Biographical Narrations, Discourses and Collective History of Palestinians in Jerusalem's Old City and in a Palestinian Refugee Camp

During their initial self-presentations, many Palestinian interlocutors, who granted us biographical-narrative interviews, were barely embarking on ‘individual’ processes of narration and were often only marginally talking about their own life courses. Instead of, they were arguing about historical events and processes referring to a collective history shared by all Palestinians. This is one of the biggest empirical challenges of our trilateral research project which is supervised by Prof. Gabriele Rosenthal (Göttingen).

In this presentation, we want to introduce how we approached these empirical challenges. By looking more closely at two localities – the Old City of Jerusalem and a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank – we highlight and compare rules of talking and commemoration in self-presentations. The questions that guide us are: What are the relations between these rules of talking and the inhabitants‘ collective history, their current situation and the life courses of the interviewees? How do these relations shape ‘individual remembering’?

Based on our empirical reconstructions, we want to shed a light on the similarities and differences of the dominant we-discourses in those two local contexts. On the one hand, inhabitants of both localities negotiate images of the self and the other in relation to the long-term conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. In both localities, we have furthermore identified similarities in who is not following the rules of a hegemonic we-discourse. These inhabitants can be considered as outsiders in the sense of figurational sociology because of their different social position. On the other hand, there are considerable differences of the we-images in the two local contexts. These are related to the history of specific local constellations of belonging to different Palestinian groupings (in these cases we have identified religious, political, generational and economic affiliations).