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Sireen: An Oral History of Palestinian Dispossession and Resistance
Abstract
This project is an oral history of a Palestinian family, tracing its experience from 1967 to the present. Members of this family have experienced military occupation, imprisonment, assassination, home demolition, restrictions on movement, and other forms of political violence. Some of them have been involved in Palestinian resistance to Israeli military occupation, planning martyr operations against Israelis and attacking Palestinian collaborators. While being mindful of this political violence and situating the oral history in such a context, my aim in this project is to tell a story of the nuances of rural life within these events, to capture the longue duree of social change, and to highlight everyday experiences and the way events and the mundane intertwine to produce people’s lives. Importantly, in telling this story, this project experiments with creative nonfiction as ethnography. In this talk, I explore my role as storyteller by first reading excerpts from my book, and then focusing on what it means to write creative nonfiction as an anthropologist, the challenges I encountered, and the choices I've made. How can we tell the story of a family’s life under occupation, apartheid and settler colonialism using the tools we learn as anthropologists? To this end, I explore the enduring question of representation and voice. And ask: how can we transform our data to forms that present themselves to greater audiences without sacrificing theory and critique? And how do we play with stories told to create stories written?
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Arab-Israeli Conflict