Review
"Dwelling in Conflict is a rare book. Few could have written about this fraught place with such detail, balance, and sophistication. Emily McKee beautifully reveals the underlying environmental imaginaries and discourses--among both Jews and Bedouin-- and shows the potential for more environmentally friendly policies and more peaceful, just relations in the Negev."--Diana K. Davis "University of California, Davis"
"Emily McKee's study of land issues in the Negev is a highly rewarding read. Her keen ethnographic eye reveals a parallel existence: Bedouins morphing from agropastoralists to the marginalized poor, living alongside Israeli settlers conditioned to view the natural environment, complete with its Orientalized others, as a frontier battlefront. The result is an engaging and cohering account of the Israeli-Arab conflict from a perspective seldom utilized before."--Dan Rabinowitz "Tel-Aviv University"
"McKee's well-written, readable book attends to the Bedouin voice from below and the way it expresses both historical and contemporary connection to place...[S]he conducts a sensitive analysis of how the Bedouins have been constructed within the Zionist perspective as the ultimate Other...Dwelling in Conflict invites readers to understand Israeli Jewish-Arab relations as constructed in conditions of inequality, segregation and separation."--Safa Aburabia, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review
"Rarely does an ethnography simultaneously provoke intellectual and theoretical engagement, invite a carefully balanced rethinking of an aforethought intractable conflict, and contain such beautifully crafted prose as to inspire furious page-turning...[R]eaders come away from Dwelling in Conflict with a nuanced appreciation of how day-to-day interactions among Bedouin Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel are filtered through the lenses of history, narrative, memory, stigma, pride, family and heritage, agency and strategy, violence and suffering, and embodied understandings of material environments."--Tanya J. King "Human Ecology"
About the Author
Emily McKee is Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department and the Institute for the Study of Environment, Sustainability, and Energy at Northern Illinois University.
