Anthropological texts and ideological problems: an analysis of Cohen on Arab villages in Israel∗

Abstract

Anthropological texts, like all ideological products, are related in complex ways to social practice. Abner Cohen's Arab Border Villages in Israel is analysed as an ideological specimen which embodies contemporary anthropological practice in its typical form—the field monograph—and objectifies a specific historical reality in a politically charged manner. For understanding this text a distinction must be made between (i) its conscious analytic concerns (rooted in anthropology as a discipline dealing with colonized peoples) and (ii) its unconscious political ideological determinations (connected primarily with the Zionist Colonial character of Israel). It is argued that the coherence of Cohen's text at the unconscious, political level is the very condition of its failure at the conscious, analytic level. It is suggested that in order to be adequate at the theoretical level, Cohen would have had to break radically with anthropological practice and attack the political reality which he attempts to reflect