Trash Talk.

Bedouins; Nation building; Middle East specialists; Social control; Israeli politics & government, 1993-; Public officers; Political participation

In contexts of land conflict and deep social divisions, evaluations of dirty and disordered landscapes carry social and political weight. This article employs a "political dwelling" perspective in southern Israel to examine how links between Bedouin character, litter and disorder, and lawlessness have become widespread, even naturalized, among many government officials and Jewish residents and even some Bedouin Arab residents. Contemporary trash talk draws on, but simultaneously masks, a history of state-building projects that employed Orientalist evaluations of order and disorder and segregationist approaches to development. While this masking of social construction is a property of all symbolically powerful social distinctions, I argue that the distinctions undergirding trash talk are especially accessible for normalization because of the language of nature within which they are expressed—natural landscapes, ethnic groups, and human nature. As a result, trash talk naturalizes links between dirty places, disorderly people, and the need to remove (or reform) them. This trash talk has profound emotional and material consequences for Bedouin residents of Israel because the discourse makes it easier for many within mainstream Israeli society to treat Bedouin Arabs themselves as matter out of place and to justify various acts of social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]