Contemplative radicals
Ori Mautner
American Ethnologist September 30, 2026 DOI: 10.1111/amet.70116 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Ethnography Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Population | Members of Engaged Dharma Israel, a radical-left Buddhist-inspired activist group, including an exemplar named Nimrod |
| Key findings | Argues that Engaged Dharma Israel participants treat Buddhist-inspired ethical self-cultivation and anti-occupation political resistance as mutually sustaining yet tension-filled commitments, each incomplete without the other. Through Nimrod's navigation of complicity, hostility, burnout, and physical harm, the authors propose that holding these values in productive tension transforms them into embodied virtues, offering an ethnographic way to relate the ethical and the political beyond any single theoretical configuration. |
Abstract
Abstract Engaged Dharma Israel (EDI), a radical‐left group, combines Buddhist‐inspired contemplation with anti‐occupation activism in solidarity with Palestinians. For EDI, ethical self‐cultivation and political resistance are mutually sustaining commitments, yet their relationship demands ongoing, sometimes anxious work. Participants challenge both dharma practitioners who pursue self‐fashioning without political engagement and radical‐left activists who pursue political opposition without systematic ethical reflection, insisting each orientation is incomplete without the other. Nimrod, an everyday exemplar of EDI's approach, realizes its plural, sometimes conflicting values. Navigating risks of complicity, hostility, burnout, and physical harm, he demonstrates how participants work out the relationship between self‐cultivation and resistance, holding their respective values in productive tension and transforming them into embodied virtues. Tracing this navigation offers a generative response to a recurring anthropological question—how to analytically relate the ethical and the political—by ethnographically comparing the ways people connect, separate, or sequence them beyond any single theoretical configuration.