קאווע שטיבל

Examining how religious minorities negotiate their boundaries vis-à-vis what is cast as the external world has become one of the pillars of the anthropology of religion. Over the past thirty years, scholars have particularly focused on fundamentalist groups and demonstrated how self-protective communities are inclined to reinforce internal taboo systems by tightening restrictions that pertain to modesty, probity, and bodily practices (e.g., Mahmood 2005; Stadler and Taragin-Zeller 2017; Taragin-Zeller 2014, 2015). Building on the seminal work of Mary Douglas (1966), researchers have defined these groups as “enclave cultures” (Almond et al. 2003, 34; Sivan 1995): distinct communities with highly demarcated cultural and moral boundaries as well as strict taboos that partition outsiders from insiders and along rigid lines of gender. Aimed at thwarting the putative efforts of “demonic forces” to corrupt the group (Almond et al. 2003, 34–36), these taboos and barriers segregate the “virtuous” and “morally superior” fundamentalists from the influences of the “depraved,” “polluted,” and “dangerous” host society (Sivan 1995). As Nurit Stadler (2009, 2) puts it, “piety, with its mastering body regime, is the only force capable of changing or restraining the secular and heretical nature of the world and thus perhaps of ensuring its future, if not present, redemption.”

Religious schools are a primary strategy to segregate identity, which reinforces gen- dered taboos, concepts, and practices (Aran 1991; Davidman 2011; Fader 2009; Hakak 2012; Zalcberg-Block 2011)