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11 By Way of Conclusion ANOTHER METAPHOR One way to recapture the story-line of this book is to say that it starts out by exploring the meanings and uses of gibush as a "key symbol" in contemporary Israeli culture, and proceeds to trace a variety of ritualized communicative practices and contexts in which the cultural meanings associated with gibush play a role. It is in and through these largely mundane, taken-for-granted practices that the central cultural semantics of cohesion is sustained, whether it is wholeheartedly reaffirmed or subtly renegotiated. By exploring the rhetoric of cohesion associated with the notion of gibush, I have highlighted the collective orientation that is such a well-recognized mark of Israeli culture. By considering the contours of its metaphorical underpinnings I have been able to address some of the implications of this culturally interpreted communal focus. Having taken the reader through this multifaceted ethnographic journey into the workings of some "cultural communication" forms and practices in contemporary Israel, let me reiterate some of the threads that link these various probings into a coherent, yet essentially open-ended account. As noted, the communal focus runs through each of the foregoing chapters, but the shape and tenor it is given are very different in each one of them. The participation in a communal practice may be half-acknowledged, as in the case of "griping rituals," or conscious and intentional, as in the case of "fire rituals." It may be diffusely orchestrated as in the case of "familial picnics in military zones," or it may be directly and presistently manipulated as in some ''radio discourses for children." Finally, it may be defined and delimited by culturally coded communication patterns like the ones explored in the chapters dealing with Israeli peer-group culture. It is these kinds of patterns and the experiences they anchor that make up the flavor of an "Israeli childhood" as lived by children and as constituting a communally shared memory for adults. My attentiveness to the ritual dimensions of communication practices is clearly in line with the substantive focus on the communal. The various chapters address ritualization at the level of speech modes, such as griping; at the level of public occasions, such as fire rituals, at the level of privatized encounters, such as family picnics, at the level of mass-mediated occasions, such as radio discourses; and in the analysis of both conflictual and cooperative exchanges within children's peer-group culture. In each of the chapters, it was the double weight of ritualized form and communal function that has motivated and 197 198 Communal Webs anchored the particular study. While attention to communicative forms is a necessary, very fruitful starting point for the kind of inquiry I have engaged in, I hope my reference to ''forms'' has not blurred the processual orientation I have tried to maintain throughout this book. I have tried to maintain a focus on griping sessions as interactional processes, not as assemblages of stylistic features. I have attended to the phenomenology of reading fire inscriptions as they are embedded within cultural events rather than viewing fire inscriptions as isolated cultural products. I have considered familial picnicking as a social occasion, not as a mere reflection of institutional social arrangements, and so on. Indeed, our language for capturing cultural processes, particularly those fluid preformations R. Williams (1977) has called "structures offeeling," is highly limited and quite slippery. Thus, in my research, I have both echoed and utilized my informants' efforts at representing and understanding their own culture. I offer these pages as the best I could do by way of reconstructing their world as I perceived and experienced it from the vantage point of my liminal ethnographic corner. The analogy, however, works both ways: While the study of ritual reveals the "human seriousness of play," in Turner's (1982) delightful phrase, I believe ethnography celebrates the human playfulness of work. In ritual, as in ethnography, the serious and the playful merge, joining to drown the gnawing suspicion that all we have been able to say to ourselves and to others both "is and is not." Let me therefore turn to the language of metaphors once again, recalling my discussion of C. Geertz's spider-web and J. Clifford's collage metaphors in the introductory chapter. As I think of my movement between these two metaphors for culture and ethnography, I am tempted to add yet another metaphor to the anthropological pool, my own play on play. The...

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