Paper short abstract:

In the West Bank, the memory of the “rainy season” calendar is resilient in reading radical local changes and patterns of farming engagements, where perceiving “air” was connected “down to earth”: this challenges our models of management of the material and our patterns of disconnections.

Paper long abstract:

Both among Palestinian refugees in Jordan as in daily skills in the Occupied West Bank, the memory of a weather calendar of the "rainy season"(winter) is resilient, in the frame of the radical changes of intensive agribusiness, of land colonization and the demise of pastoralism.

This composed a complex winter/rainy schedule and classification of 90 days of increasing rain/wet/cold wished periods, intimately interlinked to the needs of water in arid environment and farming/pastoral practices. This pattern of interlinkage of human and non human activities framed relationality of peasant wishes connected to humidity, wind types, temperature decrease of land, mule-ploughing techniques, insect signing phases still at work today.

Due to the limitedness and variability of rain season, atmosphere has been framed as a rainsphere and sphere of circulation, in which farm skills could get engaged at their best in order to save as much humidity for the longer, dry, hot summer season.

In the West Bank, due to military occupation, environment is not the main concern facing daily insecurity in one of the most high-tech experiments of land colonization. This weather knowledge necessarily engaged in arid environment (and not denying it), helps in understanding contemporary perception of the "air" as locus of risk (military visual control, attacks, drones) in Palestinian context as much as local skills in home farming based on circulation of resources. Besides, it challenges our model of "management" of the material facing the ambivalence, the relationality of fluid water and air and our pattern of engagement within.