Dance and Authenticity in Israel and Palestine

Dance and Authenticity is an ethnography of dance performance and cultural form. It describes how dabkeh, a type of dance performed at Palestinian weddings, became a model for the Israeli Jewish debkah as a means of affirming Israeli Jewish belonging and common society. The Palestinian dabkeh, in turn, acquired nationalist meanings, especially after the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank. The book traces the history of these competing, and conflicting, dance forms, basing the argument principally on the ethnographic study of two Palestinian and one Israeli Jewish dance group conducted between 1998 and 1999. The result is a fascinating parallel ethnography, showing how the ethnography of dance forms contributes to evolving notions of collective national and political identity in a context of unequal power.