Dr Ori Mautner builds on his previous successes with a four-year Junior Research Fellowship
In October 2022, Ori Mautner, a postgraduate of the Department, began a four-year Junior Research Fellowship at Christ’s College Cambridge. At Christ's, Ori will analyse unique but little-understood models and practices of living with difference among working-class Mizrahim (Jews of Middle-Eastern and North-African descent) and Palestinian citizens of Israel—in the face of precarity, inequality, and tension.
Dr Ori Mautner research focuses on lessons that can be drawn from the relations between working-class Mizrahim (Jews of Middle-Eastern and North-African descent) and Palestinian citizens of Israel - in the face of precarity, inequality, and tension. Focusing on lessons that can be drawn from these relations for thinking about tolerance, he will conduct in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in an urban area in central Israel. The prevailing academic way of studying tolerance is through the liberal paradigm. But Mizrahi and Palestinian residents of this area, while normally not anti-liberal, often reject liberal politics, which they tend to find alienating. The project aims to develop a theoretical approach that can account for such cases, ones in which people refuse central dimensions of liberal tolerance but still live mostly peaceably side-by-side for decades.
In 2021, Dr Ori Mautner was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute's Curl Essay Prize 2021 for his essay The Self in Self-Formation: Embodiment, Religious Mediation, and the Subject’s Interrelated Parts among Orthodox-Jewish Meditators.
In 2020, Ori Mautner won the Society for the Anthropology of Religion student essay prize competition by The American Anthropological Association’s Society for the Study of Religion