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Taraki: Living Palestine: Family Survival, Resistance, and Mobility under Occupation
Reviewed by Sari Hanafi
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol 38, no. 9 (Winter 2009), p. 98
Recent Books

Living Palestine: Family Survival, Resistance, and Mobility under Occupation, edited by Lisa Taraki. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006. xxx + 274 pages. Works cited to p. 291. Index to p. 296. $24.95 paper.

Living Palestine: Family Survival, Resistance, and Mobility under Occupation, a collection of five research essays written by leading sociologists and public health specialists, explores relatively recent trends in urban culture, marriage patterns, emigration, class formation, and women's economic participation in contemporary occupied Palestine. Essays by Lisa Taraki, Rita Giacaman, Lamis Abu Nahleh, Jamil Hilal, Penny Johnson, and Eileen Kuttab offer intelligent and useful interpretations of the small dramas of Palestinian daily life, taking into account the political reality of the occupation as a basic backdrop.

The volume was inspired by a 1999 Birzeit University Institute of Women's Studies (IWS) survey on Palestinian households. As the introduction explains, that survey, which covered more than 2,000 households in nineteen communities in the occupied Palestinian territories, recognized the "necessity of embedding households in their ‘natural' environment: that of a particular village, city, or refugee camp, chosen as prototypes representing economies and modes of life (for example, villages that reply mainly on agriculture versus those that have a large proportion of the labor force in Israel)" (p. xiii). In their essays, contributors also incorporate data provided by the 1997 census, as well as recent ethnographic fieldwork produced during the second intifada. While there are countless publications and reports on the socioeconomic situation in the Palestinian territories, and while these often maintain the integrity of the raw materials on which they are based, it is rare to find such in-depth analysis.

The essay contributed jointly by Lisa Taraki and Rita Giacaman addresses the current diversity of modes of urban life in three West Bank cities: Ramallah, Hebron, and Nablus. Using different sources of data and historical materials, Taraki and Giacaman attempt to explain the uniqueness of each of the three cities in terms of their geographical context and their present closure conditions. Ramallah, in their reading, represents urban life, openness, cosmopolitanism, and diversity; its opposite, insularity and homogeneity, is represented in the cities of Hebron (a semi-rural town) and Nablus (portrayed as traditionalist and nationalist). For them, Ramallah represents a "cosmopolitan" localism that is as insulated from the rest of Palestine as the "localized" localisms of insular Hebron or Nablus. I found, however, that the authors overstated Ramallah's culture of individualism and cosmopolitanism. The exceptionality of Ramallah compared to its rural surroundings and the two other cities is, in fact, not so exceptional. I would rather use the term "truncated cosmopolitism." Following Steven Seidman's analysis of the Hamra neighborhood in Beirut, the presence of social diversity does not necessarily invite a cosmopolitan culture; "otherness" may be threatening or inviting, tolerated or valued. Cosmopolitanism requires selves whose boundaries are porous enough to "let in" difference, and whose sensibilities are enriched by the challenges to the life-world that otherness presents.

Jamil Hilal's essay examines the impact of emigration on class formation, especially the middle class. Hilal correctly highlights that emigration has been a salient and persistent feature of the life of Palestinian communities since 1948, but his most compelling analysis is about emigration (especially to Jordan and to the Gulf) as a vehicle of social conservatism-not only in the village communities of West Bank, but also in towns and refugee camps. For Hilal, social conservatism, which is different from political Islam, stresses the significance and importance of local tradition, local identities, and kinship solidarity. But he seems to rather mechanically link kinship connections to social conservatism, suggesting that the fact that the bulk of emigrants "went to places where they have kin and community connections is relevant to the explanation of why emigration tended to generate social conservatism." This is not necessarily the case; Palestinian emigrants to North America who followed the location of their kin are far from being considered social conservatives. Moreover, the circular feature of migration, that is, based on the to-and-fro movement between places, including more than one return, make the migration phenomenon so multilayered and complex that it deserves a more nuanced analysis than the one Hilal provides.

Sociologist Penny Johnson contributes an interesting, meticulous study on kin marriage practices in the West Bank, exploring 1999 IWS data and 1997 census data and revealing persistent patterns of (and sometimes increases in) rates of kin marriage. Johnson demonstrates the functionality of such marriage and how it is instrumental in the occupation setting of the Palestinian territories. She observes that patterns of kinship offered (modern) strategies to respond to modernity and its challenges to families in maintaining not simply their material capital but their "symbolic capital." Johnson also demonstrates that kin marriage is part of youth choice. I regret that she did not look at it in the context of the flourishing of conservatism in Palestinian society, both in the Palestinian territories and in the region. Kin marriage is often favored in arranged marriages. When public space where young people encounter each other is retracted, there is no option other than to ask parents to find a partner. My ethnographic fieldwork in the refugee camps in Yarmuk and Badawi show clearly that parents first search for potential mates for their children among kin before searching among neighbors and friends.

Lamis Abu Nahleh offers a compelling portrayal of six families from the West Bank as she explores the everyday resistance and mobility of the Palestinian family in spite of the tough realities of existence under the Israeli regime, traversing menacing checkpoints and fenced in by a wall. Eileen Kuttab's article on women's work shies away from the idealization of the Palestinian family by acknowledging the limits of its coping strategies-which, during these years of intifada, have not always been able to absorb shocks and provide sustenance to members of the family unit.