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Consumption and Market Society in Israel This page intentionally left blank Consumption and Market Society in Israel Edited by Yoram S. Carmeli and Kalman Applbaum Oxford • New York First published in 2004 by Berg Editorial offices: 1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW UK 838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA © Yoram S. Carmeli and Kalman Applbaum 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is an imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1 85973 684 X (Cloth) ISBN 1 85973 689 0 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Wellingborough, Northants. Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn. www.bergpublishers.com Contents Notes on Contributors vii 1 Introduction Yoram S. Carmeli and Kalman Applbaum 1 2 Of Thorns and Flowers: Consuming Identities in the Negev Fran Markowitz and Natan Uriely 19 3 Consumption and the Making of Neighborliness: A Tel-Aviv Case Study Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli 37 4 Tourism and Change in a Galilee Kibbutz: An Ethnography Ronit Grossman 61 5 The Ultraorthodox Flaneur: Toward the Pleasure Principle. Consuming Time and Space in the Contemporary Haredi Population of Jerusalem Tamar El-Or and Eran Neria 71 6 Food for Thought: The Dining Table and Identity Construction among Jewish Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Israel Julia Bernstein and Yoram S. Carmeli 95 7 “Doing Market” across National and Gender Divides: Consumption Patterns of Israeli Palestinians Amalia Sa’ar 123 8 Consumption under Construction: Power and Production of Homes in Galilee Tania Forte 141 – v – Contents 9 Consuming the Holy Spirit in the Holy Land: Evangelical Churches, Labor Migrants and the Jewish State Rebeca Raijman and Adriana Kemp 163 Afterword Daniel Miller 185 Notes 193 Index 207 – vi – Notes on Contributors Kalman Applbaum teaches anthropology at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. From 1995 to 1999, he lectured at Tel-Aviv University and at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Marketing Era: From Professional Practice to Global Provisioning (2003). His current research concerns the adoption of new antidepressants in Japan and its effect on the practice of psychiatry and mental health care. Julia Bernstein is a PhD student at the University of Haifa. Her main field of interest is material culture. She is currently researching food-related practices among Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli is a sociologist at the University of Haifa. Her main interests are middle-class culture and medical sociology, especially new repro- ductive technologies. Yoram S. Carmeli is with the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Haifa. His main interest is the crisis of modernity. In this context, he has published extensively on the British circus. He has also researched and co- authored on social and cultural aspects of new reproductive technologies. Tania Forte received her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2000. She is a lecturer in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. She is currently completing a manuscript on women’s senses of selves in Galilee. Her current research is on the production of international network images of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tamar El-Or is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthro- pology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Her field of research engages topics of gender religion and knowledge. Among her publications are the books: Edu- cated and Ignorant: On Ultra Orthodox Women and Their World. Boulder CO: Lynne Reinner, 1994; Next Year I will Know More: Literacy and Identity among Young Orthodox Women in Israel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002. – vii – Notes on Contributors Ronit Grossman (MA Haifa University, 2001) is a course coordinator in the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University of Israel. Her academic fields of interest are: cultural studies, community studies, anthropology of tourism and the Kibbutz society. Adriana Kemp is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University. Her fields of research are labor migration, citizenship and identity; boundaries and nationalism. She has published several articles on non-Jewish and non-Palestinian labor migration in Israel. Fran Markowitz teaches anthropology in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva. Expressing long-term interests in identity, community and diaspora, her current projects include an ethnographic analysis of the Black Hebrews’ homecoming to Israel and the dis- cursive and practical manifestations of Sarajevans’ multiple cultural legacies. Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. His recent books include The Sari (with Mukulika Banerjee, Oxford: Berg, 2003), The Dialectics of Shopping (Chicago, 2001); Ed. Car Cultures (Berg 2001), and Ed. Home Possessions (Berg, 2001). Next will be Ed. Materiality (Duke, forthcoming) Eran Neria is a lawyer, completing his graduate studies in anthropology. He is also interested in education and Israeli geography. Rebeca Raijman is senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthro- pology at the University of Haifa. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago. She is currently conducting a comprehensive research regarding the emergence on new (migrant) ethnic minorities in Israel, the socio- political organization of undocumented migrant communities and the politics and policy of labor migration in Israel. Amalia Sa’ar, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist. Amalia does research among Israeli Palestinians, focusing on gender politics and urban conditions. Her latest research project is on micro-enterprise among disempowered Israeli women, of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. She teaches at the University of Haifa. Natan Uriely earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is currently a senior lecturer and the chairperson of the Department of Hotel and Tourism Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Dr Uriely’s main fields of interest are the sociology of tourism and leisure. – viii – Introduction –1– Introduction Yoram S. Carmeli and Kalman Applbaum An account of consumption and market orientation in Israel can be indexed in two dimensions, political-economic and sociocultural. In the first, the phased evolution of the Israeli economy in its first fifty years (1948–1998; we will return below to account for the years since Israel’s jubilee), is roughly characterized by the transition from state developmentalism to economic liberalization and finally to globalization. In this respect, Israel, in spite of its particular history, is virtually a model economic citizen of the second half of the twentieth century, having traversed the several characteristic stages posited by the optimistic theories underlying neoliberalism. From the perspective of what Joseph Stiglitz and others have referred to as the Washington Consensus on global economy (Stiglitz 1998), Israel’s market liberal- ization, privatization, and the transition to consumerism and global marketism seem to offer few unique characteristics. A closer look yields the presence of numerous extenuating factors, however: the reliance on foreign aid; a socialist legacy embedded in state economic apparatuses; assimilation of vast immigrant populations; the outbreaks of existentially threatening wars resulting in both disruption of economic programming and a massive drain on budgetary and human resources; extreme but dubious capitalization on foreign labor; paltry levels of foreign direct investment due to political instability; and the Arab boycott. It is in this dual context – conformity and divergence from international models – that we wish to introduce the question of consumption and consumerism in Israel. One may begin by pointing to two oft-cited statistics in Israeli economic scholarship. First, between 1975 and 1995 Israel’s GDP grew by a factor of seven. Israeli per capita income in 1996 was US $16,690, which placed Israel squarely as a comparator to the Asian and other “tigers” (Shafir and Peled 2002: 1). This graduation to economic affluence has enabled Israelis to participate in the global consumerist movement that has grown most conspicuously during the past three decades. Accordingly, between 1950 and 1996 private consumption per capita in Israel rose an average of four percent per year, meaning that by the later date Israeli consumption was five and a half times what it had been at mid-century. The sub- stance of items consumed begins to depict a scenario common to virtually all other industrialized countries: an increased reliance on branded commodities and a rise – 1 – Yoram S. Carmeli and Kalman Applbaum in the prominence of luxury, personal use, private sphere items. In the 1950s elementary articles (clothes, foodstuffs, etc.) made up 51 percent of the consumer basket; in 1996 this number had shrunk to 29 percent (Ram 2000: 223). Travel abroad (from 154,000 exits in 1970 to 2.5 million in 1995), private cars (from 33 per 1000 in 1966 to 204