MATAN KAMINER Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan #6 Andrews St., Jaffa, Israel 6818127 ; mkaminer@umich.edu https://lsa.umich.edu/anthro/people/graduate-students/mkaminer.html EDUCATION 2012 - University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology PhD., expected 2018 Dissertation title: By the sweat of other brows: Thai migrant labor and the transformation of Israeli settler agriculture. Committee: Andrew Shryock (chair), Alaina Lemon, Jason De León, Daniel Nemser. M.A., 2015 Awards: Thai Studies Grant, Center for Southeast Asian Studies (2014, 2015), Summer Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (2015), Academic Year Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (2014). Teaching: Introduction to Anthropology (2014), Graduate Student Instructor. 2008 11 Tel Aviv University M.A., Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Dean s Honors, 20111 Thesis Title: Zero-Grade Labor: Worker Subjectivity in an Industrial Warehouse. Research: Coordinator, Research Group on "Questions of Justice Between Philosophy and Sociology," chairs Profs. Nissim Mizrahi and Yossi Dahan, Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem. Teaching: Introduction to Anthropology (2010), assistant to Prof. Haim Hazan; Qualitative Research Methods (2009, 2010), assistant to Prof. Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni. Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students Awards: Adi Lautman Memorial Stipend (2009-11). PUBLICATIONS Journal Articles 2017 The Oksana Affair: Ambiguous resistance in an Israeli warehouse. Ethnography (Online First). 2016 A Lonely Songkran in the Arabah. Middle East Report 279 (Summer 2016), pp. 34-37 [German trans. 8 March]. 2016 Skill. Mafteakh: Lexical Review of Political Thought 10 (Spring) [Hebrew]. 2015 A surplus of disaster: Review of Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith by Vincanne Adams, Anthropological Quarterly 88, no. 1 (Winter).
Works in progress Pioneers for Hire: Transnational settler colonialism and the migrant flow from Thailand to Israel. This article, commissioned by Israeli journal Theory and Critique, will analyze the origins of this flow in an attempt by the Moshavim Movement, an organization explicitly devoted to the national goal of settlement, to resolve the crisis of Israeli agriculture in the 1980 s by importing cheap labor, as well as in the active role played by the Thai military in facilitating the flow due to its own interest in settlement as a means of controlling territory. At the zero degree / Below the minimum: Differentiated labor-powers in the Israeli labor array. This article integrates findings from my two ethnographic projects to argue that in Israel, workers and jobs find each other by means of a regimented array which matches human types with jobs for which they are seen as fit and with wages construed as adequate for their reproduction. One such type is the zero-degree Israeli citizen worker, entitled to the minimum wage for an unskilled job; another is the Thai migrant, paid about 70% of that minimum and employable only in a delimited line of work. In both cases, I argue, the labor array does not simply react to social processes which separate humans into racialized types, but actively participates in these. Race after racism without Marx beyond Marx: Receiving Balibar and Wallerstein in Israel. My contribution to a project of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) on the global reception of Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein s Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. I argue that the dialogue between historicalempiricist and critical-theoretical strands of Marxism exemplified by this collaboration failed to take place in Israel, where Balibar has been taken up by theorists of race and citizenship who are generally uninterested in the global political-economic questions important to local adherents of Wallerstein, and vice versa. Selected Other Publications 2017 A hollow democracy. Jacobin, 29 April. 2015 A long way from home: Isaan villagers experience of farmwork in Israel. Isaan Record, 15 October. 2014 with Noa Shauer, Below the minimum: Non-enforcement of wage law as a structural element in the agricultural sector in Israel. Kav La oved (Workers Hotline), June [English trans. January 2015]. 2013 Heading off the new Jerusalem. Jacobin, 23 January. 2011 "On the current conjuncture in Israel. Jadaliyya, 15 Aug. 2010 with Maya Shapiro, "Bubbling over: The contestation of urban space and possibilities for joint struggle in Tel Aviv. In "Cities in turmoil, special issue of Re-Public, ed. Gia Galati and Konstantin Kastrissianakis. October. 2007 "People's History Here and Now An interview with Howard Zinn, in A People's History of the United States. Tel Aviv: Babel [Hebrew]. MAJOR AWARDS 2017 Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Development Research Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award ($31,632). 2
2016 Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship ($19,500). CONFERENCE AND WORKSHOP PARTICIPATION Workshops Organized 2017 Seminar for Researchers of Thai Migration in Israel. Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, Tel Aviv, August 31. Conferences Organized 2012 with Efrayim Davidi. Sixth Annual Marx Conference. Tel Aviv, 1-2 June. Panels Organized 2017 with Guy Shalev. Neutrality in a Polarized Space. Annual Meeting of the Israeli Anthropological Association, Kufr Qasem, May 17-18. 2016 Migrants in Border Zones. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Minneapolis, November 20-24. Papers Presented 2017 The social reproduction of frontier settlement and racialization in the Arabah. Working Group on Borders and Sovereignty, Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, 20 December. 2017 The ethical neutralization of agricultural work in the Israeli Arabah. Workshop on Moral Economies: Work, Values and Economic Ethics, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Wittenberg, Germany, 6-9 December. 2017 Transnational settler colonialism: The case of Thai labor migration to Israel. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington DC, November 29 December 3. 2017 Segregation, Deference and the Production of an Invisible Population: Thais and Israelis in the Space of the Arabah. Seminar for Researchers of Thai Migration in Israel. Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, Tel Aviv, August 31. 2017 Between Gender, Race and Class: On Social Reproduction Theory. Loulou School Nights, Jaffa, August 21. 2017 Who Holds the Plow: Thai Migrants and the Neutralization of Farmwork in the Moshavim of the Arabah. Annual Meeting of the Israeli Anthropological Association, Kufr Qasem, May 17-18. 2016 The Production of a Neutral Work Force: Employing Thai Migrants on Israel s Agrarian Frontier. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Minneapolis, November 20-24. 2016 The hand that grasps the plow: Labor migrants at the forefront of settlement in the Arabah. Annual Meeting of the Israeli Anthropological Association, Kinneret, June 8-9. 3
2016 Outsourcing settler colonialism: migrant labor on the Israeli frontier. Border Crises: The Human Costs of Sovereign Borders, Kent State University, Ohio, March 9-10. 2016 Race as embodied sign: Migrant workers in Israel and the inadequacy of the social construction frame. UM-UPR Symposium 2016: Rethinking Violence and Area Studies in the 21st Century Classroom, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, March 3-4. 2014 Skill. Political Lexical Conference, Minerva Center for the Humanities, Tel Aviv University, May 7. 2014 No more Hebrew labor: The devaluation of agricultural work in Israel. Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, Albuquerque, March 20-22. 2014 The wages of agricultural work in Israel. Graduate Conference, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University, New York, February 27-28. 2013 A semiotic model of the social field. Michicagoan Graduate Conference for Linguistic Anthropology; Ann Arbor, May 11-12. 2013 with Eilat Maoz. The Politics of the Ethno-Nation and the Dynamic of Capital. Impasses of Critique Conference at the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, September 1. GRANTS, FELLOWSHIPS AND AFFILIATIONS 2017 - Research Fellow, Institute for Immigration and Social Integration, Ruppin Academic Center. 2016 Research Fellow, Dead Sea and Arava Research Center. 2016 Thai Studies Grant, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan ($2,000). 2016 Rackham Graduate Student Research Award, University of Michigan ($3,000). 2015 Thai Studies Grant, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan ($3,000). 2015 Summer Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship in Thai, University of Michigan ($2,500). 2014 Rackham Graduate Student Research Award, University of Michigan ($1,500). 2014 Academic Year Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship in Thai, University of Michigan ($15,000). 2014 Thai Studies Grant, University of Michigan ($3,700). 2014 Department of Anthropology Summer Research Grant, University of Michigan ($2,000). 2013 Department of Anthropology Summer Research Grant, University of Michigan ($2,000). 2010 Dean's List Scholarship for Academic Excellence, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tel Aviv University. NON-ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE Translator, 2005-13 As a translator from English and Spanish for some of Israel s most influential publishers, including Babel, Tolaat Sfarim, Andalus, HaKibbutz HaMeuhad, and Resling, I made an impact on the local intellectual scene with such titles as Steven Shapin s Scientific Revolution and Howard Zinn s A People s History of the United States, to which I also contributed an afterword and interview with the author. 4
Educator and writer on political economy, 2004- Since my teens I have been involved in writing and teaching about Marxian approaches to political economy, and have been called the foremost of the young generation of Marxists in Israel. I have written for a number of prestigious venues, given many talks, and led two reading groups of Marx s Capital, at the Left Bank Club (2010) and Beit Ha am (2012). Chair of the board, La Escuelita, 2011-12. La Escuelita is a grassroots community organization of Latin American migrants in Tel Aviv, which I joined as a volunteer in 2006. I worked as a lecture organizer and Hebrew teacher, and beginning in 2011 I led the process of registering the organization as a legal association, of procuring municipal funding and space, and of regularizing its finances. Member of extended leadership and campaign worker, City for All, 2008-13. I joined City for All (Ir LeKulanu), a municipal political movement and party, and was active in both its municipal campaigns. As a member of the party s extended leadership, I advocated for the city s migrant and refugee populations and gained an intimate knowledge of their relationship with the municipal authorities. Secretary, Shomrei Mishpat Rabbis for Human Rights, 2005. EXTRACURRICULAR UNIVERSITY SERVICE 2014 Representative for Rackham Graduate School, Central Student Government at the University of Michigan. 2010 11 Chair of the Audit Committee, Student Union at Tel Aviv University. 2009 10 Representative, Student Union at Tel Aviv University. PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS AND SERVICE Israeli Sociological Association: Member and Coordinator, Migration and Demography Section. American Anthropological Association: Member, Anthropology of Work Section. Israeli Anthropological Association: Member. LANGUAGES AND METHODS Native Hebrew and English; Fluent in Spanish; Advanced in Thai (Central and Isaan), Arabic (Standard and Levantine Colloquial), French. Software: Proficient in Excel and SPSS. 5