1. (Background) Could you say a bit about your own trajectory, and research interests?

Broadly speaking, I am interested in peripheral social phenomena that can be subversive to established modes of thought. I am also interested in classical anthropological concepts like kinship, religion, cognition, and language; and their interaction with philosophical concepts. I did not expect that this would be my trajectory. When I started my PhD at Johns Hopkins in 2015, I was more interested in explicitly political anthropology—my research is in Palestine, after all. I remain interested in this in my personal life, but my professional interests shifted, in part because of the kind of training I received as a doctoral student and the kinds of connections we had at the department. The anthropology department at Johns Hopkins at the time had a very close working relationship with a department called the Humanities Center (now defunct), which was established after the famous “Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” conference held at the university in 1966, in which post-structuralism made its debut in the United States. So, from the beginning, I was engaging with theory as a part of my studies, and I was taking courses and having conversations with psychoanalysts, art historians, literary theorists, and the like.

Regionally, I am interested in the Arab-speaking world and, increasingly, how Arab/Islamic intellectual concepts “travel.” My dissertation research was on Romani kinship in Palestine and Jordan, focusing on how the family is a “container” of difference in the Arab world, meaning that each family can sometimes be a universe of particulars, which in the case of my research was the particularity of a family being Romani. This is in contrast to more phenomenological forms of difference like race or ethnicity, as is the case in the Euro-American experience. I have a monograph coming out later this year with University of Toronto Press that presents these ideas clearly.

Currently, I am in the process of beginning a new research project on the influence of Islam in Arab Christianity, and on missionary work in the Middle East. I expect this to keep me busy for the next several years. At the same time, because of the close relationships I developed with my interlocutors over the past eight years, I do not think that my “old” research will ever really terminate. This is especially true considering that many of my interlocutors have been directly affected by the psychotic massacres taking place in Palestine now, and some have lost family members. As such, my dissertation research remains an open project.

2. (Backstage) What drove you to write this specific article?

This article came out of one of my dissertation chapters. I engaged in the chapter with Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the public/private in politics, and I was encouraged by my doctoral advisor to expand the article to highlight the limits of using Arendt’s typology as universal categories. That being the case, it took me a while to get to it, and I did not begin writing this article until after defending my dissertation in 2021. However, as I adapted one particular strand of my chapter to an article-length piece, and after some productive rounds of comments from Julia Eckert, the AT editor that I worked with, I came to the opposite conclusion from what I had originally set out to argue. To the extent that writing is discovery, I discovered that Arendt’s categories actually work rather well when paired with classical Arab/Islamic social theory. So, in its journey from conception to publication, the article transformed. Rather than an article that uses my ethnography with Romanies in Palestine and Jordan to critique the relativity of Arendt’s concepts, the article ended up being an illustration of how Arendt’s typology of the public/private can coexist with Arab/Islamic concepts, and I use my ethnography in Palestine and Jordan as case studies to show this. One of the anonymous reviewers of this article noted that Arendt “works” with my material because her philosophy engages a Greek tradition that is also part of the Mediterranean tradition to which much of the Arab world belongs.

3. (Contribution) In brief, in which set of theoretical discussions the article engages and what is the article’s contribution to those debates?

I will be the first to admit that there is something anachronistic about my theoretical orientation. I engage a lot of seemingly archaic anthropological concepts in this article (and generally), but I do not do this for any kind of atavism or by any desire to be retro-chic. Rather, it is the case that the anthropology of Palestine has historically been outside the sphere of theory; of course, with exceptions. This is in contrast to dazzling theoretical work from other places in the region, like Egypt or Morocco, which have rich anthropological traditions. This is mostly a result of the practical difficulties of doing anthropology in Palestine, which was not possible to the extent that it is currently until well into the 1990s. Before this, there were only a handful of anthropologists researching in Palestine, often foreigners and thus with difficulties of access, and also Israeli anthropologists doing what is a textbook case of colonial anthropology. In the 1920s and 1930s, there were very interesting amateur anthropologists and folklorists from Palestine (the likes of Tawfiq Canaan and Stephan Hanna Stephan), but this proto-anthropology disappeared with the Nakba and the foundation of Israel in 1948. There are a number of reasons for this, and it is not possible to get into everything here. One of them is that Palestine in the twentieth century, because of the Nakba, never had a chance to develop great universities to train native scholars, like, for example, the great universities of Cairo and Beirut that developed in the same period. Birzeit University has emerged in recent decades as a major center of humanities and social science learning, and this has created a new dynamic situation.

The anthropology of the region helps mitigate the anthropological void in Palestine to a certain extent, but Palestine, although geographically in the heart center of the region, has significant social and cultural particularities from places like Egypt or Morocco. Above all, Palestine is characterized by a protracted violence and a series of mass expulsions that gives it a singularity in comparison to these other places. Since the 1990s there has been an explosion of anthropological interest in Palestine, much of which has dealt with the immediate effects of precisely this singularity, such as the refugee experience, trauma, the challenges of living under military rule, and so forth. This focus is now expanding. Sa’ed Atshan published an important article in the Journal of Palestine Studies two years ago that reviews what he calls the recent anthropological “rise” of Palestine (which I was honored to be included in), and a lot of this scholarship engages very contemporary issues like indigeneity, queerness, infrastructure, and security studies. Still, because there are generations of anthropological theory “missing” in Palestine—e.g., structural functionalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, the so-called “ethical turn,” etc.—drawing a longue durée of concepts from the anthropological literature on Palestine can sometimes be very difficult. As such, my article aims to establish some basic premises for the continuity of anthropological theory in the region, such as the nature of the public sphere in a place in which the social structure has been resolutely assaulted.

4. (Expansion) Why does theory matter (to you and/or in a broad sense)?

Theory is the job of the anthropologist. In my opinion, anthropology has moved on from “thick description,” which is today better done by documentary film and now by bloggers and social media, and sometimes by journalism. I am very impressed, for instance, how much ethnographic detail one finds in some long-form journalism. Such detail is also important in anthropology, but I am convinced that the raison d’être of contemporary anthropology is to place qualitative empirical details into proper theoretical perspective. Theory gives shape to the social. Sometimes this can be very old theory. Marshall Sahlins sparked controversy some years ago on a Facebook thread in which he urged anthropologists not to abandon classical anthropological concepts like the gift, the kula, fetish, ritual, etc.; not because there is a shortage of concepts in the world, but because these are concepts that only anthropology can adequately deal with, for it is anthropology that is the guardian of the classical literature on these concepts. I basically concur. I say: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto the anthropologist the things that are the anthropologist’s.