A REVIEW OF THE
ANTHROPOLOGICAL LITERATURE
IN ENGLISH ON THE
PALESTINIAN ḤAMŪLA
AND THE STATUS OF
WOMEN
The following is a survey of the anthropological literature
in English on the Palestinian ḥamūla, the extended family or clan, and Palestinian women’s
lives in the
This article provides a critical,
historical overview of the anthropological literature in English on first, the
Palestinian ḥamūla, the
extended family in the widest sense, or clan, and, second, Palestinian women’s
lives in the
Abu-Lughod argues that these two
theoretical areas are distinct and unequally matched areas of inquiry:
Nearly all the
segmentation theorists are men, while nearly all those who theorize
about women are women. . . . In the former
the theoretical distinctions are fine, in the latter theoretical debate is
muted. And if the segmentation theorists are concerned exclusively with
politics, narrowly defined to refer only to the public world of men, the
scholars working on women begin with . . . the
study of women’s sphere, the harem (1989, 288).
A careful review of these zones of
theory with respect to the Palestinian case may assist scholars in developing
new approaches to these (and other) dilemmas
found in the literature. Indeed, issues of not only gender and [25] theory
but also agency are key to the review here. I discuss in the final section of
this paper my research (July 1996 through August 1997) in the Palestinian West Bank
I include here literature stretching
roughly from the 1950s (with the exception of Hilma Granqvist’s earlier works)
to the present, although this is not an exhaustive review. In 1972, when
Richard Antoun published his ethnography
Arab Village: A Social Structural Study of a Transjordanian Peasant Community (1972),
he wrote in the introduction that only three other anthropologists had published book-length studies of Arab villages in the
By the early 1980s a number of new
studies on the Palestinians in the
The Ḥamūla: Early
Approaches
Stemming in large part from Rosenfeld’s
influential work on Palestinian villages
inside Israel, early debates over the nature of the ḥamūla were framed in
terms of understanding the ḥamūla
as an essentialized patrilineage, “blood”
group or, on the other hand, as a class structure. The differences between
these points of view can also be understood as either an over-reliance on, or
radical departure from, the role of historical continuity of the ḥamūla. Correspondingly, the effects of the Jordanian (1948–1967)
and Israeli occupations (1967–present) in the West Bank are thus under-
or over-emphasized, either through authors’ silence about these occupations’
effects on the structure of the ḥamūla
or their assertion that the occupations were directly able to shape the
Palestinian family with little resistance. Thus, the political consequences of
occupation on Palestinian village and family social structure are underestimated or the role of the Palestinian peasantry in
shaping their own lives is denied. Finally, these arguments rely primarily on
the public expression of the ḥamūla,
an arena dominated by men, thereby overlooking women’s practices and
perspectives.
Rosenfeld’s perspective on the
Palestinian ḥamūla
emphasized it as a kind of social glue, held over from the past, manipulated by
external pressures, and, in certain areas, subject to some degree of change.
Rosenfeld thus described Palestinian villages as “largely dependent on wage
labor, yet maintaining contact with the land, and cleaving to the traditional
social relations based on control of land—we
may term [them] a ‘residual’ peasantry”
(Rosenfeld 1964, 228, emphasis mine). Rosenfeld stated this argument in greater
detail in the following terms:
While
the fact that they are a weak proletariat outside the village and backward agriculturists inside the village ties them economically
to a weak and fluid ‘residual’ extended family structure, the internal
politics of hamule factionalism, the
marriage system of the control over women that is its expression, and bride
price, which explains its terms, culturally and materially anchor these
extended families and makes them an on-going structural fact. Briefly: the State
places pressure on the villagers to [27] preserve the existing order and supports traditional lineage combinations or
picks their representatives (1968, 740).
Emphasizing
The
large number of Arab laborers working for wages outside the village, the growing number of merchants throughout the country,
form groups which cross-cut hamule
ties and signal the development of classes. Yet the State continues to
emphasize its ties with the hamayil
generated during the feudal regime. It thus upholds and reinforces the
traditional structure of the village through its maintenance of a form of
paternalism which makes use of social groupings and their leaders that are tied
to the economic and political organization of the past (1964, 231).
Rosenfeld thus emphasizes the ḥamūla’s ties to the past,
interpreting marriage and inheritance
practices as remnants of the practices of a kinship-based society, and
Cohen (1965), in his study of a
Palestinian village located between Haifa and Tel Aviv inside Israel, also
emphasizes the ḥamūla’s
historical continuity, but in contrast to
Rosenfeld, outlines the different ways in which the ḥamūla has dramatically changed in response to recent
historical events. Cohen argued that Arab village social structure underwent
three distinct periods of change. First, under the Ottomans, the ḥamūla played a central role
in peasant life, forming the lines according to which “dominant cleavage” in the village took place politically and socially
(1965, 8). Under the British Mandate, however, the ḥamūla lost much of its economic base and social power
as peasants lost land:
With
the conversion of a great proportion of joint estates to private ownership, the
hamula lost its economic basis. The new lines
of stratification cut across hamula boundaries and tended to disrupt the
hamula. The development of an Arab country-wide nationalist organization
weakened the hamula further by the creation of national associations that cut across particular
patronymic and territorial groups. The [28] dominant cleavage in the village
ran on class lines (1965, 8).
Families of similar economic status thus
“developed closer connections with each other
than with the other families from their own hamula” (Cohen 1965, 46).
In the third period examined by Cohen,
beginning roughly in 1950, “Despite the
development of some economic and political conditions which should have
completed the disruption of the hamula, there was a revival of intensive hamula
activity. . . .
There was renewed emphasis on the norms of patriliny. . . .
Once again the dominant
cleavage in the village ran on hamula lines” (1965, 9). This change in the
structural orientation of the village, from class to ḥamūla identity, was
brought about by certain changes in Israeli government policy as well as
“the existence of some social and cultural continuities from the past” (Cohen
1965, 105). In particular, the establishment of
the “Committee of Labour” in the early 1950s was undertaken by the
Israeli authorities to try to increase their support in the village by not
allowing any single ḥamūla
to become too powerful, thereby alienating members of other ḥamāyil in the village. The
Committee would allot jobs to the various ḥamāyil
in numbers proportional to their size (Cohen 1965, 67). In 1959 the establishment of the village council system by
the Israelis further strengthened the roles of not only large, powerful ḥamāyil in village life but
also the small ones by allowing each ḥamūla
some say in the governing of the village
(Cohen 1965, 103). Thus, “competition between the hamulas would
certainly continue over some marginal power and prestige, but under the
circumstances no single hamula would be able to dominate the village for any
length of time” (Cohen 1965, 103). Individuals stood to benefit from drawing on
their ḥamūla membership
and competing with those in a ḥamūla
other than their own. Here the ḥamūla
is presented as an enduring structure, able
to be revived in its previous form by villagers in response to Israeli
pressures.
Echoes of these arguments—the ḥamūla is an essentially traditional
structure, able to be manipulated by the Israelis—are found in the works of
other authors as well. Ein Gil and Finkelstein, while recognizing that Israeli
occupation hardly allows for autonomy on the part of the Palestinian peasantry in
The
zionist (sic) attempt to obliterate and deny the existence of Palestinian
national identity brought about a response
characteristic of oppressed minorities—the strengthening of traditional
structures. . . . In order to dominate and control the great
majority of the members of a hamoulah, it
was enough for the authorities to harness the headman to their wagon. A party which could bribe
the headman would get most [29] of
the votes of his hamoulah. In
this way the hamoulah structure was
turned from a stronghold of resistance to
zionist policy into the institutional framework through which zionist
domination over Palestinian society is mediated (1977, 17).
The ḥamūla
is presented here as a tool for the Israelis, with ḥamūla members having little or no ability to resist
such outside interference or manipulation by
the “headmen.” Also emphasizing the ḥamūla’s
ties to the past and largely immutable character, Ma’oz explained the
elections of 1955 in the
Local politics within
the
Here the power of the ḥamūla is recognized but not
problematized; nor is the larger context of Jordanian occupation taken into
account.
Cohen’s work makes an important break
with Rosenfeld’s, however, in recognizing that the genealogical structure of
the ḥamūla significantly
differs from the structure of patrilineages. Cohen describes the ḥamūla as “a patrilineal
association whose members . . . lived in the same quarter, within the
same villages, and they co-operated on a number of specific occasions” (1965,
3). Cohen thus used the term patronymic
group to reflect that the common use of a name of an agnatic ancestor
provided ḥamūla members with
a sense of shared identity (1965, 105). To explain membership in the ḥamūla, Granqvist also argued
for the use of memory and consciousness in creating a shared ḥamūla identity, as opposed
to a strict application of lineage theory: “It is interesting to see that the
fact of a common origin is not enough but people must be clearly conscious of
it. As soon as the memory of the common ancestors becomes dim, the bond by
which blood relationship is conditioned
begins to loosen” (1931, fn. 80). By explaining the ways in which the
names of families have changed over the decades, Granqvist further emphasized
the nature of ḥamūla
identity as dependent on memory and its malleability. Granqvist thus noted that
while the definition of nasab is literally,
[30] “relationship-in-law,” its wider meaning is “a bond between
families by marriage between its [the ḥamūla’s]
members.” Occasionally, it is necessary to create an appropriate genealogical
context, particularly for constituting new marriages (Granqvist 1931, 86–87).
Similarly, Antoun argued that “the village is viewed as a genuine web of
kinship rather than a series of discrete patrilineal descent groups on the one
hand or a series of marriage alliances on the other” (1972, 116). More
recently, Atran uses the term “patronymic
groups” as opposed to strict genealogical reckoning (Atran 1986, 272),
stating:
The constituent
patrilineal units (jeb) of any one ḥamula (sic) are rarely connected
genealogically. These units vary in depth but never encompass fewer than two,
and almost never more than five, generations; and it is recognized by one and
all that few, if any, of the component jeb
of a ḥamula are of the same ‘sinew’
(’aṣab). As for general social
relations between ḥama’il these
are usually phrased in idioms of affinity (nasab)
and matrilaterality (makhwal)
although relations between groups having the same patronym, but belonging to
different villages . . . are expressed in terms of patrilinearity (e‘ammam) (1986, 274).
An example of a similar reckoning of
relations is seen in Granqvist’s discussion of branches of one ḥamūla in Artas:
They could not state the exact relationship
between these three fathers: ’Ōde, Aḥmad and
As’ad Reya; and they solved the difficulty by saying that they were brothers
although of different mothers, a fact of a certain general genealogical
interest but in any case much too vague to be accepted, especially when one
knows how wide is the meaning of the word brother, which is sometimes applied
to all men in the same village (1931, 80 fn. 1).
Although Eickelman (1989, 155) credits
Cohen with being “one of the first ethnographers to break with the more
conventional assumptions of lineage theory in
a Middle Eastern context,” Granqvist may in fact have set the precedent
for Cohen’s later work.
While distinguishing the nature of the ḥamūla from a patrilineage is
important, Cohen, Rosenfeld, and others nonetheless emphasized the functioning
of the ḥamūla as a
timeless source of identity for villagers which made them easily vulnerable to
Israeli manipulation. In contrast, Nakhleh has argued for “the need for
demystifying and dismantling widely held assumptions concerning the
pre-eminence of the hamula” (1977,
54). Authors such as Rosenfeld, claimed Nakhleh, focus on “the immutable nature
of the traditional Arab social structure [as] the major factor impeding the
process of substantial social change” (1977, 65). While Rosenfeld does
recognize some degree of change as brought about by Israeli government policy,
his analysis [31] does not go far
enough: Nakhleh described Rosenfeld as “curiously coy in subjecting
the dominant ideological factor, i.e., Zionism, and the specific
policies of the government of Israel towards the Arab village to the same type
of analysis [as he employs for his analysis of the Palestinian village family]”
(1977, 66). Similarly, Lustick argues that studies
comparing the
increased vigour of Arab village hamulas,
or clans, in Israel compared to their declining political role before 1948, or
research documenting trends in intra-hamula marriages, take on added
significance when considered in conjunction with Jewish attempts to reward and
support traditionalist elements in the Arab sector (1980, 70).
Without explicitly considering the
policies of the Israeli state and how they may
have affected the ḥamūla,
researchers “adhere to the dominant
ideological configurations by which the people under study are subjugated”
(Nakhleh 1977, 67).
In a similar vein of critique, but
shifting the argument to a class analysis of the ḥamūla, Asad argued
that “‘the hamula’ of Israeli Arabs
was the ideological resolution of a
Zionist problem—for it constituted a mode of control and an imputed
identity for the only political existence allowed to Arab villagers in Israel.”
He went on to suggest that “it is in terms of class as a theoretical concept,
not of ḥamūla as the
so-called ‘traditional form’ of Israeli Arab organisation, that we can hope to
comprehend this problem” (1975, 274). Indeed, based on his analysis of
Palestinians’ class position inside Israel, land expropriations, and the
depression of Israeli Arab agriculture, he argued that “at no point in the
entire period under consideration is the hamula
a basic principle for the political economy of the Palestinian peasant” (1975,
270). Rather, class is the defining factor of identity for Palestinian
villagers; the ḥamūla is a
creation of Zionist policy in its attempts to manipulate the Palestinians
(ibid.).
Yet, viewing membership in a ḥamūla as a class identity
does not explain why the ḥamūla
itself has been maintained by villagers, particularly in cases when ḥamūla membership cuts across
economic lines within a single village. On the other hand, Cohen and Rosenfeld
rely too heavily on an essentialized view of ḥamūla identity, arguing respectively that such an
identity has been simply “revived” or “preserved”
from an earlier time period. Contending that the ḥamūla is primarily the creation of the Israeli state,
however, and that ḥamūla
identity is now a class structure, Asad commits the same error as Cohen and
Rosenfeld: the dialectic between history and the present time is not resolved.
Equally problematic, however, is the relationship between the degree of control
exercised over the ḥamūla
by the Israeli state and [32] the degree of resistance and autonomy
demonstrated by Palestinian villagers. It is unlikely that Palestinian
villagers should be analyzed as simple pawns in the hands of the Israelis tied
to their “traditional” ways of life or as free from their historical
underpinnings as ḥamūla
members.
The Ḥamūla:
Later
Approaches
Following these
early works, later anthropologists have focused increasingly on examining the ḥamūla and ḥamūla identity with greater
specificity, moving away from a focus on ḥamūla
structure to the histories of particular villages and how those histories have
shaped the interactive nature of family and class identity.
For example, Salim Tamari (1981)
examined the impact of the increase in wage labor on
(1) Family and clan connections are central
factors in recruiting villagers to work in
(2) The
unstable nature of the work in
(3) The
internal hierarchies present among village wage laborers (i.e., that certain
villagers will be hired by the Israelis to hire their family and clan members
to work) creates “not only a sense of ‘false consciousness’ among rural
workers, but an efficient system of labour
management in the absence of workers’ organizations and work tenure
stability” (ibid.).
(4) Wage labor has actually contributed to a “new
homogeneity in the village class structure” (ibid.). This is because
social differentiation based on land ownership has greatly diminished as wage
labor has increased in importance as a source of wealth; wealth based on wage
labor, however, has not become the basis of significant class differences
(ibid.).
(5) While
some villagers have accumulated cash wealth from wage labor the opportunities
[33] for economic investment
in the rural areas remain very limited.
(6) In the context of unstable work opportunities,
family land is an important source of
security; in agreement with Rosenfeld, Tamari argues that the seasonal
nature of agricultural work allows the villager to work for wages and work on the
land as necessary (ibid.).
Tamari, quoting
Ammons (1978), argues that emigration and peasant workers have contradictory consequences for the peasant
household. Migration contributes to a strengthening of the extended unit and a
conservative social outlook among the family
members who remain at home (Tamari 1981,
38). On the other hand, commuting has “hastened the process of breakup
and nuclearization, in part because younger bread-winners in the family established a source of earnings independent
from their fathers” (Ammons 1978, 213,
219; quoted by Tamari 1981, 38). In his research in one particular
village, Tamari found that the two main village factions continued to be concentrated in separate areas of the
village, suggesting that ḥamūla
identity continues to differentiate villagers; however, at the entrance of the
village new homes from both factions intermingled (Tamari 1981, 44). Tamari
thus accounts for the ambiguity of villagers’ class and ḥamūla status without relying on a fixed notion of the force
and continuity of the past.
Migdal (1980a), like
Tamari, relies on a political economy approach for his analysis of identity and social
structure in Palestinian villages. He thus examines three trends in villages
stemming from the availability of work in
In the second pattern, the village was
not significantly stratified in the past and only a small number of young men
were sent to the West to be educated. [34] The
availability of work in
work in
Clashes have been generational, rather
than class-based, in character. Migdal attributes this to the effect on young
men of working in
Finally, Migdal identified villages
which were not highly stratified in the past,
and which contained a significant number of young men who were educated
in the
Migdal removes the ḥamūla completely as a focal point for his argument,
attending instead to the role of economic and generational cleavages in
villages. Yet, by doing so, he too leaves questions about why ḥamūla identity may in some
cases be maintained at all, cutting across class and generational lines—unless,
of course, in all the cases he examined none of his informants in fact referred
to the ḥamūla. Migdal
does, however, blend a historical analysis into his argument without
homogenizing villagers’ different experiences of the past.
In contrast to Migdal, Escribano
reintroduces the ḥamūla
into her discussion as a source of identity, but, unlike some of the earlier
anthropologists discussed above, avoids an analysis which relies too heavily on
the ḥamūla as a product of the past. Escribano carried out research
in two Palestinian villages in the early 1980s which greatly differed in
their ḥamūla relations,
including marriage patterns, inter-clan feuding, and overall wealth. Kober, the
first village examined by Escribano, is a relatively isolated village in the
In Deir Dibwan, the
second village studied by Escribano, there is little antagonism among the three ḥamāyil in the village (1987,
125). Men tend to migrate for longer periods
of time than men in Kober, “broaden[ing] the sense of reference for the villagers” (Escribano 1987, 142). The
villagers own more land in Deir Dibwan than do the villagers in Kober.
Marriages among the different ḥamāyil are common (Escribano 1987, 139). A number of men
had married foreign women who returned with them to the village.
Escribano found that only one woman out of fifty she interviewed was married to
her first patrilineal cousin (1987, 131). In Deir Dibwan, the accumulation of
wealth primarily from male migration has created a link between wealth and
honor; further, for villagers “solidarity based on the hamoulleh has shifted to
the village level” (Escribano 1987, 148). Escribano claims:
The Deir Dibwan
Association, headquartered in
In Kober, ḥamūla identity remains more central than village level
identity as is the case in Deir Dibwan; thus, practices of clan endogamy in
Kober are a central source of honor, as are collective actions in response to
conflicts which arise between the two ḥamūla
(Escribano 1987, 147).
Escribano's
separation of these two levels of identity—village, and ḥamūla—begs
certain questions, including how these identities depend on and interact with
one another, what other “levels” of identity there are in a [36] village, particularly the role that class consciousness
might play, and how villagers
may use such layers of identity differently in different situations. By
dichotomizing “village” and “ḥamūla”
identity, we gain little sense of how the two may be interdependent and what
other kinds of factors may influence social
relations. Yet the works of Escribano, Migdal, and Tamari speak to the
need for a careful examination of history, economy, and politics for
understanding the nature of the ḥamūla
and its regional variation.
These works, although variable in their
approach, focus on the public expressions of the ḥamūla in the dominant discourse of village life. This
focus excludes discourses which do not often receive public recognition, but
are nonetheless important. As I argue below, while village women may share in
the expression of this dominant discourse at appropriate moments, a deeper
consideration of women’s experiences and perspectives adds an important
dimension to understanding the nature of social ties in practice.
The Status of Women
The literature on the ḥamūla is largely missing a
careful consideration of women’s lives and the ways in which women may conduct
their relationships; indeed, in the early anthropological literature there are
relatively few studies of any sort which consider women’s status and their
relations to one another. A typical example, however, of the few arguments
present in the literature can be seen in the following statement by Lutfiyya: “In
a patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal society, such as the one under
study, it is quite clear that the social position of women is expected to be
inferior to that of men. This is generally true, although, as we shall see,
women in this society are endowed with certain rights that assure them of some
protection against the tyranny of men” (1966, 146). The rights generally
focused on by anthropologists include in
particular women’s rights to inherit property (Moors 1995, 1). Thus Rosenfeld argued (1960) that the two determining
factors of women’s status in Palestinian villages are kin and property
relations. The nature of women’s relationships to one another, which may suggest various status positions held by women within
the community, are largely overlooked.
When such relationships are accounted for, there is a tendency for
discussion to rely on stereotypes of women as competing and jealous or as
indistinguishable from one another.
Rosenfeld claimed that the
male-dominated inheritance system both protects women and denies them their
rights: women are forced to forfeit their share
of the family inheritance to receive life-long protection from male kin and
certain rights. Examples of the benefits stemming from a woman’s refusal of her inheritance include the freedom to
be a zaʿlāna woman (a [37] woman who
returns to her father’s house when she feels her husband is unjust), to enter
her father’s house and take food that she needs, and ʿīdīya, the obligation of her brothers to give her
gifts twice a year on the occasion of the major feasts (also noted by Granqvist
1931; Rosenfeld 1960, 67). If the woman should claim her share of the
inheritance, however, she forfeits her kin rights, a consequence which
Rosenfeld suggests is a great tragedy for the woman (1960, 67). Women,
therefore, Rosenfeld argued, are “reduced to reliance on kinship” (1960, 70), a
perspective on women’s lives which stresses the utilitarian value of kinship.
Rosenfeld suggests
ways in which a brother may be dependent upon his sister, but focuses his argument on the near-total
reliance of the sister upon her brother and male kin for protection throughout
her life. This trivializes men’s complementary dependence on their sisters.
Indeed, while a woman’s tie to her family for protection is strong, Rosenfeld
in fact notes at one point that the brother’s tie to his sister is economically
greater (1960, 68). This is because he is dependent upon her for his own
marriage either by using her in exchange for a bride or using her bride-price
for his own (also noted by Granqvist 1931, 137–39); also, a brother relies on
his sister’s forfeiting her inheritance claim, thereby increasing his.
Granqvist, as noted above, also provides evidence of a brother’s reliance upon
his sister and the interlocking nature of responsibility to each other this
entails. Brothers and sisters can also be understood as practicing a kind of “masked
reciprocity” due to their dependent relationship upon one another. Occasions
such as gift-giving between men and women are characterized by “the on-going
indebtedness of the men to their sisters; males take females’ property and they
marry on their account” (Rosenfeld 1974, 159). Exploring the ways in which
family members depend on one another and create relations of reciprocity may be
a useful and more sensitive tool for analyzing factors of women’s status.
In terms of women’s relationships to one
another, authors generally claim that parties
are commonly antagonistic, vying for status and favors, or approximately
equal in their relations. Rosenfeld (1974) argued that women maintain primarily
egalitarian relationships with one another while men engage in hierarchical
relations. Among women, Rosenfeld argued, “the give and take of reciprocity
emphasizes the basic equality that exists among them. That is, there is not
status hierarchy between peasant women in the village other than that which may
exist within an extended family” (1974, 140). These extended family hierarchies
focus on age and the demonstrated ability to bear sons. Yet women believe,
according to Rosenfeld, that “one woman is as good as the next”; they see “their
common condition” and emphasize [38] it (1974,
149). Women struggle “not to allow a status hierarchy form among them. They do
not allow a woman to assume the status of a man. . . . They measure everything and every woman; they demand
equality, which they personalize, and the smallest distinction among them does
not go unnoticed” (Rosenfeld 1974, 149). Men, on the other hand, are “involved
in a ceaseless struggle for positions in a village-wide status hierarchy and
translate the demands of reciprocity into
distinctions between themselves” (Rosenfeld 1974, 140). Men are
separated by material differences, including the property-owning father and the propertyless son, or simply poor and rich
families. Thus rich men and poor men interact
in status-defined ways in practices of reciprocity; men differentiated
by wealth “could not but be involved in
internal struggles for individual status positions, authority, and
economic advancement; the format of reciprocity provided one of the means of
expressing inequality as well as equality” (Rosenfeld 1974, 154).
Rosenfeld concludes his 1974 article by
noting that changes in the village are
changing the nature of these reciprocal relationships. Men “try to preserve
the fictions of the past status hierarchy [but] the effect of the economic and
occupational transformation of the village has been to have men regard themselves as equals” (Rosenfeld 1974, 161). Thus,
men, like women, see themselves as essentially equals. The only
exception to this among women are the few women in the village who have become “citified”
and therefore “more reserved in expressing reciprocal behavior” (Rosenfeld
1974, 161–62). Finally, Rosenfeld claims that the wife’s sense of individuality
and self-importance, traditionally derived from her kin, is decreasing as
gift-giving becomes more oriented towards the household as a whole and less
towards the individual (1974, 162).
Rosenfeld and other authors also focus
on women as a source of disputes. Cohen wrote
that women “are often a source of disputes. The intense and complex relationships
created by in-hamula marriages strain
the relationships of patriliny in a variety of ways” (1965, 124). As part of
her husband’s family household, a young woman
is under the authority of his father, mother, and brothers. This creates
tension particularly between the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law; while the
mother-in-law struggles for the unity of the extended family household which
allows her to maintain her power, the daughter-in-law works to escape the
authority of her mother-in-law by setting up her own household. Thus a young
married woman will often pressure her husband to separate from his kin and
establish his own household so she may reach “the structural situation that she
has constantly striven for wherein the only real authority over her is her
husband” (Rosenfeld 1960, 68). While Granqvist notes that villagers believe
that all kinds of kin can be [39] a “heavy burden and most troublesome,”
she also highlights that men, like women, may experience difficulties with
their mothers-in-law (1931, 93). More recently Haj wrote, “A young bride enters
her husband’s household at an extreme disadvantage as she will be subordinate
not only to all men in the family but also to senior women, especially her
mother-in-law. . . . Indeed, a
bitter rivalry between mothers and daughters-in-law within this household is
not uncommon” (1992, 763–764). Yet Haj also notes that a sex-segregated world
allows women “to foster and maintain their own networks of sociability outside
those of men and their marriages. . . . These
networks in Middle Eastern societies offer women more control over their own
world and protect them against emotional and
social isolation” (1992, 764). Yet in the Palestinian case, networks of
women and the systems of support they provide for one another are generally not
explored.
Understanding women’s
lives and relations to each other as well as to men is the pathway to understanding issues of status,
strategy, and power among women. This approach, in contrast to that adopted by the
studies examined here, would allow for a non-homogenized view of women as
actors within their cultural bounds.
Recent Approaches to Studying Palestinian Women
Studies of Palestinian women have
mushroomed in recent years. These studies can be organized into two categories:
First, those which deal with the role of occupation and women’s involvement in
the nationalist movement and, second, works
which utilize a political economy and/or Marxist approach to
understanding women’s lives (Hammami 1995, 18). In both approaches concepts of “patriarchy”
and “tradition” are heavily relied upon but
not rigorously analyzed (Hammami 1995, 18; see Hatem 1987 and Kandiyoti
1996 for critiques of the use of the notion of “patriarchy” in the study of
women in the wider Middle East). In the first approach, authors claim that “traditional
society’s oppression of women is worsened by the experience of the Occupation”
(Hammami 1995, 19). To combat their oppression, women join organizations which
work against the occupation, but do not confront directly the issues of their “traditional”
oppression. This two-tiered approach, focusing on an unproblematized “traditional”
society made worse by the outside forces of occupation, can be seen in the
following:
The role and status
of Palestinian women in the hamula
system has been defined by centuries of cultural patterns and social
restrictions and justified by religious sanctions. It has also been maintained
by local and alien governments ruling the Palestinians, who have utilised this
traditional structure as a system of social control in [40] order to avoid conflict
and facilitate the administration of the conquered territories (Haddad 1980,
148).
The intifada is then understood as a
two-tiered rebellion against traditional
oppressions and outside forces. For example:
Resistance
in the intifada is waged not only
against twenty-three years of Israeli military occupation and economic, political, social
and cultural oppression of the Palestinians. Women of the intifada are beginning simultaneously to
wage a social-cultural struggle against the traditional Palestinian patriarchal
structure (Abdo 1991, 22; cf. Fawry 1986).
These authors and
others claim to examine these issues of traditional oppression and
externally-imposed oppression “simultaneously” but almost without exception focus on the history
of Palestinian women’s organizations and ignore the details and complexities of
“traditional family norms.” A central problem with this approach, therefore, is
the lack of specific theorizing of key concepts, such as “norms and traditions”
or “family honor” as well as an over-reliance on the role that formal
organizations play in everyday life for women.[3]
As Gad points out, while during the intifada
women in camps were present in large numbers at demonstrations, they were
rarely directly involved in regular and sustained committee actions (1989, 17).
Estimates by the Palestinian Federation for Women’s Action Committee in 1989
revealed that only three percent of the number of available women in the
occupied territories between the ages of fourteen and fifty were organized by
the existing women’s committees (Najjar 1992, 151).
In the works of only
a few authors have the practices of the occupation and its effects on women been linked to
women’s experiences of oppression within their families and society: “Thus,
women are oppressed by traditional society
and then separately by the Occupation” (Hammami 1995, 21). Kandiyoti
argues that:
[41] The historical connection between feminism and nationalism
in the
Interestingly, Hammami recommends that
scholars reread early studies such as Cohen and Rosenfeld to understand the
ways in which Palestinian society has been directly shaped by the Israeli
influence: “A re-reading of some of the literature on Israeli rule of
Palestinians within the Green Line through the mobilization of seemingly
traditional structures such as hamula
and clan might provide a useful starting point for this type of analysis on
women under occupation” (1995, 22), but this without problematizing the early
literature in terms of its over-emphasis on the determinant nature of Israeli
influence on Palestinian society (as discussed above).
Hammami herself analyzed the
relationship between women’s increased use of the veil in
The second approach to understanding
Palestinian women’s lives can be seen in the
political economy analysis of women as wage workers. As [42] Hatem
points out, however, analyses which focus on women’s roles in production “are
largely inadequate for the analysis of the emotional and sexual dynamics of the
private world with which women are largely associated” (Hatem 1987, 813).
Further, “traditional” forces are called upon to explain why Palestinian women
wage workers have not developed a radical class consciousness: tradition “appears
in the guise of discourses which attempt to maintain women’s identities as
economic dependents as opposed to instrumental economic actors” (Hammami 1995,
23). For example:
Subjugation to men in
the patriarchal family is a condition which the Palestinian female worker
shares with other women and which distinguishes her from her class comrade, the Palestinian male worker. The major
source of the vulnerability and oppression of the Palestinian female
worker is the family. . . . It is important to remember that the
Palestinian woman, particularly from a working class family, is exploited by international capital simply because of
its relation to domestic labor (Samed 1976, 2; cf. Haj 1992, 761).
These articles focusing on women’s
exploited role in the workplace fail to provide an adequate context that might
reveal “the distinct dynamic of gender
as a social/sexual relation of domination in past and present patriarchal societies” (Hatem 1987,
812).
A New Direction
The literature on both the ḥamūla and women’s lives is
in certain respects problematic. A close reading of the early literature on the
ḥamūla reveals how the ḥamūla model has been used,
alternately, to deny Palestinian villagers agency from above (through Israeli
manipulations or tradition) or from below
(through essentialist ideas about the ḥamūla’s permanence
and changeless quality). Later
literature, while paying greater attention to the specific histories of
villages within particular political economic frameworks, also presents
certain questions. These questions include how village and ḥamūla identity may be
complexly interrelated (as opposed to easily separable strands) and how
and why ḥamūla identity is
maintained through the generations. These approaches further tend to overlook
the perspective of women, relying on the publicly expressed discourse of the ḥamūla in village life for
their analyses.
The literature on Palestinian women,
like the literature on the ḥamūla,
ironically also often overlooks village women’s experiences in daily life. It
is clear that few analysts have undertaken a sustained examination of the
importance and dynamic nature of “ordinary” women’s activities and their daily
lives beyond the realms of their involvement with women’s organizations, waged
work or confrontations with Israeli soldiers. Such an approach would [43] probe
and problematize concepts such as “patriarchy” and “tradition” for these women’s
lives. We may further ask how women’s daily lives are enmeshed in the politics
of occupation, oppression, and resistance—stemming not only from external
forces but also from within the village itself—and, indeed, how these sources
of domination, at times, may work together to the detriment of women’s lives
(see Rothenberg 1999).
My research addresses some of these
issues (Rothenberg 1998). I arrived in Artas intending to study women’s
relationships within the ḥamūla.
When I moved into my hosts’ home, I was thus immediately
introduced to the families by whom we were surrounded. It was suggested
to me that it would be with the women of these households that I would be
socializing and doing my research; other homes were considered too far from our
neighborhood, or ḥāra. All of our neighbors were extended family members,
I was told. Neighbors, family, they were trusted friends. Or, at least,
most of them were.
It took some time
for the realization to dawn on me that my family’s household was actually the only
Dār X ḥamūla
household in an area of Dār Y ḥamūla
households. I was, in actuality, dealing with members of two distinct ḥamūlas in the village. I had
not, until I finally sat down to draw the genealogy, realized the division. It
was not relevant, or more precisely, it was at times only peripherally relevant
to the practices of women in particular in daily life. Even once I clearly knew
who was in which ḥamūla I
still had trouble trying to clarify how they behaved differently towards those
who were not part of their own ḥamūla
in the course of daily interactions. I was constantly
led to question what exactly it meant for women to belong to a ḥamūla.
Indeed, I became increasingly intrigued
by the more implicit principles structuring village women’s practical relationships.
These implicit perspectives provide both a contrast and complement to the
literature reviewed here which emphasizes men’s understandings of the ḥamūla, or, what may be
described as the dominant discourse of social relations in village life (and
thus at appropriate times taken up by women also).
Moving beyond—and behind—the
delineations of the ḥamūla
to understand women’s relations, allowed me to see what I have termed the
centrality of social geography and its logic, or, in other words, how the geographical
location of neighbors, friends, and family as well as notions of relatedness
create ties and shape the way women practice and experience social relations.
The ḥāra thus also emerges
as a central force in women’s creation and maintenance of social relations, as
does the force of personal preference. Indeed,
freed from the constraints of looking to genealogies to explain the [44] practice
of social relationships (albeit due primarily due to my initial confusion in
the village), I looked first to the relationships of those around me and only
later at the formally reckoned genealogies as one factor among many for
understanding those relations.
The notion and importance of the ḥamūla as a
genealogically-based entity for women’s social lives is, at times, clear to any
observer of village life; yet the importance
of this notion for women’s social relations is continuously challenged by other aspects of women’s lives which
shape their daily relations. Women, therefore, may use the language of
the ḥamūla as an idiom for
describing the relationships which are important to them, whether or not a
kinship tie exists. While the literature reviewed here presents important
interpretations of the dominant discourse on social relations—the language of
the ḥamūla—recognizing the more implicit perspectives on
social life complements this picture. Further, this approach knits
together an approach to both the ḥamūla
and women which makes women’s practices central to understanding family life, and may suggest a future path of inquiry for
men’s relations as well.
Further, in contrast
to the literature on women’s status in villages reviewed here, I found my research
focusing to a great extent on the ways in which women control other women’s
lives, as well as the way in which men dominate the lives of women. With the
exception of periods of closure by
Literature which addresses the ḥamūla and issues concerning
patriarchy and women’s status as separate areas of inquiry informed my thinking
as a first-time fieldworker in Artas. Yet the progress of my own research on
the nature of family ties and women’s lives often jarred with what I expected
to find based on my reading of the literature discussed here. My efforts
therefore turned to examining the notions and politics of family and place
which are central to women’s lives. This research may be seen as striving to
bridge the gap between these two zones of theory—ḥamūla and women’s lives and [45] status—generally
held separate, constituting both a departure from existing viewpoints and, to
be sure, material for future criticism by scholars thinking about these issues.
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[1] While some
political scientists and sociologists have argued that the annexation of the
West Bank in 1967 paralleled the situation of the Galilee in the 1950s after
Israel's occupation of the area in 1948 (for example Jiryis 1976), differences
between the two situations are significant and make direct comparison
problematic. The Galilee is not under military occupation and accompanying
restrictions in the same way as the
[2] Journalists and
non-academic professionals have also written extensively on Palestinian
women, including Bendt and Downing (1982), Wallach (1990), and Warnock (1990).
The intifada spawned numerous works including Hiltermann (1991), Lockman and Beinin
(1989), McDowall (1989), Peretz (1990), and Schiff and Ya'ari (1990).
[3] There are
numerous Palestinian women’s organizations, including four large committees
which follow the factional lines of the PLO: The Association of Women’s Work Committees
associated with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine;
the Association of the Palestine Working Women associated the Palestine Communist Party; the
Women’s Committee for Social Work associated with Fatah; and the
Palestinian Federation of Women’s Action Committees associated with the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine. There are many local women’s committees
which run outreach programs to women in villages. Two of the largest
organizations in the West Bank not definitively associated with a branch of the
PLO are the Inʿāsh al-Usra
Society, or the Family Rehabilitation Society, and the Arab Women’s Union in
[4] Wood (1993)
provides an analysis of the meaning of being an “ethnic minority” and a “terrorist
enemy” for the construction of Palestinian Israeli (i.e., Palestinians who are
citizens of