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.

The Morning After…in Ramallah

Update: One week later we returned to the first pharmacist we had visited in Umm al-Shariya - this time to get throat lozenges. He immediately recognized us and asked if we were able to get the pill, before showing us three boxes of Postinor that he had ordered. We wondered if he got them as a result of our request or if he had known what we needed but was not able to provide for us that day. 

Warning: while this is ostensibly a post about the politics of sexual reproduction in contemporary Ramallah, the observations derive from a very personal experience that – for some readers – will be Too Much Information. While this is hardly sensational stuff, if you simply don’t want to know me *that* well, don’t read this post.

This Friday, the contraceptive S and I were using broke, and we only realized this after the fact. So after the inevitable brief and mild panic, we went in search of a pharmacy. While most shops are shut on Fridays, we were actually lucky enough to find quite a few pharmacies open.

The first pharmacy we went to – just down the road in Umm al-Shariya – didn’t know what emergency contraception was. They showed us the monthly birth control pill.

The second pharmacy we found – now in Ramallah itself – did know what emergency contraception was. However, the pharmacist told us that we would have to go to a doctor to get a prescription. When asked if he could recommend a doctor, he said there were plenty, but didn’t recommend one in particular. For the record, I have bought plenty of prescription drugs, without a prescription, in Ramallah. Pharmacists simply sell you what you need. While we can’t prove it, I’m inclined to agree with S. that this guy was making a moral judgment.

The third pharmacist knew about emergency contraception, and even knew the name of the brand (although this only became clear later). However, he didn’t have any in stock. He wrote the name of the brand down on a piece of paper – incorrectly as it turns out. Since the incorrect version of the brand was ‘powster’, which he pronounced ‘poster’, we thought he was talking about an advert he’d seen. He recommended going to another pharmacy to see if they had it in stock.

The fourth pharmacist we found had not heard of emergency contraception. She said that she had many friends who had been in similar situations and become pregnant. I think she was suggesting that they would have benefited from such a pill. She said she didn’t think we would find such a pill in Ramallah.

After this we returned to the third pharmacist. He called another pharmacy, and then we established that he could order the emergency contraception and it would arrive the next day. Somewhat disconcertingly, after we asked him to do this and confirm that it would arrive, he replied ‘inshallah’ (God willing, or hopefully). Anyway, God must have willed it, because we were able to pick up the emergency contraception – called Postinor – the following day.

In the interviews I have been doing as part of my research, a number of people have expressed a desire to only have one or two children – ‘a small family’. Given that this suggests changing reproductive desires in this city (c.f. the average number of children per couple remains just above 6 in the Occupied Palestinian Territories), it is interesting to refract these desires through the lens of contraceptive availability, and the practices of health care professionals. Our small and very unscientific survey of pharmacists suggests that there is quite a lot of ignorance about emergency contraception in Ramallah. None of the pharmacists kept this form of contraception in stock. The different ways the medical professionals responded to us (in turn: confused, judgmental, helpful, sympathetic), also demonstrated a wide range of attitudes towards couples that wish to drastically reduce the risk of conception in an emergency.  

More broadly, the experience also underscores the need to always have/pursue multiple options when trying to achieve anything here.

[For anyone who arrived here after googling ‘morning after pill’ and ‘Ramallah’, try the Old Town Pharmacy located across from the Arab Bank in Ramallah Takhta.]

The life of W., continued

Yesterday I ran into W., subject of this post 3 years ago, so I thought a quick update was in order. He is now working in the kitchen of a new (and currently quite trendy) Ramallah bar. He is still living in Birzeit, albeit in a new house. He now has two children, a daughter aged 2 ½ and a son aged 1 ½. He said he hasn’t seen them for five days. Given that the place he works at doesn’t close until the early hours, I presume he sleeps there, rather than take the 40 shekel taxi back to Birzeit each night. He also told me that he was shot in the leg by the Israeli Army at the Atara checkpoint about two years ago. He lost 5 centimeters from the aforementioned leg, and now has restricted movement in it and a pronounced limp.

“Waiting:” Impressions of an Israeli checkpoint - 2010

S. is visiting for a couple of weeks. This is her first time in Palestine and the Middle East. A couple of days ago we went to Jerusalem, and so S. had her first experience of Israeli checkpoints (you don’t get checked coming from Jerusalem to Ramallah). After a comment at the Kalandia checkpoint, I invited her to guest blog. So here are some reflections from a fresh set of eyes so to speak:

The sun is hot, but thankfully we are under the shade of the roof that covers the vast waiting area of the checkpoint. We’ve arrived and a crowd has already formed, spilling out from where people are lined up to go through a life-sized, heavily barred turn-style. Before one reaches the turn-style, people are queued in what reminds me of what cattle and sheep go through to reach their pen – a corridor with metal bars on both sides. As I am waiting, I look at the people around me, Palestinians old and young, men and women, girls and boys, families, and foreigners. It is a Friday and many are crossing to go to midday prayers held at the mosque, Haram Al-Sharif, in the old city of Jerusalem. It is also the beginning of the weekend. There are men smoking and laughing, women talking amongst each other, and many more standing in silence and waiting in the summer heat. In front of me, there is a boy, around 8 or 9 years old, dressed in a dark blue t-shirt, shorts and sandals. He has dark black hair and big brown eyes. I look down and in his hands he clutches a clear plastic bag that contains water with an orange goldfish. This is all that he carries. He sees me looking at him and his fish, and we smile at each other. I put my hands lightly on his shoulders and bend down in delight to comment on his fish. I ask if it has a name and he says ‘no’, that it’s for his aquarium. The crowd begins to move and we file through the turn-style where we wait again. This time it is the waiting area just before you go through to show your passport to the Israeli officials. As we wait, there is a sense of commune amongst those around us. I feel a part of it somehow, a part of this waiting with them. Some get tired of waiting and move forward to slip in front of others who have also been waiting. Some of the older women comment on this, others stand in silence and wait. I look behind me and a boy stands quietly. He looks up at me with a slightly cross look on his face; I can see that he is tired of waiting. I share his frustration and wonder if the young because of this experience become politicized early in life or if checkpoints have become so part of their everyday that it is merely in the background of daily life. Up ahead a sister and brother, no older than 8 and 10 have come back through the gate. They have been turned away because of their identification. We discern later when their mother shows up that their other siblings got through with their aunt and are waiting on the other side. When the girl sees her mother, she begins to cry, we hear that it’s her birthday. The mother moves them in to another line to wait. We also move into a different line, as we find out that we were in the wrong queue. We also wait. This time the line is faster as it’s the line for people with official passports. We are finally at the front of the line, where they let people in 3 persons at a time. I walk through. An older woman, who walks through before me, turns and smiles broadly. She does not need to say anything; her waiting is over. I walk through the security gate and then to a window where I am asked to show my visa. I show the Israeli guard my passport and he sees that it is Canadian. The guard says, “You’re from Canada, cool.” The soldier is probably no older than 20 years old, closely cut hair, army green uniform, sitting nonchalantly with his legs wide open. He lets me through and I walk out to the other side where I wait for C. As C comes out, the sister and brother with their mother do also. They are reunited with their family so that they can go and celebrate her birthday. There is a sense of relief as we make our way to the buses that will take us to Jerusalem.  

The title of this blog entry also comes from the film “Waiting” by Rashid Mashrawi (a Palestinian director) that we saw at the Franco-German Cultural Centre.  This film depicts the experience of constant determent, particularly for Palestinian refugees, and the waiting involved during this time of deferment.

My very brief experience of waiting does not even come close to the wait that Palestinians have had to endure.

S.

The frustrations of doing research

Quite a considerable amount of my research process involves waiting, getting bored, getting frustrated, trying things that fail or lead nowhere. In the last 24 hours I have had the following experiences:

• Got bored while waiting for an interview to be arranged. Expected it to happen on Thursday. It eventually happened on Saturday.
• Visiting someone, who then doesn't want to conduct an interview.
• Ringing someone, to find they are not in the office for most of this week.
• Going to the municipality on a Sunday, only to find the door locked shut. Then remembering Ramallah is a Christian municipality, so even though the city starts its week on Sunday, the municipal workers don't come in until Monday.
• Tried to do all of the above with blocked sinus (allergies).

Despite the banal nature of these events - these are very much the everyday of conducting ethnographic field research - I still get frustrated/bored/disappointed, and feel like things aren't going well. When I feel this way I remind myself that I must manufacture some optimism as a kind of energy to fuel further endeavours. This isn't always easy.

At least my sinuses are better this morning, and S. arrives for a visit soon

Governing marriage

As Lisa Taraki’s description of Umm al-Shariya notes, the area is full of wedding halls – places where urban Palestinians go to celebrate their nuptials. (Marriage itself is a legal process, and takes place in a Sharia court). I’ve noticed that these halls are not only busy on weekends, but also during the week. This surprised me a little, although when I mentioned this to a friend, he said it was because Ramadan begins in August this year. Since you can’t get married in that month, everyone who wants a summer wedding, which is most people, have to do so before then.

The reason I was having this conversation with my friend was because he was going to a wedding party that evening in his village, which is in the Ramallah district. This led me to wonder, in villages where traditionally everyone is invited to celebrate weddings (thus preventing more than one wedding each night), how do people decide which couple gets the prime Thursday night spot, and who draws the short straw and has to settle for Monday? The answer, at least in my friend’s village, is that the village council maintain a diary, and decide who gets which date. The village council in question have also taken other steps to regulate marriage. They decreed that people should not invite the entire village to the celebration, only friends from other villages and extended family (although this can still leave you with a massive guest list). Otherwise, as my friend suggests, you can spend 10,000 shekels on the meat alone. The village has also set the price of a dowry at US$ 1000. No haggling any more. While these ordinances governing particular economic aspects of social reproduction are confined to this locality, they are apparently based on similar measures that other villages nearby have taken.

Ramallah – fairest of them all?

Research is keeping me busy, and at the same time I seem to be suffering from either a summer cold or allergies. Nonetheless, I will try to persist with blogging.

A couple of days ago, I had the pleasure of attending the opening of the exhibition ‘Ramallah – fairest of them all?’ curated by Vera Tamari & Yazid Anani at the Ethnographic & Art Museum, Birzeit University. From the catalogue:

‘Ramallah – the fairest of them all?’ is a self-reflection on Ramallah’s struggle for the title as the fairest of them all? It is an inquisition about the conflict between past and present, about change and coming to terms with new realities through two complimentary, yet separate exhibitions on social history and the contemporaneity of Ramallah. ‘Ramallah – the fairest of them all?’ is an interplay between the duality of exhibition space and urban space, social activism and archeology of social history, public intervention and display.

The gallery exhibition – Ramallah in the past – is a wonderful archive of different civic pasts. This includes a ‘salon’ installation (the living room kept ‘nice’ for guests), a display of sepia wedding photographs, and a large collection of photographs of Ramallah ‘life’ 50-60 year ago. This last collection includes couples socializing in mixed gendered environments; the women wearing skirts above the knee and sleeveless dresses, the men wearing well-cut suits. While at first blush the public morality governing these ways of dressing seems very different from today’s Ramallah (see next paragraph), it is of course possible that these people might well have been more affluent, and perhaps in that sense there is a line of continuity between now and then (which is to say, it is possible to go to certain parts of contemporary Ramallah, and take very similar photographs).

The urban exhibition – Ramallah today – is a set of installations located around Ramallah city centre. There are three different works, two of which are currently present absences. Al Riyadh, a billboard size satire of current neoliberal urban development in the city that is governed by the ideas and dictates of large transnational businesses rather than local architectural vernaculars and communal needs, and Projection, a poster (advertising the film Abi Fawk Al Shajarah) depicting a couple about to engage in a passionate kiss, were both censored (i.e. removed) by the municipality. The only way they are now ‘presenced’ in the city is through small postcards – available at the Ethnographic & Art Museum - that were intended to guide audiences to their locations. They billboards and posters are now displayed around the Birzeit University campus. Only the final piece ‘What’s wrong about having a normal life in Ramallah’ by the dynamic Ramallah Syndrome collective, remains in the city itself. The work poses a series of questions on canvas about what it means to live in Ramallah currently amid the changes that have occurred over the recent two decades. These are being displayed in a number of coffee shops. Other coffee shops refused.

What struck me about the exhibition as a whole was its introverted nature. By this I mean that it staged a conversation that was very much for local people (local here defined primarily as Ramallah, but also Palestinians from other parts of the West Bank). This contrasts quite markedly with most contemporary Palestinians discourses (whether artistic or otherwise), that engage with a whole range of external others (often by necessity). Hence, in this context, what I’ve referred to as introversion is an achievement. It is a crafting or establishment of a more enclosed space, where an ‘internal’ discussion can occur that otherwise wouldn’t. And thus (and this may seem like something of a paradox) it also establishes a space that goes beyond (‘outside’) the familiar.

Well worth a visit if you’re in town!