Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic paper explores sensory expressions of colonial power in the occupied Palestinian Jordan Valley. Analyzing the landscape materiality and as text, I show how traces left by actants reflect and reproduce power relations in a contested colonial space.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores sensory expressions of colonial power in the Palestinian Jordan Valley (JV), home to Palestinian pastoralists and Jewish settlers, who also keep and graze livestock.

Palestinian pastoral communities of the JV have been challenged by gradual shrinkage of their grazing lands due to climate change and pressures from Israeli settlers. The JV is part of the occupied West Bank, a space that has no official national borders. Yet, the dwellers of the area "share" a land full of alternative border markers, a meshwork of entwined lines produced by human and non-human actants (following Tim Ingold).

Drawing on 4 years of environmental ethnography conducted on Palestinian grazing lands, I characterize the border markings by their salience, deliberateness, and by their temporal qualities (temporary, permanent, and seasonal borders). Garbage carried by the wind to a gully bed, animal feces, fences, vegetation and other markings tell a story of climate change, weaponized environment, political violence and resistance.

By adding a layer of political analysis to the Ingoldian perspective, and by analyzing landscape as a text - as suggested by Lefebvre, Harvey and Duncan - I show how the traces left by Palestinian vs Israeli actants both reflect and reproduce the power structure of a contested colonial space.