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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the story of a demolished Bedouin village in Israel travels around the world: a local event that is reinterpreted by international activists, journalists and bloggers. By focusing on global connections in a specific locality, social reality is recuptured in new terms.

Paper long abstract

In the Israeli Negev desert, home demolitions in «unrecognized» (that is, not authorized by the government) Bedouin villages are a «hot» issue. This study tries to follow the flow of discourses, funds, and people around the very specific event of home demolition in Al-Twail. Informed by Anna L.-Tsings "ethnography of global connections" and by Complex System Theory, this study moves forth and back between a specific place and its global connections. The village of Al-Twail has been demolished seven times during my Ph.D. fieldwork last year, but has been always reconstructed. A wide range of Human Rights activities has been taken place; international journalists and politicians came to visit the place, blogs and newsletters talked about the demolions at global scale.

This is a «travelling story» about global solidarity based on systematic misunderstandings: the very place of demolitions and reconstructions is subject to different interests, desires, and realities; multiple and contradictionary «truths» are negotiated. For example, in contrast to some news reports, it has never been really inhabitated.

From a methodological perspective, this approach has been possible by shifting classical assumptions about what is a «comunity» and what is the «field» in order to recupture the local in new terms. Consequently, the way how we understand the production of social reality is framed in different terms: the «truth» about that very place itself seems to become liquid.