A Ring Transforms: Children Learning Life and Death in Lod.

Abstract

This article presents an ethnographic study of elementary school children's spontaneous role-plays at the Lod Theater Center in Israel, a site that brings psychodrama, a theater-based form of psychotherapy, to bear on Israel's long-standing institutional form of the community theater center. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (October 2021-January 2023) and in conversation with anthropological and psychodramatic theory, I chart how children growing up in a world of ongoing violence express their knowledge of life and death through spontaneous play. Analysis of the data revealed that children assimilated knowledge of death and political violence not as discrete events, but rather as part of learning something about their world as a whole. I posit that this finding has significant implications for understanding children's subjective experience of violence, showing how, in a particular context, ordinary life cycle events such as the loss of a grandmother from illness may appear just as normally as a terror attack. Shifting the focus of analysis from a bounded event to everyday life opens alternative pathways for conceptualizing how violence marks the self. This ethnographic approach moves beyond trauma discourse's focus on the event to describe how children piece together life lived in conflict.