Hating Israel in the Field

This article chronicles the beginning of my fieldwork among Lebanese Shi'a in South Lebanon and in the diaspora. The fieldwork coincided with Israel's 2006 bombardment of Lebanon that destroyed its only just rebuilt infrastructure, killed more than 1000 civilians and left behind in agricultural areas and villages thousands of unexploded cluster bombs. The village where I was preparing to do my fieldwork was destroyed and my prospective key informant was killed. The scene among the South Lebanese Shi'a immigrants in Sydney became one of generalized mourning. There was an overwhelming feeling of anger and hatred towards Israel. In this article, I scrutinize the ambivalence emanating from sharing `political emotions' with my informants. I argue that such a situation generates another set of emotions that are specific to ethnographic practice that I call, borrowing from Spinoza, `ethnographic vacillation'.