Palestinian prison ontologies

During the first intifada uprising (1987–1993), thousands of Palestinians were arrested annually, and mass incarceration affected as many as 100,000 families. Relying on several recent ethnographies, and other published research including some of my own, this article describes the contests over Palestinian prison ontology as organized by (a) the jailers, (b) the prisoners, (c) the families of prisoners, and (d) a service agency in the emerging Palestinian Authority. What becomes evident is that mass incarceration involves ontological struggles over the framing of justice, agency, and gender. The conclusion asks how these ontological struggles may be part of other modern prisons.     

Consanguinity trends and correlates in the Palestinian Territories

Secondary analysis of the trends and correlates of consanguinity in the Palestinian Territories was conducted using data from two separate surveys in 1995 and 2004. The analysis was conducted on ever-married women aged 15-54 who were asked about their relation to their husband in both surveys. A total of 16,197 women in 1995 and 4971 women in 2004 were successfully interviewed. Consanguinity was found to be widely practised in the Palestinian Territories with rates of total consanguinity reaching 45% of all marriages in 2004. Analysis was conducted with the data from the two surveys combined and this indicated that consanguinity was significantly decreasing with time after controlling for other variables. Age of the women, their age at marriage, region and locality type they lived in and their standard of living were all found to be significant predictors of consanguinity. The education level of the women was not found to be significant. After controlling for the survey year, women's labour force status was also found to be a non-significant predictor of consanguinity. Although consanguinity was found to be significantly decreasing slowly with time after controlling for other variables, the future trends of consanguinity are not known due to the unstable political situation in the territories, which could have a direct effect on marriage patterns.     

Lumbee Indian cultural nationalism and ethnogenesis

Conclusions In both cultural and political nationalism we find people attempting to make their own history from within, but at the same time seeking to move beyond the conditions imposed upon them. Because oppression is not just political and economic, but cultural as well, cultural nationalism is a liberating force. Through cultural nationalism, the Lumbee seek to generate their own culture, in contradistinction to the culture that flows from their oppressed position.But the liberating potential of cultural nationalism is only partial in the presence of political and economic exploitation. Cultural nationalism provides an abstract cultural unification of the Lumbee, and it calls for political and economic equality between Lumbee and Whites. Implicit in Lumbee cultural unification is internal socio-economic equality, but as their cultural nationalism seeks to move from self-definition to self-determination, it says nothing explicit about this.The absence of a specific program for internal social and economic transformations, in the direction of establishing equality, makes it possible for cultural nationalism to be based on an alliance between the emerging Lumbee elite and the Lumbee working class. The rise of the Tuscarora movement points to the likelihood that this alliance will be short-lived.A contradiction has appeared: at the same time that cultural nationalism, by generating not just pride but collective pride, functions to hold the Lumbee together culturally, it also functions to widen class divisions. It is too early to predict how this contradiction will be resolved, but its centrality indicates that the future political development of the Lumbee will lie in its resolution. Either cultural nationalism will move in the direction of a program of social equality, which would yield cultural unification and enhance the sense of political and economic reality, or it seems likely that cultural nationalism will do what white oppression could not — it will split the Lumbee apart and reinforce the penetration of the Lumbee community by national and multinational corporations.An alliance between cultural and political nationalism, based on the collectivization of Lumbee resources and the expansion of the cultural content of cultural nationalism to include recognition of the dynamics of class formation, seems to be necessary to permit the Lumbee to enjoy the right to make their own history. Such an alliance would entail a greater transformation of the cultural than the political nationalist position. This could occur with the ethnic elite backing cultural nationalism, since the elite witness the continual looting of their people under the aegis of the large corporations that they help bring in, and/or it could occur as their political power is eroded by the continual attacks of the political nationalists. As the only significant accumulators of capital among the Lumbee, however small, their role in an alliance would then lie in their participation in the initial founding of a socialist sub-economy. It could well be argued that this is asking the ethnic elite to commit suicide as a class. Yet the choice seems to be between that outcome, however arrived at, and abandoning communal identity.The split between cultural and political nationalism is basically a class antagonism. If the cultural nationalists win this struggle, the only answer — paradoxically — to the pressing material needs and problems of the poorer Lumbee may well turn out to be an abandonment of their cultural identity as Lumbee in a straightforward lower class alliance within the larger nation-state. Should the political nationalists become the dominant power among the Lumbee then perhaps sufficient economic and political self-determination might be established to provide the basis for a nontrivialized Lumbee Indian culture. The poignancy of this inversion of the intent and the effect of cultural nationalism can only be realized by appreciating the deep and genuine cultural concern — whether also opportunistic or not — of most Lumbee cultural nationalists.There are, in the usual view, two options open to a people such as the Lumbee. The first is stagnation, clinging to their roots and changing as little as possible: preservation with continued impoverishment as the likely price. The second is progress or economic development, with the attendant major increase in assimilationist pressures brought about by the increased penetration of the dominant state: modest material betterment at the price of major cultural decline. Cultural nationalism resists the first option as an obvious affront to collective pride. It also, however, eventually resists the second option, being opposed not just to the debasement of culture but also to its destruction. Whatever its present strength, it thus has no future.The absence of ethnogenesis from this usual array of options reflects not just a limited anthropological or ethnic nationalist vision, but the real limitations of capitalism. Fundamental to capitalist economic processes are regional inequalities. As has been well demonstrated, these regional inequalities generate nationalism, they do not, however, create nationalities. The precondition for the ethnogenetic formation of viable nations from submerged and dominated minority peoples — for a world that culture not only symbolizes, but creates — is the kind of regional equality and communal material foundation conceivable under socialism.Gerald Sider is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Richmond College, City University of New York.

---

     

Cultural and instrumental approaches to ethnic nationalism

This article identifies a set of assumptions that underlie culturalist approaches to ethnic nationalism and it assesses these assumptions from a particular instrumentalist point of view ‐ collective‐choice theory. It is argued that cultural approaches are structuralist, leaving little room for intentional explanations and, when agent‐centred explanations are used, they are typically embedded within a moral economic theory of groups. In contrast, collective‐choice theory is intentionalist and political‐economic in orientation. From the perspective of these different approaches, the article examines a common dilemma of mobilization in nationalist movements ‐ how popular support can be mobilized by activists who, for entrepreneurial or ideological reasons, have formed a nationalist organization. Empirical illustrations are drawn from interwar Brittany and contemporary Quebec.