MES 380CEncountering Israel&Palestine

Catalog

In this course, we carefully read and analyze ethnographies of Israeli and Palestinian lives, attending to how ethnographic fieldwork challenges dominant narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ethnography, the hallmark knowledge production practice of cultural anthropologists, seeks to describe people's everyday lives through long-term, immersive encounters in the field. These encounters last a minimum of twelve months, but may extend decades or a lifetime. What difference does the intimacy and duration of the research process make for what we can know about life in a given place? This course treats the borders of modern nation-states not as fixed containers of Israeli and Palestinian life, but as objects of intellectual inquiry. We read ethnographies of Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon, Israeli diaspora communities in Berlin, and Jewish life in Morocco post-1948 to explore the constitution of identity across space. Topics of study include: catastrophic memory of the Shoah and Nakba, the place of myth and archeology in Israeli nation-building practices, humanitarian aid, how war shapes kinship relations, gender, and more.