Time is central to agriculture, in growing seasons, harvesting cycles, and market temporalities. The mediation of time is also essential to claims of power. With this book, Natalia Gutkowski examines how time is used as a mechanism of control by the Israeli state and a site of resistance among Palestinian agriculture professionals. Struggling for Time investigates how Palestinian citizens uphold their native, intergenerational connection to the land while they also grapple with the Israeli state's Zionist claims to indigeneity.
Traveling across both policymaking arenas and agrarian sites in Israel, Gutkowski follows the multiple ways that Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian citizens, state officials, agronomists, planners, environmentalists and agriculturalists use time as a tool of collective agency. She unpacks power structures to show how settler society lays moral claim on native time through agrarian policies, science, technologies, landscapes, and bureaucracy. By shifting the commonly observed analysis in Israel/Palestine from land and space to time, this book offers new insight into the operation of power in settler colonial societies and in agrarian environments at large. As Struggling for Time demonstrates, in our era of climate change, time politics will take on ever greater urgency as societies and governments plan for an uncertain future.
Industry Reviews
"In this pathbreaking book, Natalia Gutkowski takes time as seriously as space/land for understanding the often-invisible governance tactics of the Israeli state and the wrenching problems faced daily by Palestinians. Struggling for Time reveals new avenues for hope, imagining better ways forward to a more just future for all."-Diana K. Davis, University of California, Davis
"Through its impressive multisited ethnography and historical analysis, Struggling for Time offers a fascinating analysis of transformations in Israeli agriculture policies as well as moving portraits of Palestinian agronomists and their complex relationship to their work and their land. The analytic of Israeli use of time as a means of dispossession is original and revealing."-Amahl Bishara, Tufts University