Taking outside a ritual: Ethnographers and the israeli Mimouna

In this article, I show how anthropologists’ focus on the marginal frequently becomes a means of reinforcing that marginality. In order to demonstrate this basic point, I take as a case study the Jewish Moroccan Mimouna holiday (as celebrated in Israel). After briefly presenting a possible venue for a critical analysis of the Mimouna, I show how Israeli anthropologists missed such perspective by endorsing widely accepted premises of the holiday’s marginality. I show how ethnographic texts of the Mimouna remove it from the legitimate societal sphere, mainly by overlooking it. When studied, it is “taken outside,” by framing it as deviant, as not belonging to legitimate Jewish-Israeli cultural manifestations. The case of the Mimouna is of particular interest since it poses far too many challenges for the hegemonic premises of Israeli society.