Zrima

Abstract

Abstract This article is about a particular kind of settler-colonial phenomenology. It is based on almost two years of anthropological fieldwork in the West Bank, during which the author lived in an illegal Jewish outpost settlement in the Judean Desert frontier. Despite being considered the most extreme settlers, and despite being at the forefront of the colonization of the West Bank, many of the “outpost people” are no longer motivated from the nationalist-messianic ideas that pushed forward the first generation of West Bank settlers. It is by disclosing the phenomenology of the flow that one is able to understand what drives the settler-colonial practices of this new generation of postideological settlers. More than a worldview, the flow is an existential force that animates these people’s settler-colonial way of being in the world. In disclosing the flow, this article also offers an understanding of a particular settler-colonial habitus, one that invites a different way to think about habitus as conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu, and a somewhat different understanding of settler colonialism from the one ingrained in the field by Patrick Wolfe.