By the Sweat of Other Brows: Thai Migrant Labor and the Transformation of Israeli Settler Agriculture
Author: Matan Kaminer, matan.kaminer@gmail.com
Department: Anthropology
University: University of Michigan, United States
Supervisor: Andrew Shryock
Year of completion: 2019
Language of dissertation: English
Keywords:
Israel
, Thailand
, migration
, labor
Areas of Research:
Migration
, Work
, Agriculture and Food
Abstract
This dissertation is an ethnography of Thai migrant farmworkers in the Central Arabah region of Israel, their employers, and their kin in Northeast Thailand (Isaan). It argues that over the last thirty years, the cooperative communities (moshavim) of this region have come to rely on cheap, skilled, disciplined and tactful workers from Isaan not only for their economic viability but also for their politico-ideological reproduction. Chapter 1 details the history of the region preceding Israeli settlement and of the “labor settlement” movement, with special attention to the ideological twin pillars of “self-labor” and “Hebrew labor” and the accompanying affective orientation I call “exploitation anxiety,” as well as the settlement of the region by ideologically orthodox second-generation members of the movement. Chapter 2 is concerned with the history of Thai migration to Israel in general and the region in particular, utilizing previously unpublished diplomatic documents to argue that the Thai military’s interest in “frontier settlement” played a role in the beginning of the migration flow and that Thai migrants brought with them a paternalist idiom of hierarchical relations, based on a vernacular Buddhist conception of karmic reciprocity, which was at first acknowledged by the community before being pushed out of the public sphere and severely curtailed by changes in the recruitment process. Following a short Methodological Interlude reflecting on my own positionality in the field, Chapter 3 argues, based on my ethnographic experience as a worker on a farm in the Arabah, that the politically decisive difference between Thai workers and both Arabs and Jews is reproduced in large part at the scale of the farm. This happens both at work itself and through the day-to-day reproduction of labor-power in such activities as cooking and eating; I also look at language, dress, and body hexis, and pay special attention to workers’ achievement of a great deal of autonomy, paid for at the price of their social isolation. Chapter 4 looks at how difference is deployed to render Thai migrants politically neutral and practically invisible at the scales of the moshav and above. It describes the “migration regime” designed to ensure that migrants do not settle down in Israel, examines spatial and temporal patterns of segregation and practices surrounding consumption and sexuality, and argues that a commitment to “saving the face” of the host community entails migrants’ cooperation in constructing themselves as an innocuous and barely visible presence. In Chapter 5, through the stories of a migrant whose marriage fell apart while he was in Israel and of another couple which has managed to stay together, I examine how kin at home, and especially wives, participate in ensuring that migrants work hard, consume frugally and remit generously, helping both to discipline their labor and to naturalize their difference from Israelis. In the Conclusion, I undertake a short reflection on the political implications of the ethnography of reproduction and the implications of its rupture.
