This last point brings us back to the protagonists of the present ethnography, the low-income women in economic empowerment workshops who endorse the idea that work done out of love is the most authentic and therefore also a wise economic strategy. To continue the conflicting interpretations presented earlier of this prevalent attitude among women, and without making light of the problematic of women reinforcing the stigma of their work as falling outside the sphere of economic productivity, I will argue that the tendency of low-income women to talk about work through a terminology of love should also be read as a form of enchantment. True, the affective charge that it exerts is not unilaterally positive—in fact it is deeply ambivalent. Nor does it by any means operate as a radicalizing force. Yet it has a clearly charismatic effect of generating commitment, emotional satisfaction, and a sense of inner transformation.
Ethnography of Neoliberalism
According to David Harvey (2005: 2), “Neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” The main role of the state is to facilitate the conditions for profitable capital accumulation by private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial markets. Neoliberalism was conceived in the US academic elite and gradually consolidated during the 1970s as a new economic orthodoxy in the governments of the United States and Britain. It then spread globally to governments worldwide, which were persuaded or coerced to restructure their economic policies to adapt to the new political-economic hegemony. Concurrently, it has also entered popular imagination as a general ethos of human well-being, that is, calculations of efficacy and optimization are the best core criteria for profit making, but also for ethics and morality more broadly. A market-driven perspective has infiltrated, for example, politics, affecting questions of civic belonging and entitlement; or the home, where it has been increasingly influential in shaping ideas and practices of commitment, attachment, or intimacy.
This book focuses on the latter aspect of neoliberalism and how it translates into real-life practices. I explore the incorporation of the ethos of self-entrepreneurship into Israeli society and how local strategies of making a living and making meaningful lives become dominated by the logic of the market. As many have argued, convincingly to my mind, in its translation into context-bound images and action scenarios, neoliberalism becomes a technology of subjectivity that “grounds the imperatives of modern government upon the self-activating capacities of free human beings, citizens, subjects” (Ong 2006: 13; see also Rose 1990). The entanglement of subjectivity and government occurs through the engulfing of human subjects in myriad suggestions for self-betterment: health regimes, body designs, skills acquisition classes, business entrepreneurial ventures, and other techniques of self-engineering and capital accumulation (Ong 2006; Greenhouse 2010). Almost without exception, these products are wrapped in the scientific dress of expert psychological knowledge.
Techniques of subjectivity travel globally, yet their incorporation into particular locales entails important adaptations (see, e.g., Greenhouse 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001a). In the case of Israel, the neoliberal emphasis on economic efficacy, individual self-sufficiency, and optimizing financial opportunities appears counterintuitive to local discourses of belonging, which are articulated primarily in ethnic, national, and religious terms. Still, the ethnography shows that these ideas do strike a chord and do become absorbed into local renditions of entitlement and inclusion. I analyze concrete encounters in the field for the dialectical effects of this process. The book therefore documents how neoliberal ideas adjust when they travel globally, while local ideas of belonging and entitlement too adapt to the new, catchy focus on individual self-sufficiency, and to the growing prominence of the logic of the market where the dominant logic has been one of blood bonds and essential differences.
The Research—Multiple Sites, Multiple Methodologies, Multiple Positions
The book is based on a series of five studies conducted over ten years, from 2002 to 2012. Three of them were ethnographic. They included participant observations, in-depth interviews, and many informal conversations with people I met repeatedly over extended periods of time. The other two consisted primarily of preset or semistructured interviews. As explained in the outline of each of the projects below, throughout this research my position shifted several times. I initially came upon the topic of studying women’s economic empowerment through my direct involvement, as a feminist activist, in the initial stages of Economic Empowerment for Women, the organization that later became the first site of my research. As explained shortly in the description of the different research projects that comprise this book, my involvement was informed by a constant tension between potentially conflicting subject positions: as a grassroots activist I had longstanding friendships and an ideological affinity with some of the key actors in the field. These friends expected me to contribute my time and my skills to document their efforts and to lend academic validation to their discourse, which was quite innovative in the beginning; in late-1990s Israel, talk of a feminist bank or even the very idea of economic empowerment were almost esoteric outside the small circles of radical feminists. As a university professor I was in a convenient position to raise research funds from the same bodies that supported the field projects. These bodies, however, expected from me “objective,” pragmatic recommendations, which stood in diametric opposition to the expectations of my friends in the field. To complicate things further, from my own professional perspective, I was actually uncomfortable with both the position of the ideologically committed, action-oriented researcher and that of the detached evaluator. As an anthropologist, my main intellectual motivation was to flesh out the paradoxes of social economy, to explore the mysterious ways in which the neoliberal logic managed to creep into the vision of social change activists, and to understand—without judgment—how the women at the receiving end were making their involvement in the projects meaningful in terms that typically evaded both the activists who wanted to politicize them and the professionals who aimed to discipline them.
Economic Empowerment for Women—Training Women in Microentrepreneurship
Economic Empowerment for Women (EEW) was established in Haifa in 1997 by a group of feminist activists from the Haifa Feminist Center Isha le Isha (Hebrew, “woman to woman”), and was registered as an independent organization in 2000.3 Its mission is to bring about economic change for women in Israel through a multilevel approach that includes assisting in small business development, broadening public policy, and developing need-specific programs for diverse populations, with a focus on women from the disadvantaged sectors of society. EEW’s main program, A Business of One’s Own, is a year-long empowerment and entrepreneurial training course. It runs several such courses yearly throughout Israel, in Hebrew and in Arabic. Other projects include a Business Incubator for course graduates, Savings for the Future to foster and promote asset development strategies, Creative Marketing via Technology for Arab women, and lobbying for policy change. During the first decade of its operation EEW also collaborated with the Koret Israel Economic Development Fund in a microcredit loan fund, in which partnership it is no longer active. To date it reports having served over 4,000 women and played an active role in the establishment and growth of over 1,700 small businesses among graduates and loan recipients. As I explain in detail in Chapter 1, EEW, like most civil society organizations in the field, works in close collaboration with a diverse array of agencies, including government and municipal agencies, members