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Spatial Relationality and the Fallacies of Methodological Nationalism: Theorizing Urban Space and Binational Sociality in Jewish-Arab “Mixed Towns”

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Applying Relational Sociology

Abstract

Now more than ever, Palestinian-Israeli relations seem like a zero-sum game. Indeed, for more than a century Jewish and Palestinian national movements have been struggling to establish their collective identities as separate autochthonous “nations” with respective distinct cultural histories and so were they analyzed by sociologists, anthropologists, and historians. Reproducing theoretical teleologies and paradigmatic “groupism” (Brubaker, 2002), both critical and conservative scholarship have conceptualized these projects of nation-building as antagonistic processes defined only by the negation and exclusion of the other (Gur-Ze’ev and Pappé, 2003; Kana’neh, 2002; Massad, 2005; Rotbard, 2005; Yiftachel and Yacobi, 2003).

“Me or him”—

Thus begins the war. But it

Ends with an awkward encounter:

“Me and him”

Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege (2002, p. 62)

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Authors
  1. Daniel Monterescu
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François Dépelteau Christopher Powell

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© 2013 François Dépelteau and Christopher Powell

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Monterescu, D. (2013). Spatial Relationality and the Fallacies of Methodological Nationalism: Theorizing Urban Space and Binational Sociality in Jewish-Arab “Mixed Towns”. In: Dépelteau, F., Powell, C. (eds) Applying Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407009_2

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