From Detroit to Deir Dibwan
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From Detroit to Deir Dibwan: Negotiated Identities of Unmarried American-Palestinian “Returnee” Girls in the West Bank Pamela Jean Scholey April 1999 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of London Department of Anthropology and Sociology School of Oriental and African Studies University of London ProQuest Number: 11015902 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 11015902 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Abstract This thesis examines the gender, ethnic, and national identities and identity issues of unmarried Muslim Palestinian-American girls who have relocated to the West Bank, with or without both of their parents. In the post-Oslo Accord era there has been a sudden influx of such “returnees” to the Ramallah-area, which is noted for its predominant migration pattern to the US. The research findings are compared against recent literature on migration and identity where there is much celebration of and emphasis placed on the “hybridisation” of identity, predicated on the new dissolution of national borders. Borrowing from recent post structuralist feminist, anthropological, and psychoanalytic literature, it is found that rather than deploying singular hybridised identities the girls acted out a number of “identity options” depending on the context and their various identity investments. The thesis traces the history of Palestinian migration to the US this century, and the varying racial, ethnic, and national identity positions available to the girls in the US and in the West Bank. Notions of “honour” and enmeshed family relations encourage or allow the parents of the girls interviewed to “deposit” their Palestinian identities in the bodies of their daughters. The imperatives of “honour” and the requirement that their daughters marry Muslims, and preferably Palestinians, compel Palestinian parents to relocate their daughters to the West Bank in order to “protect” them and facilitate their marriages to Muslim Palestinians in the West Bank. Through the girls' practices surrounding decisions to wear the hijab, attend university, or marry, it is possible to detect their investment in various “American” identities, which frequently contradict their own and their parents’ “Palestinian” identities. It is in the ways they find to accommodate their conflicting identities that the girls devise new American, Palestinian, and Muslim ways of being. 2 Table of Contents Abstract..................................................................................................................................2 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................5 Glossary.................................................................................................................................7 1. From Ottawa to Ramallah: The Politics of Migration, Foreignness, and Doing Ethnography ...................................................................................................................10 The dilemmas of doing ethnography on “protected” girls ..................................... 12 Between the “clinical interview” and the ethnographic account ........................... 20 Issues of positionality and the slipperiness of insider/outsider dynamics .............30 “Returning” and the Palestinian context in the post-Oslo Accord era ...................39 The Ramallah area and its place in Palestine ...................................................45 Residency rights of American-Palestinians ..................................................... 47 Migration, class, and social change and differentiation ....................................48 Matters of everyday life for adolescent Palestinian girls: education, marriage, and the conditions of being female. ............................................................ 53 About the rest of the thesis ..................................................................................... 63 2. In and Across America and Palestine: Palestinian Migrant Lives .............................. 67 History and demography of Palestinian migration to the US until 1967 ...............72 The effects of Israeli occupation and trends of migration to the US after 1967....76 Demographic and socio-economic characteristics of Arab- and Palestinian- Americans in the U S .......................................................................................... 79 Transnationalism and diasporic existences .............................................................86 What theories of migration and transnationalism leave out ................................... 97 3. Being Palestinian, American, and “Different” ............................................................ 102 Being American as a Palestinian girl in the US ....................................................106 Being “American” and “Palestinian” in the West Bank .......................................136 Reflections on and lessons learned from the being of “American” and “Palestinian” in the US and in the West Bank .................................................157 4. On Honour, Palestinian-American Girls, and “Return” ..............................................160 “You’re Arab, you’re Muslim, you’re different!”: the practice of restrictions in the making of Palestinian-American girlhood .................................................174 Gender, identity, and “return”............................................................................... 210 5. Practices of Identity and Fantasies of Self: Power and Agency, Subordination and Resistance....................................................................................................................214 Negotiating power, resisting subordination, and the contradictions of overlapping identities............................................................................................................220 Negotiating relational rights and the appearance of conformity .......................... 229 Covering as a mode of agency and belongingness ...............................................234 The strategic utility of covering: Cindy’s and Alia’s stories ......................... 247 University education and struggles over adulthood and return ........................... 250 The terms and trade-offs of university education: Sara’s story. ......................258 New versions of marriage ..................................................................................... 262 Engagement tactics and trading-off selves .....................................................274 Identity options as negotiation and accommodation .............................................285 6. From Detroit to Deir Dibwan, and Back Again? ........................................................287 3 Appendix A: Correspondence of Palestinian events with research schedule .................298 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................310 4 Acknowledgements Just as the theme of this thesis is transnationalism and its impact on human lives, the conditions of transnationalism shape these acknowledgements, as it does those of most anthropological research projects. First, it must be said that Ramallah in Palestine became a second home to my husband, Michael, and me, and this was due to the warmth of everyday Palestinians made more extraordinary due to the volatile and uncertain conditions in which it was extended. The support and assistance of the staff and students at the Friends Boys School in Ramallah were key in making my research feasible. Their generosity and welcome not only made it possible for me to interview girls and take part in the life of the school, but also made it pleasurable to do so. Michael Aylward facilitated my first meetings at the Friends and provided me with invaluable insights and daily school gossip. Other teachers and staff at the school, most notably Peter Brundin, Peter Kapenga, Teddy al-Marridi, Laura Sloan, and Hiyam Zakharia, extended their support and assistance in ways that were of inestimable value to my work, and I owe a debt to all of them that cannot be repaid through these simple acknowledgements. At the el-Urdonieh School in el-Bireh, Sandra Rashid enabled me to meet with her students, and she and Dima Abu Ghosh supported me in doing this project by facilitating my access to the school and its students and affirming the value of this research topic. The principals and students at the Scientific Arab School (SAS) and the al-Najah School, both in el-Bireh, were also helpful and generous with their time and facilities. In Ramallah, Dina Abou-el-Haj, a former teacher at the Friends, provided me with much insight about her experience at the school and with her students. I owe a special debt to her for alerting me to the existence of her grade eleven Palestinian History oral history projects deposited in