1075 Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 91, No. 3, p. 1075–1104, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2018 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of The George Washington University. All rights reserved. ARTICLE Liquid Distinctions: Negotiating Boundaries Between Agriculture and the Environment in the Israeli Desert Liron Shani, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ABSTRACT Relations between humans and “nature” have long been a focus of so- cial research and, in particular, anthropological inquiry. In recent years, scholars have generally dismissed the distinction between these catego- ries as empirically and conceptually irrelevant. Based on fieldwork in an agricultural community in the Israeli desert (2010–2015), this article shows that the boundaries between nature and culture remain salient to social and critical analysis that focuses on interpretive aspects of environment and space, as well as the ongoing negotiation of these distinctions. This research demonstrates that some actors in the Arava see environmental preservation as part of “nature” and agricultural lands as part of “culture,” thereby emphasizing the boundaries between the two. But their relations to the culture/nature complex are dynamic, changing in accordance with per- sonal circumstances, external pressures, and evolving definitions of these categories. In this sense, the division between nature and culture is not necessarily dichotomous, but rather a multidimensional space of Nature(s) and Culture(s). Insofar as local actors saw the blurring of the boundaries between agriculture and the environment as part of the development of the agricultural economy and a means of responding to changing realities,