Please join us for our upcoming seminar on Sulha Mediators in the Galilee as Cultural Brokers between State and Community by Dr. Ido Shahar and Dr. Tamar Parush (University of Haifa).

Monday, May 10, 2021, from 17:30 to 19:00 (Israel time) via zoom.

To receive the Zoom link, please subscribe by contacting Alon Ben Yehuda on alon.ben-yehuda@mail.huji.ac.il.

ABSTRACT

Studies of cultural brokerage typically focus on brokering as an activity that facilitates transactions and linkages across cultural boundaries, that is, they focus on the broker as a tertius iungens (a third who joins/unites/connects), who brings the sides closer together. Yet, as noted by Simmel (1950) and by contemporary social network theorists such as Burt (1992), brokers can also act as a tertius gaudens (a third who enjoys), who benefits from ensuring the sides’ continued separation and estrangement. In this paper, we take up the idea that cultural brokerage can assume many forms, and argue that different types of cultural brokerage can be distinguished based on two factors: (1) the social identities and affiliations of the broker; and (2) the nature of her or his brokering activities. We demonstrate this argument by analyzing the social identities and the brokering activities of a diverse group of contemporary sulha makers in the Galilee, in Northern Israel. We show that these individuals serve as brokers not only between the disputing parties, but also between two normative systems – that of the Israeli state and its institutions and that of the Arab-Palestinian minority. Focusing on the latter level of brokerage and applying an inductive ethnographic approach, we identify different types of cultural brokerage performed by these mediators, including brokerage as integration by means of combining normative systems; brokerage as integration by means of the broker’s dual identities/affiliations; brokerage as integration by means of participation in a “brokering pair”; brokerage as gatekeeping that blocks access to an alternative normative system; and brokerage as gatekeeping that selectively channels parties to one or another normative system. These different types of brokerage reflect and produce different patterns of relationship between the Israeli state and the Arab-Palestinian minority community.        

Ido Shahar is a senior lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Haifa. His primary areas of specialization are social anthropology and social history of the modern Middle East. He is trained both as a historian and an anthropologist, and his research combines these two disciplines, focusing especially on the Palestinian society and the legal sphere of Muslim societies.

Tamar Parush is an organizational sociologist teaching at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Haifa, and at the Department of Human Resource Management, Sapir College, Israel. She completed her Ph.D. at Tel Aviv University and was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Her research interests include institutional and organizational theory; managerial fashions, movements and ideologies; emotion in organizations; and the relationship between the fields of art and business.