Ativismo e Subjetividade Palestina

mothercraft, statecraft, and subjectivity in the
Palestinian intifada
JRJS JEAN-KLEIN
University of Edinburgh
Focusing on Palestinian subjectivity during the intifada, I highlight connec-

tions between domestic processes and the nascent state. Empowered by the
progressive-nationalist movement, ordinary young men and women chal-
lenged the moral authority of the domestic patriarch. The new moral subjects
were not, however, producing "themselves" individually and reflexively. In
the face of paradoxica/ conditions of self-making precipitated by the organ-
ized poltica/ struggle, young men with their mothers and sisters became
moral persons through a col/aborative and reciproca/ exercise of se/f. [state-
craft, kinship, political organization, gender, personhood, Middle East]
Over recent years, anthropology has seen the emergence of a "criticai anthropol-
ogy of selfhood" that takes to task the "self-centeredness of selfhood" (Battaglia
1995:1-2)-that is, the presumption that "the skin-bound individual" is the singular
site and self-sufficient author of selfhood (1995:5). In this article, I add to this critique,
expanding the scope of "other-influence" it brings into view.
lntroducing the "multiple [analytical] rhetorics" drawn together in her edited vol-
ume, Battaglia writes: "There is no selfhood apartfrom the collaborative practice of its
figuration. The se/f is a representational economy: a reification continuously defeated
by ... entanglements with other subjects' histories, experiences, [and] self-repre-
sentations" (1995:2, emphasis in original). Battaglia further suggests that the subject is
influenced by rhetorics emanating from "asymmetrical" sources, such as the state
(1995:3, 8). From the point of view of Palestinian subjectivity during the intifada,
these are valid and necessary qualifications, but they are too limited. Battaglia's for-
mulation reifies a potentially boundless field of impersonal representational and
structural influences. Further, and more relevant to my Palestinian data, the site of
self-conduct and of self-presentation is left to correspond to the singular, skin-bound
subject.
At the time of my research, in 1989-90, the Palestinian intifada, a comprehen-
sive effort across the occupied territories to break lsraeli military rule, was in its
second year. The public life of towns, villages, and refugee camps was marked by
street demonstrations and clashes between Palestinian activist youths and the Israel i
army, various measures of civil disobedience, a daily rote of reduced trading hours,
and numerous extensive curfews. The measures were in response to decrees issued
by an anonymous, by ali reports popularly based body, the United National Leader-
ship of the Uprising (UNLU), which had crystallized in the intifada's wake. The Israel i
regime made membership in PLO-affiliated organizations illegal and punishable by
imprisonment in the mid-1960s. In 1988, in keeping with this policy, the Israel ire-
gime declared ali grassroots committees affiliated with the parties of the PLO i Ilegal
American Ethnologist 27(1 ):1 00-127. Copyright 2000, American Anthropological Association.
mothercraft, statecraft 101
and their members subject to prison terms of up to ten years (Nasser and Heacock
1990:202).
This circumstance (the sanctions against political involvement) spoke against the
public display of political activism, which in turn formed a criticai part in the anima-
tion of the poltico-moral subject in the occupied territories at that time. lt could have
been for these reasons that the latter process carne to involve a unique form of col-
laborative self-practice-the "representational entanglement" of multiple individuais
and their actions (Battaglia 1995:2) at the levei of self-embodiment and "subjective"
manipulation of other-influence. To visualize this economy, one could take Moore's
account of "the subject in post-structuralist thinking," cast as "a set of multiple and
contradictory positionings and subjectivities" (1994:55) and turn the imagery inside
out. Moore writes: "What holds these multi pie subjectivities together so that they con-
stitute agents in the world ... are such things as the subjective experience of identity,
the physical fact of being as embodied subject'' (1994:55, emphasis added). The pre-
sent account shows multiple bodies, subjects, and their subjectivities-connected via
specific familial relations-collaboratively and reciprocally affecting the individual
subject. I use the notion of "cross-subjective self-enactment" to depict this economy
of personhood.
This type of cross-subjective self-enactment is foreshadowed in Joseph's (1994)
captivating analysis of cross-sibling relationships in the adjacent setting of Beirut dur-
ing the 1970s. Focusing on the reproduction of patriarchy, Joseph portrays familial
cross-gender relationships as sites where subjects act out their gender identity and
moral status-reciprocally and recursively. A boy's sense of himself (and recognition
by others) as "manly" and "honorable" is here wrapped up with his sister's beauty and
adherence to the fE:imale code of morality-both of which unfold under his tutelage
and refract his growing effectiveness in the exercise of interpersonal control (for
which this relationship is a training ground and arena of display). Obversely, a girl's
sense of herself (and perception of her by others) as "feminine" and "modest" derives
from her visible submission to her brother, to whom she publicly extends affection
(wife-like) and nurture (mother-like). The brother's character and fortune also gener-
ate dignity and security for the girl. One is thus led to imagine persons who collabora-
tively and reciprocally demonstrate each other's gendered and moral value as part of
the daily exercise of a familial connection. Reciproca! demonstration involves the ex-
ercise of appropriate relationships and the maintenance of individual conduct. To de-
note the fact that self-presentation was (in this sense) not circumscribed by the per-
formances of the individual subject but needed the individuated conduct and
relational performances of two "enmeshed" subjects related by kinship, Joseph speaks
of "relational selves" and "connective identities" (1994:55, 58).
Once this distinct economy of self-making stands out, ethnographic resonances
become apparent in other accounts of honor, tribal identity, reiigious status, and gen-
der in various other Arab world settings including accounts that predate the practice-
focused conception of identity that is now dominant (see Morris 1995). 1 lf cultural
difference, which the discipline has organized around cultural regions, serves as an
extension of the human vision by yielding plural dimensions (i.e., distinct regional in-
sights) that then act "like fresh perspectives on phenomena and alter the apperception
of the phenomena themselves" (Strathern 1991 :122, footnote 19), then Arab world
ethnography, which chastises itself for not generating fresh perspectives on anything
(e.g., Abu-Lughod 1989), may actually hold the seeds for a distinctive regional per-
spective on self-making.
102 american ethnologist
In this article, I amplify ethnographically and analytically expand the formulation

of the cross-subjective enactment of self developed by Joseph (1994). Motivated by
the distinctive, highly politicized context of the Palestinian West Bank during the inti-
fada, I bring into view the mother-son relationship, alongside cross-sibling and new
conjugal relationships. The connection between cross-subjective self-articulation and
the nascent state is my ma in concern.
Peteet's (1994) study of the West Bank during the intifada, in which she connects
ongoing political events and identity processes, serves as my starting point. There she
provides a compelling analysis of activist Palestinian mal e youths, or shebab who, she
proposes, transform physical abuse at the hand of the Israel i regime into brave, heroic
deeds. As heroic deeds, abuse suffered becomes empirical ground for the youths' pre-
mature entry into manhood and conducive to significant status enhancement.
Peteet's study vividly confirms that cultural repertoires of honor- and gender-in-
dicative practices undergo historical change. But further, the author suggests a dra-
matic reconfiguration of what might be castas the ontology (cf. Kapferer 1989:79-80)
of personal production under the influence of current political conditions. Organized
resistance against lsraeli occupation is said to have opened new arenas in which mas-
culinity and honor can be demonstrated independently, that is, "initially out of the
bounds of the kin groups" (Peteet 1994:41 ). Historically, the same subjects would
have been adolescents, economically dependent and politically subservient to the
paterfamilias (cf. Rosenfeld 1968:734-742, 1978). During the intifada, they promoted
themse/ves independent of their male elders and at the latter's expense; the youths
seemed to eclipse elders as the champions of manliness and poltica! morality. This
argument is consonant with economically focused accounts of transformations in Pal-
estinian familial relations prompted by Zionist settler- and lsraeli state-colonialism,
which stress the erosion of young men's economic dependence on fathers and the ag-
natic kin group. 2
Who exactly effected the youths' status transformation (and their fathers', the un-
said underside of this transformation)? Peteet's analysis divides responsibility between
the lsraeli regime (its uneven distribution of repressive measures, concentrating on
male youths), the nationalist movement (which provided alternative arenas for distin-
guishing action), and the youths themselves. Dividing authorial authority in the proc-
ess of self-making in this way is consonant with the model of "other influence" to
which Battaglia (1995) draws attention. My ethnography, however, presents a conun-
drum that her analysis does not address, pointing to additional other-influences: sen-
ior men were not spared lsraeli harassment; they, too, were often beaten during house
searches (Peteet 1994:34, 43, 46). Yet somehow, physical abuse had a diminishing ef-
fect on elder victims' gender identity and moral status while it had an enhancing ef-
fect if the victims were youths. In the case of the oi der victims, abuse was publicly ac-
corded the value of passive reception; in the case of younger victims, it was
recognized as a sacrificial and heroic activity. 3 The discrepancy suggests that victimi-
zation in and of itself was a partia/ signifier of virtues associated with manliness (ru-
ju/a) and honor (cf. Strathern 1991 :39). 4
In the present article, I enlarge on such processes of conversion, focusing on con-
stitutive knowledge practices. I focus on the roles of women in constituting their sons'
and brothers' heroic selves. Young men's efforts at status promotion outside the house
are shown to be independent from if not opposed to their fathers; however, they are
not outside the bounds of kinship. Young men became moral persons (shebab, i.e.,
activist youths) with their mothers and sisters-who in the process became "mothers
of heroes" and banat (politically active girls), ali in a collaborative, cross-subjective
exercise of self. Moreover, such personal connections comprised and exemplified the
connections across zones of productivity. For on its own, political activity, like mar-
riage, left junior men (I henceforth refer to these subjects as boy-men) standing at the
threshold to full manhood yet to be fully realized through marriage, the wife's preg-
nancy, and the birth of a male child. In other words, poltica! activity could not take
the place of other less contingent social thresholds such as reproductive events begin-
ning with marriage; it depended on and complemented them.
criticai incidents: allegories of activist selves in everyday life

In ali this, it is important to recognize that the process of the cross-subjective, re-
ciproca! animation of heroic selves received considerable impetus from ongoing or-
ganizational practices. From the point of view of the movement, the promotion of
shebab involved a strategy of simultaneously organizing the uprising and reorganiz-
ing Palestinian society into nation-statehood, which included converting subjects into
Foucauldian subjects-of-the-state (cf. Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:137). Aside from its
expressions of felt political commitment, activist and heroic self performance also al-
ways included an element of personal self-promotion restating, perhaps enhancing,
one's own moral integrity under challenging circumstances posed by "criticai
events." In her ethnography of contemporary lndia, Das (1995) describes criticai
events as events that call forth "new modes of action." Specifically, they entailed a re-
definition of "traditional categories such as codes of purity and honor, the meaning of
martyrdom, and the construction of a heroic life" (1995:6). Peteet's (1994) analysis
and my own suggest the intifada constituted a criticai event in this sense. Here, how-
ever, I use the notion to describe a specific subset of associated, constitutive events
and their criticai (painful and transformative) effect on the social biography of individ-
ual persons and families they affect, more than on cultural values. By criticai events, I
mean episodes of personal injury deriving from the political conflict, including arrest,
detention, imprisonment, abuse during nterrogation, and other volations the lsraeli
regime was routinely deploying against Palestinian subjects (see Black and Morris
1991; Farsoun and Landis 1990; Lockman and Beinin 1989:323-324; and Warnock
1990:149). They were criticai in that they posed risks and were experienced as trau-
matic by the persons and families concerned. They were also criticai with respect to
their decisive role in the cross-subjective performance of self-which turned on a
poignant contradiction. While poltica! activism was fast becoming an arena in which
youths could demonstrate their personal worth (not least due to organizational ges-
tures that touted youths as its embodiment), such demonstrations usually eluded sin-
gle named individuais since activists were bound to secrecy by personal and collec-
tive security considerations. lnterlocking networks of individuais shared codes for
performing co-subjectivity, including the criticai imperative that personal value (sub-
jectivity and status aspired to) be contnuously demonstrated practically, in one's
daily actions, and publicly.
In these circumstances, criticai events facilitated the indirect disclosure of per-
sons' involvements and moral virtues. Such episodes allowed the virtual authentica-
tion of an individual's activist engagement without compromising his, or the move-
ment's, continued political productivity. The Palestinian case thus brings variation to
the classic proposition (e.g., see Daniel 1994; Scarry 1985) that violence suppresses
speech; among Palestinian men involved in the movement, heroic self-making was
predicated on speech, albeit in highly channeled and coded ways. In this respect,
connective other-selves were enabling: their conduct facilitated public (if displaced)
observation of the subject under duress and, as my ethnographic evidence will show,
animated the appropriate, stoic manner in which the victims took their arrest and tor-
ture. Women's cross-presentational agency is like a "prosthetic extension" (Strathern
1991 :38-40) of the subject under duress.
In what follows, my own narrative structure reiterates the didactic significance of
criticai episodes that had become nearly routine in the lives of my Palestinian ac-
quaintances. They were routine in the sense that they occurred with considerable
regularity; people anticipated having to cope with them. I myself, however, never
learned to be adequately prepared for or to feel in control in the face of them. At the
time, they seemed to be diversions from fieldwork. I had intended to focus on the dra-
matic increase in women's political (read "extra-domestic") participation, which
leading Palestinian intellectuals and activists were touting. Later I realized that fol-
lowing the rope of extraordinary events had not led me from my original destination
but toward it via an unexpectedly domestic approach (the making of Palestinian
men's subjectivity revolved around their relations with their mothers and wives). I
give an account of one such incident in the next section. The event and its signifi-
cance then unfold over the subsequent sections, where I expand ethnographic obser-
vation beyond individual case histories. I ought to prepare the reader from the outset
for the rei ative absence of the father figure during the initial stretches of my account.
As I argue explicitly in the final two sections of this article, the discourse of cross-sub-
jectivity involves a discourse of gender complementarity and equality that specifically
excludes senior men.
the ethnographic setting: Harat Nashita

My account of Palestinian subjectivity is based on the practices and discourses
within a loosely knit network of households. Most of the 60 or so households that
made up this network were located in Harat Nashita (a pseudonym), a neighborhood
of Ramallah. Yet, this is not an account of Harat Nashita as such. lt excludes many
Harat Nashita households but incorporates the relational trajectories of those studied
(especially women's) of the members of the households that were studied. 5 Thus, the
field under consideration-Harat Nashita-extends into other neighborhoods and
towns, as well as villages and refugee camps. The Harat Nashita householders, their
own urban locale notwithstanding, were eminently migratory and incorporated di-
verse socio-geographic locales in their biographies. The majority had grown up in vi I-
lages around Ramallah or north of the West Bank; slightly fewer were descendants of
"1948-refugees," 6 and the same number again had moved to Ramallah from other
West Bank towns. The geographic dispersai of kin was common, and this had some
bearing on the authority women and youths were able to exercise in their reciproca!
self-promotion.
The occupational profile of Harat Nashita included unskilled laborers, semi-
skilled technicians, small business entrepreneurs, civil servants, anda few profession-
als. One third of the women were employed part- or fui l-time outside the house or
based at home, in jobs ranging from highly skilled to unskilled.7 llliteracy was rare,
even among elderly women. Though the majority of homes revolved around the ideal
of a conjugal couple, many were actually made up of "women without men" (cf. Jan-
sen 1987), and the paterfamilias was an unstable presence in the biographies of most
conjugal households. Two-thirds of mal e heads of households had spent long periods
of their married lives working outside the occupied region. Even as they had regularly
sent remittances home and in this sense remained the main providers, their wives had
been left in charge of the daily running of the household. Women's temporary
empowerment, also affected by the dispersai of kin, often had an erosive effect
on men's domestic authority following their return. What is more (as I will
show), returning migrant workers often found themselves locally disconnected,
without standing, and out of touch with the rules of conduct pertaining to current
"tournaments of value" (see Appadurai 1986:21; Meneley 1997:5)-competition for
adult masculinity and a place in a men's hierarchy. These were now based on the
politics of nationalist activism. For the returning migrant, a swift repositioning was dif-
ficult. Men who were physically immobile dueto old age, disability, or chronic illness
were in similar positions. Few senior men appeared (to me or to my companions) to
be involved actively in the nationalist movement (cf. Peteet 1994:43).
Two-thirds of Harat Nashita households included children and youths. These
families did not usually send their children abroad for university educations (as was
common practice among the urban bourgeoisie). 8 Furthermore, most households
with children of detainable age and sex were or became "families of prisoners" during
the period of my research. 9 Severa! women of Harat Nashita were involved in a
women's committee and, through their involvement, brought to my attention two of
the four women's committee associations that participated in the nationalist move-
ment at the time. 10
a criticai incident
A sudden sense that things were not the way they should be jolted me out of my
sleep. Apprehensively I searched the darkness of the bedroom that (with its adjacent
sitting roam) formed one of three rooms (ghurfa or oda) 11 of this traditional peasant
house, which was situated in a south-central West Bank village. I strained my eyes to
find my two companions who had earlier shared the roam with me-my friend and
fictive sister, 22-year-old Maisun, and her mother, lmm Riyad. They were no longer in
the room.
Maisun and her husband Karim had come to visit his home during a two-day
commercial strike (idrab). Maisun's parents, her two brothers, her maternal grand-
mother, and myself, had joined them. This was the second night of our stay. The next
day we planned to return to Ramallah. lt had been Abu Riyad's place of residence for
25 years.
The young man had not visited his village and parents' house in almost a year,
during which time he had married. He had stayed away after the lsraeli military
authorities had declared him wanted (matlub) for suspected involvement in the upris-
ing. He had taken a risk on this particular occasion because he had special reasons
and, in any event, it was accepted that arrest could not be indefinitely avoided, only
delayed to a more suitable moment. lnitially the hope had been to delay until the
wedding ceremony was completed, then until the bride was with child. Maisun was
now four months pregnant. '
While the bride had insinuated that the visit was partly occasioned by "work" her
husband had in the vil Iage (intimating Cama/ wataniya, patriotic work), overt explana-
tions to family and neighbors concentrated on the young man's desire to return to his
mother's home. This seemed an adequate and indeed respectable explanation, no
less commendable than political work might have been. The young man's desire was
taken as evidence of his sound and "clean" moral character. He was a "good man"
(zalame mnih), his affines reiterated. (The fact that after ali this time the "wanted"
son's visit carne just during the time when his father, Abu Farid, was away visiting an-
other son in Jordan was not given much thought.)
Already during ou r first night I gained the impression that the party was expecting
a disturbance. Karim did not spend the night in his parents' house; instead, he stayed
ata married brother's house. As for the rest of us, Maisun's father and brothers were
directed to the "guest roam" that during Abu Farid's absences became the abode of
the only son still living at home; Maisun was given the roam that would have been
hers had the couple moved into the groom's father's house after marriage; and the re-
maining women camped out where the party had been hosted on arrival, in lmm
Farid's roam.
Nothing untoward occurred during that first night. After breakfast, the women in
the party, under the direction of lmm Farid, began preparations for a festive meal in
honor of Karim's visit-in the same fashion in which members of the family and com-
munity were welcomed back after long absences abroad. A dose friend of lmm
Farid's, speaking of Karim as being "like a son" to her, lenta special hand in a gesture
of "othermothering", which was commonplace between dose women friends (cf.
Peteet 1997:108, 121, following Collins 1990:129). She baked the dozen or so chick-
ens that lmm Farid supplied and an even greater number of disks of flat bread (for
which she had prepared the dough), carrying the heavy trays to and from the village
oven (tabun). The meal was served ata married sister's house, where the party stayed
for most of the day.
Lounging in the back garden long after the meal, the younger members of the
party noticed a vehicle parked by the driveway in front of the house. From this loca-
tion, the driver of the vehicle could see into the garden and watch its occupants.
"Some villagers say this man is a collaborator," Karim's brother-in-law explained (per-
haps for those of us he presumed too uninformed about the village to appreciate the
threat the man's presence constituted). "He is probably trying to see whether or not
Karim carne with us," Maisun added matter-of-factly, sounding knowledgeable about
such matters and surprisingly unperturbed (compared to myself, who began to feel
queasy with terror). "What are we going to do?" I asked her. "Nothing," she replied
calmly. "We stay right here and do what we carne to do: have a good time!" The
young men eventually felt compelled to rise to the challenge and confront the driver,
demanding to know why he was "staring at the women," which the man allegedly de-
nied. He claimed that he was "waiting for someone." Later, the young men ap-
proached the driver for a second time. Again, the suspected collaborator insisted that
he was "waiting for someone." Only when he saw the young men approaching a third
time did he leave.
The same man reappeared in the evening, at the entrance to lmm and Abu Farid's
backyard, where Maisun, her mother-in-law, her mother, grandmother, and myself
were having a last cup of tea. "He wants to see whether my husband is sleeping here
tonight," Maisun announced, attempting to sport a lack of concern but not managing
this as well as she had during the afternoon. (Because the man in the vehicle seemed a
clear indication that lsraeli intelligence by now knew of Karim's visit, and the place
from which they were most likely to arrest him would be his father's house during the
night, Karim had stayed at his sister's house instead.)
In preparation for the second night, the older women rearranged the sleeping or-
der. I was assigned to sleep in Maisun's room, where lmm Riyad, her mother, joined
us. The changes were meant to reassure me, to whom the women attributed "fear for
[my] sister." (Much Iater I carne to appreciate that a foreigner was an opportune site
for the legitimate placement of fear that was not viscerally absent from criticai inci-
dents, but the influence of which needed to be controlled, also by the victim's female
relations.) The mother and bride of the anticipated victim were already co-performing
the stoic posture that the subjects of criticai incidents were expected to display.
Lying in Maisun's room, it struck me that the yard was lit and echoing with
excited voices. From the window, I caught a glimpse of Maisun, in her nightgown,
striding from the kitchen into her mother-in-law's room. Behind her emerged Karim's
sister, also in her dressing gown. Alarmed, I rushed to join the gathering. "They took
my husband," Maisun noted matter-of-factly when I entered. She was handing out
small cups of coffee. The groom's sister had brought the news and spread it in the
neighborhood en route as she shouted into the night: "They have taken my brother!
Abu Xis a collaborator!"
The arrestee's sister and young bride displayed remarkable composure in their
immediate and detailed concentration on procedural aspects of the arrest. Karim's
mother, by contrast, gave a dramatic demonstration of a loss of self-restraint. (This
was not the first time a son of hers had been arrested; a younger brother of Karim's
was serving a prison sentence at the time of these events.) Her hip-length gray hair,
which she usually wore in a tidy plait, night or day, now hung loosely and disarrayed
about her tear-drenched face. The buttons down the front panel of her nightdress
were torn open, exposing her chest which she was fiercely pounding and scratching.
She interrupted this self-abuse only to slap and scratch her face ferociously or to pu li
violently at her hair. Ali the while, the distressed woman kept her eyes hypnotically
fixed to a portrait of her "wanted" son (now arrested) on the wall opposite the settee.
"Karim, my love! Why you!?" she implored the photograph with her wails. And,
"Why did I bring you here!?" Again she turned angrily to assault her face and chest.
Maisun's mother and grandmother were sitting to lmm Farid's left and right, up-
right and inert. No one made much effort to commiserate o r interfere with lmm Farid's
self-abuse. The company's attention focused entirely on the arrestee's sister, who
again and again went over every detail of the arrest, and on the bride who, after hav-
ing received the first detailed run-down from her sister-in-law, now acted as an eye-
witness herself.
lmm Farid appeared not to be listening to the reports. Twice, when her wailing
again spilled over into the dominant discourse during significant narrative pauses, she
drew everyone's attention, but not to seek comfort. "Why? Why did they take my
son!?" she exclaimed. Maisun's grandmother, lmm Mansour, was the first to retort,
"Why nqt your son?" lmm Mansour was expressing impatience with the grieving
woman's failure to compose herself. "They take 13- and 14-year-old boys! Sometimes
they beat them and ali the people with them in the house! They smash the
house!-They didn't beat anybody, did they?" The old lady's words failed to elicit the
self-control that evidently was expected of the mother, so, a few moments Iater, a son
of lmm Farid's issued a reprimand, more sternly. "What isso special (khususiy) about
us?" he shouted. "Are we special? They take people ali the time! Why not also your
son? You need to be strong now, for him!" Over another round of coffee it was dis-
cussed what actions would need to be taken even before Abu Farid's return. (Maisun
would try to find out where her husband had been taken, while the young men were
to contact an acquaintance of Abu Farid's, a lawyer specializing in cases involving
the lsraeli military authorities.) Then we returned to our beds. Maisun's mother moved
back in with her mother and lmm Farid. In the company of mothers, I hoped, there
might now be space for empathy with the arrestee's mother in her anguish.
empowerment: organized articulations of familial cross-subjectivity

Surveying the communiqus issued by the Unified National Leadership of the
Uprising (UNLU) with a view to this body's recognition of women's and women's
committees' contributions to the organized struggle, Hilterman acrimoniously notes
"a shocking disregard for women's issues and the role of women in the uprising,
but also an attitude toward women that is profoundly traditional, patriarchal, and
condescending" (1991 :201-202). The following excerpt serves as a useful assessment
of the place assigned to "mothers of heroes" in the UNLU's rhetoric (as well as the
scholarly criticism with which the UNLU's placement of "women"-rarely referred to
so categorically in local parlance atthe time-was met):
When women are mentioned, it is usually as "mothers," in relation to someone
else-their sons; or else they are bunched in with children and old men, ali people
"who are suffering." [UNLU Communiqus Nos. 7-8, 29, 53, and 24]. Women are
commended for their "steadfastness," for "standing firm," and for "protecting the up-
rising" (not for participating in it) .... Thus women are castas protectors of the upris-
ing and ofthose who supposedly carry out the uprising: their male rei atives. There are
... slight departures from this general pattern. In Communiqu No. 5, the UNLU
called on "mothers, sisters, and daughters" [i.e., banat] to work side-by-side with their
husbands, sons, and brothers .... In 1988, the UNLU included a call for demonstra-
tions on 8 March [lnternational Women's Day] as part of its weekly schedule of
events. In 1989 [it] went so far as to "salute the Palestinian woman" and to declare its
"admiration for her heroism in the national struggle." In 1990 [Communiqu No. 35,
Feb. 26] the UNLU finally went so far as to name its communiqu "The Woman's
Call," and reserved a special section to women [sic], but made sure they were referred
to in the "proper" context, in relation to men .... [lt] then moved on to congratulate
mothers on Mother's day, calling their "sufferings and pain the source of our strength
and determination." Almost in the same breath, the UNLU ... praised Palestinians for
making history "through the blood oftheir sons." 12
The movement itself, it seems to me, relied on cross-subjective self-making in the pro-
motion of youths. For example, the UNLU routinely encouraged "condolence" or
"solidarity" visits (ziyarat tadammuniya) to Mothers of Heroes as a regular feature of
daily life and for grassroots committees, notably the women's committees, as part of
their committee work. Similarly, in 1988, March 21 was declared "Mother's Day" and
a national holiday. This was nota gesture in recognition of motherhood per se but spe-
cifically celebrated the act of mothering heroes and militants of the uprising. On this
day, local delegations of women's committees and youth clubs called on the families
of their party framework's incarcerated, injured, or martyred shebab within their local
area. As the above quote from Hilterman indicates, however, the mother-son relation-
ship formed merely one among severa! familial relations that were implicated in the
promotion of shebab by the movement's practices. Such practices also singled out ba-
nat. In Arabic, banatdenotes daughters and unmarried and virginal female persons; in
this context, it acquired the additional connotation of junior participants in women's
committees. The UNLU addressed activist men's sisters-daughters to the heroes'
mothers, and also "daughters of the nascent state." Finally, organizational practices
paid regular tribute to the "brides of heroes," though less energetically and less consis-
tently than they recognized mothers and daughters. The uneven attention officially
paid to mothers, sisters, and brides was congruent with the uneven distribution of sub-
ject-constitutive authority among these female relations.
Mothers of heroes, especially, were not simply honored but were continuously
called upon to be active on behalf of their sons and, by extension of their maternal
care, on behalf of ali shebab struggling in the streets and ali those "steadfasting" (from
the root s-m-dJ inside Israel i prisons. They were encouraged to demonstrate their sup-
port for ali shebab by obstructing army attempts to arrest them and by staging sit-ins
outside international human rights organizations and relief agencies to protest politi-
cal detention, poor prison conditions, and abuse during arrest and detention (see, for
example, Communqu No. 23, August 5, 1988, as cited in Hilterman 1991:242,

footnote 138; see also Giacaman 1989; Gacaman and johnson 1989:162). The flurry
of honor visits by delegations of youths from the social-cum-political clubs to which a
son had belonged (for instance, the scouts club), and from representatives of the local
women's committee supporting the same party movement (whose identity their visits
now intimated)-these, too, did more than pay tribute to the subject of the vic-
tim. They engaged the mother in the capacity of extending her son's-as well as the
party-movement's-activist capability. Families of prisoners were hugely instrumen-
tal in channeling information between the inside and outside of prisons, for example.
The evidence cited suffices as an indication of the extent to which the practical
organization of the nationalist movement relied on cross-subjective familial connec-
tivity, thereby significantly magnifying and empowering the relationships and subjec-
tivities involved. This point could be developed much further; for example, one might
question the fact that women's committees formed a distinct organizatonal genre, of
which each of the four party focused committee movements featured its own ver-
sion.13 Women's committees and men's committees of the same party movement-
especially strike forces 14-were eminently connected while the committees of differ-
ent party affiliation had few dealings with each other in the line of routine committee
work. When asked about their committee work, young grassroots associates men-
tioned first and mostly that it consisted of first-aid to shebab injured in street confron-
tations, visits to imprisoned or injured shebab, and solidarity visits to their families.
For these young women, shebab meant individual activists and the strike forces
of the same political movement in the young women's immediate vicinity. The use of
generic terms to designate the recipients of women's committees transitive work-
"shebab," "prisoners," "injured people," "families of martyrs"-concealed from the
uninitiated the committee members' personal connectons with those descrbed. The
occasions and social means around which committee visiting was organized were
frequently immediate familial relations. As part of their committee duties, the banat
visited prisoners who were mostly their own brothers or cousins. In many instances
known to me, young and elder women's recruitment had come about as a conse-
quence of enacting the respective cross-gender famlia! relationship under historically
challenging conditions. Quite simply, women participants' discourse, official or in-
formal, withheld the domestic and cross-subjective quality that marked their poltica!
relations and activities; UNLU rhetoric, on the other hand, reinstated it vociferously.
quotidian articulations: verbal recitations

Female agency that extended the victim's self-performance into the space of eve-
ryday community (otherwise removed from and invisible to it) involved two registers,
which I call verbal recitation and cross-embodiment. Together they made victimiza-
tion and the victim's retort observable to the local community, facilitating a public
witnessing of "glorious deeds." Ethnographically, verbal recitation was the more con-
spicuous expression, and so I begin there. 15
In the course of their visits to kin, friends, and neighbors (these visits increased af-
ter criticai events), mothers of victims-cum-heroes reported criticai incidents involv-
ing their sons and other shabab. These reports represent the prototype of practices that
I gloss as verbal recitation. To elaborate on what these recitations entail, I return to the
case of Karim's arrest. His was a somewhat unusual case in that he was a recently mar-
ried man who was already leaving youth behind via marriage and parenthood. His
case quite exceptionally shows a married sister and a young bride taking the lead
in reporting the event initially. The case is a compelling illustration of the social
multiplicity of young men's bodies and of the circuitry of political and domestic
agency. As a political activist, a young man could commit his body to the movement
(though preferably with his mother's tacit consent); as a sexually mature man, he must
necessarily (in criticai respects) commit his body to his wife; as a victim, he turned
over his injured body to his mother, thus throwing into relief her influence on him as a
corporeal and moral entity.
Israel i intelligence and army had come just before midnight, Karim's sister recounted.
She, her husband, and Karim had been sitting in the entrance room watching televi-
sion when suddenly an arm sporting a military uniform reached through the little win-
dow next to the entrance door, just behind the television, fumbling for the door
handle. Her husband had jumped up to shut the lights and lock the door, she reported,
while Karim had fled to the roof-using the staircase still under construction, she em-
phasized. Then carne the dreaded knock. "Who is it?" she said her husband had
asked. "Army!" carne the reply, "Open the door or we break it down!" With Karim
hidden, the couple had unlocked the door, the woman reported. In stormed six armed
soldiers who, pushing the couple aside, swiftly moved on to search the house. The
narrator underlined the fact that the intruders did not search the ground floor much at
ali but immediately focused on the upstairs; to wit, the children who lay asleep in a
ground floor room were never detected and in fact slept through the entire event. In
saying this, the woman was proposing that the army had known exactly where to look
for Karim, strengthening suspicions of betrayal by a third party.
Karim's sister had followed the search party upstairs, she said, where her brother had
already been found. They asked his name, which he stated. "On hearing his name, the
soldiers' faces lit up." She reported that one soldier had exclaimed cynically in retort:
"A-h-1-a-n, habibi (Welcome, my beloved!) Where have you been ali these past
months?" This part of the account intimated two things. First, that the arrestee had
been notoriously wanted, which in turn suggested a measure o f the challenge he rep-
resented for his captors. Second, his captors had taunted the arrestee who, however,
had not been provoked into attempting an escape. Such an attempt would have con-
stituted a foolishly dangerous action. His inaction might have been interpreted as fear
or cowardice by those listening to the report of events had the women-first his sister,
then his wife-not preempted this interpretation by themselves shouldering responsi-
bility for fear (a necessary part of danger and courage) as their report of the arrest un-
folded.
The arrestee had been forced to sit on the floor, cross-legged with his arms folded
behind his head while his hands were being cuffed. "They almost danced around
him!" Maisun emphasized every time she retold the event. "Then they pushed him
down the stairs-he almost fel!, what with his hands tied and this not being a finished
staircase!" Picking up the thread of the account, the arrestee's sister spelled out what
the bride had implied, that there was genuine danger and thus reasonable ground for
fear among the women: "I said to him, 'Don't escape! They'll shoot you!'-1 am sure
they would have done!" She pleaded with the soldiers, she said, not to keep pointing
their guns at people. She was ordered to shut up, but she said she had instead retorted
(showingdefiance), "No, youshut up! lt is not /who carne to yourhouse; youcame to
ourhouse!"
As Karim was being led away, the occupants of the house were ordered to lock the
door, and an armed guard was posted outside until the convoy of jeeps had left. "Only
then did we see," the sister elaborated. "There must have been at least a hundred sol-
diers in the garden!" she exclaimed with bravado. They had come up the hill behind
the house," Maisun established. "Yeeh!" she shrieked (almost in delight), "how many
soldiers they sent to arrest just a single man!" lt seemed that Maisun was inviting the
listeners to take the sizeable manpower as an indication of her husband's importance
and rank in the struggle. Then she added, severely, "They would have shot him; for
sure! Had he tried to escape, he would be dead now." After a pause, during which ali
had time to envisage this scenario, she continued: "I didn't want to come! I told him,
'l'm scared!' But he said he had work to do!" In the end, it appeared that in submitting
to the arrest, the young man had acted responsibly and sacrificially with regard to his
domestic relationships. This added a measure of personal morality, foreshadowing its
analogue, poltica! morality, which was yet to be established.
Following an arrest, the first and each subsequent prison visit was commonly de-
tailed by the mother with comparable meticulousness. To this, the women added judi-
cious inventaries of the prison's visiting regulations, sanitary conditions, diet, sartorial
requirements, as well as lists of names of fellow prisoners and friends who were de-
tained alongside the family's victim. Each relocation, every visit by a lawyer ora team
of family members, each progressive stage in the legal process, and every new turn in
the prisoner's physical condition implied a new set of circumstances to be conveyed,
propelling women's visiting and reporting. In this way, the prisoners' mothers (assisted
by the prisoners' sisters and wives) conjured for their everyday communities the miss-
ing (con)text, allowing others to view and assess the political commitment and moral
integrity of the victim.
A number of narrative features that marked recitations of physical abuses and in-
juries add force to my interpretation of ncident-reports as instances of cross-subjec-
tive self-presentation. A compelling indication, for example, was the modality in
which mothers tended to detail procedures of physical abuse, intimidation, humili-
ation, or medicai procedures following mistreatment, in what struck most foreign ob-
servers, ncluding myself, as disturbingly dispassionate and clinicai. The style denied,
or concealed, the emotional turmoil the speaking subjects had to be experiencing.
The women resembled independent and detached expert-witnesses testifying in
courts of law. In actual fact, their apparent detachment gave an embodied enactment
of the victim' s composure and disclosed the mother' s connective interests.
Furthermore, the discourses crafted into and around incident reporting effected
an allegorical image of the self-controlling subject. Poignant examples are the
vignettes celebrating the good humor with which the victims-cum-heroes defied at-
tempts to break them; prison and hospital visits provided particularly rich turf for such
reports. One mother capped her report of her latest prison visit by recapitulating the
boy's joke. Handing him the toiletry items she had brought along, including a bar of
soap for washing his clothes, she expressed chagrin at the thought of him hand-wash-
ing his own clothes. He had responded: "You should be pleased! When I come out of
here I will know how to do my own laundering. Less work for you!" The eyes of the
reconteuse glistened with tears as she repeated parts of her dialogue with her son. Her
tears let the hardship he was suffering be known-a flare-up of his chronic rheuma-
tism from sleeping on the ground during the winter months. Yet her story seemed to
indicate that his brash remarks revealed a spirit still intact. Another woman enlarged
on a flippant reply her prisoner-son had made in response to her questions about the
prison food. "Mumtaz! [Excellent] Like a restaurant!" she said he had answered.
Often mothers cited the humor of released fellow prisoners who had visited to convey
personal greetings. The youth might have said (in reply to the same query about
prison food): "We," or, more often, "they" (released prisoners tended to speak of pris-
oner youths in the third person plural, even as they were depicting conditions they
themselves had recently endured) "are given fui (fried fava beans), laban (yogurt) jam,
rice, fish, hamburgers, anything one might wish! Meat every day of the week!" The re-
ports by these boys were thus made to speak for the recounting woman's incarcerated
son. Anecdotes such as these demonstrated that the victim was finding it in himself to
see the humorous and educational side of events; he was not broken by them.
The detailed rol I call offellow prisoners so integral to maternal reports of prison
visits strike me as yet another way in which the boy-man's standing was refracted in
the reports. Sociality inside a detention center, which is intimated in these lists, and
annotating comments such as, "He is not to be pitied! He is attending cultural circles
every day!" or, "He is with his friends from his [scout's] club!" established the pris-
oner's political purity. Only those who had not confessed on their comrades had "re-
lations" inside, that is, were absorbed into the organizations formed among prisoners.
Simultaneously, sociality showed the prisoner's defiant pursuit of nationalist activ-
ism-now in a speakable form.
One must also not underestimate the evocative power of the vignettes the
women recounted of apparently minor everyday incidents in the far or recent past that
cast into relief particularly notorious, definitively endearing, possibly commendable
idiosyncratic habits of their sons. One could argue that they proclaimed the victim's
political maturity-with reference to a different time-space: not steadfastness in
prison, but sound relations at home in domestic relationships long before the arrest.
They might establish the good terms of his relationship with his sister, for example, by
displaying much friendly mutual teasing between them. Or they showed a sound rela-
tionship between mother and son through insinuations of his constant readiness to
help his mother with strenuous domestic work. This helpfulness was culturally ex-
pected, even if (as the anecdotes also showed) the boy did not always manage to fol-
low through on his good intentions as he was unable to resist equally strong forces
that drew young men out into the streets. One might say the vignettes established
moral conduct outside of political sets of relations and activities. Serving as allegori-
cal accounts of commendable domestic sociality in this sense, the anecdotes gave
oblique indications of an activist persona during the political present. For did anec-
dotes like these not indirectly indicate a boy's absences from home? Such absences
had acquired new connotations. Boys coming of age were culturally expected to
spend less and less time at home; now, in addition, it was widely understood that un-
explained absences were requisite to resistance work.
No less noteworthy than the utterances were the articulate silences that mothers'
incident reports contained as they refrained from speaking about the part the youth
had played in the resistance movement, about what he had done to invite an arrest or
a beating. The ethos of secrecy to which members of the movement were sworn by
their parties dictated that no one outside the small cells of cooperating individuais,
"not even family," should know thatthey were "doing things," let alone what. Still, in
my experience, mothers usually had informed hunches about what their sons had
done and could have said much more about the boys' heroic conduct as political ac-
tivists. But in adhering to oblique indications, maintaining the crucial gaps and si-
lences, the presenters' own iterative practices testified to and iconically restated their
sons' adherence to the code of silence both before and during arrest.
sisters
Unmarried sisters of victimized youths tended to assist their mothers in reciting
their brothers' victimization. They interlaced their mothers' reports with affirmative
statements. Moreover, in response to questions from the mother or another elder
woman among the present company (and even more energetically behind the
scenes), daughters supplemented their mothers' case presentations in significant
ways. Supplementation involved knowledge to which young women (who made up
the majority of women's committee activists at the grassroots levei) had privileged ac-
cess. Such knowledge pertained to criticai characters and events within a wide-reaching
"imagined community" (adapted from Anderson 1983) that was bound by support for
the same party movement. Sometimes, the girls derived such information from di-
rect or indirect connections with women's committee circles; their mothers were usu-
ally aware of these connections, though the rest of the family or circle of family ac-
quaintances might not be. "The nights are terribly cold, he said"-one woman
reported apropos her latest visit to her incarcerated son (turning to her eldest daugh-
ter). "Even though I had brought him three thick jerseys. They are not enough for
sleeping on damp ground." Three neighbor women and the mother's former work
colleague were among those gathered, but as it would have been inappropriate for a
bint (unmarried girl) to address these senior women, the 18-year-old daughter looked
only at her mother as she replied: "One youth, from jalasoun, while he was in deten-
tion they poured buckets of ice-cold water over his body to make him talk. His clothes
dried, and they carne with another bucket. Their mothers can't bring them enough
[clothes] to keep them warm."
In many ways, young girls' cooperation with their mothers in the cross-subjective
narration of junior men (their brothers) resembled the way in which unmarried girls
were expected to work with their mothers in historically more routinized areas of fe-
male domestic responsibility, such as house-cleaning, food preparation, visiting, or
nurturing younger and male siblings. lndeed, the two areas tended to blend into one
another. Where the joint exercise of housework was concerned, girls were undergo-
ing an informal apprenticeship as future mothers and wives. That isto say, both sides
recognized an asymmetry of authority in this context, which put the mother in a sen-
ior, supervisory role, although mothers also derived considerable affective and social
companionship in addition to invaluable practical support, as they frequently ac-
knowledged. From the point of view of the girls, too, it did not seem as though they
were experiencing work with their mothers, ultimately under the authority of the lat-
ter, as a personal constraint. I recall walking back to the house with a matron and her
two daughters one afternoon, after a visit to the mother of an imprisoned youth (he
was a dose friend of one of the youths in this family). "Now, let's go home and enjoy
ourselves!" exclaimed one of the daughters in eager anticipation of the evening.
"Where were we going?" I asked, hopeful there might be plans for a special, extra-do-
mestic event. "Tonight, we are going to sit and prepare a special meal. lt is a lot of
work and requires many people for many hours!" the second girl replied. The mother
added, "I have had plans to cook this dish for weeks, but I never find the time. To-
night, I don't think any people will come to call; we have been to see who we need to
see, and ali my daughters are at home." We spent four hours over food preparation
that evening, spread out in the sitting roam in front of the television where another
episode of a very popular and timely Egyptian series, a screenplay adaptation of
Nagib Mahfouz's famous trilogy Palace Walk, was aired. During the work, and the
televised screenplay, the daughters filled their mother in on items of political news
they had lately heard second- and third-hand but originally from lawyers, doctors,
and other experts dose to prisoners and injured individuais. Their news regarded
high-profile cases of political imprisonment, injury, or martyrdom. Over the following
weeks, I would repeatedly encounter information that the young women had shared
with their mother in confidence. The mother incorporated the information into her
own narrative exchanges, where such knowledge added special force to her voice
and as she retold the case of her son.
The dynamics of knowledge-production that I observed during intimate mo-
ments, such as this in the mother-daughter relationship, suggest that the working rela-
tionship between mothers and daughters in respect to the cross-subjective narration
of junior men, unlike in the context of housework, was a partnership between equiva-
lent persons who provided different but equally essential complementary insights and
perspectives. (The discourse of cross-subjectivity, then, involved a discourse on gen-
erational equality as well as on gender equality.) Only, the narrative politics that
mother and daughters enacted in public, in the company of members of discrete
households, concealed this equivalence even in all-female company; matrons then
assumed narrative authority and girls adopted a posture of deference to senior
women. In this way, the equal weight of junior women's contribution remained pub-
licly understated. The people concerned acted on the understanding that young peo-
ple's equal participation in social conversations, like women's independent participa-
tion in organized poltica! and economic activity, was still a culturally sensitive issue.
In the course of cross-subjective narration, senior and junior women effectively
articulated different genres of knowledge, both of which were required to refract the
sacrificial and heroic efficacy of the son and brother. Maternal accounts, with their in-
timately detailed elaboration of corporeal and somatic processes connected to con-
crete, personally known individuais, evoked an acute sense of the personal trauma
into which criticai events translated physically or psychologically for the "victimized"
persons. On the other hand, the contributions of young women, the sisters of the vic-
tims, focused on shebab as a category rendered in the context of heroic street ac-
tions-actions the young women had witnessed by "chance" (in fact, banat often had
prior knowledge of militant actions and encouragement to attend from their brothers
and from their women's committee contacts). Alternatively, young women empha-
sized the shebab's strength of character in relation to abuses that the lsraeli regime
was exercising against suspected activists, giving testimony to the outward displays of
control and stoicism the youths mustered in the face of abuse. Even among closest
friends, I found, there was a tendency to meet enquiries about an imprisoned
brother's well-being with formulaic replies anda quick shift to the third person plural.
This way of responding belied the sense of deprivation, pain, and fear the girls knew
their brothers to be experiencing, they themselves felt deeply, and their mothers' ac-
counts intimated. Furthermore, banat's accounts contrived empirical evidence of the
type of heroic action in which each and every victimized shab (youth) could have po-
tentially engaged to elicit the personalized accounts of victimization their mothers
were circulating, betraying neither the anonymity nor the intimate side of youths
known to them personally.
the absence of self-reflexive testimonials-the silence of shebab

The absence of reflexive testimonials by youths returning from prison or hospital
constitutes the most compelling ethnographic evidence of their reliance on familial
cross-subjectivity. The most poignant aspect of shebabs' silence in my view was their
taciturn attendance (sitting by with their eyes modestly cast down) while their mothers
recounted their ordeals. No youth I saw objected when his mother, in mid-stream of
her account, seized his body, positioning, turning, and even partially undressing
him-lifting up a shirt, lowering a pair of trousers below the buttocks-in arder to
show the corporeal evidence of the gross manhandling she was reporting. When the
boys did speak or, as in some rare instances, showed their own physical scars, it was
in response to explicit cues by the mother or another female elder: "Sahih wlla-/a"
(True or not)? And, "Speak-tell what they do to the shebab!" or, "Show us, show
where they hit you!"
Even when explicitly invited by their mothers, youths tended not to recount their
poltica! victimization in the first person singular. At best, boys spoke in the first
person plural; though more commonly they distanced themselves further from the ex-
perience (read, agency) by using the third person plural. The immediately reported
subject was thus "the prisoners" or "the shebab." When concrete incidents were re-
called, the focus was on a comrade, not on the speaker himself: "So and so-how
they beat him! He couldn't walk for days, that's how hard they beat him. But he didn't
tell them a word!" One could argue, then, that the returned victm presented himself
categorically and recursively, refracting his own value via others in his position. Even
prior to release, as in conversations with family during prison visits, young men com-
mended specific companions by name. By repeating a boy's commendations in eve-
ryday spaces, mother and sister displayed his generosity and aided the self-presenta-
tional projects of other victims and their mothers in a radical extension of
"othermothering" (cf. Peteet 1997:1 08).
The narrative silence and indirection of shebab following their re-entry into the
community are a reminder not to overlook, for the prominence of political considera-
tions impeding activist subjects' immediate self-demonstration, concurrent cultural
sensitivities that infringed on the self-representational autonomy of wou ld-be heroes,
whatever the nature of the "glorious deed." A man of honor was expected to perform
great deeds but--and this was the crucial other side of the male moral self-he was
equally expected to show humility and modesty. A true person of honor did not need
to boast about his own deeds; their exercise (an imperative of which was that they
were public acts) was thought to compel others-first- and second-hand wit-
nesses-to recount them. This ideology of the authentic articulation of personal worth
demands cross-subjective action, but it is not restricted to a single set of relations and
combination of subjectivities. 16 The ideology had not been unsettled by the poltica!
situation; on the contrary, the paradoxical imperative of keeping secret yet publiciz-
ing poltica! activities lent new force to it. A youth's silence, then, demonstrated his
confidence in his own conduct and its narrative recreation by others; simultaneously,
in hermeneutic terms, silence enacted his incompleteness as a signifier of his own
prison performance and enhanced value.
cross-embodiment: quotidian steadfastness

Back in bed and waiting for sleep to come, Maisun expressed some of the fear and
pain she felt, after ali. "Karim, my love," she muttered, over and over. And, "Usmud,"
she quietly encouraged him ("Rema in steadfast," and, with reference to political im-
prisonment this meant, "Resist pressures to confess"). To herself more than to me she
said, "lf they are going to beat him, they are beating him right now! How they beat
them [the shebab] !" An uncanny parallel occurred to me, between the fate the arres-
tee was presumed to be undergoing in a detention center as we spoke and the pain his
mother had been inflicting on herself. There was another parallel, between the stead-
fast stance expected of the man in response to violent attempts to extract a confession
and the steadfast composure maintained by his sister and wife. Moreover, both were
strengthened by women's committee discourses that the mother, too, was to adopt af-
ter an initial, dramatic emotional display.
At six a.m. the company re-assembled in lmm Farid's room. The young women were
again going over the event in detail. lmm Farid was sitting by, inert and contained, in
contrast to her fitful state the night before, although occasionally tears trickled down
her cheeks, and she was still refusing to eat or drink. "Usmudi!" (persevere), one of her
sons again urged her, more gently this time. lmm Riyad placed pieces of bread and
cheese into lmm Farid's mouth saying, ';You have to eat! You have to remain strong,
for your son!"
Later on in the morning, lmm Farid mustered the strength to dress and tidy her ap-
pearance. Listing routine responsibilities, like feeding and milking the goats, she de-
clined her affines' proposal to stay with them. She then received the ti de of visitors that
the news had precipitated, ostensibly to commiserate with the mother-of-a-detainee
such as lmm Farid had become-second time over. In reporting the event, she began
to carry herself as the proud and defiant mother of a political casualty. The daughter
and daughter-in-law were sitting by as the woman gradually took over narrative
authority, foregrounding passages that aptly demonstrated the arrestee's admirable
stance-which she now co-embodied. At the end of the day, she needed only little
verbal encouragement to eat. The following day, the woman embarked on the regular
prison visit to her other son, which involved an arduous journey. Later, she petitioned
the lsraeli (Military) Field Administration office in person for information on Karim's
whereabouts, as many mothers did on behalf of their sons.
Cross-embodiment describes the process, highlighted in Karim's arrest, whereby

the boy-man's posture in facing his predicament is cast into relief by the conduct of
other subjects (the mother, the sister, and the young bride), in another space (the daily
community), and involving a different, presumably less contingent, set of processes
and relationships for measuring personal integrity (responsible conduct in quotidian
affairs). For example, I consider the steadfast pursuit of routine domestic responsibili-
ties that the mothers of affected youths exercised, even and particularly in the face of
calamity, to h ave had this effect, if not the respective motivation. The female and daily
versions of steadfastness proceeded simultaneously with the male and extraordinary
counterpart that the boy exercised in the space of detention, the former giving an
oblique indication of the latter in the space of daily life. The women's insistence on
serving coffee and taking regular meals in the hours and days following Karim's arrest
was noteworthy; the intervention by others to ensure that the mother would persevere
for her son, to the point of gently forcing her back to her normal routines, was also
compelling. This is the context in which the controlled, clinicai style in which mothers
reported sons' progress through their harrowing ordeals takes on significance. The
mothers' style of recitation was part of the posture that iconically represented the self-
control of the absented subject in resisting confession.
Steadfastness was not expected to come automatically or easily, as can be gath-
ered from the fact that women's composure often had to overcome dramatic emo-
tional display-such as lmm Farid's conduct upon learning the news of her son's ar-
rest. Their initial enactments of arrest, defeat, and breakdown also continuously
recalled the will power that animated composure. Thus the artfulness of steadfastness
was revealed. Last, but not least, the initial outbursts had the effect of compelling con-
cerned others to apply themselves and assist the mother in gathering up the requisite
self-control.
Mothers presented their victimized sons iconically, and characteristically icons
share the extraordinary properties of who or what they (re)present. I would suggest
that the pressure that different relationships exerted on mothers to maintain their com-
mitments to everyday routines for their sons throws into relief an understanding that a
woman's composure had the power to cross-generate (that is, to co-make and effect
across distances of time and space) the correct conduct in her son (cf. Maher 1984).
There was a sense in which banat, toa, were partia I embodiments of their broth-
ers, and this independently of their mothers. According to an ethos promoted among
activists of the progressive movement, as ide from the passage through criticai events,
another measure of a boy's political development (tatawwur siyyasiy) was the in-
volvement of his sister, and in the anticipated future (which Karim and his family al-
ready embodied) also his wife, in political and economic work-for a young woman
was dependent first on her brother's and Iater her husband's approval. When people
spoke of women's "poltica! participation," they meant carnal wataniy (patriotic
work), which for most young women translated into involvement in a women's com-
mittee. The sibling pair and its double (cf. Joseph 1994), the new conjugal couple,
embodied a new cross-gender dynamic-a partnership that enabled each side to real-
ize its respective social and poltica! capabilities. Such a new politics of cross-sex sib-
ling and conjugal relationships formed the foundations ofthe nascent and ideal polti-
ca! arder that would be realized in an independent and democratic nation state. Bride
was to groom, sister to brother, as citizen would be to the state. In this outlook, an ac-
tive bint gave indication of a re-educated and politicized young man. A girl's capacity
to refract her brother's poltica! subjectivity in this way did not extend beyond activist
circles, however. In the daily community, a girl's independent (it would have seemed)
mobility outside the home was not to the young man's credit but, rather, grounds for
questioning the effectiveness of his tutelage, control, and strength of character (cf.
joseph 1994)Y
the unique cultural qualifications of mothers and sisters

The conversion of bodily assaults into glorious deeds demanded explicit and
public elaboration of matters concerning the body, a delicate procedure in most Arab
settings (see Abu-Lughod 1986; Abu-Zahra 1976; Boddy 1989:52-61; Dwyer 1978;
Eickelman 1989:205-206; Meneley 1997). Doing so challenged fundamental aspects
of an ideology of personhood, palpable across the region, that links persons' matura-
tion with the increasing understatement (contrai) of their nafsiy si de. In the Palestinian
setting, nafsiy can be glossed as the corporeal-somatic dimension and individual ori-
entation of human existence recalled in basic needs expressed as hunger, thirst, sex-
ual drive, fear, or material greed. While the nafs is respected as a vital aspect of hu-
man existence and productivity in ali contexts, understandings of humanity (opposed
to animality) center on the imperative for persons to contrai the influence of nafsiy
forces on their actions. This involves the disciplined application of aql (social sense)
supported by carefully circumscribed time-space economies socially provided.
The Palestinian caseis remarkable in that corporeal disclosures displaying polti-
ca! victimization failed to diminish the exposed subject's moral worth and social
standing; indeed, they enhanced it. In part, paradoxically, this could have been a
function of the victim's social immaturity. Shebab were not yet expected to have their
passions under full contrai; in fact, the ethnographic record of the region shows a ten-
dency for senior men to harness shebabs' social capacity for passionate behavior for
their own agendas (cf. Gilsenan 1996:60-61 ). The nature or capacity of the relation-
ship that was effecting observation and disclosure must h ave been at least as decisive
in promoting social standing.
The enabling influence of the mother-son relationship emerges in comparison
with that of the father-son relationship. In the Palestinian economy of personhood,
historically rooted in a peasant economy, the influence ofthe father and that of the
mother follow almost inverse trajectories. Traditionally children have been incorpo-
rated into their father's patrilineage, the hamula or bayt. Whereas the father would act
as the principal source of a young man's collective identity and the main source of his
future productive capital, the mother was the principal source of her son's corporeal
integrity (see Jean-Klein 1997). In this scenario, father and son can be said to rise in
social stature at each other's expense, a fact that imbues the relationship with a com-
petitive and agonistic ethos. Thus, a man's stature traditionally grew with the number
of his sons, not least because of the martial prowess and extra labor sons constituted
during the period between childhood and fui I adulthood (Rosenfeld 1968:741; cf.
Bourdieu 1977:60-61 ). Beyond youth, however, a son's continuing social and political
maturation was contingent on the gradual dissolution of his original subordination to
the patriarch, and he was destined increasingly to implode and usurp his father's eco-
nomic, social, and political prowess. Becoming a man involved, for instance, extract-
ing and incorporating the economic resources handed down through the father. The
young man married and had sons and networks in his own name, while the father's
corporal strength rapidly declined, rendering him visibly dependent and house-
bound, reversing their respective asymmetrical competencies.
A mother's influence, by contrast, has historically centered around the continu-
ous animation of her son's corporal-somatic constitution-"nurture" in the widest
sense. This is a lateral (as opposed to the father's lineal) form of inheritance. lt is gen-
erated and dispensed throughout a woman's career as mother, effecting the simulta-
neous promotion of giver and recipient (rather than a mutually displacing growth). A
wealth of reports from the region indicates that the activity of animating a son's corpo-
ral integrity has historically been the principal arena for women to gender and ad-
vance themselves, both in a female hierarchy and in relation to their husbands. 18 Ali
of this adds up to women's social authority growing and peaking in collaboration and
in tandem with their sons'.
This scenario explains the special interest mothers felt in co-effecting victimized
male subjects as political-moral selves by expanding on their victimization, but not
(yet) their unique cultural efficacy in this regard. The latter strikes me as a conse-
quence of the mothers' nurturing responsibilities, which inevitably made them atten-
dants and witnesses to their sons' nafsiy aspects, most regularly and immediately dur-
ing a stage in the son's development when exposure was normal and legitimate from
the perspective of both the exposed subjects and the exposing witness (cf. Abu-Lughod
1986:90-91, 109-113, 124-131; Boddy 1989:52-54). lt is thinkable that the inti-
macy of personal knowledge integral to the mother-son relationship made it an emi-
nently workable framework for the disclosure of similarly intimate political proc-
esses-challenges and retorts written in marks that were otherwise unspeakable.
Thus, the mother was a suitable witness to the mal e self in a state of personal con-
finement, dependence, and exposure. Under the given circumstances, however, this
state of affairs was not the result of physical and associated social immaturity at the
personallevel. Rather, it was linked to a process whereby Palestinian national history
was "shaking off" (the verbal root that underlies the word intifada) its collective child-
hood that was embodied in its extra-state existence. Among the movement's leaders,
cadre, and grassroots, "the intifada" was spoken of as a collective, political coming-
of-age.
Much of what I have said in explanation of the mother's eminent role also applies
to sisters, but sisters articulated the activist subject position of shebab differently. The
youths' mothers were ata stage in their lives when their sexual activity and reproduc-
tive capacity were presumed to be declining. This, together with the fact that their
presentations pertained to their sons, de-sexualized the explicit and required refer-
ences to young men's physiological constitution and bodily processes. Sisters and
brides, in contrast, were ata stage when the full release of their sexual and reproduc-
tive capacity was imminent. The social age of sisters and brides was compounded by
the nature of the relationship between banat and shebab, which approximated the
cross-sibling relationship in both quotidian and organizational practices. The cross-
sibling relationship, in turn, prefigured the future marital relationship (see Jean-Klein
n.d.), much as Joseph (1994) has shown for cross-siblings in Beirut.
The conjugal orientation of the relationship between shebab and banat was
explicitly expressed in the marriage scenario that progressive parties promoted as
a political ideal, an ideal that many an activist youth (mal e or female) entertained as a
personal fantasy. In this scenario, banat af1d shebab of the same movement intermar-
ried and party edogamy replaced the traditional practice of clan or hamula endogamy
(cf. Cohen 1965; Rosenfeld 1976). Party-political endogamy was touted as the most
effective means of establishing as cultural routine the "new grammar" of domestic or-
ganization, characterized by cross-gender partnership. joint activities across commit-
tees facilitated respective matches. (Maisun and Karim had metas members of a visit-
ing delegation involvng Maisun's women's committee and Karim's trade union.)
Since the shebab were banat's ideal or even prospectve grooms (not only figurative
but actual brothers and cousins among them), young women's narratives of men's
moments of exposure and vulnerability would have carried disturbing sexual conno-
tations, undermining their enactments of morality.
silences and absences: the paterfamilias

Two sets of famlia! relations are conspicuously underrepresented in the account
I have given of collaboratively produced heroic subjectivities: the husband-wife and
the father-son relationship. lndeed, the paterfamilias is a glaring absence in the proc-
ess. Even a cursory survey of committee movements' organizational and rhetorical
practices impresses a sense of the systematic failure to assign senior men a proactive
political role. Commonplace classificatory terms are revealing in this regard. While
organizational rhetoric and daily poltica! discourses made ample references to "she-
bab," "banat," and "Mother(s) of our heroic shebab," no such references were made
regarding senior men. UNLU roll calls mostly divided men under the headings of dis-
tinct classes-"peasants," "workers," "merchants," or "grocers" (cf. Hilterman 1991 ).
These professional classes stood apart from "strike forces," the principal focus of
popular and official glorification. In addition, the adaptation of teknonymic namng
practces, whch was commonplace in actvist circles, indicated the usurpton of elder
men as "fathers" of the Palestinian homeland in the struggle to determine its historical
fate. lt did not signal the involvement of this older generation. In everyday use, the
naming practice gave adults (male and female) the name of their first-born son, pre-
fixed by the parenta! ttle; thus, the man/father is addressed as "Abu X," "Father of X,"
and the women/mother as lmm X, "Mother of X" (see Eickelman 1989:181-184). This
naming practice reflects the criticai role that successful reproduction of the paternal
line has historically played in the maturation and gendering of persons, an ongoing
process that consists of a chain of affirmative events of which marriage is only one.
During the intifada, teknonyms served as noms de guerre-cum-political titles for dis-
tinguished fighters and high-ranking party officers, and aside from eminent leadership
figures such as Yasser Arafat (known as Abu CAmmar), 19 these were attached to ex-
traordinary shebab. The naming gesture conferred patron-cum-leadership status on
them, the "Chldren of the lntifada," outside of fatherhood and at the expense of their
own fathers, a generation rendered publicly ineffectual by the gender politics associ-
ated with the discourse of cross-subjectivity. This generation served as an embodi-
ment, as it were, of Palestinians' historie failure effectively to mobilize en masse when
an Israel i state was established.
The range of organized activities designated for senior men (as a professional
class) were restricted and restrictive. UNLU directives implicated this category mostly
in measures of civil disobedience many of which amounted to a suspension of activ-
ity: refusing to pay taxes to the occupation authorities, adhering to commercial and
general strikes, boycotting lsraeli goods, and perhaps resigning from official posts
such as mukhtar-ship (the position of village headman). 20 Retired men might be asked
to join the women in staging sit-ins outside the Red Cross office (see Hilterman
1991 :201-202). Even as fathers of shebab, elder men received no special tributes; at
best, they could accompany their wives to stage performances honoring the mothers
of heroic shebab. Thus, senior men were denied martial significance even by proxy,
in what was fundamentally a militarized culture. The narrow range of organized ac-
tivities available to them, too, amounted to gestures of deference vis--vis points of
authority, the UNLU, and nationalist parties, which were infringing on the authority
of the paterfamilias in home and community.2 1
Practices of everyday resistance among male heads of household in Harat
Nashita give poignant evidence of a subjective sense of demotion and usurpation
among men in the face of current events. Far from unequivocally handing their place
and authority over to their sons, as other analyses have suggested (e.g., Peteet 1994),
the respective gestures and concessions had to be extracted, a process in which male
and female youths and their mothers collaborated. Thus, the paterfamilias was often
obstructive of a wife's, son's, and daughter's organized political involvement, an atti-
tude that the youngsters and wife described as ma'akkad (complicated, tending to cre-
ate problems). Specifically, a man might deny his wife permission to go out when a
women's committee activity required her to do so. Without a husband's consent,
women could or would not leave the house, though they had fewer qualms about in-
venting plausible and compelling "social" reasons to extract consent, backed by their
sons and daughters who readily verified their mothers' presentations. On severa! oc-
casions, men charged their wives with neglect of their familial responsibilities in at-
tempts to block the women's movements. }ahla, a husband might call his wife. The
term (masc., jahin implied a flighty, carefree, and careless person who easily forgot
her or his social responsibility. To be jahlat or jahil was excusable for a youngster, but
notfor a married woman. Such charges alleged immoral, shameful behavior (Cib) and
were taken seriously by the women.
Sons' frequent absences from the house carne under attack as well, despite the
fact that absence was a culturally accepted exercise of masculinity. lncidentally, it
was a form of exercising masculinity that was denied to the elder generation, by virtue
of the general closure of public gathering places, frequent curfews, and elder men's
greater inhibitions about transgressing such restrictions. The men justified objections
by pleading parenta! concern in view of the volatile political situation. Their own
non-transgressions, they argued, were evidence oftheir greater sense. Objections to a
daughter's extradomestic movements, on the other hand, were taken up with the girl's
mother and her brothers, rarely with the girl herself. Brothers found the girl's liber-
ties-late returns from work or study and frequent visits to houses of friends-held
against them in their own negotiations for concessions: a sister's behavior became
evidence of the boys' neglect of their domestic responsibilities in favor of excessive
engagements outside the house.
Many women and youths gained empowerment of the kind my analysis has im-
plied because the patriarch eventually gave in to their relentless daily contestations.
In these cases, however, the authority of the husband-father was already sufficiently
vulnerable. Extensive periods of labor migration, which tended to be a prominent as-
pect of the households' biographies, had often reduced the men's influence in the lo-
cality as well as in their homes. This process of attrition was exacerbated by the ab-
sence of kin nearby the conjugal household. In other cases, a chronic debilitating
illness had socially muted a present husband-father.
A sense of social demotion was poignantly expressed in the occasional lamenta-

tions of men who suffered from it, like Abu Hsein. He spent 12 years in the Gulf,
returning two years before the intifada. The expression of concern I am about to cite
was triggered by the refusal of a radio technician, to whom he had referred me for the
repair of my tape-recorder, to carry out the service on the spot even though I had men-
tioned my acquaintance with Abu Hsein, as he had instructed me. The conversation
took place minutes after an argument with his wife over an outing she had planned, to
which he had objected. In the end, she had out-argued him and gone on the outing.
She visited several mothers of political casualties in a nearby refugee camp, visits she
had diplomatically put to her husband as an act of charity ("This is helping people!")
and a "moral duty" (wajib), effectively cloaking the political framework surrounding
the act. I was left behind at the house to mind the afternoon meal that the woman had
prepared in advance, to preempt charges of domestic neglect.
"There was a time once, when everyone here knew my name!" the man pro-
nounced in chagrin once the woman had left. "'Abu Hsein sent you?!' he would h ave
said, and given you a new radio to borrow while he repaired yours. Now-nobody
knows me. My wife and my children know more people than I do! In my own house,
nobody listens to my word. My own children don't listen to me!"
implications: the displacement of patriarchal authority via familial

connectivity
I suggest that the iconic centrality of mal e youths in the Palestinian uprising-this
category was celebrated in the nationalist movement's decoration practices, in inter-
national media coverage, and in scholarly citations (see Bargouti 1990)-must not
hastily be read as evidence of the youths' new-found independence from kinship and
familial relations in their self-making. I have argued that the conspicuous social pro-
motion from plain youth to activist and heroic youth-their new status comparable to
that of the groom who, with marriage, had clearly left youth but was only beginning
the jou~ney to full manhood (indeed, colloquially heroic youths were occasionally re-
ferred to as cirsan al-watan, "grooms of the homeland")-was dependent on a col-
laborative and reciproca!, cross-subjective form of self-enactment. This way of enact-
ing the self implicated the youths, their mothers, their sisters, and brides. In the course
of contributing to the youth's self-transformation, the female subjects were also recur-
sively gendering themselves (but at the same time reinventing gender) and enhancing
their own moral authority in home and community.
Whether or nota particular male individual was indeed politically active, an ex-
emplar of the publicly glorified category of "the heroic shebab," was not readily
knowable. Yet a boy's status was materially enhanced by others' assessment and re-
spective conduct in relation to him, and so others needed to know. Paradoxically, the
glorious and manly deeds for which the occupation and nationalist struggle provided
opportunity involved politically unspeakable, unpresentable acts. Thus, the self-dem-
onstration of activists had to take a detour via a convoluted and hyper-allegorical
economy of self-presentation. Like the subjects I described, it made use of criticai in-
cidents (for which both Israel i repressive practices and the organizational practices of
the Palestinian movement were singling out male youths) as the principal signifying
contexts. lt rei ied on specific others (the victim's mother and sisters) to supplement the
victim-subjects' politically and culturally curtailed competence to signify themselves
reflexively. This form of activist self-presentation relies on other forms of making
known as well as on other subjects and their subjectivities. In unveiling these connec-
tions, I have also shed new light on the comparably iconic status of women and the
fact of their active participation in the imaging of the uprising, nationally (as it were),
and internationally.
As other commentators have noted (Peteet 1994), youths no longer depended on
the paterfamilias in transforming themselves into men. Unlike male youths and
women (mothers and sisters of the youths), elder men played no significant part in
either the nationalist movement or in their sons' social and political promotion, nei-
ther co-making nor growing with it. On the contrary, the accelerated promotion of
one category of subjects-boys (via nationalist activity)-subtracted from and threat-
ened to eclipse the moral authority and social stature of elder men.
The women and youths might have imagined themselves as the principal benefi-
ciaries of the redistribution of domestic and civil authority incurred by their connec-
tive activism, which, as I have shown, entailed intermittent bouts of connective resis-
tance to the paterfamilias. The same subjects, however, as also their cross-subjective
self-promotion, did carry "national authority" into quotidian spaces. In that sense,
women, youths, and the economy of cross-subjectivity were practical instruments in
the relocation of patriarchal authority-from the domestic patriarch to the nascent fa-
ther state, embodied by the movement's and steering parties' leaderships.
Because of their ambiguity (cf. Joseph 1994), or more aptly, their duplexity in re-
lation to patriarchal contrai and its reproduction, boys were eminently suitable sub-
jects to carry the transformation of Palestinian society that was to accompany the as-
cent of an independent nation-state. The boys embodied potential, future patriarchal
contrai-for which their relationships with their sisters and mothers might well have
been a training ground Uoseph 1994). But in the immediate present, as youths, they
inherently embodied a forceful challenge to patriarchal authority-that is, to their fa-
thers. One and possibly the most important expression of this challenge was a cultur-
ally expected contestation of the father's authority over subalterns of the traditional
domestic economy: women, youths, and children. In contesting a father's authority, a
boy had the active support of his mother and sisters, and implicitly of the nationalist
movement, as the West Bank case has shown. And why should the women not sup-
port the aspiring boy-man? A youth's challenge to the incumbent domestic patriarch
h as historically entailed brokerage of personalliberties for women that run against the
grain of cultural expectations surrounding female subjectivity-greater freedom of
movement and access to formal education (cf. Arebi 1994:39), and participation in
organized poltica I activity that serves, if not exclusively, also their own female inter-
ests. The boys' social ascent and the women's self-interests were intrinsically synony-
mous.
I now return to the question from which I began: how was it that poltica I victimi-
zation had a diminishing effect on elder victim's gender identity and moral status,
while it tended to have an enhancing effect when the victims were youths? The key
difference in the West Bank case was effected jointly by the politics of cross-subjec-
tive presentation that engaged selective familial relationships and the uneven deploy-
ment of subjects and familial relationships in the nationalist movement's organiza-
tional practices. Statism and kinship are not principally conflicting, mutually
displacing processes and sets of practices, as is often suggested (e.g., Joseph 1994);
however, historically specific statist movements connect more productively with
somefamilial relationships than with others.
notes
Acknowledgments. I am deeply indebted to the individuais and families on the West
Bank who, during 1989-90, generously allowed me insight into their daily lives when mistrust
of inquisitive foreigners would have been understandable. I do not use their real names and
have altered aspects of their personal circumstances to conceal their identity; I hope, however,
that ali recognize nonetheless something of themselves and of the shape their lives took in my
account. Field research on which the article is based was supported by a doctoral fellowship
from the Social Sciences and Hu'manities Research Council o f Canada (SSHRC). Iam especially
grateful to Marilyn Strathern for providing continuous intellectual stimulation. Many others
have contributed to the development of the argument I am presenting here, among them the
lively audiences at research seminars where earlier versions were presented: atthe University of
Manchester, the University of Swansea, and the University of Sussex. Gabriele vom Bruck and
Mona Marshy gave generously of their intellectual companionship. Last, but not least, special
thanks are dueto the editors of AE and to the anonymous reviewers they appointed, for their in-
terested engagement with my arguments and materiais and their many constructive comments.
1. For example, this is the case with accounts of honor in the transactionalist tradition (see
Abu-Zahra 1974, 1976; Vinogradov et ai. 1974).
2. This was the result of increased opportunities for wage labor first in the Zionist and Brit-
ish and later in the lsraeli labor market, which facilitated the individualized accumulation of
material resources. See Bargouti 1990; Migdal et ai. 1980; Moors 1996:28-29; Owen et ai.
1982; Rosenfeld 1968, 1974:161, 1978.
3. For elder men, physical abuse translated into a loss of face and honor. This outcome is
in keepi ng with ethnographic accou nts o f honor, gender, and violence in other parts o f the Arab
world. These describe the exerci se of violence more often than its reception as the threads from
which brave deeds and honorable men are fashioned (cf. Caton 1990; Gilsenan 1996).
4. Partia/ means "not only is there no totality, each part [or, in the present case, each sce-
nario] also defines a partisan position" (Strathern 1991 :39, emphasis added).
5. My research extended over roughly two thirds ofthe households in the neighborhood
around which the research gravitated. lt would be misleading to claim, however, that I selected
my informants. The 12 key informing households with which I entertained regular and intensive
visiting relations selected me by virtue of their interest in my presence and sheer human empa-
thy.
6. "1948-refugees" are families who fled their homes in the area on which a Zionist state
was established during 1948-49, transgressing the borders defined in the UN Partition Plan.
7. The vocational biographies of most people showed considerable instability, and virtu-
osity, over time. During the time of my study, many were earning incomes from multiple
sources; educational attainment often did not correspond with current occupation(s).
8. Primary and secondary schools were closed for about nine months in 1988 and for
about eight months in 1989 (Moors 1996:227, footnote 1). Universities had been subject to con-
tinuous closure since the beginning of the intifada.
9. Girls and young women were arrested in much smaller numbers and were usually de-
tained for briefer periods than boys and young men. See Warnock 1990:149 and Johnson et ai.
1989:162.
1O. Namely, the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees (UPWC), aligned with the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); and the Union of Palestinian Working
Women's Committees (UPWWC), affiliated with the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP). For
further details, see Hilterman 1991 :126-172.
11. Iam transcribing terms and phrases as I heard them used locally.
12. See also the communiqus published in English translation, collated in an appendix of
Lockman and Beinin 1989.
13. A fu 11 analysis o f women's committee practices in the Iight o f cross-subjective self-pro-
duction cannot be accommodated here. This is the subject of a separate study Oean-Kiein n.d.).
14. Strike forces (AI-quwwat ad-dariba) were locally and colloquially referred to as "the
popular army" (/-jeish il-shacabiy), or simply as ash-shebab (the [militant] youths). Each party-
movement in the national movement had a net of locally based (village o r neighborhood) strike
forces to its name. The masculine quality of strike forces was amplified by the existence of spe-
cial and exclusive women's committees. lt is not suggested that women were not involved out-
side of women's committees; the gloss proposes that their involvement was extraordinary. For
example, second-hand reports of girls who worked with the "strike forces" described them as
being "like shebab." Compare Peteet 1991 :154, who lists being "like men" as one of two forms
of activism open to unmarried female actors in the Lebanese-Palestinian context. Tellingly, the
other alternative her study mentions is "sister of men."
15. The notion of recitation is borrowed from analyses of religious knowledge and author-
ity in Middle Eastern settings (see Eickelman 1989:305; Messick 1993:7-1 O; Mitchell 1988:
148). My use o f recitation is intended to distinguish vocalizing (and disseminating) performance
from narration. In the economy of self-presentation I am proposing, narration involved three
subjective sites: the victimized subject's observable posture, connective famlia! relations who
carried that posture into the community (a process in which recitation played a part), and the
communal witnesses who were ultimately to judge collaborative reciproca[ self-performances.
16. Two ethnographies (Caton 1990 and Gilsenan 1996:127, 169, 177) contain captivat-
ing accounts of male same-sex cross-narration.
17. Thus, active girls had to show an acute sense of personal and domestic morality, as I
repeatedly heard committee cadre impress on young neophytes. Associates had to be extra
modest in their personal presentation (dress, manners, body comportment), hyper-correct in the
conduct of cross-sex interactions, and exemplary in fulfilling domestic obligations.
18. The ethnographic records show that women access the full range of rights and powers
open to female persons in their societies predominantly as mothers of sons who perpetuate their
fathers' names. See Abu-Lughod 1986; Boddy 1989:181-184; Dwyer 1978; Maher 1984;
Moors 1996:188-189; Peteet 1991, 1997; Wikan 1980:73-74.
19. Mr. Arafat was directly referred to as "the father symbol" in UNLU Communiqu No.
28 (cf. Hilterman 1991:241, footnote 134).
20. A position introduced under Ottoman rufe, the mukhtar was the appointed repre-
sentative ofthe dominant hamula (and the rest ofthe village) to the externai government (vari-
ously, Ottoman administration, the British Mandate, Jordan, and Israel i military administration).
See Baer 1980 and Migdal 1980:50-52.
21. A powerful visual expression ofthis process was the display of portraits of party leaders
in homes and committee centers, occupying places traditionally reserved for the paterfamilias.
The portraits of leaders were flanked by portraits of the heroic youth(s) of the family, neighbor-
hood, orvillage.
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accepted Apr/1 O, 1999

final version submitted }une 23, 1999
/ris Jean-Klein
Department o f Social Anthropology
University of Edinburgh
Adam Ferguson Building, George Square
Ediburgh EHB 9LL
United Kingdom
lris}K@afb1.ssc.ed.ac.uk
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TITLE: Mothercraft, statecraft, and subjectivity in the Palestinian

intifada
SOURCE: American Ethnologist 27 no1 F 2000
WN: 0003204676045
The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it

is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in
violation of the copyright is prohibited.
Copyright 1982-2000 The H.W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved.

Ativismo e Subjetividade Palestina

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mothercraft, statecraft, and subjectivity in the

Focusing on Palestinian subjectivity during the intifada, I highlight connec-

In this article, I amplify ethnographically and analytically expand the formulation

criticai incidents: allegories of activist selves in everyday life

the ethnographic setting: Harat Nashita

empowerment: organized articulations of familial cross-subjectivity

example, Communqu No. 23, August 5, 1988, as cited in Hilterman 1991:242,

quotidian articulations: verbal recitations

the absence of self-reflexive testimonials-the silence of shebab

cross-embodiment: quotidian steadfastness

Cross-embodiment describes the process, highlighted in Karim's arrest, whereby

the unique cultural qualifications of mothers and sisters

silences and absences: the paterfamilias

A sense of social demotion was poignantly expressed in the occasional lamenta-

implications: the displacement of patriarchal authority via familial

accepted Apr/1 O, 1999

TITLE: Mothercraft, statecraft, and subjectivity in the Palestinian

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it

Copyright 1982-2000 The H.W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved.

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