Boston University Core Curriculum<\/a>, Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies<\/a><\/p>\n National identity and belonging; secularity; Judaism; neoliberalism; personhood; medicine; France<\/em><\/p>\n View Professor Arkin’s CV – September 2024<\/a><\/p>\n Kimberly Arkin is a cultural anthropologist whose work explores the surprising ways that a powerful and meaningful fiction of French national community\u2014whether ethno-racial, cultural, and\/or moral\u2014has been produced, contested, and reproduced in the years following the turn of the millennium.\u00a0 Her first book,\u00a0<\/span>Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France, showed how<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>young, multiply liminal, upwardly mobile Parisian Jews of North African descent acted as a \u201cwedge\u201d minority in France. By tracing out young Jews\u2019 everyday attempts to distinguish themselves from both \u201cArabs\u201d and \u201cthe French,\u201d\u00a0<\/span>Rhinestones\u00a0<\/span><\/em>explored the contingent production of normative Frenchness, on the one hand, and racial and religious \u201cothers,\u201d on the other.\u00a0 Dr. Arkin\u2019s current book project, entitled\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Keepers of the National Faith: Secular Medical Morality on the French Mediterranean,\u00a0<\/i>again offers an ethnographic account of the French nation, but this time as a community of responsibility rather than belonging.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0Growing out of fieldwork with state-paid medical practitioners working in assisted reproduction and palliative care in three southern French hospitals, this project involves an ethnographic examination of how doctors and nurses argued for, understood, and enacted moral responsibility in relation to patients.<\/p>\nAreas of Expertise<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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