Capitalist Colonial : Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture / Matan Kaminer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kaminer, Matan.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Foreign workers, Thai--Israel.

Foreign workers, Thai.

Israel--Emigration and immigration.

Israel.

Thailand, Northeastern--Emigration and immigration.

Thailand, Northeastern.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (300 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Redwood City : Stanford University Press, 2024.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Front Cover

Half-title

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

List of Illustrations

Maps

Preface

Note on Non-English Terms

Note on Anonymization

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Domination Across Difference

1. The Settlement of the Central Arabah

2. Transnational Capitalist Coloniality

3. The "Thai Revolution" in the Arabah

4. Producing Vegetables and Reproducing Difference

5. Saving the Face of the Arabah

6. Social Reproduction and Karmic Reciprocity

Conclusion: Anthropology and the Politics of Rupture

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Back Cover.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781503641105

1503641104

OCLC:

1456764941