The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine

Abstract

This essay identifies four different modes of ethnographic engagement with Palestine since the nineteenth century: biblical, Oriental, absent, and poststructural. Focusing on the epistemic and political dynamics in which the recent admissibility of Palestine as a legitimate ethnographic subject is embedded, we highlight two conditions. One is the 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 humanities. Combined with the rupture in Israel's sanctity in the West since the 1980s, these developments were conducive to Palestine's admission. We conclude by considering Palestine as a problem space that could reinvigorate the critical abilities of postcolonial language and the anthropology that it engenders.

Palestinian Christians in the Mandate Department of Antiquities: History and Archaeology in a Colonial Space

“…36 He joined the British Mandate administration as a general civil servant, starting at the Treasury, but some of his earliest published writings (from 1921/22) show his existing interest in the culture and history of Palestine from a perspective which means that he is often included in the notional "Canaan circle" of nativist ethnographers who "challenged a colonial British version of Palestinian history that saw Arabs in Palestine as transient and ephemeral". 37 In works such as his translations of the Palestine sections of Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatname, 38 his "Modern Palestinian Parallels to the Song of Songs", 39 and several guidebooks for English-speaking visitors during World War II, Stephan asserted a strong and distinctive Palestinian culture which can be seen as a kind of subaltern cultural diplomacy, using historical, cultural and religious themes both to assert Palestinian legitimacy against Zionism claims, and to suggest commonalities between Palestinian Christians and their European and American co-religionists. 40 In Stephan's portrayal, Palestinian culture had several defining features, including roots in a rich and diverse blend of cultures, and the presence within its contemporary manifestation of instances of modernity which refuted Zionist claims to have brought civilisation to the Arab population of Palestine.…”

Governing Through Timescape: Israeli Sustainable Agriculture Policy and the Palestinian-Arab Citizens

“…77 The text reflects the deep orientalist imaginary 78 towards al-Batuf embedded in the minds of officials, and points to the heritage values and continuity that they are looking to conserve: it is the image of the fellahin as a living museum symbolizing both early Zionism days and mostly the landscapes of the biblical past. 79 Beit Netofa, then, is a timescape of bringing the past to the present.…”

Responses

“…Second is the Palestinian experience, not least of those Palestinians who in the wake of 1948 were trapped within Israel—a state they never wanted or anticipated (Furani and Rabinowitz ; Rabinowitz ). The founding generation of Israeli anthropologists, researchers who were active since the 1960s (some of them still are), looked at Palestinians and at Bedouins with empathy, using “culture” to forge a liberal framework of analysis.…”