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Contribution short abstract:

Based on ethnographic study of learning processes around parenting/family on educator-kibbutzim, the paper shows how ‘the purchase of cooperativism’ is created. The purchase of cooperativism refers to practices and feelings of communality shaped through learning that link relationality and economy.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper shows how practices and feelings of communality can be shaped through learning processes that link relationality and economy. The kibbutz has fascinated anthropologists for its attempts to create new commons through the re-design of production and reproduction, primarily childcare. Yet by the 21st century, the kibbutz has been virtually erased through capitulation to capitalization, privatization, and neo-liberalism. The new educator-kibbutzim are attempting to revive the kibbutz by adopting communal living arrangements and dedicating themselves social-educational initiatives. This study follows how they use learning processes to shape family, intimate group relations, and economy.

Based on ethnographic study of learning processes around parenting/family on educator-kibbutzim, this paper questions: How do these learning processes create and maintain communality? How do they work to constitute relationality through economic practices? Building on Zelizer's idea of the 'purchase of intimacy,' the paper presents the 'purchase of cooperativism' as created in learning processes. The 'purchase of cooperativism' refers to the structure of caring relations created by educator-kibbutzim and includes three layers: the creation of care as a moral economy, 'shared agreement' as a form of payment practice, and the distribution of caring labor as bridging the domestic and organizational levels of the kibbutz. The purchase of cooperativism is revealed as a gripping form of caring relations between adults maintained through payment practices, yet which also challenges capitalist forms of work/family separation and neo-liberal individualism. This study reveals how practices of intimacy created through the social process of learning can offer alternative economic cultural logic.