Smith, Sonia Isabel; (2020) Shelter and Alarm: An ethnography of “a period of quiet” in the northern Galilee. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores how Jewish Israeli citizens living on Israel’s northern borders with Lebanon and Syria interact with materials of war in their everyday lives. The research investigates these practices during a relatively “quiet time” in the relationships between Israel and its neighbouring states, and between Israel and the Lebanese Shi’a militia group and political party, Hezbollah. In particular, the thesis describes and considers how people on these borders interact with bomb shelters and sounds issuing from the heavily militarised environment, incorporating these structures and sounds into what becomes for them something natural to the region. The thesis also considers how people orient towards these structures and sounds for their protection. Rather than offering a discussion that prioritises the materiality of war or the traumatic effects of violence, the thesis explores how participants experience being situated in a militarised environment of ‘non-war’ (Blok in Lubkemann 2008: 23), and secure themselves within this context. I therefore draw on regional scholarship in which Israeli state practices are contemplated alongside their implications for personhood and cosmology. I bring this together with anthropological discussions that attempt to break down categories of war and peace, and the everyday and the extraordinary, showing instead how normalcy and exceptionality cut across varied situations. The thesis presents an ethnography of an area that is not at war and not at peace, depicting the temporal dimensions of this in between state, as well as the implications of making “in-between-ness” natural. Arguing that there is political and aspirational purchase in the ‘apparently mundane’ (Kelly 2008: 351), I consider that the naturalisation of the materials of war transforms what might otherwise be an off duty war-scape into quotidian surroundings. Normalcy and naturalisation therefore entail powerfully creative security practices that move with people into war and out again.

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