\u201cA Free People, Controlled Only by God\u201d: Circulating and Converting Criticism of Vaccination in Jerusalem

Ben Kasstan

doi:10.1007/s11013-020-09705-2

Abstract

This paper explores how criticism surrounding the ethics and safety of biomedical technologies circulates and ‘converts’ through global–local religious encounters, producing new claims of moral opposition and rights to religious freedom. The paper is concerned with the question of what rhetorical devices make vaccine safety doubt relevant to religiously Orthodox settings and what implications arise? Based on an ethnographic study of vaccine decision-making and non-vaccination advocacy in Jerusalem, the paper examines how opposition is forged amidst evolving global–local encounters and relations. The data reveal how Christian activists attempt to engender ethical and moral opposition to vaccination among American Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem by ‘converting’ public criticism around safety into a religious discourse of bodily governance. Pinpointing how critiques of biomedical technologies discursively ‘convert’ offers a conceptual template in anthropology to chart how counter-positions are formed and transformed amidst evolving tensions between biomedical and religious cosmologies.

Highlights

This paper explores how criticism surrounding the ethics and safety of biomedical technologies circulates and ‘converts’ through global–local religious encounters, producing new claims of moral opposition and rights to religious freedom
The paper is concerned with the question of what rhetorical devices make vaccine safety doubt relevant to religiously Orthodox settings and what implications arise? Based on an ethnographic study of vaccine decision-making and non-vaccination advocacy in Jerusalem, the paper examines how opposition is forged amidst evolving global–local encounters and relations
My ethnography demonstrates how the non-vaccination stance of Jewish parents in Jerusalem reflected a concern with safe decision-making, but at the same time, an active engagement with globalized non-vaccination advocacy

Summary

Introduction

This paper explores how criticism surrounding the ethics and safety of biomedical technologies circulates and ‘converts’ through global–local religious encounters, producing new claims of moral opposition and rights to religious freedom. Common to the parents I met is that they ‘‘returned’’ to Orthodox Judaism and made conscious decisions to live according to varying and heightened standards of Jewish law (ba’alei tshuvah) They are situated in a ‘cultural borderland’ (Benor 2012) that enables an integration of navigation skills— especially regarding the non-Orthodox world and their practice of Judaism. This means that ba’alei tshuvah are well placed to situate common vaccination concerns in the ‘local moral world’ of religious Orthodoxy, and their positionality sheds a unique light on circulation and conversion of non-vaccination advocacy. Their position was that ‘A significant factor contributing to the outbreaks this year has been misinformation [...] Some organizations are deliberately targeting these communities with inaccurate and misleading information about vaccines.’ In what follows I explore how non-vaccination advocacy becomes assimilated in Orthodox and Haredi Jews through processes of discursive transformation or religious ‘conversion.’

Methods

Discussion