The Israeli law obliges the construction of bomb shelters as integrated rooms within every residential unit throughout the country. Based on 12 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews with both Jewish–Israeli and Arab–Palestinian citizens of Israel, we argue that the mundane presence and use of these everyday-cum-security spaces has produced a new civilian sensibility towards securitization, which we call ‘ routinergency’: the naturalization of security emergency as intrinsic to the flow of routine life. We demonstrate that while the privatization of domestic securitization affords reliable protection to every citizen, routinergency also excludes Arab–Palestinians from the ethnonational boundaries that still inform the constitution of collective identities in Israel. Yet, as embodied practice, routinergency also enables access to a universal form of citizenship in Israel, which is premised on socioeconomic criticism of Zionist discourse. We use the topological metaphor of a Mobius strip to discuss how mamad rooms accentuate the contemporary tension in Israel between these ethnonational and neoliberal vectors of citizenship.
What can we learn about religious diversity in Brazil if we isolate ritual practices from their sociocultural surround? Using vocabulary developed by Don Handelman in his framework of 'ritual in its own right', I discuss this question in the context of low-income Northeast Brazil. I demonstrate that Afro-Brazilian possession rites and Christian-Evangelical prayers (oração) transform the lives of the persons who practise them in ways that are intrinsic to their self-organization, internal complexity, and differentiating 'curves'. I consequently argue that these rites are not representations of antagonistic moral prescriptions for good living but rather variations on a single theme of sociality.
In this article I examine ordinary ethical practices that underpin intimate relations in the Brazilian state of Maranhão. I focus ethnographically on jealousy and seduction as complementary forms of play, which simultaneously affirm and challenge such aspects of emotional relatedness as trust and love. I argue that since a measure of concealment is inherent in both these play-forms, they render invisible those actions that challenge conventional moral injunctions, such as sexual infidelity. I consequently offer an ethnographic theory of 'invisibility' by which opacity, uncertainty and paradox become intrinsic to the emergence of intimate relations as ethical practices in their own right.
Based on fieldwork with Brazilian neo-Pentecostal pilgrims to the Holy Land and ongoing survey of social media in this article I argue that Brazilian neo-Pentecostals increasingly imagine Brazil as a Promised Land and the Brazilian People as the People of God. Here, different substances associated with the Holy Land, the Jewish People and Jesus Christ are used to disperse in Brazil divine power, which is seen to emanate from God. This imaginary seeks to replace the hegemony of the democratic ethos of power in Brazil, which is seen to emanate bottoms-up from the Brazilian People. I associate this process with the conservative wave sweeping through the Brazilian political system and show what a Brazilian political imagination whose spiritual and moral centre is located in Biblical Jerusalem may look like.
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