Contribution short abstract:

An emerging ethnographer/ PhD student in cultural and social anthropology offers insights, concerns and auto-ethnographic reflections on engaged and political anthropology through the lenses of a marginalised positionality while occupying a precarious institutional position

Contribution long abstract:

Living under both, the ongoing imperially-sustained occupational military rule in Palestine, and statelessness in Austria, while Palestinian political subjectivity continues to be materially-targeted, structurally-erased, vilified or/and unacknowledged, how does one utilize their marginalized positionality while becoming an anthropologist/ethnograper? What are the security concerns/dangers of this becoming? Are there necessary silences for political protection, personal/collective? These questions come from a Palestinian PhD student navigating the academia through their first semester of Social and Cultural Anthropology in an institution that, not only erased a moderate statement supporting a ceasefire/demands for basic Palestinian rights from its website, but also one that canceled lectures on Palestine, in a country that voted against ceasefire, three times (at the UN-and EU) as a genocide was still taking place in PoT.

Palestine, serving as an example of the broader oppressed-geographies in the Global South, demonstrated huge multi-layered contributions to politically/morally engaged and urgent anthropology of speaking-Truth-to-Power(Lila Abu Lughod, Maura Finkelstein) under the subfield of anthropology of Palestine, and has also fostered global solidarity through comparative approaches to parallel oppressive systems. Participating in engaged feminist-queer(thus necessarily political) production of anthropology is intellectually rewarding and harbors justice and liberation. However, is this only possible to tenured professors or the materially-privileged (including Palestinians or “halfies” (Abu Lughod) who have a valuable citizenship? This paper proposal discusses anthropology written by a structurally-disadvantaged subjecthood becoming an anthropologist/ethnographer. Are there important political silences for fear of doxing, reprisal, possible abuses of ethnographic materials by institutions, military-forces, antagonistically(-politically) motivated individuals e.g misrepresentation and decontextualization?