ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on an ethnographic study of student engagement with the Palestine-Israel issue to explore the moral and ethical formations of polarised conflict within public life. The chapter begins by drawing on notions of the sacred and social performance, developed by the ‘strong programme,’ in order to theorise the processes through which pro-Palestine and pro-Israel student groups appear to cohere around conflicting moral truths. Focusing on a high-profile public event staged within a British university, the chapter traces the reproduction of symbolic identity and difference; explores the sources of the institutional desire to perform moral rationalism; and argues that this represses and aggravates the traumatic histories at stake. The chapter then turns away from these more visible spectacles to highlight how publicly adversarial students engage in caring and uncertain conversations within overlooked contexts of their campus. In this way, the chapter claims that theories of the sacred can be enhanced through an engagement with anthropological work on ‘ordinary ethics’ and that this can help sociologists to explore the workings of ambiguity, ambivalence and creativity in democratic life.
