Post-Doc, Sociology and Anthropology
PhD Nov 29th, 2010!
Thesis Title: The Social Life of Conscience: Rhetoric Sacrifice and Community Among Israeli Conscientious Objectors
About
I finished my PhD in the Department of Anthropology in November 2010. My dissertation is entitled: The Social Life of Conscience: Rhetoric Sacrifice and Community Among Israeli Conscientious Objectors. My research, based on 20 months of fieldwork, examines the experiences of Israelis who refuse to perform their legally-required military service for reasons of conscience, as they grapple with their decision, and try to justify their actions to the Israeli state and society. I explore how conscientious objection and its fallout exposes the sacrificial logic of the modern nation-state. My research examines conscience as a political entity that sits only partially outside the jurisdictional bounds of state power. While freedom of conscience is a powerful symbol against state power, Israelis who refuse military service for reasons of conscience often find that their dissent engenders severe social and legal consequences, including imprisonment. I highlight the ways in which invoking humanitarian notions of conscience, and the aura of protection it provides, reveals the interdependence of individual conscience and collective consciousness. Appeals to conscience as defense against state power interrupts the norms that call for immediate punishment of military refusal, but such conscience is also highly suspect in its dissent from public reason. Such public reason exposes the tension between the liberal protections of individual rights the Israeli state provides, and ideas of security and national obligation that requires sacrifice. I explore how different articulations of conscience are categorized into different bureaucratic and legal frameworks, and the implications of such categorization for liberal democracy. My research explores the rhetorical negotiation of beliefs about community, nation, loyalty, obligation, betrayal, and ethical responsibility and its limits.
