Managing marginalized identities between local knowledge and global culture – environmentalism as a resource: examples from Arab society in Israel.

Abstract

The critique of Orientalism brings to the fore the disempowerment of local cultures by a Western gaze that imposes on them irrelevant cultural concepts, thereby silencing their own ways of life and value systems. However, it also allows looking from the opposite perspective at the social creativity of local cultures in reacting to non-local repertoires, rejecting or incorporating them in reconstructing their own cultural vitality. Such social creativity is embedded in the ceaseless symbolic struggles over local identities. A central vector of these symbolic struggles is the tension between culture conservation – the use of local heritage, or adhering to local canons – and culture change – the adaptation and adjustment of new and transforming fashions. These two interlinked dynamics of identity construction intensify in situations of ethnic and national tension. In this article I discuss ways in which local identities are negotiated and transformed through enhancing or contesting existing repertoires, and brokering new ones, as contingent on groups’ power struggles.

Article translated by Marcello Stella, originally published in Souto, D., Sampedro, A. & Kortazar, J. (eds.) (2021) Circuits in Motion: Polysystem Theory and the Analysis of Culture. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Argitalpen Zerbitzua / Servicio Editorial, pp. 42-58.