Clusters of Minority Nationalism under Complex Entrapment: Multi-Field Boundary Work among Arab Christians in Israel

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Political Subjectivity (Table 11)

Abstract

This paper develops a cultural-interpretive framework for analyzing minority nationalism under conditions in which actors are embedded in multiple, partially autonomous symbolic fields whose logics do not align. While research on national minorities often explains variation through single-axis models (e.g., Israelization–Palestinization) or through typologies anchored in a single national field, such approaches obscure patterned forms of non-alignment—cases in which proximity and distance toward different “Others” do not converge into a coherent hierarchy of belonging. We argue that double minorities in nationalizing states form national belonging not as a unitary orientation but as configurational boundary work linking multiple fields, axes, and dimensions simultaneously.
Focusing on Arab Christian citizens of Israel, we conceptualize their position as one of complex entrapment: a layered condition produced by simultaneous embedding in the Jewish nationalizing state field, the field of Palestinian minority nationalism, the transborder field of the Palestinian homeland, the field of Arabness, and transnational Christian and Western fields of valuation. Analytically, the framework distinguishes between fields (relatively autonomous arenas of legitimacy and recognition), axes (relational lines of possible positioning such as Palestinian–Israeli or Arab–Christian), and dimensions (symbolic criteria of evaluation such as moral grammars, affective registers, narratives of threat, and criteria of worth). Drawing on 61 in-depth interviews conducted in Arabic (2016–2020), we reconstruct three ideal-typical configurations of minority nationalism—Arab-Palestinian, Israeli-Christian, and Arab-Christian—each defined by distinctive boundary moves across religious, civic, national, intra-minority, and civilizational axes.
The findings demonstrate that Arab Christian heterogeneity reflects structured configurational differentiation rather than residual attitudinal variation. By specifying boundary work as the mechanism through which actors link non-aligned symbolic arenas, the paper contributes to cultural and political sociology by relaxing the assumption of a unified national field and by offering a multi-field, multi-axial account of national type formation under conditions of complex entrapment.

Authors

• Ameer Kamee Fakhoury

• Yuval Feinstein, University of Haifa