Nationalism and Resistance: The Two Faces of Everyday Activism in Palestine during the Intifada

Abstract

In a review of anthropological studies of resistance, Ortner has criticized work in this area for its of thickness (1995:174), symptomatic of which are a thinning of culture (1995:180-183) and dissolving of the subject (1995:183-187).' The refusal's effect, and Ortner's main concern, is a systematic failure in this area to register and represent the ambiguity of political activity classified as resistance (1995:175). The current study registers doubt about the inverse certainties that Ortner's critique implicitly erects: that ethnographic thickness will invariably reveal ambiguity, regardless of context; and that accounts that register ambiguity represent complexities more holistically and fully. Studies of constitute a poignant rebuttal. While a similar form of refusal can be said to have driven work in this adjacent field of political study, here it has had the opposite motivation and undesirable effect. Especially since the 1980s, studies of nationalism have practiced a determined, systematically discriminate denial of certainty to a distinctive social space that, furthermore, analyses in this field have cast into a distinct, superior moral subjectivity: the practice of life. The response put forward in this article, which employs a more literal understanding of everyday life than the majority of anthropological studies of political processes, draws attention to the nationalizing efficacy of ordinary people's daily exercises of neighborhood, household, kinship, and self: I call this process self-nationalization. Contemporary studies of have systematically refused to acknowledge that ordinary persons could, in specific circumstances, infuse their pursuit of daily interests and relations with political projects with nationalizing effects.