Occupational Hazards: Palestine Ethnography

Swedenburg, Ted

doi:10.1525/can.1989.4.3.02a00030

Cited by 125 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“… 6. Classic ethnographies of local memory include Herzfeld 1991 and Seremetakis 1994 on Greek memory, Swedenburg 1989 on Palestinian memory, and Cattell and Climo 2002 on Holocaust memory. I refer here not only to genocidal memory but also to the enlistment of personal memory and the gap between the personal and the national.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embracing the lived memory of genocide: Holocaust survivor and descendant renegade memory work at the House of Being

Kidron¹

2010

American Ethnologist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The House of Being is a Holocaust‐survivor geriatric center and memorial museum in Israel, where lifeworlds and deathworlds coexist to create a “lived memory” of the Holocaust past. Its agenda, decor, and provocative commemorative practices engender movement between everyday life in the present and the genocidal past. Humor, for instance—the House genre—allows Holocaust descendants to explore contradictions between their familial lived experience of genocide and the “dead memory” of national commemoration. Sustaining a balance between a departure from and accommodation to mainstream national memory work, ludic memory reinvigorates the commemorative landscape. The activities that take place at the House, as well as its design and ambiance, problematize conceptualizations of commemoration, traumatic loss, serious humor, and the sequestration of death in everyday life.

show abstract

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embracing the lived memory of genocide: Holocaust survivor and descendant renegade memory work at the House of Being

Kidron¹

2010

American Ethnologist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Why could the old man and his fellow Mamprusi not see that I was, as Ted Swedenburg has written in reference to himself and his research among Palestinians, a "good foreigner" out to debunk European myths and pretensions about an African society? 12 Yet I could also understand the old man's feelings about me. Rattray's gargantuan study of the north, The Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland was not merely an impartial anthropological exercise, but was also the outcome of an assignment commissioned by the Gold Coast government in the late 1920s to provide a guide to northern societies which would help facilitate colonial administration in the region.…”

Section: IImentioning

confidence: 99%

What the Stranger Brings: The Social Dynamics of Fieldwork

Lance

1990

Hist. Afr.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A major feature of research in African history is the reliance of African historians on oral statements for much of their evidence. Vansina's pathbreaking explorations of African oral traditions and testimonies established criteria for the collection of oral evidence and ushered in the contemporary era of scholarship in African history. Although the publication ofOral Traditionsanctioned the use of oral data, it also prompted considerable reflection about the nature, strengths, and weaknesses of oral evidence. For the most part this scholarly examination of African oral traditions and testimonies has focused on their value as sources. What has not been fully addressed are the social and cultural dynamics of the research process itself: how the interaction between a foreign fieldworker and an indigenous informant involves not only the production of knowledge but the management of asymmetrical power relationships as well. Rarely do researcher and informant interact as equal partners. During the process of fieldwork, sometimes the researcher is favored, sometimes the informant. This brief paper is a reflection on the ways the attitudes of an African people about knowledge, power, and outsiders influence the kind of oral evidence the researcher collects.For much of the past two years I resided in a village in northern Ghana where I was conducting fieldwork among the Mamprusi people. I was seeking information which would embellish and provide an indigenous texture to the archival sources I had collected earlier as part of my efforts to reconstruct the social history of Mampurugu during the colonial period. It soon became apparent, however, that my quest for an indigenous expression of, and perspective on, historical process was mired in a complex host of conflicts and assumptions. As a white stranger in the Mamprusis' midst asking as many questions as I could about the Mamprusi past, I received answers which reflected not only the degree to which I had successfully or unsuccessfully established cordial and trusting relationships with my Mamprusi informants, but also Mamprusi attitudes about historical knowledge and their anxieties in regard to possible consequences if such knowledge were revealed to non-Mamprusi.

show abstract

“…22This vignette also echoes an ethnographic vignette written thirty years ago by Ted Swedenburg. While driving in the West Bank, he put on and took off a Palestinian kufiya (headdress) in order to pass as an Israeli or as a Palestinian, a cycle which signified his uncertainty ‘as a fieldworker under military occupation’ (Swedenburg : 266).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Under the cover of the kippah: on Jewish settlers, performance, and belonging in Israel/Palestine

Harel

2019

Royal Anthropological Inst

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

What can a kippah – the Jewish head cover – reveal about settlers’ politics of belonging in the Israeli‐Palestinian space? During fieldwork among settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank, I selectively put on and took off the kippah, using it to control social identity and interactions, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. This article interrogates my use of the kippah as a reflexive means of highlighting its powerful meanings and effects within the Israeli‐Palestinian space. In showing how the wearing and removal of the kippah bears upon the social construction of Jewish identity, this article offers new insights into the sociopolitical significance of sartorial practices in Israel/Palestine. These insights contribute more broadly to debates at the intersection of studies of settler colonialism, material culture, identity, and performativity.

show abstract

Occupational Hazards: Palestine Ethnography

Cited by 125 publications

References 1 publication

Embracing the lived memory of genocide: Holocaust survivor and descendant renegade memory work at the House of Being

Embracing the lived memory of genocide: Holocaust survivor and descendant renegade memory work at the House of Being

What the Stranger Brings: The Social Dynamics of Fieldwork

Under the cover of the kippah: on Jewish settlers, performance, and belonging in Israel/Palestine

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About