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Fertile Circulations: Planting, Foraging, Harvesting, Sharing
Abstract
This paper investigates how global discourses about food -- particularly its origin and ways of production – come to Palestine through an often circuitous route and take particular root in Palestine soil at this moment in time. A central tenant of Palestinian resistance has stressed the longevity and the tenacity of Palestinian agriculture (particularly ancient, long-lived, olive trees grown on terraces) employed to counter Zionist assertions of a “land without people.” Recent acts of agricultural resistance draw inspiration on international discourses and movements promoting new agricultural strategies that focus on changing production, circulation and consumption. During my research over the last decade, I have noticed the influences of permaculture, eco-farming, seed banks, anti-GMO discourses, CSA (community-shared agriculture), Slow Food, which have inspired farmers and activists to practice similar forms of “fertile resistance” in Palestine. These cosmopolitan discourses themselves do not face the difficulties of physical movement that Palestinians themselves do because of the checkpoint and permit regimes. Yet when these discourses take root in occupied Palestine, they are employed to draw attention to, circumvent, or ameliorate these infrastructural obstructions. So while children of Palestinian refugees, for instance, become familiar with CSA practices in the US, they transform them when they return to Palestine, invoking how volunteer laborers earning rights in shared, local produce from Palestinian seeds can be a means of subverting the occupation by providing a means of boycotting industrially farmed or produced Israeli goods. I draw on Elaychar’s notion of “phatic labor” to describe how activists in different parts of Palestine maintain connections with each other (or generate new ones) despite the difficulties of movement. They engage in complicated exchanges of knowledges, practices, and tools, as well as art, spaces, and hospitality. They are at pains to separate their productive activities from the “aid industry” activities and their connections, often initially made in shared political activities like olive picking, from the more classically known “wasta” ties which are associated with considerably less inspiring established Palestinian political organizations. These activists also share concerns with reclaiming and sharing Palestinian knowledges about foraging for edible plants, a practice receiving much attention from chefs like of Rene Redzipi of Noma and anthropologists like Anna Tsing, and passing along these embodied ways of seeing and gathering can be preserved and passed along to young Palestinians.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries