Conclusions

After talking to men who have migrated to live in Ramallah about their relationships with their families and neighbours, what did I find out this summer?

1. Extended families and distant neighbours
When people move to Ramallah they maintain good relationships with their families in their place of origin. However, few migrants know their neighbours in Ramallah very well. This creates a binary between family (spatially distant, socially close) and neighbours (spatially close, socially distant). Social relations become stretched across space. Further research might explore women and children’s social relations, since they may not conform to this pattern.

2. Rethinking the city

Ramallah is currently thought about as a bounded space in various ways (e.g. Bantustan, enclave, bubble). Ramallah is the political and economic centre, and thus quite different from other Palestinian cities. However, it is also connected with those cities and villages through the lives of migrants. The movement of people, money, knowledge, and goods (esp. food) between Ramallah and other parts of the West Bank (e.g. through weekly visits, telephone calls, financial transfers) suggests that the city can be thought of as a series of emotional, social, economic and political networks that stretch across the West Bank. The city is thus not just buildings and infrastructure, but also people.

3. Political economy and affective atmospheres

Migrants experiences of Ramallah must be understood in the context of changing political and economic relations. They must also be understood in relation to the atmosphere of the city. Many research participants talked about an atmosphere of ‘freedom’. For different people this meant: 1) freedom from familial & social obligations; 2) freedom to make money; 3) freedom from occupation (although these are all interlinked). This atmosphere is actively produced in various ways by the Authority, the municipalities and by residents themselves. In addition to the political and economic factors that make Ramallah distinct, this atmosphere also defines Ramallah. Further research on this issue is necessary.

And with that, another trip comes to a close.

Ramadan

Ramadan, the Holy Month, began a few days ago. In preparation brightly coloured lights had been appearing outside toys stores since last weekend. A number of houses in the neighbourhood also have an array of fairy lights, many in the shape of crescent moons and stars, attached to exterior walls and roofs.

One of the most interesting things about Ramadan, is the way in which it changes time and space for an entire month. The city is transformed during the day, as food vendors shut down (some use the time to conduct renovations), and fewer people walk around – not surprising given that many are neither eating nor drinking during daylight hours. [I should actually say most of the city is transformed. I went to the Ramallah municipality – a ‘Christian municipality’ even though I presume many of the staff are now Muslim – and was promptly served tea at 10 o’clock in the morning. The restaurants in that area are also open during the day, although people eat and drink inside rather than on the patios). Later in the afternoon, there were fewer services running into town, and at sunset (iftar – the breaking of the fast), the streets become almost totally deserted, until people start going to the mosque for the prayer one hour after sunset. On the first day of Ramadan, so many people were going to my local mosque in Umm Alshariyat, that some literally had to pray in the street. After prayers many presumably return home to watch the Ramadan soap operas (Bab el Hara is in its 5th and final season now). Others walk around the neighbourhood. It seems that each night a group of men jog around around my neighbourhood, while singing. I can’t make out what their song is about. Unable to sleep last night, I also heard the drums beating notice – at 3am – to tell people to eat before the next day’s fast begins.

For many the day becomes night and visa versa, ensuring that while the body cannot eat and drink it remains asleep for many hours. However, even for those of us who are not fasting, time changes. The clocks have been put back an hour – reverting to ‘winter time’ in the middle of summer (a whole month earlier than they normally would). While many recognize that this makes fasting a little easier, it has also led to a great deal of confusion. This is something that has just been done in the West Bank. We are now one hour behind Israeli time. Can Palestinians living in East Jerusalem travel to Ramallah and arrive at the same time they left? When they are in East Jerusalem and beholden to the power of the Israeli state, do they live two times simultaneously? The settler-colonists in Psagot that I can see living on top of the nearby mountaintop are living in a different time, even as these exist in an adjacent space.

Johannes Fabian talks about how colonial regimes consign the colonized to a different time, as part of discourses and practices that promote the modernity of the colonizer at the expense of the ‘backwards’ indigenes, who belong to another time. (These ideas then underpin various ideas around ‘development’ among other things). But the multiple chronologies that came into being here on the first day of Ramadan are something different. Apparently it is Salem Fayyad (Palestinian PM) and the PLO that has the power to change time in this way. Thus this is a form of indigenous biopolitics – self-governance – highlighting that the colonized also participate in making their own temporal experiences. And it is also quite mundane. While I am certainly experiencing different ways (temporalities) of existing in the world simultaneously, for most people here the time change makes easier the task of sustaining bodies when particular (religiously inspired) conditions are placed on those bodies.  

p.s. Talking of bodies, I have come into contact more than once – in communal taxis – with some very sweaty, odorous bodies since Ramadan started. While the weather has been hot – as usual – I don’t remember there being a prohibition of bathing. I wonder if (a) some areas are experiencing water shortages; or (b) fasting increases sweating.

Methodological limitations

I now have a little over 2 weeks left in my field visit, and hence have started to feel a sense of heightened urgency to get work done. This temporality – not getting much done explicitly at the beginning of the trip, then rushing to get lots of ‘data’ towards the end – is quite familiar to me. It was certainly the basic pattern of my two previous visits here in 2006 and 2007. In some ways the early weeks can be frustrating, because it doesn’t seem like you’re doing much. However, I try to remind myself that these weeks are important too – both in terms of orientating oneself to the context one finds oneself in, and also ‘presencing’ oneself in that context: becoming known, familiar, and hence (hopefully) becoming less unknown/threatening/strange.

This act of ‘presencing’ oneself in the space of research has been particularly important this summer, because my primary sampling strategy – snowball sampling – has to all intents and purposes not worked. Snowball sampling, which I intended to use to generate interview participants, involves getting to know a few people, and then using their social networks to generate further research participants. In more concrete terms and in the context of my research, this would involve interviewing people, and then asking if they know other people who might be able and willing to help with my study. This is a useful method in contexts where a researcher doesn’t know many people themselves, and where time (and particularly the time to establish relations of trust) is limited. It can also give a sense of what social networks exist in a particular place and how they are maintained.

This method worked well in my previous project because the social networks were quite dense in the locality where I conducted research. However, in Umm alshariya, this method doesn’t have the same efficacy. While I was hoping – perhaps naively, perhaps generalizing too much from my previous research – that even in ‘migrant neighbourhoods’ some reasonably durable social ties would exist, this doesn't seem to be the case. In fact, the people I have talked to celebrate the fact that they are free from social ties and obligations. They embrace – to a certain extent – a more anonymous lifestyle where one doesn’t interfere with ones neighbours, and they treat you in a similar way.

Simply put, the sampling method I have chosen is inappropriate for the social practices and spaces that I wish to study. In this situation, I have had to rely on my own ability to ‘make relations’, which is harder and takes longer. Thankfully my ‘presencing’ is paying some dividends in this regard, and thus revealing the value of those early weeks where it seems like nothing much is happening.

Imagin(in)g Palestinian urban futures

Haaretz reports that the building boom in Ramallah symbolizes growth in the West Bank. While I would argue that Ramallah's growth is happening largely in lieu of growth elsewhere in the West Bank, it is interesting to examine some of these development projects such as Al Reehan, Al Ghadeer, and perhaps the most talked about, Rawabi.

Rawabi is a new town, currently being built a few miles north of Ramallah. It's really interesting to unpack the ways in which Palestinian space, urban life, family, economic activity and ultimately futures are being imagined by those responsible for this project (and its website). While a friend is currently researching this project in detail, I thought I'd post this picture to give a flavour of the new urban subjects being co-produced for/by/with this space. 

Notes from S’s visit.

S. has now left. Here are a few retrospective thoughts from the two weeks she was here:

• On the first night S. was here, we went to see Boney M play the Ramallah Cultural Palace (an awesome gig btw). A couple of days later we went to see a reggae concert at a local bar, and the next evening we had dinner at a popular local restaurant. By this point, it seemed like we knew or recognized half the people in the restaurant. This definitely gave me the sense that Ramallah is starting to resemble Amman: a limited social scene where an elite few constantly search for and inhabit the ‘next’ restaurant/bar/event, speaking to see and seeing more or less the same people.
• Travelling around the West Bank, the extensiveness of Israeli colonialisation is (still) staggering. Bantustanization (the division and fragmentation of Palestinian space) is a ‘permanent solution’, regardless of which variety of state – if any – emerges in the next few years. [I don’t conceive of ‘permanency’ in this context as either static or eternal, rather obdurate and enduring].
• Birzeit Old City has been extensively renovated since my last visit in 2007. I should have an opportunity to write more about this later in the month.
• We visited Al-Khalil [Hebron], which has changed a great deal since my previous visit in 2005. It’s much less tense. Businesses have opened in the Old City again. The colonies built on top of Palestinian houses in the heart of the city remain, as does the military presence protecting them. This situation will not endure.
• Also in Al-Khalil, Jawwal – the Palestinian mobile phone company – has built a series of fountains in the middle of roundabouts. Their billboards and posters are all over the West Bank. They sponsor festivals and community projects. We are witnessing the Jawwalisation of public space in the Palestinian areas of the West Bank.
• Frequently when people met us (i.e. as a couple), they would ask if we had any children. When we said no, the common response – inshallah (God willing) – could be interpreted as part invocation, part blessing. One young woman told S. that when she returns to Palestine, she should return with a child. One old woman told me I looked too young to have children.