The Palestinian Peasant as National Signifier

Swedenburg, Ted

doi:10.2307/3317957

Cited by 176 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The symbolism of this is complex. As Swedenburg (1990) explains, the kufiya is actually specific to peasants and the Bedouin who constitute only a small proportion of the Palestinian population (which over time has been spread across the region and beyond). Thus what is really striking about the headwear is the way in which it was nationalised to produce (amongst a geographically-scattered population) a sense of national identity with roots in a specific place.…”

Section: Embodying Identitymentioning

confidence: 97%

Identity, Culture and Contestation: Social Identity as Cross-Cultural Theory

Hopkins

Reicher

2011

Psychol Stud

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In this paper we explore the logic and implications of the social identity approach to group processes. The theory argues that the consequences of social identification for behaviour are not simple givens. Rather than making generalisations about the behaviour that flows from social identification, the theory makes the point that behaviour depends upon the way in which identities are defined. This emphasis upon the contents of social identities draws our attention to their construction and we pay particular attention to how group identities are made and remade in and through argument and social practice. We argue that attention to the dynamics of identity construction means that this perspective is respectful of culture and cultural difference and that the social identity approach therefore has considerable value in exploring the politics and practice of identity wherever group behaviour may be found. Moreover, we argue that the ubiquity of identity-related argument across cultures and contexts reflects the fact that group identity is a basis for social power.

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Section: Embodying Identitymentioning

confidence: 97%

Identity, Culture and Contestation: Social Identity as Cross-Cultural Theory

Hopkins

Reicher

2011

Psychol Stud

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“…They refer to sumud, steadfastness, with its defiant connotations related to Palestinian nationalism (Swedenburg 1990), to describe village residents' dwelling practices. Some also engage in more direct tactics, like public advocacy in partnership with NGOs, insurgent building and planting (McKee 2013b) and filing court cases.…”

Section: Seeking Recognition In Bedouin Villagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Demolitions and Amendments: Coping with Cultural Recognition and Its Denial in Southern Israel

McKee¹

2015

Nomadic Peoples

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This article examines how social preferences, in the form of cultural politics, become concretised in land laws. In Israel, Bedouin Arabs in unrecognised villages and Jewish farmers of individual farmsteads each faced governmental eviction orders and responded by seeking recognition of their land-use practices as legal. However, whereas Jewish farmers successfully mobilised place-based identities to gain legalisation, Bedouin Arabs' dwelling practices were not recognised as the legitimate basis for land claims, and their attempts to assert place-based identities have been denied. Instead, Bedouin Arabs faced pressures of 'de-cultural accommodation' and continued evictions. Ethnographic comparison of these two cases of 'illegal' settlement demonstrates how cultural identities -as former nomads or pioneer farmers -matter for land claims.They were called to go to the Negev not in order to expel Bedouins, but to settle the land as we did throughout this whole state. And even if it doesn't seem so to you, we need to settle the land. This is why I came from Morocco to here, to settle the land.(Knesset member Yaakov Edri, during Knesset debate of legislation to retroactively legalise Jewish farmsteads in the Negev, 26 October 2009) Why do we run to answer by law to 59 individual settlers and ignore 81,000 residents who live in forty settlements, that don't have drinking water and have no roads? They have children and have no schools, no education and no welfare. Is this because these are Jews and those are Bedouins? Is this policy right? Is an individual Jew more important than tens of thousands of Bedouin residents?(Knesset member Talab al-Sana, during same proceedings)NOMADIC PEOPLES 19 (2015): 95-119.

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“…Initially, the landscape appears to undergo a softening, the tone shifting from militarized urban setting to gently undulating hills -a pastoral landscape that remains centre-shot as we hear snatches of an intimate conversation between director and actor about her decision to leave Palestine, and his love of acting (see Figure 2). In contrast with the fraught and artificial setting of the checkpoint, the naturalness of this environment seems to invoke a very different "law"; one that perhaps recalls the original meaning of the term nomos (law) as derived from nemein, meaning "to pasture" as well as "to divide" (Schmitt 2006, 70) and that speaks to the deep-rooted connection to the land prevalent in much pre-colonial Palestinian discourse (Swedenburg 1990). This natural, peaceful state of normality is soon shattered, however, when the crew are confronted by an ad hoc checkpoint at which three armed guards call them to a halt, forcing them to confront the authority of Israeli sovereign law.…”

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Kafka at the West Bank checkpoint: de-normalizing the Palestinian encounter before the law

Ball

2013

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

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Abstract:The checkpoint has emerged as a quintessential trope within the contemporary Palestinian imagination, to such an extent that "checkpoint narratives" have arguably come to assume a dangerously "normalized" status as everyday, even iconic features of Palestinian existence. Turning to the films Route 181 by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, and like twenty impossibles by Annemarie Jacir, this article explores how alternative representations (and theorizations) of checkpoint encounter might serve to "de-normalize" the checkpoint in a way that invites us to interrogate the very nature of the checkpoint apparatus in itself, including the nature of the "law" that it represents. Mobilizing the critical paradigms of the "state of exception" and "homo sacer" drawn from the theoretical work of Giorgio Agamben and the literary work of Franz Kafka, the article argues that apprehension of the enduring oddity and abnormality of the checkpoint serves as a vital mode of critical resistance to the policies of

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The Palestinian Peasant as National Signifier

Cited by 176 publications

References 12 publications

Identity, Culture and Contestation: Social Identity as Cross-Cultural Theory

Identity, Culture and Contestation: Social Identity as Cross-Cultural Theory

Demolitions and Amendments: Coping with Cultural Recognition and Its Denial in Southern Israel

Kafka at the West Bank checkpoint: de-normalizing the Palestinian encounter before the law

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