Papers by Matan Kaminer
Journal of Legal Anthropology
In a 2013 Facebook post, Israel’s then Minister of Economy Naftali Bennett (2013; my translation)... more In a 2013 Facebook post, Israel’s then Minister of Economy Naftali Bennett (2013; my translation) wrote: 'If an Israeli employer knows that he has to pay every worker the minimum wage, give him one day off a week, pay overtime and produce pay slips – he just won’t employ infiltrators and foreign workers. He will choose an Israeli worker. This is how we dry the main fuel which sets fire to the problem of infiltrators in south Tel Aviv and across the country, and at the same time do justice to workers who are exploited in substandard conditions.' Bennett posits the equal protections of labour law as primarily informed not by a universalist concern for the welfare of all workers but by a desire to exclude both documented ‘foreign workers’ and undocumented ‘infiltrators’ from the labour market. A document – the pay slip – serves in Bennett’s plan as an icon of legality and a tool in the hands of this policy of exclusion through egalitarianism.
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, 2022
Journal of Legal Anthropology, 2020
In a 2013 Facebook post, Israel's then Minister of Economy Naftali Bennett (2013; my translation)... more In a 2013 Facebook post, Israel's then Minister of Economy Naftali Bennett (2013; my translation) wrote: If an Israeli employer knows that he has to pay every worker the min imum wage, give him one day off a week, pay overtime and produce pay slips-he just won't employ infiltrators and foreign workers. He will choose an Israeli worker. This is how we dry the main fuel which sets fire to the problem of infiltrators in south Tel Aviv and across the country, and at the same time do justice to workers who are exploited in substandard conditions.
Dialectical Anthropology, 2019
Marx conceived of the reproduction of labor-power as a circuit in which the wage must suffice to ... more Marx conceived of the reproduction of labor-power as a circuit in which the wage must suffice to purchase the commodities necessary to meet the worker's "so-called necessary requirements ," which are "products of history." In this article, I argue that, through ethnographic investigation of the wage as a sign of these requirements, we can arrive at a wealth of knowledge about how the wage helps to construct different groups of workers as belonging to different human types, which are often "bundled" together with categories such as race and citizenship. I make my case through the investigation of two groups of workers: young Jewish-Israeli citizens engaged in logistics work and earning the minimum wage, and migrant farmworkers from Thailand who are paid far below that minimum for their labor. I argue that the first group represents a "zero degree" of labor-power, defined by the legal and biopolitical concern of the state for its reproduction, while the latter is understood by its members, their employers, and the surrounding society as undeserving of such concern. Deploying the Marxist-feminist problematic of the social reproduction of labor power, I argue that, by affording different groups of workers, and their children, different standards of living and opportunities for integration into labor markets, the wage works together with other forces to lock people into embodied, inherited "types." From this perspective, I suggest, some categories of oppression do not "intersect" at right angles but rather run almost parallel, and at times coming close to cohering-a finding with implications for both analysis and political practice.
In volatile situations, resistance can often take an ambiguous form which demonstrates the power ... more In volatile situations, resistance can often take an ambiguous form which demonstrates the power of the dominated but avoids provoking repression. Such ambiguity cannot be simply dispelled by ethnographers; rather, it must be acknowledged and accounted for through a methodology that is willing to accommodate uncertainty while demonstrating the researcher’s good faith and sufficient knowledge. I show how this can be done by narrating an episode of ambiguous resistance which took place during my fieldwork doing logistical labor in a warehouse in Ashdod, Israel, when the work crew of which I was a part successfully undertook to resist the removal of our popular forewoman, Oksana. Taking into account the precarious nature of warehouse employment and drawing on the ambiguous statements and non-verbal behavior of both workers and management, I probe the tactical advantages, strategic limitations and epistemological corollaries of ambiguous resistance in the struggle against domination.
The rights of Thai migrant agricultural workers in Israel are violated with great frequency. Part... more The rights of Thai migrant agricultural workers in Israel are violated with great frequency. Particularly egregious and salient among these violations is the payment of wages lower than the minimum required by law, which is the focus of this report. The first part of the report, which compiles the information gathered by Kav La'oved for the year 2013, demonstrates that wage violations are prevalent on most farms in Israel; that on average workers are paid only 70% of the wages required by law and that the damage to workers due to these violations amounts to around half a billion shekels (NIS) per year. On the basis of this evidence of widespread minimum wage violations, the second part of the report deals with the possibility that the phenomenon has become structural – that is, that the Israeli agricultural sector has become dependent on illegally low wages, and that enforcement of the law without compensation of some kind to farmers may do great harm to the sector. We set forth the various justifications provided by farmers for maintaining the status quo: that wages in Israel are in any case higher than those in Thailand, that low wages are necessary to provide workers with the overtime hours they desire, that employers face a labor shortage, and that they face various costs that cannot be deducted from employees' wages. We respond to each of these arguments in turn and argue that even if some of the employers' complaints toward the state are justified, the damage done to them cannot be compensated through an " indirect subsidy, " by allowing them to violate workers' rights. We conclude with a short list of policy recommendations for state and civil society organizations to bolster enforcement of wage and other labor laws in the sector, to consider policy steps to support agriculture, as other countries do, and to lessen the burden of payments related to employment which do not benefit workers and to encourage unionization among farmworkers.
Since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Northeastern Thais have left their farms at home to w... more Since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Northeastern Thais have left their farms at home to work as agricultural laborers in Israel, often facing exploitation by manpower agencies and employers. Despite a recent push to improve the working conditions of Thai farmworkers in Israel, their situation often remains precarious.
מילון אוקספורד מגדיר את המילה skill כ״יכולת לבצע דבר מה בדיוק ובוודאות, ידע מעשי המשולב ביכולת, א... more מילון אוקספורד מגדיר את המילה skill כ״יכולת לבצע דבר מה בדיוק ובוודאות, ידע מעשי המשולב ביכולת, או יכולת לבצע תפקיד, הנרכשת או נלמדת באמצעות אימון.״1 בעברית, שתי מלים נפרדות מתארות את היכולות התכליתיות הנרכשות של בני אדם: ״מיומנויות״ ו״כיש רים״. בתור הבחנה ראשונית אציע כי כישורים הם יכולות שזוכות להכרה חברתית, בעוד שמיומנויות אינן זוכות בהכרח להכרה שכזו. כישורים, אם כן, הם מיומנויות, אבל לא להפך. כישורים ניתנים למדידה, לבחינה ולתגמול, ואילו המיומנות היא ערטילאית, מגולמת בגוף, ומתקיימת גם מחוץ לספירת ההכרה החברתית.
Nine years later, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath are the subject of a sizeable body of socia... more Nine years later, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath are the subject of a sizeable body of social science literature arguing that this disaster was anything but natural. Vincanne Adams’ new ethnography, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith, joins this literature with a much-needed examination of the horrors experienced by ordinary New Orleanians at the hands of a “recovery effort” marred by embezzlement and dispossession at a staggering scale. Adams, a medical anthropologist, explores the devastated post-Katrina landscape with the sensibilities of her subfield, paying special attention to the affective phenomena produced by the hurricane and its aftermath. Though not particularly innovative theoretically, this brief ethnography is eloquent in its empathetic evocation of the spectrum of socially generated and mobilized emotion animating the New Orleans landscape, ranging from mourning, depression, and anger to hope, faith, and solidarity. The book will be of interest to students of New Orleans and the American South; to those studying the effects of neoliberal policies on lived experience; and to investigators of the growing significance of philanthropy in public life. It is a swift, accessible read, at times moving and enraging throughout.
Chapters by Matan Kaminer
“Race, Nation, Class”: Rereading a Dialogue for Our Times, 2018
Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein’s Race, Nation, Class (RNC) was received by the Hebrew-s... more Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein’s Race, Nation, Class (RNC) was received by the Hebrew-speaking intellectual sphere without fanfare; no reviews of the book were published, and only one chapter appeared in translation. This chapter, Balibar’s “Is there a ‘Neo-Racism’?” has had a significant impact on Israeli thinking about racism, but its reception was divorced from the larger concerns of Balibar and Wallerstein’s collaboration. While Balibar’s later works have made an impact on Israeli political theory, they have not been linked to his thinking on race; Wallerstein, on the other hand, has been received as a theorist of world-systems and globalization, but not of race. In this review, I describe the reception of Balibar’s “Is there a ‘Neo- Racism’?” and of the two writers’ other work in Israel, then conclude with a discussion of the ongoing relevance of their analysis of the connections between the three concepts for a critical understanding of Israeli society.
Thesis Chapters by Matan Kaminer
Doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 2019
Interviews and roundtables by Matan Kaminer
Allegra Lab, 2020
Since its publication in 2019, Darryl Li’s The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge ... more Since its publication in 2019, Darryl Li’s The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford University Press) has been the focus of a great deal of attention and debate. This historical ethnography of jihad fighters in 1990s Bosnia touches on some of the central questions of our era, using the plural concept of “universalisms” to bring many of the historical forces in this conflict into conversation with one another. Drawing on the author’s legal background and work as well as his anthropological training, the dense narrative connects Bosnia to the far-flung homes of the mujahideen, from North Africa to Southeast Asia, and to the carceral archipelago constructed by the US in its war on terror. Delving into the little-explored, everyday universalisms of Third World students and UN peacekeepers as well as jihad participants, Li demonstrates a wealth of empathy which can be as unsettling for radical readers as it is for liberals. Matan Kaminer of LeftEast and Dr. Li held the following exchange about the book and its lessons last month. The following is an abridged version of the conversation; the full piece has been published on LeftEast.
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Papers by Matan Kaminer
Chapters by Matan Kaminer
Thesis Chapters by Matan Kaminer
Interviews and roundtables by Matan Kaminer