Senior Research Seminars with Dr Jake Silver (Cornell University)

Senior Research Seminars with Dr Jake Silver (Cornell University)Vantages of Humanity: Political Anthropology and Palestine at a Moment of Mass Reckoning

Anthropologists are no strangers to the concept of a vantage: it is through a particular location that ethnographers glimpse the texture of everyday life in a certain place. Today in Palestine, however, as Israeli colonization ekes out into the natural environment to reconsolidate and extend state power in new technoscientific ways, even something as innocent as a location or vantage or fieldsite is loaded with overdetermined political values that Palestinians encounter on a daily basis. Drawing from my own work with Palestinian astronomers in the West Bank, this talk considers how Palestinians with unique vantages (scientific, environmental, vertical, planetary, bureaucratic) understand the political value of their lives—not just in the singular, but within an international theater of murderous colonialism that has become a definitive moment of reckoning for communities across the world. I ponder how political anthropology constructs its own flexible definition of what counts as “political,” and I engage this disciplinary narrative with Palestinian astronomers’ own frustrations, malaise, and rethinking of politics—their own philosophy and experience of humanity and life. Palestine, in its exceptional locality and monumental social life, offers anthropologists an important vantage to consider how political objects construct and deconstruct humanity, even as anthropologists so often try to reparatively tell the stories of those caught in the crosshairs of violence.