About this item
Highlights
- For decades, the agricultural settlements of Israel's arid Central Arabah prided themselves on their labor-Zionist commitment to abstaining from hiring outside labor.
- About the Author: Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist and a Lecturer at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London.
- 298 Pages
- Social Science, Anthropology
Description
About the Book
"For decades, the agricultural settlements of Israel's arid Central Arabah prided themselves on their labor-Zionist commitment to abstaining from hiring outside labor. But beginning in the late 1980s, the region's agrarian economy was rapidly transformed by the removal of state protections, a shift to export-oriented monoculture, and an influx of disenfranchised, ill-paid migrants from northeast Thailand (Isaan). Capitalist Colonial, Matan Kaminer's ethnography of the region and its people, argues that the paid and unpaid labor of Thai migrants has been essential to resolving the clashing demands of the bottom line and Zionist ideology here as elsewhere in Israel's farm sector. Kaminer's account mobilizes capitalism and colonialism as a combined analytical frame to comprehend the forms of domination prevailing in the Arabah. Placing the findings of fieldwork as a farm laborer within the ecological, economic, and political histories of the Arabah and Isaan, Kaminer draws surprising connections between the violent takeover of peripheral regions, the imposition of agrarian commodity production, and the emergence of transnational labor flows. Insisting on the liberatory possibilities immanent in the "interaction ideologies" found among both migrant workers and settler employers, and raising the question of the place of migrants who are neither Jewish nor Arab in visions of decolonization, this book demonstrates anthropology's ongoing relevance to the struggle for local and global transformations"--Book Synopsis
For decades, the agricultural settlements of Israel's arid Central Arabah prided themselves on their labor-Zionist commitment to abstaining from hiring outside labor. But beginning in the late 1980s, the region's agrarian economy was rapidly transformed by the removal of state protections, a shift to export-oriented monoculture, and an influx of disenfranchised, ill-paid migrants from northeast Thailand (Isaan). Capitalist Colonial, Matan Kaminer's ethnography of the region and its people, argues that the paid and unpaid labor of Thai migrants has been essential to resolving the clashing demands of the bottom line and Zionist ideology here as elsewhere in Israel's farm sector.
Kaminer's account mobilizes capitalism and colonialism as a combined analytical frame to comprehend the forms of domination prevailing in the Arabah. Placing the findings of fieldwork as a farm laborer within the ecological, economic, and political histories of the Arabah and Isaan, Kaminer draws surprising connections between the violent takeover of peripheral regions, the imposition of agrarian commodity production, and the emergence of transnational labor flows. Insisting on the liberatory possibilities immanent in the "interaction ideologies" found among both migrant workers and settler employers, and raising the question of the place of migrants who are neither Jewish nor Arab in visions of decolonization, this book demonstrates anthropology's ongoing relevance to the struggle for local and global transformations.
Review Quotes
"In Capitalist Colonial, Kaminer puzzles through the forces that shape relations between Thai workers and their Israeli bosses. Drawing on ethnographic work conducted on a moshav he calls Ein Amal, as well as in Thailand with his interlocutors' kin, the book presents a rich account of the relationship between domination and difference."--Skyler Inman, Ethnos
"This timely book traces the origins and significance of Thai labor in Israel.... This small community encompasses much of the enormous complexity of modern globalization, and Kaminer renders it well."--Lisa Anderson, Foreign Affairs
"The historical and conceptual work developed in Capitalist Colonial affords such comparisons [between the dynamics of Israeli settler, Indigenous Palestinian, and alien Thai], making the book an important read. But it is the ethnography that reveals the dynamics that allow this system to function, making the book indispensable for students of global regimes of racial capitalism."--Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Dialectical Anthropology
"Matan Kaminer provides a rich, engaging, and piercing analysis of transnational capitalist domination through the unique positioning of Isaanite migrant workers in Israel and their integration into the Israeli farming sector. This astonishing and insightful ethnography is a seminal contribution to labor, migration, postcolonial studies, and cultural anthropology." --Piya Pangsapa, Thammasat University
"Ethnographically vivid, analytically sharp, and resonant with global historical echoes, Capitalist Colonial exposes the racialized cruelty of postcolonial neoliberalism. Israeli entrepreneurs built a profitable agriculture by replacing a dispossessed Arab peasantry with a rural Thai proletariat, politically disciplined to appear complaisant despite exploitative pay, social exclusion, and backbreaking labor. While the brutal geopolitics of the 2023 Hamas raid and vengeful Israeli response fatally trapped the migrants, Kaminer movingly probes the still-fertile ashes for seeds of a potential multi-ethnic future." --Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University
"This book sheds new light on the centrality of international migrants to Zionism and its capitalist colonial expansion. Its anthropological exploration of connection between international labor flows, capitalist production, and violent colonial transformation is both timely and valuable." --Leila Farsakh, University of Massachusetts Boston
About the Author
Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist and a Lecturer at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London.