Baladi politics: the social life of an untranslatable agro-culinary category in Israel/Palestine

In Israel/Palestine, baladi, derived from the Arabic balad, is an agro-culinary category that operates as both a marker of authenticity and a site of political negotiation. This paper explores baladi as a borderline concept, simultaneously defining and destabilizing cultural and territorial boundaries. Palestinian uses of baladi often articulate indigeneity, environmental decolonization, revivalism, and gastro-political resistance, while Jewish-Israeli adaptations reframe it as an expression of local authenticity, frequently through appropriation and commodification. This study demonstrates that these invocations do not stabilize baladi as a bounded category. Rather, they underscore its function as a borderline concept, whose meaning emerges precisely through its unstable position between indigeneity, appropriation, and commodification. Drawing on socio-historical analysis and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, the paper reveals how baladi transcends binary categories of authenticity and appropriation. Theoretically, this study interrogates baladi as an untranslatable term shaped by settler-colonial histories, global markets, and sociocultural boundary work. Furthermore, it demonstrates how untranslatable concepts like baladi illuminate the contested processes of emplacement and cultural reclaiming that unfold within asymmetrical structures of colonial entanglement and global neoliberal circulation.