Language:
Hebrew
Year of publication:
2014
Titel der Quelle:
תיאוריה וביקורת; במה ישראלית
Angaben zur Quelle:
43 (2014) 75-102
Keywords:
Palestinian Arabs Drug use
;
History
;
Marijuana abuse History
;
Marijuana abuse History
Abstract:
This article is a study of the history of hashish in Palestine-Israel from the beginning of the Mandatory Period. My aim is to examine how the “hashish problem” was defined and constructed and to trace the discourses that developed around it in Mandatory Palestine and subsequently in the State of Israel. In particular, I explore the extent to which hashish came to be loaded with cultural, political, ethnic, and racial meanings that have never had anything to do with the substance itself, and certainly not with its psychoactive effects. To that end, I examine the knowledge about hashish received in Palestine-Israel as a link in a chain of “traveling theories” – that is, knowledge developed and popularized elsewhere in the world and then assimilated and adapted to local circumstances and specific power relations in its new environment. This knowledge can be traced back to colonial encounters with peoples in Asia and Africa, for whom cannabis consumption was an important constituent in everyday recreational, devotional, and medicinal practices. In these encounters, hashish and its consumers were racialized and criminalized. Once the negative knowledge about hashish had arrived from the colonies and from the countries of Euro-America, where it had already been used to stigmatize minority and marginalized groups, it was applied to its principal consumers in Palestine-Israel: first to Palestinians and Arabs of neighboring countries, then to Jewish new immigrants from Islamic countries (Mizrahim). Although there is no evidence that either of these two groups were excessive hashish consumers, and although the drug problem in Israel was comparatively marginal, this knowledge was integrated into the meaning-making activity whose main objective was to exclude those groups and prevent the adoption of “Oriental” customs and habits.
URL:
אתר את הפרסום בקטלוג המאוחד של ספריות ישראל
Permalink
