Search

Begin New Search Topic Anthropology Political Geography Palestine

1. The Anthropological Rise of Palestine

Author:
Sa'ed Atshan
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article traces the rise of anthropological scholarship on Palestine and/ or Palestinians from 2011 through the present, providing readers with a comprehensive bibliography of anthropological publications related to Palestine over that period. Drawing upon the author’s experience as a scholar of Palestine and a publicly engaged anthropologist, it accounts for the factors fueling the proliferation of this domain of knowledge production and the implications this has for representations of individual and collective Palestinian human conditions. The article argues that contemporary anthropological research and writing provide Palestinians with intellectual tools for discursive enfranchisement. Such anthropological engagement also makes possible global solidarity wherein Palestinians are recognized as epistemic equals, rendering legible the heterogeneity and complexities of Palestinian lived experiences.
Topic:
Research, Solidarity, Anthropology, Ethnography, Academia, Epistemology, and Palestinians
Political Geography:
Middle East and Palestine

2. Settling for Less: The Planned Resettlement of Israel's Negev Bedouin

Author:
Steven C. Dinero
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Book
Institution:
Berghahn Books
Abstract:
The resettlement of the Negev Bedouin (Israel) has been wrought with controversy since its inception in the 1960s. Presenting evidence from a two-decade period, the author addresses how the changes that took place over the past sixty to seventy years have served the needs and interests of the State rather than those of Bedouin community at large. While town living fostered improvements in social and economic development, numerous unintended consequences jeopardized the success of this planning initiative. As a result, the Bedouin community endured excessive hardship and rapid change, abandoning its nomadic lifestyle and traditions in response to the economic, political, and social pressure from the State—and received very little in return.
Topic:
Development, United Nations, Anthropology, and Repression
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

3. ARAB STUDIES JOURNAL VOL. XXVI, NO. 2

Author:
Shehab Ismail, Reem Bailony, Neha Vora, Ahmed Kanna, Graham Auman Pitts, Judith Naeff, Maha Nassar, Benoit Challand, Jocelyn Sage Mitchell, David Gutman, Alexa Firat, Matthew L. Keegan, Matthew S. Hopper, Johan Mathew, and Thomas F. McDow
Publication Date:
09-2018
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Arab Studies Journal
Institution:
Arab Studies Institute
Abstract:
We are proud to feature a collection of pieces that innovate new methodological approaches, confront the relationship between knowledge and power, and speak to the urgent concerns of the present, infrastructure, ecology, migration, and war. In “Epicures and Experts: The Drinking Water Controversy in British Colonial Cairo,” Shehab Ismail explores taste, class, and the environment. When in 1905 the Cairo Water Company altered its source of intake to deep wells instead of the Nile, it pitted experts, officials, and the urban poor in a battle over knowledge, medical traditions, and water practices. In tracing the five year struggle in which the palate became a battleground, Ismail reveals how taste, as a mode of embodied knowledge became a site of confrontation between heterogenous epistemic persuasions. In “From Mandate Borders to the Diaspora: Rashaya’s Transnational Suffering and the Making of Lebanon in 1925,” Reem Bailony traces debates on the social, political, and economic constructions of Lebanon and Syria, both in the borders of the French Mandate and well outside of it. By placing mahjar studies and Middle East studies in close conversation, Bailony both calls for and provides a model for a methodology that transgresses the territorial confines of the nation-state. In doing so, she reveals the crucial role of the mahjar in consolidating Lebanon as nationally distinct from Syria and in need of different sectarian arrangements. Neha Vora and Ahmed Kanna contribute reflections on two decades of ethnographic experiences researching Dubai and other cities in the Arabian Penninsula. “De-exceptionalizing the Field: Anthropological Reflections on Migration, Labor, and Identity in Dubai,” explores and critiques scholarly identity and authority in a call to develop understandings of Gulf cities that address migration, diaspora, place, and belonging. Vora and Kanna thus put the individual experiences of politics, geography, racialization, and minoritization into conversation with the knowledge that is produced on these historical forces. Graham Pitts reveals how the “human ecology” of Lebanon evolved according to the logic of an expanding and retracting global capitalism in “The Ecology of Migration: Remittances in World War I Mount Lebanon.” In detailing the material and environmental history of migration as well as highlighting World War I, the famine, and remittances, Pitts traces a broader trajectory of Lebanon’s history. In “Writing Shame in Asad’s Syria,” Judith Naef analyzes how the Syrian author Khaled Khalifa built feelings of shame into the literary structure of his novel No Knives in the Kitchens of this City. She traces the multiple forms of shame and how, like rot, its pervasive spread unravels relations. Shame, she suggests, is at once contagious and repulsive, and is one site to both refect on and understand the unraveling of Syrian social landscapes under the Asads’ authoritarianism. We ofer as always a robust set of reviews and review essays that feature the latest contributions to the study of the Middle East.
Topic:
Migration, War, History, Labor Issues, Infrastructure, Capitalism, Colonialism, Anthropology, and Ecology
Political Geography:
Middle East, Palestine, North Africa, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Dubai