Paper Short Abstract:

How are the deceased in Gaza commemorated when relatives in the West Bank are unable to fulfill mourning rites? Taking the case of a Palestinian Romani family, this paper looks at symbolic action as spiritual strategy when earthly ritual becomes impossible under war and security/borderland regimes.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines grieving of the deceased in Gaza by family members in the West Bank who, in times of war, are unable to fulfill traditional funeral and mourning rites. Taking the case of a Palestinian Romani family who lost members in Gaza during Israeli bombing, this paper asks how relatives in Ramallah might compensate for an inability to fulfill mourning responsibilities by turning instead to a symbolic universe of political procession. Commemoration as such, I argue, is a rejoining of the Antigone-like morass between kinship duty to family and political duty to the state or nation. Although the improvisational ethos of “going around” from one checkpoint to another, the taking of alternate routes to compensate a road block, and other such strategies have been a feature of Palestinian life since at least the leviathan growth of the Israeli security state in the early 2000s (Hammami 2019)—often theorized under the rubric of everyday spatial tactics (De Certeau 1984)—this paper looks instead at improvisation of another kind: symbolic action as spiritual strategy when earthly practice becomes impossible. As such, this paper contextualizes long-term ethnography with Romani families in the Jerusalem/Ramallah area with the anthropological literature on grief and commemoration, the literature on the Israeli security state, and the theology of martyrdom in Palestine.