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Understanding the top-down and bottom-up development of emotional styles in a modern colonial context: The case of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine

Project description

Emotional styles developed in Jewish Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine

Colonial emotional styles play a significant role in shaping settler identities, influenced by individual actions and discussions regarding preferred traits. During the early days of Zionism, colonies were viewed as opportunities to craft a new populace for the national project. The Yishuv, which was the Jewish community formed in Mandatory Palestine, adopted a straightforward top-down approach to moulding their identity. The MSCA-funded ColEMP project aims to analyse emotions within the Yishuv and settler society, offering fresh insights into emotional styles within a colonial context. It investigates how colonialism influenced emotional styles during the early Zionist era and how these styles were introduced into European settler households. Researchers will also assess how this emotional transformation impacted mainstream urban families in the Yishuv.

Objective

How do emotional styles develop in colonial settings? What are their roles in the construction of settler identities? Such processes happen both “from below”—in the daily and often casual behavior of ordinary men, women, and children; and “from above”—in discourses about the ideal and actual characteristics of a settler. As the early Zionists, looking to execute their national project in the colonial world, fully realized, a colony, regardless of its function, always provides an opportunity to produce “new people.” In the case of the Yishuv—the Jewish community that coalesced in Mandatory Palestine—the top-down direction of this process can be identified in the extensive Zionist literature about the desired “New Jew” as well as in the attempts to embed his or her traits using printed matter (such as parents’ manuals and children’s literature). Drawing on this feature of the Yishuv, the research analyzes both the Zionist project of top-down emotional transformation and the actual expression and experiences of emotions in the burgeoning settler society. By integrating these two levels, the research goes beyond the existing scholarship, which usually focuses on one or the other, and breaks new ground in understanding how emotions were mobilized and how new emotional styles emerged in a colonial context. The outgoing phase, which will last two years at Harvard University, under the supervision of Prof. Derek Penslar, has two aims: (i) to understand how the colonial context (within which early Zionism operated) impacted ideas about new emotional styles; and (ii) to survey the attempts to bring these ideas into the homes of (the mostly European) settlers at the time. The incoming phase, running one year at Bar-Ilan University, under the supervision of Prof. Hizky Shoham, will assess the impact—or lack thereof—of the emotional transformation studied in the outgoing phase on the everyday emotional practices of families in the mainstream urban sector of the Yishuv.

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Topic(s)

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HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01

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Coordinator

BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 294 833,28
Address
BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY CAMPUS
52900 Ramat Gan
Israel

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Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

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