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Culturally Palatable: Food practices, Nationalism, and Druze Positionality in Nora's Kitchen
Abstract
Tucked behind her house, Nora is running a very popular and tasty Druze restaurant that caters to the culinary desires of Jewish-Israeli tourists, IDF soldiers, and students on school field trips. The establishment she runs, part restaurant and part cultural curiosity, is off the beaten path, as it sits inside a neighborhood far from the main road into Daliyat al-Carmel, Israel. Nora and her sister Fareda have decorated the walls of her home-restaurant with photographs of Old Jerusalem, from Israeli and Druze culture. In this paper, I analyze the culinary space and practices found in Nora's Kitchen as they relate to the surrounding and competing national narratives produced by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Utilizing interventions made by linguistic and cultural anthropologists in performance and food studies, I consider Nora's Kitchen, both in its culinary consumption and embodied experience, to be interdiscursive (Goodman et al 2014) with discourses of ethnicity and the nation-state. I argue that to cultivate a unique positionality within Israeli society and ideals (and away from Palestinian ones), Nora's Kitchen must signal dominant Israeli discourse in a highly localized manner. Using ethnographic data collected from 2016-2017, I specifically interrogate Nora's "authentic Arab" food practices and the restaurant's material culture to illuminate Druze place within narratives of nationalism. I find that the interdiscursivity between hegemonic Israeli culture and ideology and Druze foodways do two things. First, it draws subtle attention to the orientalist paradigm that structures Israeli society and promotes ethnic exclusion (Khazzoom 2003). Second, and more insidious, it undermines the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism and erases internal Palestinian Israeli dissonance by creating a space where people can safely engage with and consume exotic culture without being ideologically threatened. Druze, then, serve as a unique case study for which to evaluate Israel's ethnodemocracy and the food politics which are endemic to identity formation.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Israel
Sub Area
Israel Studies