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At the core of the author's concern stands the question of cultural transmutation in an era riddled with media channels and all-embracing messages. Fragments of the Israeli experience are pieced together in this provocative essay to provide a socio-anthropological agenda for some of the issues involved in the manufacturing of items of symbolic solidarity and common national imagery in an epoch of social disunification and cultural pastiche. The author argues that even though the aesthetic forms of major cultural idioms have unrecognizably altered and are accommodated to befit the shape and style of post-modern living, the basic programs underlying them have remained immutable. Furthermore, it is the quality of adaptability to changing aesthetic conventions that allow such symbolic corner-stones to be left unturned. The case of the youth culture is chose here as a yardstick for examining the double voice of such process - the global versus the tribal.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Introduction
Myths and Simulations
Youth and Post-Zionist Simulations
Forget Zionism?
Capturing Time-Space
Myths of the Body and the Territory
Israeli Collectivism in Retrospective
Beyond Collectivism
Chapter 1. Resolving Social Inequalities: The Ethnic Discourse
Five Root Metaphors
Community as Instant Acculturation
Afterword: Community as Simulation
Chapter 2. Revisiting the Holocaust: The Historical Discourse
The Holocaust in Israeli Eyes: A Brief History of Collective Images
The School Delegations
The Ministry's Course
School Preparations
Reading the Holocaust
Afterword: The Holocaust as Simulation
Chapter 3. Serializing War: The Interrupted Discourse
Israel in the Gulf War
Framing the Text
A Poetics of Reversal
Global Responses to the Gulf War
Local Responses: The Interrupted System
Afterword: The Gulf War as Simulation
Chapter 4. Taming Youth Culture: The Generational Discourse
The Plot
Late Summer Blues as a Mythical Structure
The Group
"Individualism" versus "Collectivism"
A Rite of Passage
The Tel-Aviv Syndrome
Afterword: Blues as Simulation
Chapter 5. Living after the Assassination: The Political Discourse
Rabin's Two Bodies
"Our Father Has Gone"
Afterword: Rabin's Bereavement as Simulation
Epilogue References
Index
About the author
Haim Hazan is Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Tel Aviv University.
Summary
At the core of the author's concern stands the question of cultural transmutation in an era riddled with media channels and all-embracing messages. Fragments of the Israeli experience are pieced together in this provocative essay to provide a socio-anthropological agenda for some of the issues involved in the manufacturing of items of symbolic...
