Author ORCID Identifier
Emily McKee: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5494-4873
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Current Anthropology
Abstract
In contexts of land conflict and deep social divisions, evaluations of dirty and disordered landscapes carry social and political weight. This article employs a “political dwelling” perspective in southern Israel to examine how links between Bedouin character, litter and disorder, and lawlessness have become widespread, even naturalized, among many government officials and Jewish residents and even some Bedouin Arab residents. Contemporary trash talk draws on, but simultaneously masks, a history of state-building projects that employed Orientalist evaluations of order and disorder and segregationist approaches to development. While this masking of social construction is a property of all symbolically powerful social distinctions, I argue that the distinctions undergirding trash talk are especially accessible for normalization because of the language of nature within which they are expressed—natural landscapes, ethnic groups, and human nature. As a result, trash talk naturalizes links between dirty places, disorderly people, and the need to remove (or reform) them. This trash talk has profound emotional and material consequences for Bedouin residents of Israel because the discourse makes it easier for many within mainstream Israeli society to treat Bedouin Arabs themselves as matter out of place and to justify various acts of social control.
First Page
733
Last Page
752
DOI
10.1086/683198
Publication Date
10-2015
Recommended Citation
2015. “Trash Talk: Interpreting Morality and Disorder in Negev/Naqab Landscapes.” Current Anthropology 56 (5): 733–52. https://doi.org/10.1086/683198.
Original Citation
2015. “Trash Talk: Interpreting Morality and Disorder in Negev/Naqab Landscapes.” Current Anthropology 56 (5): 733–52. https://doi.org/10.1086/683198.
Department
Department of Anthropology
Comments
This is an author-archived version of an article published by The University of Chicago Press in Current Anthropology, The version of record can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1086/683198