Christine Leuenberger

The politics of maps: Constructing national territories in Israel

Within the last 2000 years the land demarcated by the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the Jordan Valley to the east has been one of the most disputed territories in history. World powers have redrawn its boundaries numerous times. Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 within British Mandate Palestine, Palestinians and Israelis have disagreed over the national identity of the land that they both inhabit. The struggles have extended from the battlefields to the classrooms. In the process, different national and ethnic groups have used various sciences, ranging from archeology to history and geography, to prove territorial claims based on their historical presence in the region. But how have various Israeli social and political groups used maps to solidify claims over the territory? In this paper we bring together science studies and critical cartography in order to investigate cartographic representations as socially embedded practices and address how visual rhetoric intersects with knowledge claims in cartography. Before the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the Israeli government and the Jewish National Fund produced maps of Israel that established a Hebrew topography of the land. After 1967, Israel’s expanded territorial control made the demarcation of its borders ever more controversial. Consequently, various Israeli interest groups and political parties increasingly used various cartographic techniques to forge territorial spaces, demarcate disputed boundaries, and inscribe particular national, political, and ethnic identities onto the land.

Introduction: The Self as Project: Politics and the Human Sciences in the Twentieth Century

On May 8, 1945, Germany formally surrendered to Allied forces, ending the Second World War in Europe. Soon after Soviet, American, British, and French troops occupied German territory, something unique in the annals of military history took place. Scores of researchers and practitioners from clinical medicine, law, psychiatry, and the social sciences descended upon Germany at the invitation of occupying authorities. They were charged with two main tasks: help determine who was responsible for the murderous actions committed in the name of National Socialism, and contribute to the reconstruction of a democratic Germany. To these ends, legal scholars, forensic pathologists, physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychometrists were recruited to assist military tribunals in western occupation zones in analyzing evidence and interrogating defendants and witnesses in criminal cases against Nazi officials, administrators, scientists, and doctors. At the same time, social scientists were brought in to revamp the German educational system and to track public opinion using a relatively new tool, the mass survey.

The Rhetoric of Maps: International Law as a Discursive Tool in Visual Arguments

Abstract This article was presented at the workshop on “Borders and Human Rights,” College of Law & Business, Ramat Gan, Israel.Notions of human rights as enshrined in international law have become the “idea of our time”; a “dominant moral narrative by which world politics” is organized; and a powerful “discourse of public persuasion.” Tony Evans, International Human Rights Law as Power/Knowledge, 27 (3) HUM. RTS. Q. 1046 (2005); Meg McLagan, Human Rights, Testimony, and Transnational Publicity, 2 (1) SCHOLAR & FEMINIST ONLINE 1 (2003), available at http://www.barnard.edu/ps/printmmc.htm; Wendy S. Hesford, Human Rights Rhetoric of Recognition, 41 (3) RHETORIC SOC. Q. 282 (2011). With the rise of human rights discourse, we need to ask, how do protagonists make human rights claims? What sort of resources, techniques, and strategies do they use in order to publicize information about human rights abuses and stipulations set out in international law? With the democratization of mapping practices, various individuals, organizations, and governments are increasingly using maps in order to put forth certain social and political claims. This article draws on the sociology of knowledge, science studies, critical cartography, cultural studies, and anthropological studies of law in order to analyze how various international, Palestinian, and Israeli organizations design maps of the West Bank Barrier in accord with assumptions embedded within international law as part of their political and new media activism. Qualitative sociological methods, such as in-depth interviewing, ethnography, and the collection of cartographic material pertaining to the West Bank Barrier, provide the empirical tools to do so. The maps examined here exemplify how universalistic notions of international law and human rights become a powerful rhetorical tool to make various and often incommensurable social and political claims across different maps. At the same time, international human rights law, rather than dictating local mapping practices, becomes inevitably “vernacularized” and combined with local understandings, cultural preferences, and political concerns.

Cultures of Categories: Psychological Diagnoses as Institutional and Political Projects before and after the Transition from State Socialism in 1989 in East Germany

How can psychological categories be understood as historical, political, and cultural artifacts? How are such categories maintained by individuals, organizations, and governments? How do macrosocietal changes—such as the transition from state socialism in East Germany in 1989—correlate with changes in the social and organizational structures that maintain psychological categories? This essay focuses on how—pre‐1989—the category of neurosis (as a mental disorder) became entwined with East Germany’s grand socialist project of creating new socialist personalities, a new society, and a new science and on how diagnostic preferences were adapted, modified, and extended by local cultural and institutional practices. It also examines how post‐1989 the category of neurosis became redefined in accord with a for‐merly West German psychotherapeutic paradigm and was eventually obliterated by the bureaucratic health care system of the new Germany. East German practitioners adopted new therapeutic guidelines and a new language to make sense of the “normal,” “neurotic,” and “pathological” self in terms of “individualizing forms of knowledge”1 that tied in with efforts to remake East German citizens as liberal democratic subjects. At the same time, practitioners’ clinical practice remained based upon face‐to‐face encounters in which formal guidelines and stipulations were often superseded by local, interactional, institutional, and cultural practices and contingencies.

The West Bank Wall

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue sets out to bring some clarity and organization to the diverse bodies of literature on the construction, lived experience, and consequences of the West Bank Wall. We review the literature on the Wall and identify three broad themes: the significance of the Wall in the context of political negotiations, its disruption of daily life in the West Bank, and its role as a symbol in broader debates about sovereignty, territory, and the state in border studies.

Knowledge-Making and its Politics in Conflict Regions: Doing Research in Israel/Palestine

Abstract This paper is based on a personal journey of starting a long-term sociological research project in a conflict zone: the research was to be carried out in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The question posed is: what sort of problems and concerns arise for researchers and ethnographers who work with traditionally marginal communities in violently divided societies? In an attempt to provide an answer, I focus here on such issues as: the social constructions of fears and dangers in what are perceived to be dangerous places; difficulties of access to traditionally underrepresented and marginal social groups; useful methodological and ethical precepts for doing research in risky environments; as well as the advantages of working with, rather than on communities. Moreover, I suggest that conducting research in politically and socially unstable contexts puts into stark relief the advantages of conducting participatory and collaborative research. Such approaches provide researchers with networks of trusted local protagonists, offer more in-depth insights into traditionally marginalized and frequently misrepresented social groups, whilst also generating knowledge that may facilitate beneficial social changes for local communities.