Cement! Lies Defever, ‘Cementing Settler Colonialism: An Ethnography of Israeli West Bank Construction’, in Marie Stender, Claus Bech-Danielsen, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Madlen Kobi, Ying Zhou (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Architecture and Anthropology: Contemporary Approaches to a Cross-Disciplinary Field, Routledge, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Cement! Lies Defever, ‘Cementing Settler Colonialism: An Ethnography of Israeli West Bank Construction’, in Marie Stender, Claus Bech-Danielsen, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Madlen Kobi, Ying Zhou (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Architecture and Anthropology: Contemporary Approaches to a Cross-Disciplinary Field, Routledge, 2025

14Dec25

Abstract: This chapter proposes cement – the world’s most widely used building material, as a lens through which to theorize the processes of Israeli settlement construction in the occupied West Bank. It draws on an ethnographic case study of Israeli settlement construction of private villas in Nokdim and follows cement’s material and immaterial flows. By attending to cement’s material properties, ideological connotations, geopolitical and legal deployment, and unpredictable connections and trajectories, this chapter goes beyond the categorical separation between “the material-lived” (the built environment) and “the representational” (discourse on settlements). The open-ended assemblage that emerges from this case shows that “the material-lived” and “the representational” are co-constitutive and cannot be studied separately and that centring the building material can reconceptualize theory on settler colonialism, its practices, and processes. This chapter invites the political and material anthropologist to think with and through building materials and urges the architect to think of materials beyond their physical, sustainable, and aesthetic properties.

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