Hadas Weiss, ‘On value and values in a West Bank settlement’, American Ethnologist 38, 1(2011)

In this article, I use value theory to interrogate values in the West Bank settlement of Beit-El, particularly the coexistence of pragmatism with the valorization of self-sacrifice. My aims are threefold: to make sense of West Bank settlement values specifically, and contemporary fundamentalism by extension, within the socioeconomic coordinates of the present moment; to illustrate the contribution of value theory to an ethnography of values; and to tease out from the case study some generalizations regarding the formal relations between value and values as they pertain to contemporary possibilities for and limitations on social agency.