Ethnofiction and Interior Protest: Scholar-Activism in the Yemenite Children Affair

Abstract

In this article, ethnofiction is discussed as a scholar-activist methodology that offers advantages for interior protest within community borders. The case study centers on the affair of the abducted Yemenite-Jewish children in Israel. Ethnographic studies and the researcher’s experience with members of the community serve as sources for a dramatic dialogue that reflects the definition of, and coping with, a problem as the topic of protest in the affair. The connection between the case study and its sources of information is stressed and the ethnodrama is instantiated as a transformative methodology. The findings on the acceptance of this ethnofiction in the community show that the transformative methodology allowed the researcher to send a clear and empathetic message of protest to social activists in the affair and did not endanger the researcher-activist as an agent of change. Ethnofiction accommodates the unconventionality of scholar-activism by reflecting the challenge of an interior protest among social activists in a community of victims of a collective trauma, expressed by an encounter with the supernatural. The discussion centers on the efficacy of ethnofiction as a dramatic strategy and the advantages of subverting the “aesthetics of objectivity” in matters of victims’ representation and agency.