After introducing the dramaturgical perspectives by drawing on insights from anthropology, sociology, and the theater, the contributors give examples of enactments for which the persons involved were quite conscious of the fact that they must first establish a stage, or action area, before they could perform. As in theater, the setting of the stage has implicit meanings and actions will then become explicit as the drama unfolds. In Part I of the book, the accounts of the early kibbutzniks who needed an action area for their collective agricultural settlements, the new settlers who wish to reclaim Judea and Samaria, and the African-Americans who discovered that Israel was at the intersection of Hebrew and African traditions, provide variations on this theme.

Part II details varieties of enactments that have and possibly will take place in Israel, including an account of Ethiopian youths who experienced their crossing of the Sudan on their way to Israel to participate in the events of the Millennium. Other accounts of social dramas describe the sulha, the traditional Bedouin method of the resolution of a blood feud between Bedouin tribes, and the religious pilgrimmages by Jews, Arabs, and Christians to holy sites where they sometimes reenact a past event.

Scholars bring their field experience and their expertise in sociology, social anthropology, economics, political science, and other areas to bear on an understanding of what happened to a model socialist construction: the rural village cooperative of Israel, the Moshav. A number of the chapters describe re-studies of communities their authors had examined a generation ago. The overall result is a diversity of views from the perspectives of individual community members, community organizations themselves, and expert interpreters, about the causes and consequences of a decline in economic cooperation concomitant with a decline in government support and a decline in the role of agriculture in most communities and in the national economy. The processes examined here have considerable importance for the understanding of transformations taking place in vast regions of the world.