"In Partitioned Territory: Kinship and Belonging in a Palestinian Refugee Camp" by Nadia Latif

Nadia Latif

Deposited 2010

Abstract
This dissertation examines the relationship between subjectivity and belonging to place in the context of a sixty year-old Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, a relationship explored through the oral accounts of three generations of camp refugees. Distinctions in the sense of belonging to a community and in disrupted, contiguous spaces that have been imbued with meaning through continuous habitation were noted. Palestinian camp refugee subjectivity is shown to be bound up with multiple places: the physical place of the village of origin in pre-1948 Palestine, the refugee camp of habitation post-1948, as well as the imagined place of Palestine as homeland, and Lebanon as unwilling host.

Camp refugees' descriptions of their multiple places of habitation and former habitation revealed an intertwining of subjectivity and belonging to place mediated through kinship-based ties. Associated narratives concerning values and practices revealed the primacy of kinship in cross-generational imaginings of home, and in the sense of not being at home. Concretized in norms of reciprocity and mutual obligation, along with ties of marriage, friendship, cohabitation and co-work established since 1948 within and between refugee camps, as well as their Lebanese environs, articulations of home and not-home almost invariably referenced pre-1948 peasant kinship, particularly in camp refugees' retrospective accounts of the armed struggles of 1936-1939, 1948, and 1969-1991. Such references further appear to have contributed strongly to Palestinian camp refugee national imagining, imbuing it with mobilizational power and emotive depth.

Home, in the accounts here analyzed, appears to represent a site of habituation, a site of the inculcation of familiarity and the familial. The accounts further reveal an understanding that neither of these can be attained within the current conditions of statelessness. Hence, second and third generation Palestinian camp refugees self-articulated an inability to feel at home in the places they currently inhabit, and a longing for Palestine—the place they know only through accounts of the first generation and, more recently, the globalised media. Their accounts underscore the hegemonic status of the nation-state as the primary place of belonging in the contemporary globalised world of mass movement and forced displacement.