"Smadar Lavie, in creating this beautiful book, has accomplished something wonderful. An Iraeli Jew, she sojourned among the Mzeina Bedouin with an open heart and comprehending spirit . . . [and] deeply engaged their way of life and their oral literature."--Maxime Rodinson, Directeur d'Etudes, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

"Speaking about a region where conflict, for all involved, has deepened divisions, separating 'us' from 'them, ' Smadar Lavie courageously seeks out the paradoxes and ambiguities in everyday life."--Renato Rosaldo, Stanford University

Challenges conventional understandings of identity based on notions of nation and culture as bounded or discrete. This volume exemplifies a cross-disciplinary cultural studies and a concept of culture rooted in lived experience as well as textual readings. It is intended for scholars and students concerned with postmodern and postcolonial theory.

Challenges conventional understandings of identity based on notions of nation and culture as bounded or discrete. In exploring histories of displacement and geographies of identity, this collection of essays calls for the reconceptualization of theoretical binarisms such as modern and postmodern, colonial and postcolonial.

Weaving together memoir, auto-ethnography, political analysis, and cultural critique, Lavie equates bureaucratic entanglements with pain--and, arguably, torture--to examine the conundrum of loving and staying loyal to a state that repeatedly inflicts pain on its non-European Jewish women citizens.

Creativity and play erupt in the most solemn of everyday worlds as individuals reshape traditional forms in the light of changing historical circumstances. In this lively volume, fourteen distinguished anthropologists explore the life of creativity in social life across the globe and within the study of ethnography itself. Contributors include...