Unruly spaces, unsettling transformations: Nature connection, neoforaging, and unmediated encounters with others in Israel/Palestine

Abstract

This article explores the potential of unruly wild spaces and foraging practices to enable unmediated encounters and unsettling transformations, through the ethnography of neoforaging praxis and its emphasis on seeking direct “connection.” In pursuit of connection with nature through foraging practices, neoforagers regularly encounter both non-human and human others at the unruly edges and seams of cultivated space. Neoforagers associate the unruliness and immediacy of such encounters with “true connection” and pursue practices that are considered both “connective” and “transformative,” capable of subverting hegemonic narratives and consumerist dependencies. Through the case of Israeli neoforagers in the troubled context of Israel/Palestine, I revisit power and categorical relations in the nation-state from neoforagers’ connection-oriented perspective, making salient ongoing processes in which micro-scale encounters are continuously disrupted by the mediating affects of macro-politics, social categories, cultural schemes and such, making salient that in the nation-state unruly situations and unmediated encounters are all too scarce.

More‐than‐“bird”

“…On the other hand, Israel is a population‐dense, hyperindustrial country with high‐tech and robust information, transportation, power, and commerce infrastructures. Love of nature and nature‐connection sensibilities compete with an equally strong development ethos that emphasizes conquering and cultivating wilderness and with powerful capitalist, religious, military, and political zeal (Appel, 2023). Thus, Israeli nature‐connection currents involve a complex and often self‐contradictory mix of romantic, pragmatic, nationalist, globalist, environmental, religious, and critical perspectives (De‐Shalit & Talias, 1994; Orenstein et al., 2013).…”