Holding onto Palestine: Reimagining Anthropology at a Time of Genocide (Online)

12-15 September 2024

Keynote Lecture: “Unethical Anthropology and Anthropology of the Unethical” By Prof. Ghassan Hage

Much like 1948 and 1967, 7 October 2023 ushered in a violent project of erasure and elimination of Palestinians as an indigenous population. While uncertainty, fear and anguish have been features of Palestinian daily life for decades, at this time of high-flame violence, with their habitat becoming spaces of blatantly visible non-life, questions of the meaning and practice of remaining present, of existence itself, have never been more urgent. These extreme times require a bold agenda for critical inquiry. How can anthropology make sense of contemporary mass killing, large scale physical destruction, genocidal rhetoric and transfer plans as colonial powers seek to destroy and empty Gaza while silencing criticism and dissent dissent around the world? How can the tools and concepts of anthropology respond to these violences in all their forms? In turn, what can Palestine, as one of the most protracted examples of occupation and colonial erasure, offer to the anthropology of genocide, settler-colonialism, de-colonization, indigeneity, and emancipatory ethics and knowledge? This Conference will explore these questions through a focus on several interconnected themes: processes and dynamics of elimination; forms of activist as well as everyday praxis and resistance and their epistemologies; and “convergences” and alliances between Palestine and experiences of the structural violence of Western colonial modernity elsewhere. We seek to reflect on the conditions for transversal politics and the kinds of epistemologies and knowledges generated in such everyday praxis and mobilizations.