Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Palestinian Refugees and Identity
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.migrationpolicycentre.eu/people/luigi-achilli/ * http://eui.academia.edu/LuigiAchilli * http://allegralaboratory.net/author/luigi/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), M.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Political anthropologist, researcher, educator, and writer. Robert Schumann Center, Migration Policy Center, European University Institute, Florence, Italy, research associate.
WRITINGS
Contributor to the Allegra Lab Web site.
SIDELIGHTS
Luigi Achilli is a political anthropologist whose research and writing focuses on everyday forms of political engagement and disengagements, citizenship, nationalism, the Palestinian issue, refugees and refugee camps, and the politics of space. He has conducted extensive fieldwork, primarily in the Middle East andlived and worked for long periods of time in the urban Palestinian refugee camps of Jordan as part of his ethnographic research. In his book titled Palestinian Refugees and Identity: Nationalism, Politics and Everyday, Achilli presents a nuanced portrayal of Palestinian refugees that goes beyond the what he believes is the oversimplified view that these refugees are obsessed with their national cause. Nevertheless, Achilli, who spent part of 2009-2010 at the Wihdat refugee camp doing field work, does delve into issues of national identity and the refugees’ ambiguous citizenship status in Jordan but does so within the context of his discussion of these refugees’ everyday lives.
Achilles provides a look at the historical context of the Palestinian refugees, who first fled over the border into Jordan following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the formal annexation of the Webst Bank by Israel two years later. Following the 1967 War, also known as the Six-Day War, between Israel and its neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, more Palestinians sought became refugees in Jordan, where by the twenty-first century forty-two percent of registered Palestinian refugees lived. Achilli recounts his time spent studying the refugees in Jordan and discusses how various aspects of their ordinary lives affect national identity. “Achilli works in the ambiguous and fraught interstices of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, and marginalization in state and society that suffuse the lives of Palestinians in Jordan,” wrote Julie Peteet in a review in the Middle East Journal.
According Achilli, some of the major themes of these ordinary lives are religion and masculinity, as well as the idleness and entertainment. Achilli notes that the national identity that has developed among the refugees is not the normal way this identity is perceived, that is, within the context of being neither strictly national or political in nature. Ultimately, Achilli argues that it is through a focus on everyday life that the refugees come to establish their own particular meanings and understandings of national identity. He states that these identities are far more flexible than those found in the politicized Gaza and the West Bank. Achilli also points out that, unlike other Palestinian refugees living in other Arab states, many of the Jordanian-based refugees were granted full citizenship in Jordan, thus obtaining the same legal rights and duties as native-born Jordanians. Furthermore, noted Achilli, many of these refugees have been become cynical of politics in the Middle East.
Achilli found that the men of the Wihdat refugee camp focus on being pious and honorable men who want to integrate themselves into the socio-economic world they live in primarily through employment and supporting their families. He notes that leisure activities are structured in ways that enhance family bonds as well as an a national affinity among the refugees without engaging directly in politics or the political. Achilli places this approach to life within a historical context that compares the modern refugees’ lives with that of their fathers and grandfathers, who lived through the establishment of Israel and subsequent difficulties. “In each historical era, the performance of a moral masculinity differs substantially,” wrote the Middle East Journal contributor Peteet, who also noted that Achilli primarily focuses on males and their experiences. Achilli spent his most intensive interactions with young men in the camp from teenagers on through those in their early thirties. “This well-informed, nuanced portrait should prove valuable,” wrote Choice contributor G.E. Perry.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2016. G.E. Perry, review of Palestinian Refugees and Identity: Nationalism, Politics and the Everyday, p. 1231.
Middle East Journal, winter, 2016, Julie Peteet, review of Palestinian Refugees and Identity, pp. 159-160.
ONLINE
Allegra Lab Web site, http://allegralaboratory.net/ (March 11, 2017), author profile.
Migration Policy Centre Web site, http://www.migrationpolicycentre.eu/ (March 11, 2017), author profile.*
LC control no.: n 2008031336
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Achilli, Luigi
Field of activity: Political anthropology
Affiliation: Robert Schuman Centre
University of London. School of Oriental and African
Studies
Profession or occupation:
College teachers
Found in: Pratiche e politiche dell'etnografia, 2008 (2007 printing):
t.p. (Luigi Achilli) p. 4 of cover (specializes in the
anthropology of migration, especially from the Middle
East)
Palestinian refugees and identity, 2015: page 4 of jacket
(Luigi Achilli is Research Assistant at the Robert
Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (MPC), Florence,
Italy. He holds an M.A and a Ph. D. in political
anthropology from the School of Oriental and African
Studies (SOAS))
Associated language:
eng
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Luigi Achilli
Research Associate to MPC
Luigi Achilli
Luigi holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His research and writing focus on everyday forms of political engagement and disengagements, citizenship, nationalism, Palestinian issue, refugees and refugee camp, and the politics of space. His research and writing are based on extensive fieldwork conducted primarily in the Middle East. Ethnographic in approach, his work has led him to spend long time living and working in the urban Palestinian refugee camps of Jordan. His last research project has culminated with the publication of a book about the significance of the “ordinary” in the process of political self-fashioning in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Palestinian Refugees and Identity: Nationalism, Politics and the Everyday (I.B. Tauris, 2015).
Luigi.Achilli@EUI.eu
Tel: +39 055 4685 782
Luigi Achilli is research associate at the Migration Policy Center (EUI). He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His research and writing focus on everyday forms of political engagement and disengagements, citizenship, nationalism, the Palestinian issue, refugees and refugee camps, and the politics of space. He is currently working on the reverberation of the Arab Spring in Jordan. His last research project, culminated in the publication of a book is on the significance of the “ordinary” in the process of political self-fashioning in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, “Palestinian Refugees and Identity: Nationalism, Politics and the Everyday” (I.B. Tauris, 2015).
Achilli, Luigi. Palestinian refugees and identity: nationalism, politics and the everyday
G.E. Perry
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1231.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Achilli, Luigi. Palestinian refugees and identity: nationalism, politics and the everyday. I. B.Tauris, 2015. 258p bibl index (Library of modern Middle East studies, 158) ISBN 9781780769110 cloth, $99.00; ISBN 9780857729040 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-3690
HN661
MARC
This sophisticated study by Achilli (Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Italy), a political anthropologist, is largely based on a year of fieldwork in Jordan during 2009-10 at al-Wihdat refugee camp (now swallowed up, as he shows, by the vastly enlarged city of Amman, on whose outskirts it was founded in 1955). The author interacted intensively with young men in the camp, from teenagers to those in their early 30s, and reports on their attitudes and activities, including what he calls "ordinary masculinities," which range from unruly behavior or idleness to religious piety. Challenging what he considers to be oversimplified, unidimensional portrayals of Palestinians as being obsessed with their national cause, Achilli sees them as having become cynical about politics and concerned primarily with pursuing an "ordinary life," balancing their Palestinian identity (the continuing depth of which the author recurrently demonstrates) with the reality of being lifelong residents and citizens of Jordan. This well-informed, nuanced portrait should prove valuable not only to students of Palestinian and Jordanian politics and society but also to specialists in such broader fields as nationalism and comparative diaspora studies. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--G. E. Perry, Indiana State University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Perry, G.E. "Achilli, Luigi. Palestinian refugees and identity: nationalism, politics and the everyday." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1231. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661821&it=r&asid=95e7a0897566764cb9b1e4a415dbf702. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661821
ONLY PARTIAL PART OF REVIEW
Reviewed by
Julie Peteet (bio)
Palestinian Refugees and Identity: Nationalism, Politics and the Everyday, by Luigi Achilli. London: I.B. Tauris 2015. $99.
In this finely grained and elegantly written ethnography of the political life of a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan through the lives of boys and young men, anthropologist Luigi Achilli takes on a welcome task. Aside from a select group of anthropological articles, Jordan has been largely missing from the scholarly literature on both camps in general and Palestinian refugee camps in particular. Research access has been problematic for decades largely due to security issues. Achilli’s ethnography is all the more interesting in that Jordan has hosted some of the largest refugee camps in the world and the most permanent of what is ostensibly a temporary abode. Achilli has managed to breach the gap in the literature by conducting extensive ethnographic research in Wihdat camp in ‘Amman; needless to say politics and secrecy as sources of anxiety form a subtext. The author faced the usual suspicion of outsiders that, in this particular political context, can become an obstacle but one he managed to overcome.
Achilli works in the ambiguous and fraught interstices of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, and marginalization in state and society that suffuse the lives of Palestinians in Jordan. His ethnography is focused on the negotiation of Palestinian national identity, their ambiguous citizenship status in Jordan, and everyday life. But beyond this task, Achilli also writes a history of the camp, touching on its early years, the watershed era of confrontation with the Jordanian state and the Palestinian resistance movement, the latter’s defeat, the state’s “discriminatory turn” (p. 47), Jordan’s neoliberal turn, the rise of Islamism in the region and, more recently, the Arab Spring. Palestinian Refugees and Identity is a most welcome addition to the body of scholarship that will carry forward our understanding of camps as dynamic spaces, as well as filling in the gaps in the literature on the Palestinian experience in Jordan.
The complex and variegated political subjectivities of Palestinian refugees are at the heart of this ethnography. Through the themes of religion, masculinity, and idleness — aspects of what the author calls “ordinary life” — Palestinian national identity is produced and reproduced but not in ways normally perceived as being national or indeed even political. A primary goal of the book is to complicate dominant narratives of Palestinian nationalism, and this the author does admirably. The most significant contribution of Achilli’s work is his approach to “politicization;” refugee camps have long been characterized as zones of political activity and, not surprisingly, Wihdat was once in the forefront of Palestinian resistance. Its seeming political quiescence and perceptions of politics as highly corrupt belies an at times ambiguous relationship with Palestinian nationalism and the now West Bank-based political struggle for self-determination. What comes to mind is the presence of a “post-national” way of being in the world. Achilli argues that Wihdat’s men have adhered to the ideals of Palestinian nationalism through ordinary activities of being pious, honorable men, gainfully employed, which he refers to as socio-economic [End Page 159] integration, able to support their families, and engaged in leisure activities that enhance a sense of closeness to others and a sense of national affinity. Even the seemingly nonpolitical domain of fun, such as soccer matches, hanging out on the weekends, or simply lingering outside assume significance for the way they blend an ethical nationalism with the need to live ordinary lives but do not directly engage the political.
I especially appreciated the comparative historical angle the author adopts. For example, when elaborating on piousness and new ways of being masculine, he compares this with that of their fathers and grandfathers, the generation of Palestine and the generation of the revolution, respectively. In each historical era, the performance of a moral masculinity differs substantially.
The book is focused overwhelmingly on male experiences, and indeed he provides an incisive analysis of masculinity. As a (presumably) single male conducting research in the camp, his access to women was somewhat limited by cultural norms of gender interaction. Nevertheless, masculinity is a primary theme of the book, and the...