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Survival, an Israeli Ju Jutsu school of martial arts

Violence, body, practice and the national

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, einatcb{at}hotmail.com

Nationalism is the untenable union of the impersonal, mechanistic, bureaucratic logic of the state and the intimate, emotional, organic logic of the nation. While practicing martial arts, the participants at the Israeli Survival School of Ju Jutsu create a utopian Israeliness, using bits of state-national understandings to form a family-like organicity. At the North Indian school of wrestling described by Joseph Alter, too, an organic utopian nationalism is practiced into existence through meticulous care for the body itself. A comparison between those modes of embodying the national, set in very different cultural and national realities, reveals not only different understandings of the national and of its organic nature, but also different uses of semiotic mechanisms. Whereas the Israeli world of the Survival School is based on representation, the Indian one is constructed from the body and the environment, set in dense connectedness forming this world in and of itself.

Key Words: body • martial arts • violence • practice • nationalism • Zionism

Ethnography, Vol. 10, No. 2, 153-183 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1466138109106300


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