Citizen Azmari

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Ilana Webster-Kogen. Citizen Azmari

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Citizen Azmari

CITIZEN AZMARI

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GREATER TEL AVIV

This book deals with national imaginaries of citizenship, but most of the action takes place in and around Tel Aviv, a city that is at once distinct (politically, religiously) from the rest of the country and representative of it demographically. Initially I spent a year in south Tel Aviv (July 2008 to July 2009), conducting ethnographic research through participant observation there and in many venues around Israel. I spent little time in Rehovot, the suburb that for two decades had the largest Ethiopian-Israeli population, or Tiberias in the Galilee, which has an enormous absorption center (merkaz klita). I spent no time in Kiryat Malakhi, the “development town” (that is, a town created after the establishment of the state in peripheral regions such as the Galilee and the Negev—see Yiftachel and Meir 1998) with a disproportionately large Ethiopian population relative to its size and remoteness. Instead I carried out most of my research in the major urban centers of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, as well as smaller cities like Ashkelon that are home to significant Ethiopian-Israeli populations. This multisited work, conducted in Hebrew but with use of Amharic words and phrases, highlights the emergence of new immigrant population cores in urban areas. I cover many of the institutions enumerated by Alex Perullo in his conception of a “music economy” (2011) comprising live music venues (nightclubs and Azmari houses, where I attended live music performances several times per week), music vendors (record stores, where I chatted with patrons and employees and increased my knowledge of contemporary music from Addis Ababa), state-run support bodies (absorption and community centers, where I interviewed musicians and social workers and took lessons in the massenqo, the Azmari’s one-stringed fiddle), and musicians themselves (approximately a dozen of whom I cite by name from interviews in this book, and many more of whom I anonymize).

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