mothercraft, statecraft, and subjectivity in the Palestinian intifada

Abstract

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...

Dimensions of everyday resistance: the PalestinianSumūd

“…Thus, an analysis of everyday resistance has to place great importance on generation, and the way lived historical events have shaped each generation's sense of identity. 17 Jean-Klein (2000) shows how relationships between agents of resistance are reshaped through combinations of age and gender. She interviews younger as well as older men in 60, households in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank, discovering that while a reputation for suffering physical abuse at the hands of Israeli soldiers enhances the moral standing of the young men, the older men associate the abuse with passive reception, something which is devaluing for a man in a highly masculine culture.…”

Keeping mum: The mediation of military conflict in the everyday mothering of middle-class Israeli Palestinian and Jewish women

“…A few studies examine how mothering practices support their children while doing military service (Bershtling and Strier, 2018; El-Or, 2001; Katriel, 1991). Research into Palestinian mothers examines their engagement in the Palestinian national struggle (Jean-Klein, 2000) through the ‘politicizing of domesticity’ (Neugebauer, 1998), as well as the experiences of mothers and mothering under occupation (Akesson, 2015).…”

The burden of being exemplary: national sentiments, awkward witnessing, and womanhood in occupied Palestine

“…This language is informed by the gendered organization of Palestinian society. At its centre are the young men who sacrifice their lives and are therefore perceived to be the primary heroes of the resistance against military occupation (Asad ; Hage ; Jean‐Klein ; Khalili ). They are martyrs, while the detainees have put their lives on hold, all in the name of a Palestinian nation‐state (cf.…”

“…Through an analysis of the constitutional documents of the Palestine Liberation Organization and political communiqués from the first Intifāḍa, Massad shows how women are primarily represented as mothers destined to deliver the new warriors and mourn their loved and lost sons. Important work in anthropology has documented how Palestinian women have historically participated directly and indirectly in activities of resistance in the public domain, for example Leila Khaled or other political heroines of particularly the first Intifāḍa (Jean‐Klein ; Peteet ; Sayigh ). Meanwhile the general exhaustion of Palestinian society after the failed Oslo Accords and the second Intifāḍa has meant, among other things, that the new forms of gendered, social organization gained under the first Intifāḍa have evaporated (Johnson, Abu Nahleh & Moors ).…”

“…This actualization makes relevant a return to the politicized and nationalized image of the exemplary suffering and nurturing mother who sustains everyday life in the absence of a son (Jean‐Klein ). For the wives who emphasize those aspects of womanhood that are connoted by motherhood, life remains recognizable even in the absence of a husband.…”