Paper short abstract:

For horizontal transversal ethnographic knowledge exchanges to occur, the multilingual availability of unmediated texts that resist the practices and theories of the US-Eurocenter (whether hegemonic or counter-hegemonic) ought to be put at the crux of scholarly and activist cooperation.

Paper long abstract:

Talal Asad's 1973 Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter ushered in the crisis in ethnographic representation and the subsequent one-way decolonialization of Anthropology. It was an English-only privilege, however, allowing counter-hegemonic scholars of culture situated in the US-Eurocenter to blur the boundaries between research and activism. The non-English speaking world knows that on its national level of academic knowledge, upper-class cosmopolitanism, Humanities and Social Science FTEs, and proper English go hand in hand. Though difficult for counter-hegemonic US-European academe, it would be valuable to study cultural zones of subaltern struggles on their own *theoretical* terms, outside the English-speaking teaching machine. Such textualized theories of lived experiences refuse the dominant process of mainstream translation and publication routinely forced on lived experiences by non-English national elites, anthropologists included.

The possibility for a decentralized, multivocal global anthropology of Palestine/Israel depends on "breaking down barriers to the exchange of knowledge" [Reuter, AN Oct 05], including participation by NGOs and individuals who promote cultural rights yet are quite disjointed from the national-transnational scene of academe. The paper will furnish examples for such knowledges and the manners in which they are performed in Hebrew. Such NGOs and individuals produce both migrant and indigenous self-studies, "less likely to be known," and rarely "cited by scholars whose work travels more widely." Rather, they were and still are excluded from institutional academe [Gledhill AN Oct 05]. Yet for such knowledge exchanges to occur, the transversal English availability of such unmediated texts that resist the practices and theories of the US-Eurocenter (whether hegemonic or counter-hegemonic) ought to be put at the crux of scholarly and activist cooperation. Translated to and from English, the theories and practices in these anti-oppression texts could then facilitate a horizontal global dialogue to equalize our scholarship.