For more than four decades, socially disadvantaged Israeli Mizrahim—descendants of Jews from Middle Eastern and North African communities—have continuously supported right-wing political parties. Scholars, left-wing politicians, and activists tend to view Mizrahim as reacting against their structural exclusion, or more crudely as acting against their own interests, but Nissim Mizrachi locates the source of their so-called paradoxical behavior within the limitations of the liberal grammar by which their outlook and behavior are read. In Beyond Suspicion, Mizrachi turns the direction of inquiry back on itself, contrasting liberal grammar—which values autonomy, equality, and universal reason and morality as the only authentic human choice—with the grammar of rootedness, in which the self is experienced through a web of relational commitments, temporal ties, and codes of collective identity. Recognizing rootedness as a fundamental need and desire for belonging is necessary to understand both scholarly and political rifts in Israel and throughout the world.

Reviews

"With profound lessons for us all, this book excavates the rootedness at the heart of right-populist politics in Israel. In seeing his subjects fully, Nissim Mizrachi turns the mirror on ourselves to show us how our constricted vision limits the appeal of our ideas to the very people whose rights we claim to fight for. This book powerfully redefines our understanding of the illiberal world we increasingly inhabit."—Ann Swidler, Professor of the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley

"In challenging sociological orthodoxy, Mizrachi dares us to conceptualize the social actor beyond our own dominant liberal paradigms. His extensive research among Mizrahi Jews calls into question prevalent ideas of individual autonomy, forcing us to recognize the role of rootedness and belonging in the self-conception of millions in Israel—and beyond."—Adam Seligman, Professor of Religion, Boston University

In this issue we present a thematic set of articles that illumine aspects of contemporary sociology in Israel, thereby continuing the effort to make the journal broadly international, as was done with earlier issues on sociology in Canada, Japan, France, Belgium, and Brazil. Special thanks are due to Professor Nissim Mizrachi, who organized the project, working closely with contributing authors throughout the process of development, and who has provided a very scholarly and wide-ranging introductory essay. Thanks also to the individual authors for their stimulating case studies. The articles share a focus on moving beyond a perspective in sociology that the authors call “the liberal grammar,” which might be characterized as a combination of social conflict and social contract assumptions about social organization, with corresponding methods of analysis. Importantly, the authors do not seek to refute the liberal grammar, but rather to demonstrate that it has certain limitations that make it difficult for sociologists who employ it (as a “tool kit”) to understand adequately some types of persons and practices. The authors have a particular concern for developing a sociological understanding of those groups—which are often prominent among Israeli and Palestinian peoples—that can be defined as conservative or as “non-liberal subjects.” They ask: Can non-liberal subjects be allowed to speak in their own voice and to describe their own reality, and, if they do so, can sociologists listen and understand? As noted in some of the articles, this approach accords with the Weberian tradition of “verstehen” (“understanding”) and is similar to the phenomenological method of “surrender and catch” that Kurt Wolff articulated.

A comparative look at how discrimination is experienced by stigmatized groups in the United States, Brazil, and Israel Racism is a common occurrence for members of marginalized groups around the world. Getting Respect illuminates their experiences by comparing three countries with enduring group boundaries: the United States, Brazil and Israel. The authors delve into what kinds of stigmatizing or discriminatory incidents individuals encounter in each country, how they respond to these occurrences, and what they view as the best strategy-whether individually, collectively, through confrontation, or through self-improvement-for dealing with such events. This deeply collaborative and integrated study draws on more than four hundred in-depth interviews with middle- and working-class men and women residing in and around multiethnic cities-New York City, Rio de Janeiro, and Tel Aviv-to compare the discriminatory experiences of African Americans, black Brazilians, and Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as Israeli Ethiopian Jews and Mizrahi (Sephardic) Jews. Detailed analysis reveals significant differences in group behavior: Arab Palestinians frequently remain silent due to resignation and cynicism while black Brazilians see more stigmatization by class than by race, and African Americans confront situations with less hesitation than do Ethiopian Jews and Mizrahim, who tend to downplay their exclusion. The authors account for these patterns by considering the extent to which each group is actually a group, the sociohistorical context of intergroup conflict, and the national ideologies and other cultural repertoires that group members rely on. Getting Respect is a rich and daring book that opens many new perspectives into, and sets a new global agenda for, the comparative analysis of race and ethnicity.

Multiculturalism and diversity have raised a number of challenges for liberal democracy, not least the stigmatization of people in response to these developments. In this book, leading experts from a range of disciplines look at the responses to stigmatization from the perspectives of ordinary people. They use a range of case studies drawn from the US, Brazil, Canada, France, Israel, South Africa, and Sweden: the first systematic qualitative and cross-national exploration of how diverse minority groups respond to stigmatization in the course of their everyday lives. The chapters in this book tackle a range of theoretical questions about stigmatization, including how they make sense of their experiences, how they shape subsequent behaviour, and how they negotiate and transform social and symbolic boundaries within a range of social and institutional contexts. Responses to Stigmatization in Comparative Perspective provides new data and analysis of how stigmatization affects a range of societies, and its original research and analysis will be important reading for those studying Ethnicity, as well as Sociologists, Political Scientists, and Anthropologists. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

When we agreed in 2014 to devote this special issue of Israel Studies Review to the subject “Resisting Liberalism in Israel,” we did not realize how timely it would be. At this point in early 2016, it is a truism to say that Israel has moved well to the right, both politically and religiously—a phenomenon that is equally obvious to this trend’s proponents and opponents. It is thus particularly important that the articles in this issue examine different aspects of the reasons that ‘liberalism’, broadly understood, has little appeal to the disparate group of approximately half of Jewish Israelis generally gathered under the rubric ‘Mizrahim’. As is well-known, ‘veteran Ashkenazim’, who overwhelmingly set the tone for Israel’s political and cultural direction from the pre-state Yishuv until the late 1970s, are broadly distributed across the political spectrum, although they tend toward the left. Mizrahim are much more concentrated toward the right, rejecting the universalistic liberalism that Ashkenazim believe is inherent in the DNA of the State of Israel and even of the Jewish people. In this special issue, all of the articles examine this thorny set of topics from related but somewhat different perspectives. The introduction by the guest editors, Nissim Mizrachi and Menachem Mautner, gives a flavor of the provocative content and the perspective that informs this issue. We hope that these articles will be of present and future use for those who are looking to better understand—and perhaps even deal with—some of Israel’s most pressing social problems, whose ramifications spread throughout the whole society. In addition, as usual, we include several book reviews, one of which discusses Colin Shindler’s volume on the history of the Israeli (secular) right and another that comments on the English translation of Hillel Cohen’s Year Zero of the Israeli-Arab Conflict: 1929 (Tarpat in Hebrew), which created quite a stir in Israel when it was originally published. We also review a new book on what can be learned from Bedouin graves and funeral practices (quite a lot, it turns out) and one on Diaspora Jewry’s ‘obligation’ to Israel, among others. We hope that you enjoy this issue of ISR and that it provides you with much food for thought. Please consider sharing those thoughts with us by e-mail or in person at the upcoming Association for Israel Studies (AIS) meeting this June in Jerusalem.

Disability Studies: A Reader is the first book in Hebrew in the field of disability studies. This field is an innovative and fascinating academic discipline that proposes viewing disability as a social concept, an identity, a category of critical analysis, and a basis for political action. The approach is transformative; that is, it seeks to change society and culture. The research encompasses a broad and varied field and deals with social, cultural, political, legal, and economic processes that shape the concept of disability. The innovativeness lies in the transition from a medical approach, or a personal-tragedy approach, to a social-critical approach. Whereas the former sees disability as an act of fate, a pathology, a deviance, a dependence, and a burden, and views people with disabilities as the objects of charity and pity, the approach in this reader examines disability as the product of social power relations and of cultural constructs, proposing an alternative view based on recognition, human variability, mutual dependence, pride, and equal rights.

During the last third of the twentieth century, the US became a major – if not the major – producer of the world’s professional sociologists. In many countries, publication in top American journals has become decisive in determining sociologists’ career paths and providing them with an imprimatur of undeniable excellence (Azaria 2010; Jacobs & Mizrachi, 2020). In many countries, American sociology sets the discipline’s theoretical and research agenda, leading to a worldwide stratification of the field (Jacobs & Mizrachi, 2020). A recent article by Jerry Jacobs and Nissim Mizrachi (2020), “International Representation in US Social Science Journals,” published in this journal, shows that only a fifth of the articles appearing during 2010–2016 in the two leading American sociological journals, the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology, addressed non-American societies. When comparing international representation in top journals in sociology, political science, demography, education, and economics, these two top sociological journals were found to be among the journals with the least representation of other countries, ranking just above the education journal, which was the least international of the entire set. This underlines not only American sociology’s centrality, but also its sequestered nature.

This article seeks to revisit the “Mizrahi” stance in the field of Mizrahi critical legal studies. Taking advantage of Rogers Brubaker’s differentiation between “group” and “groupness”, the article demarcates the gap between the view of Mizrahiness commonly held by critical Mizrahi researchers and activists, and the view of Mizrahiness characterizing ordinary Mizrahi men and women. While the former view Mizrahim as a discriminated-against minority group, the latter usually do not relate to themselves as members of one minority among the others found in Israeli society(Palestinians, labor migrants, refugees, LHTB sub-groups, etc.); and do not hinge their lives on the Mizrahi struggle. On the contrary, they view themselves as rooted in the Jewish collective, fully and actively tied to the State, and experience their life course as an open horizon. The article’s main argument states that the Mizrahi critique of the law should not ignore these findings; even more, that it should embrace them. Such a step will free the Mizrahi critique to take a more humble, attentive and empathic position that would balance between the Mizrahi identity of ordinary people, essentially the same as the accepted national-Jewish identity, and the Mizrahi-critical stance demanding social justice for Mizrahim as well as for other minority groups. This move will allow the Mizrahi Critical Legal Studies to formulate a legal activism intrinsically tied to the community in whose name it battles and by which it is supported. It will likewise assist Mizrahi Critical Legal Studies to establish a critical stream amenable to turn its gaze upon the critical approaches currently dominating academic legal studies international. The mission guiding this move is to update and challenge those the oriesin the presence of social realities that refuse to categorize themselves according to the liberal-critical logic in Israel and the world. Doing so promises to broaden and deepen Mizrahi Critical Legal Studies’ unique theoretical contributions to the academic-legal field.

In this paper we examine the publication of international articles in the two leading journals in sociology, the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology. The most prominent journals in several other social-science fields, namely economics, demography, political science and education, are included for purposes of comparison. “International” is defined alternatively with respect to topics and authors. The journal with the least representation of international topics is the American Educational Research Journal, followed by the two leading sociology journals. The journal Demography is also more international in focus than are ASR and AJS. Economics, as represented by the American Economic Review, and political science, as represented by the American Political Science Review, are the most international of this set of fields. The rank order of journals follows largely the same pattern when the focus shifts to international authorship rather than international subject matter. Foreign first authors are not uncommon, but many of these authors received their PhD degrees from a university based in the US or held a faculty position in the US. Co-authorship teams are most likely to be all US authors, but cross-national teams are not at all uncommon. Our findings suggest that a disproportionate focus on the U.S. may limit the sociological imagination and result in an impoverished sociological toolkit that is ill-suited for understanding the global reality of deeply diverse and divided societies. In addition, the opportunity structure available to sociologists around the globe is somewhat skewed. Foreign sociologists who rely upon publication in US journals for career advancement may find themselves at a disadvantage.

This article considers the cultural meaning of religious and community boundaries when attempting to mediate the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Here we compare two sites, one religious, the other secular, of peace-building encounters between Palestinians and Jews in Israel and in the West Bank. Through extensive ethnographic work, the study draws attention to the divergent meanings of community boundaries in liberal and non-liberal cosmologies. Whereas secular liberals view religious boundaries as barriers to the autonomous individual’s free choice, itself considered necessary for co-existence, for these Jewish and Muslim religious groups, those same boundaries safeguard a peaceful and respectful shared space. Our ethnographic insights call for a broader discussion of the meaning and use of social and symbolic boundaries beyond the liberal vision for social and moral order. Such a discussion is theoretically timely and politically pressing in view of the challenge of living together with difference in the global reality of deep diversity.

This article considers the conflicting temporal models of peace among Jewish Israelis, specifically between liberal Zionists who populate the traditional peace camp, and the broader population that largely ignores or opposes such initiatives. We compare the mainstream peace process with budding alternative non-liberal peace initiatives on one issue—the relative importance of a signed peace agreement—to explore diverging visions of temporal progression as they relate to the shared value of peace. The article claims that peace initiatives emerging from the liberal worldview reflect a vision in which the transition to peace will be a concrete temporal event, and that the horizon of peace is achievable, qualitative, and permanent. By contrast, the non-liberal initiatives reflect a belief that peace is modular and relative, that the transition to peace is inherently gradual, never to be fully achieved, dynamic, and impermanent.

Insight meditation (vipassanā) originated in Theravāda Buddhism. However, participants in a “Jewish Vipassanā” meditation retreat – held at a Jewish settlement in the West Bank region controlled by Israel since 1967 – often depicted vipassanā as essentially Jewish. Indeed, to validate their adoption of insight meditation, many participants first needed to establish their exclusive commitment to orthodox Judaism. Consequently, they culturally appropriated vipassanā, decoupling this practice from “religious” Buddhist elements and instead depicting it as “theirs”. While this appropriation entailed significant dimensions of openness to cultural otherness, including an appreciation of “eastern” expertise in meditation, it would be difficult to characterize it as “cosmopolitan”. Rather, in this case openness ironically depended on, and resulted in deepening, meditators’ belief in the superiority of national-religious Judaism. Thus, far from being identical to openness, cosmopolitan attitudes may actually preclude openness in settings that emphasize an exclusive commitment to a single tradition. Theoretical implications are discussed.

The powerful film "I am not your Negro" concludes with novelist James Baldwin reflecting on how the United States made African-Americans into a "problem". He states that addressing this "problem" is the responsibility of the country as a whole, not of blacks only. Still, Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil and Israel (GR) demonstrates the ways in which the burden of dealing with persistent racism continues to fall on African-Americans (Lamont et al. 2016). While we have witnessed improved opportunities for African-Americans over the past several decades, experiences with stigmatization and discrimination remain a dominant feature of their daily life. We aim to contribute a phenomenology of such micro experiences and of how people respond to them across various contexts. Our book aims to improve our understanding of what feeds destigmatization and the transformation of group boundaries - and more generally social change and the progress toward racial justice.

For almost three decades, critical sociology has held Israeli sociology in its grip. This article seeks to turn the critical gaze upon sociology itself, to reveal its limits, and, by doing so, to open an alternative interpretive space, beyond the liberal grammar of contemporary critical sociology. My central claim is that by following in the footsteps of American sociology and aligning itself with the liberal left, Israeli sociology moved unreflexively from the pole of critique to the pole of social criticism, thus significantly narrowing its own interpretive space. Here I argue that critical sociology's unquestioning loyalty to the values of liberty, equality and human rights binds its self-awareness and social criticism to the limits of the liberal imagination. In so doing, critical sociology hinders its ability to make sense of the resistance of "target groups" to the liberal message and hampers its potential to offer new insights to the civil society it is so eager to serve. Through examples from the field, I offer some general bearings for a new interpretive space transcending the liberal grammar of Israeli critical sociology. Drawing on the work of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, I have chosen to call this interpretive space a "sociology of meaning." The transition from what Ricoeur calls the "hermeneutics of suspicion" to a sociology of meaning, I maintain, will allow sociology in Israel to offer a more attentive and adequate reading of its informants' lived experience, as well as enhance its added value in discussions taking place in civil society, politics, and the public discourse. Furthermore, I suggest that extending the interpretive space of sociology in Israel beyond the liberal grammar of American sociology will allow Israeli sociology to articulate its unique contribution to sociology as a discipline.

This article poses a simple question: why do marginalized Mizrahim, a group most likely to benefit from liberal justice and human rights, so vehemently and repeatedly reject the liberal message? To address this question, we shift the direction of inquiry from problems in the message’s transmission or reception to the message itself. By doing so, we seek to go beyond the ‘liberal grammar’ shared by most social activists and critical sociologists. The insight emerging from this theoretical turn is that the politics of universalism, rooted in the liberal grammar of human rights and viewed from the liberal standpoint as a key to social emancipation, is experienced by the target population as a heartless betrayal and a grave identity threat. This article offers the initial outline for a new interpretive space and seeks to surpass both the limits of the Israeli case and those of the liberal grammar of contemporary critical sociology.

Over the last two decades, the liberal democratic form of governance has been facing a major challenge. This challenge is manifested in varying ways around the globe, with crises erupting in diverse geopolitical contexts, including democratization in Eastern Europe, objections to the human rights discourse in East Asia, disillusionment following the Arab Spring, and the decline of the liberal left in Israel. The modernist secular utopia is far from sight. The porous borders of Western liberal democracies, open to global migration in post–Cold War Western Europe, have allowed the challenge to internal social and political order to become pressing and even acute, in some cases. The question of how to accommodate new ethnic and religious groups that hold profoundly different views about social justice and the ‘common good’ yet share the same political space has become critical. In this special issue, we delve into the Israeli case in order to take a glimpse into the crisis of liberalism in a particular setting, without losing sight of the global context and its deep historiosophical roots.

This study examines how Muslim religious leaders (imams) introduce the liberal notion of disability to their communities in Israel. The project described, initiated and supported by an American NGO, provides a case for exploring how the secular notion of disability rights is cast and recast in a Muslim world of meaning. It focuses on the mediation strategy that I call modular translation, employed by imams in sermons delivered for the purpose of altering or improving the status and conditions of people with disabilities. This strategy, as it emerged from the analysis, entails decoupling norms of conduct from their underlying justifications. It thus suggests that norms of conduct are open to change so long as the believers’ cosmology remains intact. As such, this turn may offer new avenues of thinking and acting about globalizing human rights within the arena of health and disability.

This study examines how members of minority groups in Israel cope with stigmatization in everyday life. It focuses on working-class members of three minority groups: Palestinian Arabs or Palestinian citizens of Israel, Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin) and Ethiopian Jews. It reveals the use of racial, ethnic and national markers in daily processes of social inclusion and exclusion in one sociopolitical context. Palestinians, a group with a fixed external identity and a limited sphere of participation, were found to use the language of race and racism when describing stigmatizing encounters. Ethiopian Jews, the most phenotypically marked group, strictly avoided this language. For their part, Mizrahi Jews perceived the very discussion of stigmatization as stigmatizing, while often using ‘contingent detachment’ to distance themselves from negative group identities. Despite differences between the communities and the powerful role of the state in establishing symbolic and social boundaries, members of all three groups expressed their intention to achieve or retain avenues for participation in the larger society.

This special issue offers a first systematic qualitative cross-national exploration of how diverse minority groups respond to stigmatization in a wide variety of contexts. This research is the culmination of a coordinated study of stigmatized groups in Brazil, Israel and the USA, as well as of connected research projects conducted in Canada, France, South Africa and Sweden. The issue sheds light on the range of destigmatization strategies ordinary people adopt in the course of their daily life. Articles analyse the cultural frames they mobilize to make sense of their experiences and to determine how to respond; how they negotiate and transform social and symbolic boundaries; and how responses are enabled and constrained by institutions, national ideologies, cultural repertoires and contexts. The similarities and differences across sites provide points of departure for further systematic research, which is particularly needed in light of the challenges for liberal democracy raised by multiculturalism.

Our research explores how Ethiopian Jews in Israel apply local and global cultural resources when forming their reactive strategies to stigmatization. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with adult men and women, we examine class variations in the destigmatization strategies of working-class and middle-class Ethiopian Jews. Working-class Ethiopian Jews rely on their local bounded identity, that of Jews, rather than identity politics, which stresses phenotype in formulating destigmatization strategies. The former provide is Ethiopians of all classes with the network of meaning necessary for active participation in the broader society, whereas the latter is primarily the province of a small number of highly educated middle-class individuals, those who had access to social networks of highly educated liberals and could mobilize valued global black cultural resources (e.g. music, art) to their advantage in the local context.

This article draws attention to the growing evidence of a mismatch between sociological categorization and actors' worlds of meaning as expressed in the classroom. The mismatch is especially blatant in cases where students from disadvantaged groups are introduced to what educators and theorists presume to be the liberating discourse of multicultural education. Nurtured by recent developments in the sociology of culture, the article sheds light on this phenomenon by delving into the logic of the actors' own worlds of meaning while making a concerted effort to avoid directing prepackaged allegations of ‘false consciousness‘ at informants. The article delves into the mismatch by reviewing multicultural education sites in two national contexts, the United States and Israel. Its findings from a unique high school in Jerusalem invite researchers to explore new avenues for understanding cultural encounters at school in view of the growing multicultural reality.

Social inequality in Israel's education system has often been analysed with top-down structural models. This study inquires, instead, how students understand their position in the stratified structure of opportunities at school. Our quantitative and qualitative data, gathered in Jewish high schools in Israel, indicate that, despite clear ethno-class distribution in academic tracking, students reject the logic of identity politics and consider ‘free will’ to be the main factor determining tracking. In light of the Jewish-Israeli national identity, which rejects class and ethnic divides, the reference point for the system of classification at school shifts to the autonomous individual. Our findings show that students use consumerist and psychological discourses to dismantle ethno-class identities and depoliticize the classification system at school.

On the basis of participant-observations of classroom discussions in Jewish Israeli high schools during two memorial days, we examine how different ethnoclass groups within a presumably consensual national collectivity remember the nation. We found that teachers use different memory techniques with different groups of students and in relation to different historical memories, and we suggest that doing so variously repositions subgroups toward the public sphere. We argue that, to understand ethnoclass memory work and its differential appropriation and refraction along ethnoclass divides, scholars need to go beyond the contents of historical narratives and collective ceremonies to inquire into the plethora of memory techniques social actors use.

Sociologists and other social scientists have recently renewed their interest in the concept of trust. Multidisciplinary studies have identified social psychological, economic, and structural determinants of trust; traced its development in interpersonal relationships; and explored its transformation in response to modernization. Drawing on ethnographic research at a multinational corporation operating in a politically charged environment, we reexamine these approaches to trust. We explore trust relations between Israeli and Jordanian managers in an Israeli-Jordanian industrial site. Trust, always tenuous in multinational collaboration, poses formidable challenges to this fragile relationship between former enemies. Comparing trust relations during normalization and political unrest provides a natural experiment for observing how forms of trust change in response to a transformed political environment. We show how Jordanians and Israelis apply different forms of trust alternately and interchangeably, tran...

This article explores the role of the psychological sciences in depoliticising processes of ethnic demarcation and marginalisation within the Jewish population in Israel. It shows how the psychological sciences have provided the scientific foundation by which cultural domination and subordination have been essentialised. The study traces the ways in which ethnopsychological discourse has changed its contours over time. Early ethnopsychological discourse provided an overt link between the ‘cultural backwardness’ and ‘psychological impairment’ of the Mizrahi Jew. In light of broad social and political transformations, in the more recent model the overt ethnic signifier was silenced, and the Mizrahi ‘impaired mind’ appeared to be detached from its ethnic roots while being attributed to the same ethnic population. Both ethnopsychological forms have focused on the individual's ‘special needs’ and ‘inherent psychological impairment’, obscuring the role of social and political forces in shaping social gaps in Israeli society and reinforcing the hegemonic discourse of nurture. The latter has provided a negative mirror image of the modern Ashkenazi secular Israeli Jew following Western cultural models of self‐control as the universal index of health and progress. This study is based on both primary and secondary sources as well as on my in situ observations.

Sociologists who do field work in medical settings face an intractable tension between their disciplinary field, which takes a critical perspective toward medicine, and their ethnographic field, which often includes physicians. This paper explores the ethical problems that result from the collision of the two fields. While in the field, ethnographers are forced to choose between sociology and their obligations to host members, as they decide whether to disclose their actual research agendas, whether to ask tough questions or to reveal their concerns, and whether to give advice. The tension persists when field workers leave the field to write, forcing them to choose between competing interpretations and to decide what to reveal or conceal in the interests of confidentiality.

Through these moral choices about what to ask, record or present to the reader, ethnographers shape the academic field even as it shapes them.

This study examines the strategies of the biomedical discourse vis-à-vis the growing public demand for alternative medicine by comparing formal and informal claims for jurisdiction. The analysis is based on two main sources of data from Israel: (a) two formal position statements, and (b) a series of participant observations and interviews with practitioners in clinical settings where biomedical and alternative practitioners collaborate. At the formal level, the biomedical discourse seeks to secure its dominant position by drawing strict cognitive and moral lines differentiating “proper biomedicine” from “improper alternative medicine.” At this level alternative medicine appears morally “contaminated” and its knowledge-base delegitimized by extreme forms of boundary-work. At the informal level, the contour of boundaries change. In the hospital field where alternative and biomedical practitioners are collaborating, mutual respect was expressed even as social and symbolic boundaries were being demarcated. Modifying the forms of boundary-work appears to be biomedicine's reactive strategy in the field to changing environmental and market demands. It is a strategy that allows biomedical discourse to absorb its competitor within its professional jurisdiction with no battle, while retaining absolute epistemological hegemony and Institutional Control.

The study explores the process of boundary demarcation within hospital settings by examining a new phenomenon in modern medicine: collaboration between alternative and biomedical practitioners (primarily physicians) working together in biomedical settings. The study uses qualitative methods to examine the nature of this collaboration by calling attention to the ways in which the biomedical profession manages to secure its boundaries and to protect its hard-core professional knowledge. It identifies the processes of exclusion and marginalization as the main mechanisms by which symbolic boundaries are marked daily in the professional field. These processes enable the biomedical profession to contain its competitors and at the same time to avoid overt confrontations and mitigate potential tensions between the two medical systems.

In this article, the authors address the boundaries of institutional structures, the dynamics of their configuration, and the nature of their permeability. The authors explored these issues in Israel, where the changing relationship of bio- and alternative medicine elucidates recent processes of professional boundary redefinition. They used qualitative methods to analyze in-depth interviews in clinics and hospitals where alternative and biomedical practitioners work under the formal auspices of publicly sponsored biomedical organizations. The findings show an incursion by alternative practitioners into territories viewed until fairly recently as the exclusive domain of biomedicine. However, the "alternatives" are not defined as regular staff members, and their marginality is elucidated by a variety of visible structural, symbolic, and geographical cues. The authors used decoupling theory in interpreting the findings. Changed boundary contours signal underlying processes of social change that could have meaningful implications in defining membership criteria in the biomedical community.

There is a growing evidence that alternative health care practitioners and physicians are working together in collaborative patterns. The paper examines these collaborative patterns in hospital settings in Israel. On the theoretical level, the specific issues relate to theories concerning relationships between dominant institutional structures which enjoy the benefits of epistemological legitimacy as well as extensive, supportive social structures and groups of non-conformists who seek to attain many of the same goals by utilizing different methods based on other epistemologies. In the most general sense, the issues involved concern processes of accommodation and social change.

Data were collected by means of semi-structured, qualitative interviews in four general hospitals in Jerusalem during 2000. Nineteen persons were interviewed including 10 alternative practitioners working in a variety of fields and nine biomedical practitioners who worked with them (six physicians and three nurses). Interviews focused on background and training, reasons for entry into the hospital, length of practice, status in the hospital system, mode of remuneration, content of work, modes of interaction with others in the hospital and problems encountered.

The findings suggest a dual process of simultaneous acceptance and marginalization of alternative practitioners. While small numbers of alternative practitioners were found to be practicing in a wide variety of hospital departments and in a broad spectrum of specialties, they were in no way accepted as regular staff members and their marginality was made clear by a variety of visible structural, symbolic and geographical cues. There is a division of labour expressed by focusing on the biomedical practitioners on the diagnosis and treatment of specific disease entities, while the alternative practitioners work in the illness context, concentrating of feelings and affective states involving the alleviation of pain, suffering and efforts to improve the quality of life.

This study examines the role of the interplay between epistemology and legitimacy in shaping the conceptualisation of anorexia. It focuses on the process of knowledge production within a particular medical setting – the journal, Psychosomatic Medicine. The journal was founded as part of the first psychosomatic movement in the history of the US seeking to undermine the epistemological foundation of biomedicine: the mind-body division in medical theory and practice. From its inception, the movement was haunted by an ongoing identity problem, institutional uncertainty and scientific ambiguity. The study relies on four separate data sets – articles appearing on anorexia in Medline, archival sources and editorial board minutes of Psychosomatic Medicine, the journal’s referees and their decisions and the articles on anorexia which appeared in Psychosomatic Medicine. The study shows how in the course of its knowledge production, the journal managed to increase the level of consistency while evaluating papers submitted. At the same time it moved towards the dominant biomedical discourse, either through shifting the psychosomatic focus on anorexia from the mind-body interaction to the ‘anorexic body’ only, or alternatively through reducing the methodological model from causal to correlational. This transition in reasoning in the case of anorexia represents an intriguing trade-off between the scope and the reliability of ambiguous medical knowledge in the face of the overriding need to gain legitimacy within the existing dominant biomedical domain.

This study focuses on the first four decades inthe history of the pioneering journal Psychosomatic Medicine. The goal of thejournal as stated by its founders was to reformmedicine by scientifically reintegrating the``mind'' into medicine. However, from itsinception, the editorial members were hauntedby internal ambiguity regarding the nature ofpsychosomatic knowledge. This led to recurrentidentity crises. This study tells the story ofthe complex interplay between internal andexternal forces shaping PsychosomaticMedicine's institutional transitions andepistemological transformations. Itdemonstrates how, despite this continuousinternal confusion, the level of consistencynecessary for gaining legitimacy increasedduring the process of evaluating papers. Theincreased level of standardization coincidedwith a transition in the psychosomaticmovement's epistemological approach: from causation to correlation. The initialattempt to search for causal mechanismslinking the psyche and the soma were replacedby correlational models measuring variousmanifestations of psychological and biologicalphenomena in a way that presupposed andreduplicated the split the founders ironicallysought to supersede.

Gary Belkin offers an insightful commentary on my paper “From Causation to Correlation.” Especially penetrating are his remarks about the difficulty of overcoming the mind-body split both in medical theory and practice and in the writing of this history. Belkin even discerns a lapse on my part into the very dichotomies I wish to explain. Nevertheless, despite Belkin’s clearly thoughtful reading of my argument, I believe he fails to grasp its true import. An indication of this failure is already gleaned in his principal criticism, which he announces in the title of his response, “Causation to What? Relevant to Whom?” By this, Belkin suggests that “the persuasiveness and completeness of a psychosomatic paradigm was elusive because it was not terribly important.” Thus, according to Belkin, I do not pose the right question of my historical evidence. Instead of asking about the epistemological and institutional strategies of the editors of Psychosomatic Medicine, the question that Belkin would ask is: “Why and how would anyone be interested in these ideas/practices [of linking the psyche and the soma]?”

This study explores the interrelations among visibility, knowledge, and power in a hybrid institution—a hospital that functions as a boarding school for handicapped children. It demonstrates how the incongruity between the institution's formal definition as a hospital and its day-to-day reality plays a role in shaping the power structure, prioritization of types of knowledge, and visibility of its agents. For through these groups' interactions with, reactions to, and acceptance of these structural determinants, the institution's own identity takes shape around the conflicting discourses of social control that it seeks to accommodate.

In this chapter, I examine the range of cultural repertoires applied by CAM and bio-medical practitioners during mutual encounters in medical settings. Recent developments in the sociology of culture (Mizrachi, Drori and Anspach, 2007; Mizrachi and Shuval, 2004; Mizrachi, Shuval and Gross, 2005; Swidler, 2003) provide us with the tools to explore how boundaries are negotiated when two therapeutic systems, one dominant (traditional bio-medicine) and the other popular yet still lacking institutional legitimation (CAM), meet. I will examine boundary work by looking at real people and their actions as the engines propel-ling events (Swidler, 1986). By doing so, I do not lose sight of the structural and discursive conditions within which people pursue their goals and interests (Mizrachi, et al. 2007).