Dr. Ori Mautner
I am a social anthropologist specializing in the study of religion, ethics, and politics. My research examines how people navigate normative disagreements—especially local approaches to living with religious, ethnic, and national differences. A central concern is understanding the sources of radical right-wing political success and the challenges it poses for liberal and progressive visions. Previously, I was a research fellow (JRF) at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, and an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. I am also a graduate of the Adi Lautman Program for Outstanding Students, Tel Aviv University.
My current research is grounded in long-term, ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Ramle, central Israel, where I lived for 14 months during 2023–24. It examines everyday neighbourly relations between Israeli Jews—primarily working-class Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent) who support right-wing parties—and Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel. I focus on:
- Local conceptualisations and practices of tolerance, including their boundaries and limitations, across different scales of social life in Ramle. This includes examining how these conceptualisations and practices both align with and transcend liberal tolerance—as articulated in liberal political philosophy (the dominant academic framework for studying tolerance) and as attributed to ‘liberal’ Israelis by my interlocutors in Ramle. This facet of my project will culminate in a monograph that helps establish a new area of research: the anthropology of tolerance and its limits.
- The ambivalent support among Ramle’s working-class Mizrahim for Netanyahu’s Likud party and for politics widely deemed ‘populist’. This part of the project captures rare, real-time reflections by residents on the appeal and limitations of such politics among them—and, crucially, residents’ urgent and detailed advice to Israel’s opposition and protest movements on how to respond.
- New ways of exploring and conceptualising the relationship between democracy and ethnographic practice and sensibilities.
Before that, my PhD (University of Cambridge, 2021) examined how two seemingly opposed Jewish-Israeli groups—radical-left ‘anti-occupation’ activists and nationalist orthodox Jews (primarily religious Zionist, with some Haredim)—use Buddhist-derived meditative practices to cultivate distinct Jewish-Israeli subjectivities and political orientations. This research was awarded the 2021 Curl Essay Prize by the Royal Anthropological Institute (UK) and the 2020 Student Essay Prize by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, a section of the American Anthropological Association.
Selected Publications
Monograph
Mautner, Ori. Forthcoming (expected 2026). Settling the Mind, Settling the Land: Mindful Nationalism and Value Conflict among Religious Israelis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Peer-reviewed articles and chapters
Mautner, Ori. Forthcoming. ‘Struggling to Uplift Divine Sparks: Implicit Strategies for Handling Value Conflicts among Orthodox-Jewish Meditators and Beyond’. Current Anthropology. (Includes nine commentaries and author response.)
Mautner, Ori. Forthcoming (pending minor revisions). ‘How Not to Fight “Populism”: Passionate Advice from Ambivalent Netanyahu Supporters Amidst Multiple Unprecedented Crises’. Anthropology Today.
Mautner, Ori. Forthcoming (pending minor revisions). ‘On Reflection: Contrasting “Reflective Freedom” in Working-Class Mizrahi Political Self-Critique and Orthodox-Jewish Meditation’. In M. Candea et al. (Eds.), Finding Freedoms: Cultures and Concepts of Human Possibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mautner, Ori. 2024. ‘At Home in My Enemy’s House: Israeli Activists Negotiating Ethical Values through Ritualized Palestinian Hospitality’. American Anthropologist, 126: 59–70.
Mautner, Ori. 2022. ‘Secularization and Its Ethical Consequences: Orthodox Israeli Jews Sanctifying “Mundane” Buddhist Meditation’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 28: 1270–1289.
Mautner, Ori, and Nissim Mizrachi. 2020. ‘When Buddhist Vipassanā Travels to Jewish West Bank Settlements: Openness without Cosmopolitanism’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 43(7): 1227–1245.