Frictions as opportunity: Mobilizing for Arab-Bedouin ethnic rights in Israel

The question of how to advance justice for indigenous or marginalized ethnic groups leads to the heart of a polarized debate. We find a widely diffused ‘right to culture’ stance on one hand and a critical, constructivist one on the other. By taking up Tsing’s metaphor of ‘zones of friction’, (2005) this article follows the way in which voices and imaginations about Bedouin culture and rights are produced in the conflict over a piece of land in the Negev desert, which is contested between the Israeli authorities and Bedouin representatives. As an imagined inhabitant of the area, ordinary citizens such as Mustafa are fashioned by activists and political tourists in highly culturalist or romanticized ways images that are distant from the shifting self-representations of Mustafa himself. This case shows how the current emphasis on the ‘right to culture’ creates both new sites of contestation and new spaces for collective action.