'Ethnographic fieldwork is a daunting adventure. It demands a wrenching combination of empathy and objectivity. There is a constant temptation to rely on formal interviews and surveys, or, conversely, to privilege personal experience. And much depends on fortune. All the work preparing for the field may have to be jettisoned in order to profit from an unexpected opportunity. The contributors to this volume embraced the challenges in their own fieldwork, and they show how good ethnography yields insights and tests hypotheses.' Adam Kuper, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and author of The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth and Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England 'This is a most fitting tribute to the life-long work of Emanuel Marx, the great practitioner and teacher of anthropology, and indefatigable explorer of the ways and means of interaction between cultures and of the accelerated pace of cultural transformations. As the human condition acquires in contemporary society more and more traits associated traditionally with the culture of nomads, his unique and lasting contribution to our knowledge, focused on the investigation of the "nomadic condition" and the nomads' ways of adaptation to the fluid world, has significance reaching well beyond the boundaries of ethnography. It will go on informing and inspiring a wide range of social and human studies zealously seeking a paradigm free from received and still insistent, but by now obsolete, presumptions, and remade to the measure of new challenges: a paradigm reshaped to grasp and comprehend the nature of contemporary living.' Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Leeds, UK, and author of: 'Modernity and the Holocaust' and 'Modernity and Ambivalence'. 'This book will be a good help for anthropologists and social scientists interested in the Middle East, particularly in the complexities and layers of Israeli realities. This collection of articles succeeds to address theoretical and methodological questions, the paradoxes of representation and accumulation of knowledge. The variety of writing styles and genres adds a particular touch of multiplicity of contexts, perspectives and narratives arising from these serendipitous encounters.' Anthropological Notebooks 'Parts of the book are dark with the sorrow of displacement, duplicity, and destruction. Others reflect lighter realities, laying bare the coping mechanisms, subterfuges, and artistry that characterize the human condition. Like a tapestry, the book is in itself a work of varying shades and patterns. The chapters constitute a mosaic, displaying a design that is as multi-faceted and rich as the variegated nature of ethnography allows. These essays reveal contents that are a worthy tribute to an eminent scholar, a man of courage and integrity.' Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Hazan and Hertzog's edited volume stands as a strong claim to redefine anthropological disciplinary boundaries and the value of insights gained through the ethnographic method. It follows the line of critical research based on fluid concepts and approaches, but focuses on the usefulness of anthropological fieldwork to bridge differences in the construction of knowledge. Social Anthropology
