Embroidered Palestine: A Stitched Narrative

Salamon, Hagar

doi:10.13110/narrcult.3.1.0001

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…These women participating in the Tejidos project organized their own truth-telling endeavour that relied, among many other modes of engagement, on weaving, embroidery and drawing to tell stories of harm, violence, resistance and recovery, in a more multi-dimensional, complex, non-linear and lived way, which defied easy verbal narrativization often required in formal truth commissions or other human rights bodies. Also in the Palestinian context, we observe that displaced people embroider as a form of non-verbal memorialization of complex collective trauma, for example through stitching embroidered maps of historical Palestine (Salamon 2016). These alternatives to verbal language as modes of engagement are particularly relevant when considering the complexity of making sense of extreme life events, and when working with vulnerable and displaced people from a variety of contexts.…”

Section: Blind Spots Of the Current Debatementioning

confidence: 82%

Artistic Practices as a Site of Human Rights: How Performative Ethnography Can Facilitate a Deeper Contextual Understanding

Destrooper

Verclyte

2021

Journal of Human Rights Practice

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There has been, in the past two decades, more scholarly attention for how rights-holders understand human rights norms, and how these understandings interact with pre-existing notions of (social) justice. This attention for rights-holders’ lived experiences can be linked to the growing influence of socio-legal and legal anthropological perspectives, as well as to that of emancipatory research methods, such as participatory action research. What these perspectives and methods have in common is their interest in how people experience and express their rights in practice, and how they give meaning to them. Remarkably little attention, however, has been paid to the question of how we try to understand this process of meaning-making. The dominant modes of engagement tend to (a) emphasize the spoken or written word, and (b) presume—the possibility of—an accessible verbal narrative. The shortcomings of engaging exclusively on the basis of verbal language becomes clear when considering the lived experience of certain particularly vulnerable groups, such as displaced people who are coping with ongoing violence and trauma or who have been forced into silence for years. Not everyone can speak freely about their lived experience or can tell a coherent story about it, and adopting an—exclusively—word-driven engagement strategy may reproduce existing power relations. Based on preliminary fieldwork with refugees from Syria in the Shatila refugee camp, we argue that a performative ethnography rooted in collaborative making and artistic practice is a promising way to engage with and understand how people make sense of their lived experience, as it allows research participants to express themselves using those (skilled and artistic) practices most familiar to them. We reflect on how a practice-driven mode of engagement may shed a different light on how people make sense of questions related to justice and their rights.

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Section: Blind Spots Of the Current Debatementioning

confidence: 82%

Artistic Practices as a Site of Human Rights: How Performative Ethnography Can Facilitate a Deeper Contextual Understanding

Destrooper

Verclyte

2021

Journal of Human Rights Practice

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“…4 In the context of conflict and displacement, embroidery's expressive potential, allows artisans to address, amongst other things, the (ongoing) harm they experience(d) and the justice they aspire to achieve in cultural resonant forms. 5 Artistic practices such as embroidery thus offers a (partly) non-verbal language-and thereby agency-to give meaning to both justice and injustice (Mansour, 2018;Salamon 2016), for example, describes how Palestinian refugees embroider as a form of non-verbal memorialization of the complex collective trauma of the Nakba. Palestinians embroiderers weave rights narratives, including the right to return, into their work, insisting on the duty to remember because "if we forget, we will lose our land forever" (Samira Salah, in Bendadi & Mohajerin, 2019, 44).…”

Section: Women From Syria Living In Shatila and The Role Of Embroiderymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Through this entanglement of material culture and verbal speech, embroidery has a long tradition of narration, including one of presencing ,2 resistance and recognition in the broader region by expressing identities and telling stories on clothing and household items (Dedman, 2020; Saca & Saca, 2006). This makes embroidery, which is rooted in a long history of material culture (Ghnaim, 2018; Salamon, 2016; Vogelsang‐Eastwood, 2016), a relevant means for better grasping contextualized understandings of justice and rights. Through a method of performative ethnography, we examine how this skilled material practice is used to express ideas about justice and rights—even when women do not always use this vocabulary.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stitching a rights narrative: How Syrian women in Shatila use embroidery to express ideas about social justice

Verclyte,

Destrooper

2023

PoLAR

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Human rights can be seen as a means to improve people's lived realities. Yet the language and practice of human rights are not always moored in these realities. What happens to the meaning of human rights when these are expressed in (partly non‐verbal) ways that are deeply rooted in lived—embodied, material, and cultural—realities, and how does that practice transform ideas about rights? In this article, we describe how women from Syrian refugee communities living in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut use the skilled practice of embroidery to express and negotiate what they consider to be their rights and what they are entitled to. In doing so, they foreground a deeply indivisible, multi‐layered, and multi‐perspectival understanding of justice and more specifically of how they understand their rights. These perspectives, we argue, are intrinsically rooted in the embodied, material, and cultural practice through which they emerge, and offer avenues for enriching human rights debates.

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“…There were social, cultural and economic differences between us as well as differences in beliefs, values and identities. Participants respond to a researcher based on his or her perceived identity (Salamon, 2016). I was a former journalist who had left the profession to pursue a doctoral degree venturing into academia and research.…”

Section: Gaining Accessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As for Salamon (2016), I thus had to help Navin rationalize my presence so that he could trust me. I began by calling him and communicating with him through WhatsApp.…”

Section: Gaining Accessmentioning

confidence: 99%

The imponderabilia of a stringer’s everyday life in Darjeeling Hills – excerpts from an ethnographer’s field diary

Roy

2021

Journalism

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Learning about journalists, their culture, their shared beliefs and behaviours by immersing ourselves in their context through ethnography has emerged as a significant strand in journalism studies. Such a strand, however, is limited to studying elite media and elite journalists. It has thus, led to a substantial lacuna in understanding the sociology of news production particularly, in developing countries like India. Taking this as a point of departure this paper looks at a neglected but dominant workforce in the news media sector – the stringers. Based on intensive field research and building on participant observation, and employing emic and etic perspectives, this paper offers a thick description of the everyday life of a stringer. The researcher argues that the shared agreements and the manifestation of value attached to stringers are lopsided since stringers often find themselves at the lowest rung of the value structure within the journalistic reporting community resulting in a meta-social paradox. Stringers are the culture hero and the custodians of the community’s memory yet remaining the quintessential other.

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Embroidered Palestine: A Stitched Narrative

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Artistic Practices as a Site of Human Rights: How Performative Ethnography Can Facilitate a Deeper Contextual Understanding

Artistic Practices as a Site of Human Rights: How Performative Ethnography Can Facilitate a Deeper Contextual Understanding

Stitching a rights narrative: How Syrian women in Shatila use embroidery to express ideas about social justice

The imponderabilia of a stringer’s everyday life in Darjeeling Hills – excerpts from an ethnographer’s field diary

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