Palestinian Sumud: Steadfastness, Ritual, and Time Among Palestinian Refugees

Abstract

This proposal is built up on my fieldwork experience researching among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and in Brazil for about 5 years. At first, I made a comparative ethnography of Al-Jalil (Wavel) and Dbayeh refugee camps in Lebanon. My research attempted to single out the most important referents of identity and social organization – and the dynamics between them – in the context of social life in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and their unique surroundings. This discussion was thus propelled by a one year and a half on site study of these two different camps – the first Muslim and the other Christian.

The question of religion as identity marker and organizational principle for Palestinians and Lebanese was at the very core of my research objectives. In Lebanon sectarianism is best seen is a consequence of post-colonial modernity, but Palestinian refugees are largely left at the margins of such Lebanese modernity. Partially as a consequence of this process, the role of faith in the Palestinian public sphere is integral to quotidian life discourses, debates, and social practices, through different processes that confer authority to both the collective social body and individual social, political, and religious entrepreneurs. Religion had a completely different significance to the Palestinians as it had to the Lebanese. Media-famous radical Salafist Jihadist networks (such as Fatah al-Islam) are but a fragment of the social subjects created through such dynamic processes; the whole picture being composed of a myriad of different forms of engagement with the public sphere, many of which are not even necessarily “Islamic”. Religion is de facto constitutive of social life in all its aspects among the populations that I studied, it is by no means the main important factor informing palestinianess, but it is much lived as a language in which much of daily life is framed and expressed.

Once back to Brazil I started a post-doctoral research on Palestinian refugees who came from Iraq about four years ago, and who are in a complicated process of resettling. In all these contexts (in Lebanon and Brazil), I found out that what drives much of quotidian life and a shared universe of experiences and expectations is a complicated relationship between a Palestinian conception of time framed especially by al-Nakba (The Catastrophe) and al-‘Awda (The Return), resettling projects referred by Palestinians as “tawtin” (and seen as opposed to al-‘awda), and different forms of resistance (especially al-sumud, more than muqawama). But in every single one of these contexts different relations to these terms – and thus with the expression of identity – can be found.

While in Al-Jalil (as it is for most camps in Lebanon) I found what I called a hyper-expression of palestinianess which gave rise to a ritualization and sacralization of the quotidian life tied to the notion of al-sumud, in Dbayeh and in Brazil I found Palestinian times informed by the same notions but giving rise to yet different forms of going about life, experiencing identity, and informing social action. These are what I wish to present and discuss at your conference if given the opportunity.

Keywords: steadfastness, refugees, resistence

JEL Classification: F22, O15, R23