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Abstract

This article explores the potential of unruly wild spaces and foraging practices to enable unmediated encounters and unsettling transformations, through the ethnography of neoforaging praxis and its emphasis on seeking direct “connection.” In pursuit of connection with nature through foraging practices, neoforagers regularly encounter both non-human and human others at the unruly edges and seams of cultivated space. Neoforagers associate the unruliness and immediacy of such encounters with “true connection” and pursue practices that are considered both “connective” and “transformative,” capable of subverting hegemonic narratives and consumerist dependencies. Through the case of Israeli neoforagers in the troubled context of Israel/Palestine, I revisit power and categorical relations in the nation-state from neoforagers’ connection-oriented perspective, making salient ongoing processes in which micro-scale encounters are continuously disrupted by the mediating affects of macro-politics, social categories, cultural schemes and such, making salient that in the nation-state unruly situations and unmediated encounters are all too scarce.

Keywords

Immediacy unruliness foraging neoforager connection

In the winter of 2018, myself and two peers from “Shomrei HaGan” (Hebrew: “Caretakers of Eden”) arrived early to the patch of woods that we call “forest” with the intention to use extra time before class for foraging mushrooms. The mushrooms were late that year, and we were filled with anticipation. We were particularly looking for “saffron milkcaps” (Lactarius deliciosus), that are not only delicious (we consider them the seasonal highlight) but were also plentiful in the previous winter. Spreading out to forage in silence, each carrying a self-crafted basket and specialized knife, I suddenly heard something rustle in the brush near me. Initially I thought it a big wild boar, but after a few moments I could make out the sound of clanking keys or coins in a pocket, the rhythmic thud of shod steps, and sure enough … a person emerged from the bushes. His name was Hammoudi, as I would later learn. He was a Palestinian worker from a construction site in the adjacent neighborhood who came down into the woods on his lunch break with a simple plastic bag and exacto knife, looking for mushrooms too. Stopping short, we faced each other square-off, knives in hand. After a fleeting yet undeniable tense-filled moment I said “I think we're still too early.” “Yes!,” he exclaimed relaxing, a smile brightening up his face. “I looked there, and there, and there, but nothing!,” he said, gesturing to invisible spots around us and shrugging. “You know,” I offered, “there are plenty mushrooms up there,” I gestured in the direction from which I came “if you like that kind,” “Oh, those, yes I saw several. Big ones. But I don't touch those…” “So I figured” I replied “ you're probably looking for the big ones with a little orange and green, right?” “Yes,” he said “color just like the rocks.” “This is where they came earliest, last year” I offered, pointing to a specific patch next to us, “If there's nothing here, then I believe it's really a week or two too early.” “Yes, probably!” he said “Thank you.” After a brief awkward silence we resumed some mushroom foragers’ small talk. “You know,” I offered “the ones that you don't eat, that's the mushroom that most people here forage. It can be very good too if you prepare it the right way.” I was referring to Suillus granulatus, which is called in Hebrew “Orniya,” literally meaning something like “mushroom of the pine” because of the mushroom's mycorrhiza with pine trees. “Ah, no no, I don't eat those. Don't know them and don't eat them” he declined, “This one that I'm looking for I grew up picking with my grandfather, you know? He'd take us out each winter, and I get crazy for the smell.” I nodded. I told him, “You know, many Jewish mushroom pickers only know that one [the Orniya]. It resembles Bolete types more commonly foraged in Europe. They'd probably see this good one we're looking for as something strange and dangerous.” “I don't know” he said shaking his head, “We love this one. You know what we call it in Arabic?” he asked, “Fitr a-snobar.” Funny, I thought to myself… “mushroom of the pine"!

Literature about nature in colonial contexts such as Israel/Palestine often discusses its management or subjugation to human power dynamics and control. The romantic notion of pristine nature is at an end. Nature is imagined, made and unmade according to human agendas: The concept of “Terra Nullius” usefully articulates how the land can be imagined as full or empty depending on the onlooker's position, solidifying or dismissing the factual presence and histories of humans, nonhumans, and entire ecologies (Svirsky, 2010). Trees are recruited as “planted flags” or “soldiers” in the Israeli-Palestinian war (Braverman, 2009). Nonhumans are monitored and controlled by authorities as much as humans are (Gutkowski, 2021). Development alters landscapes—sites of memory and identity—severing experiences of belonging, indigeneity, and resilience from the locations in which they were once anchored (Manna, 2020; Shehadeh, 2009).

Meanwhile, assuming a more-than-human perspective on human sociality by looking at it through its relations with mushrooms and other companion species, anthropologist Anna Tsing describes “multi-species landscapes,” existing at “the unruly edges and seams of imperial space” (Tsing, 2012). In her illustrations of such landscapes Tsing specifically associates foraging practices with relations and dynamics that seem to take place beyond or betwixt imperialist mechanisms of control and classification:
To find a useful plant, animal, or fungus, foragers learned familiar places and returned to them again and again … Through their familiar places, foragers learn not just about ecological relations in general, but also about the stochastic natural histories through which particular species and species associations happened to flourish in particular spots. The familiar places of foraging do not require territorial exclusivity; other beings—human and otherwise—learn them too. Their expansive and overlapping geographies resist common models, which divide the world into ‘your space’ and ‘mine’. (p. 142)

In a subsequent monograph about mushroom foraging, Tsing (2015) explores additional concepts and modes that characterize the types of dynamics that this article foregrounds, such as fertility and vitality that surprisingly reside in desolate and ruined landscapes, the precarity and messiness of more-than-human assemblages and encounters, the enabling potential of entanglements and collaborations, experiences of freedom, problems of scalability, the need for developing “arts/tools of noticing,” and the potential of such concepts and modes to subvert the strict classifications, discourse, and imaginations of capitalist and imperial regimes.

“Unruliness” is a prominent concept in Tsing's work and in current social theory. It is especially evoked in contexts of resistance to nation-state power (Khanna, 2012), colonialism, patriarchy, and anthropogenic attempts to control the other-than-human. Previously a derogatory implication of others that are supposedly unyielding to civilized rule, “unruly” is now more often repurposed to positively imply agency and freedom in the face of oppressive hegemonic forces, criticizing and reversing its former use.

In this article I discuss the unruliness of wild places and its potency for enabling unmediated encounters and transformative experiences through ethnography of Israeli “neoforagers” and their engagement in foraging practices. Neoforagers are newly (not traditionally) introduced to foraging skills,¹ which they incorporate into postindustrial² lifeways (Appel, 2021). The neoforaging movement, also referenced via terms such as “primitive skills,” “ancestral skills,” “rewilding,” “nature connection,” and more, is a growing social phenomenon with sporadic manifestations worldwide. It is often self-perceived as an antithesis to industrialization, capitalism, and detachment from nature (see: Appel, 2021; Fenton, 2016; Pike, 2018).

“Unruliness” seems a fitting term for describing what neoforagers seek in a landscape. Their praxis, emphasizing “connection” and unmediated engagement, draws Israeli neoforagers to less-manufactured, least-managed multispecies landscapes. There, where things live wild and free, neoforagers may experience direct encounters with others (non-human and human), discover common ground with other foragers, and stumble upon incriminating evidence of other lives and alternative histories. In the face of such potentially intimate and unmediated connections, capitalist and nation-state power are reframed in a way that highlights not just their magnitude, asymmetry, or violent oppression, but more importantly pinpoints their invisible systematic intervention in micro-scale encounters and endogenic processes.

The ethnography for this article draws on my active participation in the Israeli neoforager scene since 2009, with formal fieldwork conducted between the years 2015–2019. During this period (2009–2019) I engaged in both anthropological studies/research and in practicing and teaching foraging skills and know-how as an active member of Shomrei HaGan (SH), a prominent neoforager group in Israel. As an anthropologist and a practitioner of neoforaging skills I spend much of my time outdoors with neoforaging peers, the children that we teach, with family, or alone. My observations in this article come either from my own experiences, sometimes shared and discussed with co-present interlocutors, or from observing and hearing others in our closer and broader social circles. Where I describe my own first-hand experiences, I selected and use them to represent places and encounters that my neoforaging interlocutors should find familiar and common.

I begin the paper by illustrating key themes in neoforager practices and perceptions; namely connection, immediacy, and transformation. My description of neoforager transformations as “unsettling” is twofold: First, transformative experiences of reconnection are quite literally unsettling on a personal level for those who practice neoforaging—altering practices and undoing and reforming preconceptions of nature, history, place, identity, society, work, relationships, health, etc. But more importantly, seeking unmediated connection while foregrounding non-human contexts unsettles social and cultural orders and undermines hegemonic narratives common in the nation state. This is further explored when I next turn the focus towards unruly places, discussing how the multispecies landscapes that exist beyond or betwixt disciplined anthropogenic space provide conditions for unmediated and transformative encounters in ways that at least temporarily evade settler-colonial dynamics, resist them, or make them ever more noticeable and questionable. Then, I elaborate on neoforager encounters with foraging others, specifically Palestinian, demonstrating the scarcity and fragility of unmediated encountering in Israel/Palestine. Subsequently I flesh out the association of nation-state and macro-societal ruling as working through elusive micro-scale mediation.

Before that, the setting of Israel/Palestine and parallel cases of neoforaging globally make it pertinent to address the settler-colonial dynamics and relations in which neoforagers operate. Neoforagers often enjoy a privileged status associated with ethnic, economic, and political hegemonic groups, learn from indigenous knowledge and imagery, and operate on lands from which others were/are excluded—in this case Palestinians whose access to land, maneuverability, and ability to practice foraging is restricted or prohibited (Badarin, 2015; Braverman, 2009; Eghbariah, 2017; Manna, 2020). From the perspective of settler-colonial critique neoforaging tends to be framed as a settling practice and movement, but there are some important points to consider in this regard.

First, Israeli neoforagers mostly come from a Jewish and settler background, but neoforaging as a theoretical concept and practice can also apply to indigenous people that are reconnecting with lost or severed foraging traditions, including contemporary Palestinians. Many aspects of the foraging practices discussed may be relevant to both neoforagers and traditional foragers. Moreover, foraging practices can be found among refugee immigrants and work migrants in marginalized social strata—people settling-in whose complex situations do not necessarily match the stereotypical depiction of hegemonic settler-colonizers. The point here is that the dichotomy of settlers and natives is important morally and politically but a discussion of foraging practice and experiences entails messier and less binary differentiations.

Second, although neoforagers are organic to a settler-colonial order settler-colonial critique and framing (by scholars or activists) is not necessarily part of emic neoforager sensibilities. Being an Israeli anthropologist, I am both part of a settler-colonial order and consciously interested in grappling with it critically. However, many of my interlocutors would require a long introduction to settler-colonial theory and its propositions (and time to digest them) before they consider themselves the relevant case study that they obviously are. This is not necessarily due to disagreement or denial, and in many cases they would be exceptionally sympathetic and receptive to such framing precisely thanks to their engagement in neoforaging, as I will show in this article. Rather, the common framing and focus of neoforagers is typically ignorant of said discourse due to a deep rift between Palestinian and Jewish socio-cultural ecologies and daily experience. Ignorance can itself promote colonial dynamics of elimination, but as an ethnographer the fact that such framing may be so alien to my interlocutors’ reasoning warrants caution and unease, even as I acknowledge its importance. In contrast, more-than-human theory is a far better framework for thinking with neoforagers and shares much with their own sensibilities. The pairing of postcolonial critique with more-than-human theory is a theoretical challenge well worth attempting, and I aim to follow a growing body of scholarly forays into the study of more-than-human entanglements in the colonial contexts of Israel/Palestine (e.g. Braverman, 2009; Gutkowski, 2021; Mazzawi and Sa'ar, 2018within a special themed issue in this Journal, see also Braverman, 2021; Salih and Corry, 2020). These works mostly foregrounded Palestinian perspectives, and related works argued that not making indigenous perspectives center risks reifying settler-colonial modes of domination (Snelgrove et al., 2014). Since my research foregrounds the perspectives, experiences, and transformations of Israeli neoforagers, I take care to heed scholarly suggestions and do so in ways that critically engage Israel's recognition politics (Badarin, 2021), “incorporate deeper colonial histories and their legacies [and] pay greater attention to reciprocity and relatedness” (Adams, 2019), promote “land-centered literacies which are based on an intimate connection with and knowledge of the land.” (Snelgrove et al., 2014: 2), contribute to the critical understanding of “those who adopt and legitimize a ‘way of thinking with an imperialist's mind’,” and support and further the argument that “solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples must be grounded in actual practices and place-based relationships, and be approached as incommensurable but not incompatible” (p. 3).

A more thorough discussion of Israeli neoforaging vis-à-vis Palestinian indigeneity, foregrounding their paradoxical relations and politics, necessitates further ethnographic engagement with indigenous points of view on neoforaging that exceeds the scope of this text. It is the subject of another paper currently under work.

Connection, immediacy, and transformation in neoforager praxis

When Rona arrives in the forest, she quickly removes her sandals. The ground is full of rocks, some of which are fractured and quite sharp, but she doesn’t worry: touching unshod feet to the ground—she explains to the children in her classes—is akin to opening one's eyes or removing earmuffs from one's ears. “The ground tells you how to walk it,” she says. The painful feedback may force you to slow down, but it just makes you pay better attention. It makes you careful. Counter-intuitively perhaps, taking off your shoes reduces the chance of injuring yourself seriously, and dramatically improves your chances to see wildlife. It teaches you to step gently, with care. It makes you more silent, more attentive, and more aware. If you step too hard or too fast—it will hurt. “Actually, everything will hurt in the beginning” she tells them, “But with time, as your brain gets used to the sensory input, you will learn to walk more easily, more lightly and more flowingly.” Within minutes most of the children have thrown their footwear aside and are practicing “foxwalking”; an ultra-slow and measured gait in which the weight is gradually and controllably shifted from one foot that is maintained stable, on the ground, to the other that is kept weightless as it feels around for safe footing. A few kids are more hesitant though. This is still too new and too far out of their comfort zone.

Rona's sandals are merely a couple of cut-out rubber soles laced with leather straps. She wears them daily if it isn’t too cold, including around town and while driving. Rona swapped her old commercial sandals for these self-crafted ones a couple years ago. First she experimented with making the soles from leather, then from car tires, but eventually settled for “proper” sole-rubber sheets sourced from a store selling professional shoemakers’ equipment. These rubber sheets are thinner and lighter than tire-rubber, providing a better feeling of the ground. The straps are goat skin, which she takes pride in having processed herself at a skinning and tanning workshop. The design is inspired by Tarahumara “huaraches,” popularized through the barefoot-running trend (see Lieberman et al., 2020). Many SH members began to make and use such sandals. In the forest, they are very useful when one needs to go faster than what barefoot allows, or walk through denser thicket, or when thorns become bigger and tougher during the drier months. In the city they keep the feet away from the muck. In truth, heavy metals, industrial oils, rusty particles and soot scare Rona more than forest dirt or critters. Also, walking around barefoot in the city will attract too much negative attention and snarky remarks, and in some places she might be denied entry. The sandals are a good compromise. They provide protection but maintain a good degree of freedom and connection.

“Connection” is a key emic term in neoforager jargon, commonly invoked by neoforagers when explaining the main motivations and aspirations concerning their engagement in such praxis. In an era characterized by “disconnect” between humans and nature—as the argument is often framed—returning to foraging lifeways is all about “connecting,” “becoming connected,” and acting “in a connected manner.” This connection-oriented perspective, not at all foreign to broader contemporary sentiments, permeates neoforager praxis, ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Foraging-related skills, including Rona's foxwalking and sandal making, are considered “techniques for connection,” comparable to the “arts of noticing” and ways of becoming-with discussed in multispecies scholarship. “Being more connected” is the neoforager ideal. When encountering ethical dilemmas one should “connect” to receive guidance, “act from a connected place,” and be aware of one's connections. As a result, neoforager lifeways can be described as heavily focused on “connectionwork”—simultaneously a connection-oriented ontology and an ongoing effort to achieve better connectivity in the world (Appel, 2021).

Inspired by indigenous perspectives, at least as they are represented in media or scholarship, neoforagers are proponents of animistic worldviews, envisioning humans as part of a vast and entangled web of life (again comparable to multispecies scholarship). In the neoforager view, partly borne of intense outdoor experience and partly echoing Western romantic fantasies, the world is animate and filled with living things and more-than-human agency. Unruly non-human nature all too often avoids capture and evades discipline. Living things—human, animal, and other—are always more than what their taxonomic classification might indicate. In the face of such uncertainty, neoforagers seek to connect—to meet directly, without mediation. The industrial predicament, as exemplified by shod feet, is that of a detachment between humans and the world—a “disconnect” that rather than the absence of connection would be better described as the result of something coming in-between and hindering connections—an interfering obstruction.

It is interesting to consider here the literal meaning of “immediacy,” a concept that anthropological studies of hunter-gatherers pinpointed as a pivotal aspect of foraging lifeways. The original and common use of “immediacy” is in the temporal sense, implying the immediate versus delayed consumption of resources (Woodburn, 1982). However, anthropologist Nurit Bird-David suggested that immediacy may be considered more broadly as an aspect of forager sociality (Bird-David, 1994), and discussed how it pertains to various attributes associated with small-scale forager groups; including group intimacy, sharing, egalitarian or anti-hierarchical social dynamics, environmental perceptions, and particularly their so-called animistic inclinations (Bird-David and Naveh, 2008; Naveh and Bird-David, 2014). Bird-David and Naveh's work correlates a “departure from immediacy” (Bird-David and Naveh, 2008; Naveh and Bird-David, 2014) with the disappearance of some of these cultural tendencies, not merely referring to temporality but to a much broader sense of spatial and social proximity. For example, foraging for self-consumption versus wage labor (Naveh and Bird-David, 2014), or being present together versus imagined communities (Bird-David, 2017). In neoforager terms, the departure from immediacy disconnects. This suggests a fascinating literal interpretation of “immediacy”; highlighting the mediatory factors and actors that affect relations or connections, that are typically seen by neoforagers as a challenge to true “connection,” and the potential source of hierarchy, conflict, exploitation, and discord.

For neoforagers, foraging practices—described as both “connective” and “transformative”—are essentially about replacing mediated connections with im-mediate³ (or less-mediated) connections, or connections that disconnect with connections that connect (Appel, 2021). For example, removing shoes eliminates a mediating element and all its associated social and material baggage—entire industrial assemblages that produce footwear, transport them, sell them, and facilitate their use. Neoforaging practices can ideally eliminate certain dependencies on industrial assemblages and exchange their mediated connections for less-mediated ones. Foraging mushrooms and other wild species replaces store-bought and industrially grown food. Making fire by rubbing sticks together, foraged and fashioned from local plants, eliminates the need for industrial matches or lighters. Constructing and residing in a good “primitive” shelter makes neoforagers question the necessity of permanent housing. Experiencing such alternative connections results in practical and ontological changes described by practitioners as “transformative”—life altering. The capacity to remove mediation is associated with newfound, richer and more intimate and organic relationships—with the earth, with mushrooms and plants, with animals, with fire and the elements, with other people, and with oneself.

Neoforager testimonies explicitly convey such self-professed transformations. A friend posted on her Facebook wall:
I started to go deeper into ancient life crafts 6 years ago … I fell in love with the world that I discovered. The Avnei Derech gathering⁴ was an identity [shaping] experience for me, of connection to the earth, to community, to the ancient way of life which always called to me. After that I attended an animal tracking course … and a life-skills course … which showed me that there are other ways than those I knew to “be” in nature [quotation marks in original]. As a child I visited many natural places with my family, but always felt as though there was some glass pane separating me from the “outside.” For years I knew that there's another way, and prayed for that pane to shatter. Today, when I'm in the outdoors I feel much more at home, and less like some alien visitor.”

Such transformative removal of obstructions or mediation is a common narrative among neoforagers, and rather than being merely performative or ontological these perceptual and practical transformations are accompanied by empirical changes in lifestyle. To illustrate: both Rona and I are members of SH's “instructors’ circle,” comprised of more than 150 active affiliated instructors who turned nature education and mentoring into a serious career, leaving old jobs and positions in the process. Several SH members not only became fascinated with wild plants and foraging but made it their full-time passion. One of our peers, for example, alternates between working as a herbalist, botany college lecturer, and a plant foraging guide. He says none of these were even on his mind before becoming exposed to foraging skills and wild plants. Another became hooked onto basketry and constantly explores new techniques and designs, teaches workshops, and occasionally produces baskets to-order. Before this he used to work as a contractor in real-estate renovations. A few became accomplished woodworkers. Some neoforagers are professional archaeologists involved in experimental archaeology projects, combining love for skills and crafts such as flintknapping or skin-tanning with academic research and scientific research. A fellow instructor who also teaches foraging workshops collaborates with chefs and restaurants, consulting them on including wild foods in their cuisine. A former stage actor left a successful and high-profile career to found a renegade “forest theater,” performing self-selected plays in the woods using minimal accessories and props. Many neoforagers make a transition to self-employment. Some quit high-paying jobs, for instance in Israel's prestigious high-tech sector, to become nature educators and foraging guides—often sacrificing income for what they perceive to be an overall better quality, less strenuous, and more ethical lifestyle.

A deepening involvement in neoforaging led many neoforagers to change their place and manner of residence, often seeking simpler homes (in some cases tents, yurts, or geodesic domes) but with better access to suitable outdoors spaces, and in some cases desiring to be closer to neoforaging peers—explained as “seeking community.”

To varying degrees, neoforagers enrich their diet with wild foods—mostly foraged plants and fungi, but occasionally involving homestead animals or roadkill. For most these are small symbolic or health-conscious augmentations to an otherwise consumerist diet, focusing mainly on fresh greens or herbs and spices. But for some who put significant time and effort into foraging and processing calorically dense foods (e.g. processing and storing acorns, carob pods, dry fruits, grains, or digging tubers when they are available) the part of wild foods in their daily food consumption can be quite substantial. The variability in intensity can also be a seasonal matter, mushroom season being a good example.

There is a good reason that these life-changing transformations rely on experiences that take place in “wild” settings, away from human spaces and influences. The unruliness that makes “wild” or “natural” spaces what they are—their inherent positioning beyond or betwixt more disciplined and supervised spaces—makes them a suitable place for unmediated and unruly encounters. In turn, these encounters may result in unsettling experiences and further transformation.

Unruly spaces, unsettling encounters

In the short walk from the edge of the neighborhood to the patch of woods that my peers and I call “forest,” the soundscape changes significantly. The constant noises of construction sites and loaded trucks, the workers’ yells and reverse-gear beeps, the barking of dogs and the whine of vacuum cleaners—all become duller, muffled by the surrounding vegetation. This allows the low shush of Mediterranean breeze, the chirping of birds and the rustle of pines to gradually fade-in, becoming more noticeable, sharper, and crisper.

The particular “forest,” where my co-instructors and I conduct many of our classes and excursions and where I met Hammoudi is commonly known as “The Goats’ Hill” (“Giv'at ha'Izim”). In Israeli land-use terms it is defined as an “open space” or “green lung” set on a rare unconstructed slope descending from Mt. Carmel towards the coast within the municipality of Haifa. Several large neighborhoods in Haifa sit on similar hills to the north, south, and east. This one, however, somehow still resists development. There were and still are plans to construct yet another neighborhood on top of it, but despite the efforts of entrepreneurs and city officials these plans encounter resistance from residents of the adjacent neighborhood and environmental activists. In conversations with dedicated protestors I learned that the land is separated into many small private plots, and that the success of the resistance so-far is partially attributed to the desire of certain plot-owners themselves to keep the hill undeveloped and available to the public as a natural open space. Meanwhile, the hill is a place where locals and visitors engage in activities such as hiking, trail running, cycling, dog-walking, and birdwatching, and a preferred location for youth-movement activities, birthday celebrations, and weekend picnics.

For neoforagers the hill presents a wealth of opportunities, resources, and interactions; with dense uncultivated flora, and with fauna such as wild boar, porcupines, hedgehogs, foxes, mongoose, hyrax, falcons and kestrels, owls, songbirds, turtles, agamas, snakes, bats, and even a few striped hyenas. There are edible and medicinal plants to forage, lots of flint for making stone tools, materials for basketry, cordage making and shelter construction, and animal tracks and trails to follow and study. The warm-dry seasons bring sweet carob pods, buckthorn berries, ripe wild-growing olives, and caper buds and fruits. Winter and spring bring wild greens such as mallow, mustards, nettles, milkthistle, fresh asparagus stems, colorful stretches of wild flowers, and plenty of mushrooms. “Neglected” and undeveloped, the multi-species diversity and symphony of the hill is contrasted by the organized, cultivated, streamlined, paved-over, yet dissonant and cacophonic space of the suburban streets, less than a hundred meters away.

As Tsing so eloquently conveyed, multispecies landscapes tend to persist at the unruly edges and seams of imperial space. She describes the “Anthropocene landscape” as “patchy” and simultaneously juggling processes of “modular simplification” on the one hand and “feral proliferation” on the other (Tsing et al., 2019). Sandwiched between encroaching suburban homes, highways, and industrial districts, the slowly-shrinking “goats’ hill” provides a significantly less-disciplined refuge for all beings, both other-than-human and human. Ever-since the emergence of disciplined anthropogenic spaces designed for increased productivity, predictability, assurance, and control at the expense of feral biodiversity, foragers (from hunter-gatherers to opportunist mushroom hunters) relied on such patches of biopolitical “refugia” (Keppel et al., 2012) for carrying on their exploits and lifeways.

Unfortunately for people engaged in foraging, such unruly yet accessible patches are harder to locate than one might expect. The Israeli landscape is dominated by patterns of enclosure (Fields, 2017) that are fundamental to industrial capitalist lifeways, and further utilized for nation-state governance (and in settler-colonial settings—for colonial purposes).

Most of the vaster and wilder open spaces in Israel are either protected nature reserves or military training grounds (with a surprising overlap between the two categories). A third type, preferred by neoforagers because it doesn’t prohibit civilian activity and engagement as much, is land managed by the JNF-KKL (Jewish National Fund).

The JNF is a non-profit organization dedicated to buying and managing land for Jewish settlement. It was founded in 1901, during the Ottoman rule in Palestine, and continued to acquire land and run development projects throughout the British mandate and well after the formation of the Israeli state. After 1948 the JNF served a major role in the appropriation of land in Israel, where “absentee” properties (lands from which Palestinians either fled or were displaced or killed) were sold by the state to the JNF (Forman & Kedar, 2004). When JNF-developed lands were transferred to the Israel Land Administration (ILA, a governmental agency) in 1960, it had owned 13% of the lands in Israel (Kretzmer, 1990). In that transfer forested lands remained under JNF management, and it was thereafter recognized as the state's main afforestation agency. In many cases JNF forests hide ruins of Palestinian villages whose inhabitants were displaced and are prohibited from returning. These settler-Nature forests are also visibly different from the landscapes that they eliminated and replaced: JNF afforestation favored pine trees, planted in large quantities to recreate its policy makers’ cultural imaginations of European forests at the expense of species that characterized Palestinian cultivars, notably olive groves (Bardenstein, 1999; Braverman, 2009). In her book titled “Planted Flags: Trees, Land and Law in Israel/Palestine,” ethnographer and legal scholar Irus Braverman (2009) provided a comprehensive account of the JNF's utilization of tree planting and erecting memorials for establishing Zionist dominion and absenting Palestinian presence. Braverman's account interestingly discusses that although absenting and replacement are undeniable JNF agendas, its afforestation project isn't necessarily motivated by nefarious or conspiratorial sentiments. This seems particularly relevant since what Braverman's ethnography describes as a revolutionary transition in the role of the JNF from a development agency to an environmental organization between 1990 and 1995 (p. 55). Like Braverman, my introduction to the JNF as a schoolboy was through a little blue fundraising box that stood in the corner of our classroom, inviting us to participate in a national project to—in our simple understanding—increase and empower nature. For my generation the JNF is commonly viewed as the caretaker of nation-wide and accessible nature, for public benefit.

The reason I mention this isn't to absolve the JNF from its settler-colonial responsibility. Rather, it is to lay the ground for my observation that even though it has been nefariously effective with afforestation playing a role in dynamics of settling and replacement, the accessibility of JNF forests to the public and their relative ineffectiveness in erasing evidence on the ground leaves space for the unruliness and unsettling encounters that I discuss in this article. Desolated “Arab villages” are often encountered along marked trails in school fieldtrips or weekend excursions. All too often they remain silent for their visitors, but as I will illustrate shortly, neoforaging involves perceptive and practical engagements that may animate such ruins in ways that mainstream activities generally do not.

A fourth major type of open spaces is agricultural plots, that neoforagers may find agreeable if they are “wild” enough. And lastly, a fifth type (applicable to the “Goat's Hill”) is lands that are owned privately or publicly but are still marked in official planning and zoning systems as designated open spaces, limiting their development and ensuring public accessibility. In some cases, municipalities or private owners manage these lands closely, for example as cultivated public parks. However, sometimes these lands are left neglected—typically because the owners would rather not invest in them nor sell them until their designation is changed by the official planning committees, which would transform them into valuable developable plots. Foraging activities require a specific combination of bureaucratic conditions; unconstructed and “wild” space that is not over-protected or closed-off.

Evidently, neoforager practices and perceptions, as well as the unruly patches that enable their lifeways are part of a biopolitical mosaic that involves other people, the state and its agents, adjacent disciplined spaces, etc. In most cases neoforagers operate on land which is not “theirs,” and this bears on their practice and ethos. Negotiations with land owners, authorities, and co-present Others are often important. In several cases, SH children classes take place on private plots (e.g. on agrarian land) with the owners’ permission. In some cases permission is not requested and the activity is simply kept under the radar. Often, specific exogenous limitations and challenges must be addressed, such as particular sensitivities by neighbors or officials to fire-making, usage of water sources, and anthropogenic effects on wildlife. In KKL-JNF managed forests, SH sometimes seek the approval and support of JNF foresters and Israel Nature and Parks Authority inspectors. In some cases, they establish particular relationships with city officials, firefighter emergency centers, co-present ranchers, or nearby neighbors. A common slogan in SH is “the earth is not ours—we are the earth's.”⁵ Attachment to a certain territory—a regular campsite for instance—is not understood in terms of possession so much as belonging. In most cases this fits into an ideology which recognizes possessiveness and property as generally problematic, but it is also an enforced reality: the land is often owned by others, and being publicly accessible it hosts others’ presence and activity just as much as it does SH's.

Neoforagers therefore explore the open spaces in their vicinity with a keen eye not only for wildness but also for hints of human presence and interference, often with at least some awareness of the land's official zoning status. The perceived problem is not human intervention per-se (which would go against the very presence of neoforagers in natural places). Rather, the perceived problem is one of interference in their ability to experience direct connection with the “forest.” The unruliness of a patch—reliant on its seclusion from external affects—is of utmost importance to neoforager praxis, as it is precisely what makes unmediated connections possible.

In SH's pedagogical approach “the forest” is not just the settings, but possibly the main actor—“the real instructor” as is often stated. Its non-human presence is considered the core element of SH classes and activities, and the human instructors’ role is mostly to facilitate the direct interaction between the students and the forest environment, including its myriad co-present entities. Forested areas with laxer restrictions on access and use are considered most suitable because they offer diverse flora, habitat for fauna, and obstruct the view of adjacent human activities (a bi-directional obstruction that works both ways), but if need be then all sorts of spaces without intensive human management would suffice. In fact, the term “forest” (“ya'ar”) is more commonly used by neoforagers than “nature” or “wilderness” in reference to their neoforaging places and is applied to any sort-of-wild area where the presence of non-human life is strong. On occasion, it may even be applied to desert scenes with very little trees, shrubland, or intensely-managed groves that have almost no underbrush. Whether it is technically a proper “forest” or not matters less than how biodiverse, vital, and unruly it is. This unruliness and the unmediated connectivity it allows involve some risk, but are valued for their other-than-human vitality.

When thinking about unmediated encounters neoforagers often focus on connections to animals and plants, and these are indeed major sources of transformative experiences. Encountering wild boar, for example, makes for a sense-shaking experience with another powerful mammalian presence—an unignorable personhood with communicative capacity that just dares you not to pay it due attention. In some cases, however, the encounter concerns other humans, their histories, and enduring effects on the landscape. Foraging involves roaming landscapes with a keen eye for detail and the almost forensic mindset of a tracker or aspiring hunter (Liebenberg, 2013; Lye, 2021). It inherently views “wilderness” as a complex fullness rather than bare emptiness. “Terra Nullius” (a legal term implying land that is “empty,” unowned, and available for owning) is an often-referenced element of the settler-colonial process, entailing the elimination of the Other's presence from colonized space (Verancini, 2011; Wolfe, 2006). It is often also associated with the concept of a “wilderness” or “nature” implying an uninhabited, uncultivated, and unowned land, and with the naturalization of Western and so-called “White” perceptions of land as property (see: Baldwin et al., 2011; Davis, 2019; McLean, 2013; Morgensen, 2011; Suzuki, 2017). This and other spatial elements of colonialism have been studied extensively in the context of Israel/Palestine, specifically concerning Zionist practices of colonization, elimination, and replacement (e.g. Azaryahu and Golan, 2001; Badarin, 2015; Braverman, 2011; Collins-Kreiner et al., 2006; Dallasheh, 2015; Frantzman et al., 2012; Gutkowski, 2018; Kedar, 2000; Kotef, 2015; McKee, 2011; Nasasra, 2012; Peteet, 2017; Shihade, 2014; Sousa et al., 2019; Svirsky, 2010; Tatour, 2019; Yahel et al., 2012). However, it has been pointed out that Terra Nullius is also a rather fragile colonial fantasy: The presence of ruins and evidence of ruination, and the disruptive power of “intimate encounters” trouble linear narratives of elimination and replacement, allow for multiple histories to be co-present in a given space, and may fracture constructions of emptiness and uncover the ambivalences at the heart of Zionist narratives (Leshem, 2013; Leshem, 2017). Entangled with indigenous lifeways, natural elements can operate as “living archives” that may “awaken and re-populate the post-settlement ruins, unearthing the past and making colonial erasure and control unstable in the present” (Salih and Corry, 2020: 390–391).

In our regular excursions at the Goats’ Hill my fellow neoforagers and I sometimes find ancient stone tools. It turns out that the hill was a center of stone tool production. Remnants of these ancient industries and workshops still lie scattered all around us, hidden in plain sight. Almost every time, and with different people, these encounters elicited strong emotions and reactions among those present. “You mean, I'm holding up something that someone made, what, thousands of years ago?!” is a common comment. In some cases, those reacting are already familiar with certain stone tools, and may have even used them. Two summers ago, one of the children in our group discovered a Neolithic adze head,⁶ which he instinctively compared side-by-side with my own hafted flint adze that he had used only moments earlier to hollow out a wooden bowl. Realizing not only that other people lived right here before us, but also getting a visceral feel of their presence, technical capabilities, mental processes, intentions, and aspirations—is a transformative experience altering our perception of time and space. Suddenly, we look around at our campsite and see an ancient industrial complex. We see a place where youngsters just like our students probably apprenticed in stone-tool production. We see a place which was familiar and known to them as it is to us and perhaps more. We begin to ask questions about how they lived here, and what their experience was compared to ours. We share these visions by making up stories about this land, now including these characters and their imagined deeds. They have become our “diachronic neighbors” (Weiss, 2011)—people who reside in the same places albeit at different temporalities. Moreover, developing such a longue durée perspective of life on the hill and of the capabilities of beings that predate H. Sapiens puts our own current practices and lifeways into a rather limited and humbling context.

On another occasion we (Rona, myself, and the children in our class) encountered a few rugged olive trees while exploring off-trail and largely “bare” parts of the hill, a kilometer or two down the rocky slope. Wild-growing olives are common in the wider vicinity, but not so much on the hill itself. They immediately attracted our attention because olive saplings and shoots make for excellent bows and arrows. “What are these olives doing here?” we wondered. Looking around some more we noted a pile of big limestone rocks. Though it was hard to tell through the lush springtime vegetation, we managed to make out the shape of what used to be a small wall. Screening the surrounding brush, it suddenly became apparent to us that this used to be a cultivated terrace. Was there a bustling human presence on the hill sometime between those stone-age industries we were already aware of and more recent times? Was the hill methodically cultivated, rather than just used as goats’ pasture—as the hill's current name may imply?

Rummaging through books on Haifa's history and looking at archaeological surveys available online following our findings on the hill, I learned that the terraces have been dated to the Byzantine, Crusader, and Mameluke periods (Masarwa, 2011; Spivak, 2006). Most of the archaeological finds on the hill, according to surveys, are indeed from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods (Olami et al., 2003), but could this be due to the focus of the surveyors? Old maps and brief mentions in books and newspapers merely hint at the hill's history between these older periods and more recent history, leaving much unanswered. It turns out that the “Goat's Hill” was previously called “Ha'Kinyan” hill, named after a private Jewish land-acquisition venture that operated during British mandate of Palestine. Apparently, the company later divided the land into small plots and sold it to its current private owners and the ILA. The lower part of the Hill was called “al-Iraq” and was once owned by private owners from the Palestinian village of al-Tira. Another arabic name associated with the hill is “a'Sahalat,” appearing on maps such as Eberhard Friedrich von Mülinen's map of the Carmel (von Mülinen, 1907). The area in general seems to have been associated with lands connected to al-Tira. It may have been used for agriculture continuously up until the days of the British mandate, or maybe it was used as a wild-growing pasture for goats throughout the Ottoman period and had an older cultivated past forgotten by then (olive cultivation is well known to have been a hallmark of the region as far back as the bronze age).

These anecdotes concerning the hill trace a complex and patchy history. Settler-colonial dynamics play a crucial role in it, but the messiness of layered ruinations and their blurring under both human-manufactured and wild growing natures evade sweeping generalizations such as those sometimes made in the literature that symbolically associate pines with Jews and olives with Palestinians. In my encounter with Hammoudi, both mushroom types we discussed (the one that is familiar to European Jews from abroad and the one Hammoudi's father taught him to love) are “mushrooms of the pine,” albeit different species. The pines on the Goat's Hill, specifically, precede Jewish activity—they were either planted by the British, or by German Templers in the 19th century. There are even claims that small pockets of pine were native to the Carmel range. Like many immigrant species they became part of the local ecology, and of native biographies like Hammoudi's.

When did the cultivation of the hill occur? Who cultivated it? How intense was human presence on the hill regardless of terrace cultivation, for example by herders from al-Tira? Was it a sort of “commons,” or did someone have a claim to it and was displaced? Much more research needed to resolve the mysteries of the Goats’ Hill, but the mere questions are unsettling. The abovementioned incidents illustrate how unmediated encounters in unruly spaces can—at least for neoforagers themselves—undermine hegemonic discipline, transform perceptions of space and time, unsettle old narratives, inspire inquiry, and potentially reshape future encounters. Neoforagers almost inherently view “wilderness” not as Terra Nullius but rather as full of life begging to be discovered and engaged. And although initially neoforager motivations focus on connection with the non-human, in most cases they necessarily shift towards a much broader recognition of co-present others. An active utilitarian fascination with the practices of people who inhabit similar environments, or even the very same places, makes the presence of these past and present Others very vivid and relatable.

Encounters such as those described in this section are “unsettling”—in that they unsettle preexisting conceptions, subvert hegemonic “recognition politics” (see: Badarin, 2021) and make salient Other lives and lifeways. But paradoxically, they can also be a settling-in, as in settlers becoming more closely entangled with a place and its life.

The revelations discussed in this section show all too clearly that neoforagers are operating in a settler-colonial setting, and are organic to a settler-colonial order. Despite encountering evidence of Other lives and having a deepening awareness and appreciation of indigenous know-how and, actual intimacies between neoforagers and contemporary indigenous people are rather scarce. In the following section I discuss encounters between neoforagers and Palestinian foragers. As my encounter with Hammoudi began to illustrate, such connections hold much potential, but they are not without troubles.

Neoforagers and foraging others in Israel/Palestine

In the last neoforager gathering that I attended, one of the workshops attracted special attention due to its instructor. She was an old Bedouin lady called Faiza, who demonstrated and taught one of her traditional crafts; weaving on a ground-loom. Her workshop and presence at the gathering followed earlier collaborations with Jewish women who revered her as a traditional craftsperson. Notable among them is Yonit Crystal, a well-known figure in the Israeli crafts scene, whose life-work concerns the documentation and preservation of local indigenous traditions and practices. Yonit works closely with Palestinian, Bedouin, and Ethiopian experts, mostly women elders but also men, whom she wishes to empower as teachers of essential cultural skills and heritage. Most of her collaborative workshops involve people coming to learn from these experts in their own homes (“to properly respect the crafts and craftspeople in the context of their own traditions, lifeways and places,” in Yonit's own words). The workshop and Faiza herself, as well as her accompanying family members, were welcomed with much enthusiasm and respect by the neoforager participants of the gathering. Nevertheless, they stood out. They looked differently, dressed differently, talked differently, and didn't walk around or intermingle as much. Moreover, I thought their body language and general mannerism reflected quite clearly their discomfort in the unfamiliar setting of a somewhat “hippie” neoforager event. While neoforagers can share much with more traditionally foraging people and craftspeople in terms of specific practices and know-how, different backgrounds often present a challenge to interaction and collaboration.

There are extremely few Palestinians (or members of other minorities, for that matter) in the Israeli neoforaging scene. In SH there is only one active Palestinian member in a circle of around 150 affiliates. Generally, and in my assessment somewhat similarly to neoforaging elsewhere in the world, Israeli neoforagers tend to come from hegemonic socioeconomic, ethnic, and political backgrounds. We must be very careful with the labels and sweeping generalizations we make here, as there is much diversity among neoforgers in many aspects, but in a rough overview: Israeli neoforagers tend to be of Jewish ethnicity, from the socioeconomic middle-class or higher, from highly-educated and relatively secular environments and families with strong connections to the intellectual, academic, creative, self-employed sector, and mostly (though not clear-cut at all) identifying with leftist political views (once Zionist mainstream, nowadays a minority-elite). One of the main reasons for this is that neoforaging involves associating oneself with behaviors and substances which deviate from hegemonic mainstream norms, such as getting dirty, violating dress codes, hanging around in unruly places that others shun or even fear, coming into contact with animals, and more. Engaging in such praxis without attracting scrutiny demands social credit and a privileged status. Unlike traditional foragers for whom foraging is a necessary dietary element—sometimes even crucial for managing economic poverty—neoforaging practices emerge from lifestyles in which the problem isn't scarcity but rather overabundance.

In this context, it has been claimed that legal restrictions on foraging were deliberately set up to hinder Palestinians as foragers-by-tradition, and that they are more likely to be suspected and fined for commercial foraging even when truly engaged in it for self-consumption (Eghbariah, 2017; see also Davis, 2019 for a similar discussion regarding the US). In an even more volatile example: Palestinians practicing camouflage techniques, archery, and stalking (as many neoforagers do) may be suspected of illegal activities by state authorities, or even marked as a potential security threat (see Twite, 2009 for a relevant discussion). The point is, neoforagers must able to pass such deviant behaviors as positive and harmless “connection to nature” practices that do not endanger social order.

Thus, the involvement of Palestinians as well as other non-hegemonic groups in the neoforager scene is often difficult. In addition to the abovementioned risk of being marked for deviant behaviors, members of such groups may react to “typical” Israeli neoforagers negatively given their relative asymmetrical positioning and power-relations—with emotions ranging from suspicion to contempt. On one hand, the keen interest neoforagers have in foraging know-how and in forager lifeways provides fascinating opportunities for collaboration. On the other hand, this very interest is often portrayed among scholars in terms of cultural appropriation and further exploitation. In the case of Palestinians, neoforager praxis may be viewed as Zionist settlers attempting to claim indigeneity at the expense of the Palestinian indigenous status and political struggle, which would deter many from the scene or trigger refusal (McKee, 2019). When direct encounters between neoforagers and foraging others occur, and even more so when they occur in unruly landscapes, foraging practices and wild nature seem to be effective connectors. Several neoforager peers and interlocutors told me about chance meetings like Hammoudi's and mine that resulted in what they thought was a positive exchange and a collaborative foraging session, despite some apparent differences and difficulties. In one case, Rona met an elderly Palestinian couple foraging wild herbs. She told me how they taught her what they were looking for, while she helped them fill their bags. In the process both she and them discussed their families, children and grandchildren, food preparation, health issues, and foraging experiences. In another case, a Palestinian couple on their day trip with young children—seemingly from a more urbanized background—approached another SH instructor and inquired about the plants he was foraging. He showed them and explained, and they shared stories about how the fathers’ grandparents would take him and his siblings to forage and later prepare certain herbs. Some of these were the same plants they were looking at now, and the father was excited to return to something which he remembered fondly but only vaguely and couldn't recognize on his own. In another case, a meeting between two neoforagers and some goat herders near their camp sites began with tensioned suspicion, but developed into sharing smoke, jokes, stories, and know-how around a small campfire into the night. In yet another case, my interlocutor recounted how his presence with a co-foraging Palestinian family deterred an observing state official from harassing them and accusing them of commercial foraging.

There seems to be some growing interest in reviving traditional crafts and lifeways among Palestinians in Israel—especially among those who are themselves coming at it from a more urbanized, postindustrial background, often in association with progressive and globalist environmentalist discourses on locality and sustainability in addition to nationalist activism. This has led to slightly more systematic interfaces between Palestinians and the Israeli neoforaging scene. Those involved seem happy to engage with the subject matter not just for asserting Palestinian identity and resisting Zionist occupation—but also for sheer pleasure, aesthetics, and nature connection sensibilities that are perhaps not so different from those experienced and expressed by Jewish foragers (e.g. Manna, 2020; Meneley, 2021; Shehadeh, 2009).

Palestinian Lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh (2009) and Visual artist and activist Joumana Manna (2020) both write on traveling through nature in Palestine, foraging wild greens and witnessing the land change over time due to encroaching settlements, constructed highways and industrial zones, ethnic, political and religious tensions, etc. Their accounts are painfully relatable for anyone involved in foraging: The segments about wandering out, foraging and witnessing obstructive development read like a foraging peer's while the occupied context they describe make obvious the difference in power relations and security. When Manna describes the plants she forages during COVID-19 lockdown—they are some of the same plants we'd forage, and my interlocutors’ reaction to the lockdown was the same. When she recounts picking, processing, and preparation techniques I can imagine the motions, feel them in my muscle memory and compare them to my own. Chapter 6 in Shehadeh's book “Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape” the author writes about his encounter with an Israeli settler next to a favored water stream. The scene has many parallels to my encounter with Hammoudi and to my friends’ stories. Eventually sharing a smoke with the settler, Shehadeh writes:
I was fully aware of the looming tragedy and war that lay ahead for both of us, Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jew. But for now, he and I could sit together for a respite, for a smoke, joined temporarily by our mutual love of the land. (2009: 203)

My encounter with Hammoudi in this article's opening vignette illustrates both the prospect of positive collaboration and its complexity and partiality: On the one hand, the common ground (literally) on which we met was solid. As fellow mushroom hunters we had something to connect through and bond over. If somehow we found ourselves cut-off from everything that happens outside the Goats’ Hill, perhaps that thing we shared would have become of utmost substantial and existential primacy, fueling endogenic collaboration. However, it was not an untroubled encounter. Differences in preferences, gear, appearance, ethnicity, language, accessibility, privilege, and the invisible-yet-present social and cultural baggage that each of us dragged with him into the woods… it appears as though our nationalities, class, and other interfering “disconnective” affects were right there with us.

Conclusion: encroaching mediation

In the past decade there have been several SH groups that included participants from both Palestinian and Jewish families. Some of these groups were defined as “bilingual” and the activity was conducted in both Hebrew and Arabic. A couple of years ago I was involved in the co-instruction of several Palestinian families (in partnership with a Palestinian neoforaging friend). We practiced shelter construction with the parents and their children and enjoyed pleasant camping sessions. All this took place next to unidentified ruins within a JNF-managed forest, originally planted by the British and still bearing the name of Winston Churchill, on the outskirts of Nazareth—the biggest Arab city in Israel—with a large military enclosure close by and surrounded by highways and intersections. Our genuine interpersonal encounter bore a sensuous certainty and intimate heartfelt affection to which the disciplined categories, labels, and discourse of our macro-context seemed completely unrelated. It was also obvious that this experience is temporary and fragile—an alternative world of unruly immediacy encased within a miniscule “forest,” beyond which all sorts of disconnective affects lurked.

I would argue that such encroachment is not only typical of settler-colonial nation-states, but is at the very heart of capitalist, industrial, and “civilized” world order. Settler-colonialism and nation-state governmentality provide a particularly powerful context for discussing unruliness and immediacy: The statement “colonialism is a structure, not an event” is often invoked to explain the resilience of colonial dynamics in the face of decolonization efforts (Veracini, 2011) and scholars of both colonialism and indigeneity have noted that colonialism is a process, rather than an ontology of rigid relations or essentialist identities (e.g. Busbridge, 2018; Kauanui, 2016; Lentin, 2018; Rifkin, 2013; Snelgrove et al., 2014; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Wolfe, 2006). My findings and analysis point to the very subtle and often invisible ways in which colonial macro-structures and recognition politics operate through micro-scale everyday interactions; the “affective networks” through which “administrative projects of settlement and accompanying legal categories, geographies, and subjectivities become part of the everyday life” (Rifkin, 2013). They point to the crucial capacity of unruly spaces (physical and symbolic, spatial and temporal) to facilitate direct connections, joining earlier works on the importance of recognizing affective “intimacies” in sociopolitical and historical arenas (Leshem, 2013; Lowe, 2007; Lowe, 2015), the afterlife of ruination residing in unruly nature, its potential of inspiring indigenous revivals (Salih and Corry, 2002) and the observation that “nature–human entanglements [are] crucial for understanding the operations—but also the instability—of colonial power … [and] suggest that fractures and openings become legible by paying attention to ecological ruins.” (p. 383) Future research would do well to examine whether the personal transformations (perceptual and practical) that neoforagers undergo culminate in larger-scale social transformation. Meanwhile, the findings importantly draw attention to the general scarcity of truly unmediated encounters in nation-state society, as well as of unruly spaces or moments. Despite attempts to bring people together (Hanssen-Bauer, 2005; Naser-Najjab, 2020; Pundak, 2005) and though daily encounters between Jews and Palestinians are common (in Haifa for example) the mediatory influence of “civilized” spaces imbues such encounters with symbolism and prejudice that eliminate most chances for truly endogenic interactions (see Kolodney & Kallus, 2008; Kallus 2011).

It would be naïve to ignore the importance of cultural mediation, namely the security it provides. Unmediated connections also involve unruly risk. Immediacy is not inherently “good,” nor is unruliness. When external forces disrupt connections between people they typically do so in the name of order and safety. Despite common negative depictions of governmentality or discipline, mediation and intervention can have important merits such as ensuring safer spaces and mitigating risks and aggressions. Unruly encounters can certainly become violent, harmful, and unjust (Govindrajan, 2015). My argument is not to remove mediation from social interaction, but rather to make it noticed and debatable, and to draw attention to the importance and potency of having unruly space (both spatial and temporal) that would allow endogenic connections to form among co-present people.

Highlights

Neoforagers incorporate foraging practices into contemporary post-industrial lifeways, with a special emic emphasis on “connection.”

Foraging practices involve encounters with both non-human and human Others at the unruly edges and seams of cultivated space.

For neoforagers, these encounters reshape spatial and chronological perceptions, and may challenge hegemonic narratives, categories, and dynamics of elimination and replacement.

The neoforager ethos of “connection” and immediacy makes salient ongoing exogenic mediation and the continuous disruption of endogenic encounters and processes.

In the context of a settler-colonial nation-state, specifically Israel/Palestine, the scarcity of truly unmediated encounters, as well as of unruly spaces or moments, is emphasized.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ariel Appel

Notes

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Unruly spaces,unsettling transformations: Nature connection,neoforaging,and unmediated encounters with others in Israel/Palestine

Abstract

Keywords

Connection, immediacy, and transformation in neoforager praxis

Unruly spaces, unsettling encounters

Neoforagers and foraging others in Israel/Palestine

Conclusion: encroaching mediation

Highlights

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References