The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
AN40CH29-Furani ARI 16 August 2011 14:40 The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine Khaled Furani1 and Dan Rabinowitz2 1Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel; email: [email protected] 2Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel, and Central European University; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2011. 40:475–91 Keywords First published online as a Review in Advance on sovereignty, epistemology, colonialism, representations, Palestinian July 6, 2011 by Tel Aviv University on 02/28/12. For personal use only. The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at Abstract anthro.annualreviews.org This essay identifies four different modes of ethnographic engagement This article’s doi: Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2011.40:475-491. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org with Palestine since the nineteenth century: biblical, Oriental, absent, 10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145910 and poststructural. Focusing on the epistemic and political dynamics Copyright c 2011 by Annual Reviews. in which the recent admissibility of Palestine as a legitimate ethno- All rights reserved graphic subject is embedded, we highlight two conditions. One is the 0084-6570/11/1021-0475$20.00 demystification of states and hegemonic groups that control them, and the concomitant legitimacy of groups with counterclaims. The other is the “crisis of representation” in the social sciences and the humani- ties. Combined with the rupture in Israel’s sanctity in the West since the 1980s, these developments were conducive to Palestine’s admis- sion. We conclude by considering Palestine as a problem space that could reinvigorate the critical abilities of postcolonial language and the anthropology that it engenders. 475 AN40CH29-Furani ARI 16 August 2011 14:40 All truths that are kept silent become poisonous. enabled, since the late 1980s, the ethnographic admissibility of a Palestine absorbed in national Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra struggle. (Kaufman 1968, p. 228) Palestine as a homeland, and Palestinians as its native inhabitants both defy conclusive def- inition. Additionally indeterminate are anthro- INTRODUCTION pology as a field of inquiry, and ethnography The Madrid-Oslo process of the early 1990s, as its main method. Mindful of these difficul- commonly called the peace process, brought ties but cognizant of the epistemological, disci- neither security nor sovereignty to the Pales- plinary, and political significance of boundaries tinians. Instead it subjected the population that set the scope of a review like ours, we begin in the West Bank and Gaza to an unprece- by clarifying these terms. dented regime of segregation and surveillance, Most of this review sustains the distinc- hindering, among other things, the possibil- tion between anthropology as discipline and ity of ethnographic fieldwork. This situation ethnography as its constitutive practice, with notwithstanding, those years saw Palestine and occasional evocation of the latter as a metonym Palestinians become increasingly admissible as for the former. Our inclusion of works by subjects of anthropological inquiry. nonanthropologists reflects that, in Palestine Taking this apparent quandary as a point of as elsewhere, nonanthropologists also em- departure, this essay argues that the new admis- ploy ethnography.1 Defining “ethnographic sibility of Palestine is embedded in two interre- engagement” broadly, we thus include proto- lated epistemological-political conditions. First anthropological writings of late-nineteenth- is the demystification of nations and the ethnic century Western travelers, missionaries, and groups that formed them, and a correspond- colonial officers who used some of the meth- ing surge in the legitimacy afforded to groups ods that later came to be associated with ethno- with counterclaims. Second is the “crisis of rep- graphic fieldwork in anthropology. Members of resentation” within anthropology and beyond this cohort were the first to use such methods to it. These two developments fall within a wider represent Palestine in the modern West; they critique of Western modern reason and the na- also had considerable influence on subsequent tional, colonial, and imperial sovereignties that anthropological encounters with Palestine. it sustains. They also coincided, after the 1982 Prior to 1948, Palestine had been the war in Lebanon, with a rupture in the sanctity homeland of a predominantly Arab-Muslim by Tel Aviv University on 02/28/12. For personal use only. of Israel in the West (Said 1985), where it had native population with a rich genealogy trace- been previously shielded from moral reproach. able to the antiquity of numerous imperial We begin by reviewing four modes of and local civilizations,2 including Canaanite, Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2011.40:475-491. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org ethnographic engagement with Palestine. In rough chronological order they include (a)the proto-anthropological mode, which depicted 1Within a fragmented and politically besieged Palestinian Palestinians as residual biblical relics who can condition, some have doubted the suitability of quantitative research for studying Palestinian society and emphasized the be easily incorporated into a Christian Eu- particular amenability of qualitative, read ethnographic, re- ropean patrimony; (b) a secularized, scientific search (Tamari 1994, Zureik 2003). While we agree with mode of engagement that generated Pales- these authors’ view, we believe the reasons lie elsewhere, not in supposed cultural orders (Arab versus Western, industrial tinians as Oriental subjects; (c) a mode in versus nonindustrial). It is out of the distance from the state which mainstream anthropology disengaged and its statistical normalized subject that the stateless and dis- from Palestine in the decades following 1948, credited Palestinian condition may find greater receptivity. 2 facilitating a predominance until the 1970s of In early 1948 Arabs, then a majority, constituted almost 1.4 million out of nearly 2 million people in British-ruled Zionist scholarship in Palestinian ethnogra- Palestine (see Khalidi 2006, p. 1; for earlier years showing phy; and (d ) a poststructuralist mode that has similar figures see Abu-Sitta 2004, p. 11). 476 Furani · Rabinowitz AN40CH29-Furani ARI 16 August 2011 14:40 Edomite, Israelite, Greek, Roman, Nabataean, are Palestinians living in the lands that Israel Arabian, Philistine, Phoenician, and Egyptian occupied in 1967—both those who had lived (Rainey & Notley 2006).3 This multiplicity there prior to 1948 and those who came as notwithstanding, Palestinian cultural and social refugees in 1948. Third are Palestinians who forms, which emerged with the beginning of became refugees, residents, or citizens in Arab Muslim sovereignty in the seventh century countries and beyond. Within these locales, A.D. (Doumani 1992, p. 8), endured for more Palestinians have various degrees of formal cit- than thirteen centuries, disrupted only by the izenship, different kinds of identification with Crusades. their respective host states and a corresponding In the early twentieth century, as the region range of rights and limitations in residence, was pulled into a regime of nation-states, Arab employment, property ownership, movement, Palestinians still formed a predominantly peas- and political agency. ant society with an elaborate oral culture, en- With these definitions in mind, we trace the trenched politics of kinship, and a rooted sense development of Palestinian ethnography from of place.4 Alongside this peasant population, the the nineteenth century to the present, with par- social fabric included Bedouins and a diverse ticular attention to the admissibility of Palestine and vibrant urban population of landowners, tax as a prevalent ethnographic subject since the farmers, merchants, government functionaries, late 1980s. We conclude by considering how artisans, and religious leaders. Palestine as a conceptual space could contribute Until the modern era this predominantly to the critical potential of ethnography in colo- peasant society had “an indissoluble bond with nial conditions and to postcolonial inquiry. the land” (Said 1992, p. 8), which has come under continuous assault since the onset of Western expansion into Palestine. This expan- FOUR MODES OF sion entailed British colonial rule over a dissolv- ETHNOGRAPHIC ENGAGEMENT ing Ottoman province that facilitated a Jewish Biblical Palestine and later Israeli colonial-settler society, forcing Palestinians to a national path that is yet to cul- Propelled by a desire to gain ground in the minate in a sovereign state. With this sequence Levant at the expense of the ailing Ottoman in mind, we identify Palestinians as currently Empire, European interests often mobilized inhabiting three types of locales.5 the Bible as a self-explanatory legitimizing First are Palestinians who remained—either text for European influence in the Holy Land. by Tel Aviv University on 02/28/12. For personal use only. in their original communities or elsewhere Doumani (1992, pp. 7–9) suggests that the as internally displaced persons—within those biblical rediscovery of Palestine triggered parts of their homeland on whose ruins Israel more European writing on Palestine in the nineteenth century than on any other Arab Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2011.40:475-491. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org was established, and who were eventually granted formal Israeli citizenship. Second territory save Egypt.