Ethnographic Imbalances across "Resistance" and "Nationalism"In a review of anthropological studies of "resistance," Ortner has criticized work in this area for its "refusal of ethnographic thickness" (1995:174), symptomatic of which are a "thinning of culture" (1995:180-183) and "dissolving of the subject" (1995:183-187). 1 The refusal's effect, and Ortner's main concern, is a systematic failure in this area to register and represent the ambiguity of political activity classified as "resistance" (1995:175). The current study registers doubt about the inverse certainties that Ortner's critique implicitly erects: that "ethnographic thickness" will invariably reveal ambiguity, regardless of context; and that accounts that register ambiguity represent ethnographic complexities more holistically and fully.Studies of nationalism constitute a poignant rebuttal. While a similar form of ethnographic refusal can be said to have driven work in this adjacent field of political study, here it has had the opposite motivation and undesirable effect. Especially since the 1980s, studies of "nationalism" have practiced a determined, systematically discriminate denial of certainty to a distinctive social space that, furthermore, analyses in this field have cast into a distinct, superior moral subjectivity: the practice of everyday life. The response put forward in this article, which employs a more literal understanding of "everyday life" than the majority of anthropological studies of political processes, draws attention to the nationalizing efficacy of ordinary people's daily exercises of neighborhood, household, kinship, and self: I call this process self-nationalization. Contemporary studies of nationalism have systematically refused to acknowledge that ordinary persons could, in specific circumstances, infuse their pursuit of daily interests and relations with political projects with nationalizing effects.The practice of "nationalism" in everyday ltfe will be made visible through the optic of a seemingly paradoxical stream of everyday practice among West Bank Palestinians during the recent popular uprising or Intifada Cultural Anthropology 16(1)83-126 84 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY # (spanning the late 1980s and early 1990s), a practice that I gloss as the suspension of everyday life. 2 These ethnographic data, I argue, call for an analytical and political readiness to approach quotidian performances as influential in the "collective production of novel political and cultural identities" (Escobar 1992:396-397) and, more specifically, in the production of nationalist-cumnational subjectivities and communities.My objection is not just a methodological quibble; it concerns the scholarly determination of authentic transformative agency and, thus, of political responsibility. If everyday practices can be shown to produce and articulate national subjectivities, then this demonstrates a significant political process that our analyses of nationalism have systematically "refused," self-nationalization. By this I mean a process wherein ord...
The ethnographic subject of this article is Palestinian political committees and their heuristic importance as a means of rendering Palestinians in the first intifada. Drawing on fieldwork among politically active Palestinians from diverse walks of life, I show that, contrary to the prevalent view in the scholarly literature and in political displays, Palestinians who joined committees did not "leave the house." Concentrating analysis on forms in which Palestinians' interest in committees was actually expressed, one finds an aesthetic likeness as well as a substantive intertwinement between the socialities of committee movements and of houses.
Focusing on Palestinian subjectivity during the intifada, / highlight connections between domestic processes and the nascent state. Empowered by the progressive-nationalist movement, ordinary young men and women challenged the moral authority of the domestic patriarch. The new moral subjects were not, however, producing "themselves" individually and reflexively. In the face of paradoxical conditions of self-making precipitated by the organized political struggle, young men with their mothers and sisters became moral persons through a collaborative and reciprocal exercise of self, [statecraft, kinship, political organization, gender, personhood, Middle East] Over recent years, anthropology has seen the emergence of a "critical anthropology of selfhood" that takes to task the "self-centeredness of selfhood" (Battaglia 1995:1-2)-that is, the presumption that "the skin-bound individual" is the singular site and self-sufficient author of selfhood (1995:5). In this article, I add to this critique, expanding the scope of "other-influence" it brings into view.Introducing the "multiple [analytical] rhetorics" drawn together in her edited volume, Battaglia writes: "There is no selfhood apart from the collaborative practice of its figuration. The self is a representational economy, a reification continuously defeated by ... entanglements with other subjects' histories, experiences, [and] self-representations" (1995:2, emphasis in original). Battaglia further suggests that the subject is influenced by rhetorics emanating from "asymmetrical" sources, such as the state (1995:3, 8). From the point of view of Palestinian subjectivity during the intifada, these are valid and necessary qualifications, but they are too limited. Battaglia's formulation reifies a potentially boundless field of impersonal representational and structural influences. Further, and more relevant to my Palestinian data, the site of self-conduct and of self-presentation is left to correspond to the singular, skin-bound subject.At the time of my research, in 1989-90, the Palestinian intifada, a comprehensive effort across the occupied territories to break Israeli military rule, was in its second year. The public life of towns, villages, and refugee camps was marked by street demonstrations and clashes between Palestinian activist youths and the Israeli army, various measures of civil disobedience, a daily rote of reduced trading hours, and numerous extensive curfews. The measures were in response to decrees issued by an anonymous, by all reports popularly based body, the United National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), which had crystallized in the intifada's wake. The Israeli regime made membership in PLO-affiliated organizations illegal and punishable by imprisonment in the mid-1960s. In 1988, in keeping with this policy, the Israeli regime declared all grassroots committees affiliated with the parties of the PLO illegal American Ethnologist 27(1 ):1 0O-1 27. Copyright C 2000, American Anthropological Association. mothercraft, statecraft 101 and their...
Focusing on Palestinian subjectivity during the intifada, / highlight connections between domestic processes and the nascent state. Empowered by the progressive-nationalist movement, ordinary young men and women challenged the moral authority of the domestic patriarch. The new moral subjects were not, however, producing "themselves" individually and reflexively. In the face of paradoxical conditions of self-making precipitated by the organized political struggle, young men with their mothers and sisters became moral persons through a collaborative and reciprocal exercise of self, [statecraft, kinship, political organization, gender, personhood, Middle East] Over recent years, anthropology has seen the emergence of a "critical anthropology of selfhood" that takes to task the "self-centeredness of selfhood" (Battaglia 1995:1-2)-that is, the presumption that "the skin-bound individual" is the singular site and self-sufficient author of selfhood (1995:5). In this article, I add to this critique, expanding the scope of "other-influence" it brings into view.Introducing the "multiple [analytical] rhetorics" drawn together in her edited volume, Battaglia writes: "There is no selfhood apart from the collaborative practice of its figuration. The self is a representational economy, a reification continuously defeated by ... entanglements with other subjects' histories, experiences, [and] self-representations" (1995:2, emphasis in original). Battaglia further suggests that the subject is influenced by rhetorics emanating from "asymmetrical" sources, such as the state (1995:3, 8). From the point of view of Palestinian subjectivity during the intifada, these are valid and necessary qualifications, but they are too limited. Battaglia's formulation reifies a potentially boundless field of impersonal representational and structural influences. Further, and more relevant to my Palestinian data, the site of self-conduct and of self-presentation is left to correspond to the singular, skin-bound subject.At the time of my research, in 1989-90, the Palestinian intifada, a comprehensive effort across the occupied territories to break Israeli military rule, was in its second year. The public life of towns, villages, and refugee camps was marked by street demonstrations and clashes between Palestinian activist youths and the Israeli army, various measures of civil disobedience, a daily rote of reduced trading hours, and numerous extensive curfews. The measures were in response to decrees issued by an anonymous, by all reports popularly based body, the United National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), which had crystallized in the intifada's wake. The Israeli regime made membership in PLO-affiliated organizations illegal and punishable by imprisonment in the mid-1960s. In 1988, in keeping with this policy, the Israeli regime declared all grassroots committees affiliated with the parties of the PLO illegal American Ethnologist 27(1 ):1 0O-1 27. Copyright C 2000, American Anthropological Association. mothercraft, statecraft 101 and their...
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