Summary

The Israeli elections of 1996 and 1998 brought with them a deluge of magical objects and practices. Magic appeared in the political sphere of the state in the form of popular party-affiliated mystics and a wide distribution of mass-produced amulets; but equally as a semiotic axis around which ethnic, class, and religious identities were being constituted. It came to occupy the central stage in the public discourse of the press and of the legal institutions of the state. The articulation of magical practices with the institutions of the state provides a possibility of examining the politics behind linguistic processes of signification. Specifically, it allows an investigation of the power relations that shape the discursive practices of the state as a hegemonic social force, commanding a privileged position of authority established and secured through linguistic intervention and standardization.

The paper seeks to explore how this position becomes mobilized politically in what might be termed “nationalist discourses.” The concept of nationalist discourses encompasses the linguistic practices that operate within the state, conceived broadly as a set of related institutions that emerged together under the sign of nationalism. These discourses may be characterized as national not only by their institutional links with the state. They are also national in their metaphysical assumptions, which share in common, among other things, the hegemonic voice of the state as an authorizing function, the indexical manufacturing of the state as a centralized power, and the entailment of national ideologies.

How is society stratified through the category of magic in nationalist discourses? What other social categories are constituted through this category? What are the power relations expressed through these semiotic processes of signification, and how do they operate in the political field of the nation-state in contemporary Israel? Arguing that the national press and the legal sphere constitute nationalist discourses, this paper analyzes texts from both fields and suggests that magic has become a crucial trope against which fundamental social categories such as ethnicity, religion, and class are constructed. Furthermore, the analysis reveals how metaphysical presuppositions about rational political agency, which underlie the ideology of the democratic nation-state, become deployed in these semiotic operations to exclude certain social groups from the democratic process and to delegitimize their political practices. Nationalist discourses are thus shown to be not only classificatory and stratifying, but also hierarchical and exclusionary.

Methodology

The method of discourse analysis used in the paper draws on the theoretical framework of Peircean semiotics, and on its further development in the work of Michael Silverstein on the metapragmatics of language, and on the ideology inherent in the dialectics of the process of semiosis. The notion of entailing indexicality is used to identify and understand the discursive constitution of social reality in nationalist discourses. Following Susan Gal, the analysis identifies certain statements as indexically iconic of social groups and as pragmatically productive of social categories. The pragmatics and metapragmatics of the discourse of the press and of the law are examined as ideological-political operations within the institutional spheres of the nation-state. These are examined with reference to the political-historical context in which they occur, to uncover the stratifying moments of these discourses, and to examine their articulation with the institutional hegemony of the state.

Data

The data analyzed in the paper include texts from two spheres of nationalist discourses, the press and the law. Press materials were collected through a comprehensive survey of the three major Israeli newspapers during a month-long period preceding the national elections of 1996 and 1998 and the municipal elections of 1999. All articles relating to magical practices, amulets, and mysticism were systematically collected and analyzed. Specific attention was given to articles discussing the articulation of magic with the political sphere of the state. Legal materials comprise of texts from the Central Election Committee, the body overseeing the administration of national and local elections in Israel. They include the regular booklets of decisions and regulations published by the committee following each election; publications of committee decisions during the period that preceded the latest election of January, 2003; and expert opinions submitted to the committee by the Hebrew University anthropologist Yoram Bilu and by the head of the Shas party.

This data forms part of a larger study in which, for purposes of comparison, press indices were used to locate articles related to these topics in other periods, and texts were also collected from journalistic publications of smaller circulation affiliated with specific political groups that do not seem to fall under the category of nationalist discourses. Similarly in the case of legal discourse, the study included materials from court cases against mystics, in which the articulation of magic with the legal sphere was examined outside the immediate context of election campaigns. Due to the limitations of space, however, the current paper focuses on texts that have their origin in nationalist discourses in the periods preceding elections.