Stanley Waterman

Carnivals for elites? The cultural politics of arts festivals

Despite their ubiquity and cultural prominence, academic study of arts festivals has been neglected. This article examines how cyclical arts festivals transform places from being everyday settings into temporary environments that contribute to the production, processing and consumption of culture, concentrated in time and place. Moreover, festivals also provide examples of how culture is contested. Support for the arts is part of a process used by élites to establish social distance between themselves and others. Festivals have traditionally been innovative and have always been controlled. In the past, artistic directors wielded this control but recent attempts by commercial interests to control festivals reflect a wider situation in which marketing agencies and managers are transforming arts and culture into arts and culture industries. Today, promoting arts festivals is related to place promotion, and this encourages ‘safe’ art forms. This highlights latent tensions between festival as art and economics, between culture and cultural politics.

Residential patterns and processes: a study of Jews in three London boroughs

This paper examines the concentration and separation of ethnic groups using the contemporary example of Jews in the three Greater London boroughs of Hackney, Redbridge, and Bamrnet. The high Index of Dissimilarity, measured at the borough scale, of this well-established population, compared with the general population, raises issues concerning the scale of analysis and time-period of study of residential patterns and processes. Rather than observe the ethnic group from the viewpoint of overall society, it is suggested that emphasis be placed on the ethnic settlement pattern from the internal perspective of the ethnic group itself. Commonly used measures such as the Indices of Dissimilarity, Segregation and Isolation fail to explain adequately the degree of spatial cohesion of the group and how the group perceives this cohesion. Ethnic Intensity scores and indices are proposed in order to bring these issues to light. It is suggested that congregation rather than segregation is a better descriptor of the current dominant residential process of this particular population. However, a better understanding of the dynamics of ethnic residential processes can come about only through local field studies stressing questions of a distinctly spatial nature.

The political impact on writing the geography of Palestine/Israel

In response to the first question, Falah states that their aim is ... to obliterate the Arab geographical identity of the country and render the Arab population invisible’ (Falah, 1989b: 536). On the second question, he generalizes that the ’... role of geographers in investigating Arab geography and publishing for a local Israeli readership has been to underscore the pattern of distribution and location of Arab settlements and population ... ’ (Falah, 1989b: 546). We dissent sharply from these claims and present a different perspective on ’biased human geography’ in general, and on the human geography of Israel/Palestine in particular. We believe that this is a more balanced picture. Why do geographers choose any specific topic or region for study? Three pairs of selection criteria are suggested. First, topics can be either general-universal or special-particular; the literature on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict belongs to the latter, concentrating on regional, local and parochial issues. A second criterion is the status of research areas within the relevant discipline, and here we differentiate between traditional topics, such as regional geography, and ’frontier’ topics, such as ’geography of gender’. Israeli geographers have been very quick to adopt ’new’ paradigms and new frontier research areas. Unfortun-

CHANGING RESIDENTIAL PATTERNS OF THE DUBLIN JEWISH COMMUNITY

This paper investigates the changing residential patterns of the Dublin Jewish community in the twentieth century. Using communal data provided by the annual reports of the major mutual aid society, moves of residences in the community have been mapped. The results show that moves up to the late 1950s occurred principally within well-defined sectors and were mainly short. Later, moves across sectors became more common and, in general, considerably longer. By the late 1970s the community had declined in size from 5,000 to 2,000 persons and had become widely spread on the south side of the Dublin urban area. Questions are asked about the viability of the community under these circumstances and about the possibility of a reversal of the trends that have been noted over the past half-century.

Residential Change in a Middle-Class Suburban Ethnic Population: A Comment

Complex social issues such as integration and segregation are often inadequately researched because of terminological and methodological deficiencies and inappropriate scales of study. A recent paper on British Jewry (Newman, 1985) suffers from such failings by discussing these issues but neglecting to relate to them directly in the analysis.

Alternative images in an Israeli town

Lynch’s study took the form of interviews with small samples of relatively well-educated downtown employees in their office environments in three large American cities. In addition to producing verbal descriptions of their city, each respondent was also requested to draw freely a map of the city noting all places of significance. In spite of the nature of his sample of respondents, analysis of these maps led Lynch to the recognition of five formative elements (paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks) in the con-

Neighbourhood, community and residential change decisions in the Dublin Jewish community

The Dublin Jewish community has undergone numerical decline over the past thirty years. At the same time, there have been substantial changes in the residential locations of members of the community. This paper investigates the significance of the neighbourhood and the community in residential change decisions through an examination of social visiting patterns, friendship and family networks and the perception and importance of having Jewish neighbours. The results show that although contacts with non-Jewish neighbours have increased, there is still a tendency to choose residential locations close to other community members. While there is still a tendency to move to higher status suburbs in south-cast Dublin, there is an opposing trend back towards the area of second settlement in the south-west of the city.

Separation and its consequences

Fred Boal’s classic paper, ‘Territoriality on the Shankill-Falls Divide’ was written just prior to the outbreak of ‘The Troubles’ (Boal 1969). Thus it is a case study in historical geography. As Boal noted in the paper, the social geography of Belfast had already been documented; Estyn Evans noted the intense communal segregation in the 1940s and Emrys Jones’ monograph, predating Boal by almost a decade, was on its way to becoming a mini-classic (Boal 2007). However, Fred’s work was no mere repetition or update. His achievement was in extending the study of segregation in Belfast to encompass activity segregation, drawing attention to the fact that the segregation of Protestants and Catholics in Belfast was deeper-rooted than the mere separation of residences.

The non-Jewish vote in Israel in 1992

Abstract In the Israeli general election of June 1992, non-Jewish voters comprised 12.3 percent of the electorate. Theoretically, this would be sufficient to elect 15 non-Jewish members to the Knesset if there was a united effort to elect only Arab representatives. However, three Arab-supported parties took only 4.88 percent of the valid vote and won five (4.17 percent) of the 120 seats in the Knesset. This understatement of potential electoral strength is due almost entirely to low voter turnout, unfocused voting patterns among non-Jewish voters who, in addition to voting for the three predominantly non-Jewish parties, also cast their votes for the full range of Jewish (Zionist) parties, and the inability of the Arab parties to agree on distribution of their surplus votes among themselves. It would not be improper to say that the distribution of the Arab votes in Israel defies statistical explanation. Statistical analysis of the voting shows that it is extremely difficult to explain or predict the electoral behaviour of the Arab population in Israel, as neither geographical nor socio-economic variables reveal any clear pattern. This study indicates the need for detailed investigations relating directly to local and neighbourhood effects in the Arab vote in Israel.

Eating, Drinking and Maintenance of Community: Jewish Dietary Laws and Their Effects on Separateness

This chapter examines the food consumption practices of Jews with an emphasis on Jewish dietary laws and their effects on Jewish community and separation. One of the consequences of any successful religion is that it eventually becomes institutionalized, for without institutionalized rules and regulations it becomes difficult to hold its adherents together. Whereas some religious beliefs and practices are active on a personal level, others are designed to create community, segregating members of one religion from others. Food has had a significant role in religious practice and observance throughout history and food consumption has traditionally been a sure way of separating Jews from others. In the period before the Enlightenment, these proved reasonably efficient in achieving their goals, especially the preservation of Jewish peoplehood. More often than not, the effects of food on religious practice have been negative rather than positive because food and food consumption are efficient media for enhancing the perception of difference between groups and members of these groups. When translated into religious injunctions rather than just cultural differences, practices relating to which foods are proper for consumption and which are inappropriate and customs regarding the care and attention devoted to the preparation of food and food taboos become powerful elements in distinguishing Jews from other religions. However, the emergence of different customs in diverse Jewish communities and the institutionalization designed to safeguard observant Jews from consuming prohibited food highlight differences among Jews themselves, a feature further emphasized by the secularization of many Jews in modern societies and the widening gaps between observant Jews and others.