Content warning: Israel-Palestine mentions (but from over 5 years ago)
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Context warning: I’m a lifelong leftist - I also stand strongly with calls for ceasefire. But situations are highly complex and I’m not part of leftist antisemitic strands, nor of any calls that would deny the claims of several communities to live in that contested space. (You didn’t think this situation was a binary 2 community thing, I hope)? I’ve also not supported BDS - and this was a slow and reasoned decision. (Collabs with Palestinian and Leftist Jewish academics has been part of that story). Don’t hate-mail me - because I’m not naive. I’ve worked with, alongside, and in solidarity with Jewish and Palestinian people of various persuasions, including leftists, liberals, secular and orthodox observant folks.
I’ve also worked in other places of communal tension (most notably India). As a white Brit, I know a bit about colonial fuckery and legacies. As a European, I’m exposed to both Islamophobia and Antisemitism and I try to work against both. As someone from the Xtian tradition, I try to recognise my positionality. As an academic, I know that border and nation are invented and problematic constructs of modernity. As an anthropologist, I’m sensitive to nuance. I hope you are too.
Story 1: The Heart of The World
The Director of the Unit for Archaeological Research of the Nation sat across from the Deputy President, perplexed.
“Erm, could you explain that a bit more for me? I’m not sure that I’ve really understood the brief.”
The DP, a busy man at best of times – and these were not the best of times – leaned forward and spoke in a tone that, while not exactly patronising, nor menacing, nor even properly scathing, was decidedly not one that the DUARN wanted to hear too much of.
“You know the sacred texts, right?”
The DUARN nodded, unnecessarily. Every schoolkid from age six onwards learned, studied and was tested and examined on those texts. The creative ones were encouraged to draw or paint depictions of the events in them. Nerdy kids won prizes – real cash prizes – for memorising portions of the text and reciting them in annual public competitions. Poets and writers vied to produce the most harmonic and semantically interesting translations. Musicians set the words to tunes, both high-class and popular. The texts were beautiful. Polyvocal, enigmatic, shape-shifting, capacious, made anew by each generation and community that encountered them. Alive and wild and impossible to rein in or stabilise. Sacred words.
“Stanza 16, verse 5?” the DP asked.
The DUARN slowly recited, wondering if he was going mad, or if the DP had gone mad: “And you shall be the heart of the world.”
“Simple,” snapped the DP, in a concluding-this-meeting kind of way. “The President wants you and your team to locate, excavate and make a permanent public exhibition of the heart of the world.” He stood, looked at his watch, and reached out to shake the DUARN’s reluctant hand. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to find it. The texts give several hints. You can have some of the philologists and classicists on secondment to your team. And a few postdocs if you like. The exact budget can be negotiated, but it’ll be more than 30 million. We’re setting up a special tax to pay for it. We realise this will need person-power for the excavation, once you locate it.”
The DUARN walked out of the office bewildered. This was not what he had trained for, and he had no idea where to start.
The Sociology Bit
An experimental interdisciplinary short project [10 years ago] intentionally assembled an ethnomusicologist, a media studies academic and two ethnographers to work in Jerusalem Old City as a “sensory city”. Some of the team were Palestinian, or Jewish; some were queer; some were faith practitioners; some observed food prohibitions; some knew the area well already. I was one of the Jerusalem newcomers, having worked as an anthropologist for over 25 years in India and the Gulf states.
Team members made use of the cognitive and sensory shocks provided by the mix of familiarity and the unfamiliar, recognition or misrecognition, and we leaned into the fluidity/instability produced by our own anxieties. This was intended to encourage and intensify our fallback upon embodied understandings in our interactions with Old City locals. When superimposed upon the body of an experienced researcher such as Wood, Matar and Marchand, this technique – a meld of what I name as ethnographic naive with ethnographic experience (...erm, but elsewhere, in a place which is sometimes uncannily like this ... but again, is clearly not like this) – turned out to be fruitful.
We hoped to:
resist the categorical thinking that turns empirical and ethnographic nuance and complexity into brutalised representations – a problem haunting even the richest intersectional analyses
get beyond overdetermined and pre-scripted “Jerusalem” narratives common in academia and media
open ourselves to each other’s positionalities and methodologies.
We wondered if we could speak of “Jerusalem” without immediate capitulation into those modernist-linear “it’s all about the politics” narratives, which immediately close down other possibilities of perception and representation.
I worried about history a lot. If it’s “all about 1948”, what stops it from being “all about 1492”? While I held out, academically, for Hayden White’s insights and David Christian’s “Big History”, I was also comfortable working with the non-linear and mythic time signatures that religious respondents used. (My earliest ethnographic training was with rural Hindus, who would sometimes begin their answer to an ethnographic question about a current situation with, “It was in 1200BC that the sage …”).
To a team member’s opening question (“What is the most significant sound you hear in Jerusalem?”) one Old City resident respondent we spoke with offered: the noises in people’s heads. We all understood this. I’d felt nauseated, exhilarated, righteously angry, broken-heartedly compassionate, suffocated, pinned down, free-floating, utterly immanent and blissfully transcendent: pulled and pushed by sensory and emotional overload and crushed by anxiety about how to represent or make sense.
The Old City is an extraordinarily dense space as soundscape, landscape, history-scape, emotion-scape, any damned scape you want: the tiny place is overloaded and it can be hard to breathe, the air feels so viscous. Getting that six-senses texture into my analytic and my modes of representation was my desire. Post-1980s anthropologists are obsessed with matters of representation: our disciplinary moment of postcolonial reckoning was hard, necessary, and left us with an alertness to nuance.
And yet, while I shared with the project interviewees, respondents, and fellow team members alike a sense of the air in Old Jerusalem as treacle-thick, I maintained my analytic stance of strong anti-exceptionalism - exceptionalism being something over-prevalent in those modernist linear narratives. Working in India and the United Arab Emirates, I’ve experienced moments of tension, violence and the weight of the past that have also been extraordinarily dense (see also Atshan & Galor; Mitchell & Curtis; Basak).
The issues of Jerusalem (including state, borders, colonial interferences, communal tension, dispossession, institutionalised structural inequalities, nationalised religion, incitements to violence, dodgy archaeological projects, faith hardened into dogma) are also seen elsewhere – in different combinations, to be sure. The singularity of Jerusalem is its specific combination; but then, every place is singular.
Two years after that project, a Palestinian PhD student invited me back to the Old City – and also to a Ramallah visit.
“Writing up”? Impossible after such intensity! I produced an anguished 18000-word academic paper on representation, materialism and embodiment, which I never took beyond the conference stage – and a handful of interconnected short stories. This was story 1 - ‘Heart of The World’.
References and further reading
Atshan, S. & Galor, K. (2021). Israelis, Palästinenser und Deutsche in Berlin. De Gruyter.
Basak, B. (2018). Guest Editorial: Public Archaeology in India, Public Archaeology, 17(2-3): 69-73, https://doi.org/10.1080/14655187.2019.1703163
Christian, D. (2017). What is Big History? Journal of Big History 1(1). https://doi.org/10.22339/jbh.v1i1.2241
Doran, R. (ed). (2013). Philosophy of History After Hayden White. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Howes, D. (2010). Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. University of Michigan Press.
Marchand, T. H. J. (2015). Place-making in the "Holy of Holies": The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem. In Bull, M. and Mitchell, J. P. (ed). Ritual, Performance and the Senses, Routledge: London
Matar, D. (2019). The struggle over narratives: Palestine as metaphor for imagined spatialities. In Iqani, M. and Resende, F. (ed). Media and the Global South: Narrative Territorialities, Cross-Cultural Currents. Taylor & Francis.
Mitchell, J.S. & Curtis, S. (2018). Old Media, New Narratives: Repurposing Inconvenient Artifacts for the National Museum of Qatar, Journal of Arabian Studies, 8(2): 208-241, https://doi.org/10.1080/21534764.2018.1556873
Simpson, E., Kresse, K. (2007). Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean. Hurst.
Wood, A. (2013). Sound, Narrative and the Spaces in between: Disruptive Listening in Jerusalem’s Old City, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 6(3), 286-307. https://doi.org/10.1163/18739865-00603003
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