Lecture | LUCIS What's New?! Series
Palestine beyond the Borders: A Local Daily Construction of Alternative Maps
- Date
- Thursday 23 September 2021
- Time
- Serie
- What's New?! Fall Lecture Series 2021
- Address
- This is an online event. Please register to receive the link to the lecture.
Thinking of Palestine only from the cartographic imperatives printed on the region – which delimit spaces in what I call a “rigid binomial” of “Palestine vs. Israel” – may incur the erasure of local categories of territoriality and their identity equivalences. In opposition to such rigidity, these Palestinian local categories end up constituting a “single Palestine,” composed of four distinct spaces: the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, and, finally, Al Dakhel. Al Dakhel (Arabic for “within”), or its variant ’48, exists in what I will call a “contrasting category,” namely “Israel.” In other words, according to local expressions of territoriality, “Palestine” is not limited as a space to the so-called “Palestinian Territories,” considering the daily transit of Palestinian individuals between (and within) the spaces quoted above.
I developed the arguments for this talk through my two years of fieldwork as an anthropologist in Palestine, as well as my experiences as a guitar teacher. In this reflexivist study, I contemplate mobility and its inherent local complexities as components of the construction of a “single Palestine,” also aiming to highlight and present local categories of territoriality and identity.
About Rafael Oliveira
Rafael holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil. He has been dedicated to the fields of anthropology of music, ethnomusicology, and the anthropology of politics and postcolonial studies. Among his main interests, Middle East Anthropology stands out, with an emphasis on Palestine, music and politics in Palestine, territorialities, borders, and contemporary colonialities. Alongside his work as a researcher, he worked as a music teacher at the Edward Said National Conservatory in Jerusalem and at the Al Kamandjati Conservatory in Ramallah and Jenin.