State of Israel and its Mizrahi single mothers who are at the forefront of Mizrahi feminism. It also presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology that preempts the agency of disenfranchised Mizrahim who are Israel’s demographic majority. Mizrahi protests fall flat when the Israel-Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. While most studies of neoliberal bureaucracy employ a Foucauldian or Marxian lens, this book illustrates how Israeli bureaucracy draws on a theological essence that fuses religion, gender, and race into the foundations of citizenship. It sets out to understand why Mizrahi mothers remain loyal to a state that injures them though its bureaucratic system.
The extensive Afterword to the Second Edition connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel’s political right. In between came bloodletting between the IDF, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel’s neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed, but not only in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reform. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizrahi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel’s Mizrahi-Ashkenazi rift.
From the interview:
'...I called the first indexer for an update, only to be told the manuscript went against everything she was raised to believe about Israel. Indexer number two used the index as a tool of censorship. Categories such as “apartheid,” “Zionism,” “Palestine,” and “race” were nowhere to be seen. She insisted her categorization improved the book, refusing to change them before sending me a pricey invoice via her attorney. It took the third indexer, who had no expertise in Middle East Studies, to treat the manuscript with the professionalism it required...'
Three prints of the 1st edition were sold between April 15, 2014 - July 31, 2015. The book went out of print and its adventures in publish-land are discussed here:
https://www.academia.edu/41932472/Jadaliyya_-_New_Text_Out_Now_Author_Interview_with_Smadar_Lavie_on_Wrapped_in_the_Flag_of_Israels_Revised_Edition_with_the_New_Afterword._January_20_2020
This volume exemplifies a cross-disciplinary cultural studies and a concept of culture rooted in lived experience as well as textual readings. Anthropologists and scholars from related fields deploy a range of methodologies and styles of writing to blur and complicate conventional dualisms between authors and subjects of research, home and away, center and periphery, and first and third world. Essays discuss topics such as Rai, a North African pop music viewed as westernized in Algeria and as Arab music in France; the place of Sephardic and Palestinian writers within Israel’s Ashkenazic-dominated arts community; and the use and misuse of the concept “postcolonial” as it is applied in various regional contexts.
In exploring histories of displacement and geographies of identity, these essays call for the reconceptualization of theoretical binarisms such as modern and postmodern, colonial and postcolonial. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars and students concerned with postmodern and postcolonial theory, ethnography, anthropology, and cultural studies.
Contributors. Norma Alarcón, Edward M. Bruner, Nahum D. Chandler, Ruth Frankenberg, Joan Gross, Dorinne Kondo, Kristin Koptiuch, Smadar Lavie, Lata Mani, David McMurray, Kirin Narayan, Greg Sarris, Ted Swedenburg."
Dedicated to the memory of Victor Turner, the volume is at once playful and political, bridging innovative theory and practice."
Wrapped in the Flag of Israel -- Book Reviews by Smadar Lavie
traditional methods of ethnographic research and emphasizing the
necessity of subaltern auto-ethnography, particularly in the study of marginalized groups... Scholars of social movements
should follow [Lavie's] lead by focusing on similar cases of unsuccessful mobilization, or indeed those that have minimal possibility for mobilization. Furthermore, for those engaged in anthropological and ethnographical research methods, this book provides an excellent justification for appealing to subaltern auto-ethnographies of marginalized groups to truly grasp their predicament. As Lavie says herself, “as luck would have it, I was a welfare mother in the lines when I conducted my research” (23). Another approach would not have produced as rich a study as she has achieved.