HOMEMAKING IN THE SUBJUNCTIVE SPACE OF PALESTINIANNESS

Abstract (English)

I studied Palestinian social belonging processes for 20 years. During this time, I have done fieldwork among Palestinians in Lebanon (mostly in refugee camps), in Denmark, Austria, Palestine, and Brazil. Each of these contexts produces different ways of being Palestinian. But apart from that, there are so many ways one can feel and express their Palestinianness, based on all sorts of social cleavages - such as gender, social class, ethnicity, race, political inclinations, ideology, religion, and more – and subjectivities, meaning how different people creatively engage with the environment around them.
In recent decades, anthropology tended to slap an “s” after everything to account for respect for diversity and these seemingly infinite ways of being in the world. That is, there should not be a single normative tradition of anthropology, or a canon anymore, because to decolonize means to acknowledge the existence of several different such traditions, hence “anthropologies” (in plural, with an “s”). In the same way, this has been applied to other things, such as Palestine. That is, on the limit, supposedly there is not a single objective Palestine – and there never was – but there are as many “Palestines” as there are Palestinians. But if we look closely, this extreme relativistic approach may also carry the same prejudice of the extreme objectivistic approach, namely, that it reifies a normativity, only this time, one per subject, which in Liberal terms is the individual their respective politics of identity. Likewise, in the case of multiple anthropologies, supposedly there are Norwegian, a Brazilian, an Italian, a Czech, and so on “anthropologies”, each distinct from one another and none being a canon in themselves. This, in turn, reifies each of these iterations, as if they were in themselves homogenous and as if they were entirely different things, instead of being related to one another and embedded in a context marked by relations of power and dispute.
But most of my Palestinian interlocutors, especially those apart from academia, always told me that being Palestinian was something objective, and that there was only one Palestine to which all Palestinians belong. So, how can Palestinians be at once very different from one another, and yet feel and express that they belong to a Palestinian nation? In other words, what is Palestinianness, and how to understand, study, and describe it, accounting for both subjectivity and objectivity? My answer passes through understanding Palestine as home and Palestinianness as a homemaking process. These homemaking practices are, in turn, a favored form of subjunctive space, where past, present, and future collide with conceptions and ideals of the self (collective or otherwise).